October 26th, 1985. The end.
Searing blue light. Not fire, but colder. The color of godhood and annihilation. The feeling of being unmade, every atom screamed apart. Then, silence. A long, bottomless drop into nothing.
Consciousness returns like a bad taste in the mouth.
Rain. Cold, slick, and relentless. It drips from a rusted fire escape, tracing paths through the grime on the brick wall beside me. I'm on my back, the unforgiving cobblestones of an alley digging into my spine. The air is thick with the smells of ozone, wet asphalt, and something else… a synthetic sweetness, like burnt sugar and circuits.
I push myself up, a low growl rumbling in my chest. First, a systems check. My body aches, but nothing feels broken. Trench coat, soaked through but intact. Fedora, miraculously still on my head. I run a gloved hand over my face. The mask is there. The shifting patterns of black and white feel like a second skin, a comfort in this sudden, jarring wrongness.
This isn't my New York.
My New York is a dying beast, groaning under the weight of its own sin. This place… this place is different. I stumble out of the alley's mouth, my boots splashing in a shallow puddle that reflects a sky choked with neon. The skyscrapers are arrogant needles of glass and steel, shaped with impossible curves, piercing a perpetual twilight. Billboards flicker with holographic advertisements for companies I've never seen. Oscorp. A green, demonic-looking logo. Alchemax. A name that sounds like a perversion of science. My city's landmarks are gone. No Veidt Tower piercing the clouds with its gold-tinted hubris. No familiar grime-caked skyline.
This city is an imposter. A forgery. It smells wrong. Beneath the rain and the cloying sweetness, there's a hum of power, a clean, sterile energy that feels deeply unnatural. My New York smells of decay and desperation. This place smells of progress. The two scents are equally vile.
"Not New York," I mutter, the sound swallowed by the city's din. "Hurm. Imposter."
Instinct takes over. Survive. Assess. Understand. Paranoia is not a sickness; it is the sharpened edge of awareness.
I retreat into the relative darkness of another alley, my back pressed against the cold brick. My hands move with practiced efficiency, taking inventory. The grappling hook gun is still holstered beneath my coat, its metal cool and reassuring. A small aerosol can and lighter, my makeshift flamethrower. Lockpicks. A small, vicious-looking knife. And in my inner pocket, its corners softened by years of use, my journal. My anchor. The one place where truth, unvarnished and brutal, is recorded.
A shard of a broken mirror lies in a heap of trash, catching the lurid pink glow of a nearby sign. I lean over it. The shifting inkblots of my mask stare back, symmetrical for a fleeting moment before melting into a new, chaotic pattern. "Face still here," I whisper to the reflection. "Good." The face is a promise. No compromise. No surrender. It is the only truth I have ever known.
I begin to walk, melting into the shadows that cling to the edges of the brightly lit streets. I keep my head down, but my eyes are constantly moving, scanning, absorbing the details others miss. Small, metallic drones with glowing blue optics buzz through the air like pigeons, perching on ledges and watching the crowds below with unnerving stillness. The traffic signs are not painted metal but shimmering holograms that hang in the air, glitching occasionally in the rain.
Then I see them.
Just a glimpse at first. A flash of red and blue, arcing between two skyscrapers with impossible grace, leaving a silvery thread in its wake. Moments later, another figure, this one black and white, swings past in the opposite direction, her movements sharp and balletic. Then a third, a darker silhouette with glowing red highlights, runs straight up the side of a building, defying gravity as if it were a polite suggestion.
They are fast. Too fast. Unnatural. Insects scuttling across a web of their own making. This city is infested.
I force myself to join the river of people flowing down the sidewalk. The crowd is a suffocating press of bodies. They look… familiar, but off. Their clothes are made of strange, self-illuminating fabrics. Their slang is a foreign language, clipped and full of terms I don't recognize. Many have glowing cybernetic implants around their eyes or ears. They are plugged into the city, part of the machine. Their faces are slack, content, anesthetized by the spectacle.
A massive screen mounted on the side of a building flickers to life, showing a news report. The anchorwoman has chrome-lined eyes and a smile that doesn't reach them. "—another spectacular save in Midtown today as Spider-Man apprehended the Vulture before he could make off with the Alchemax particle inverter!"
The footage is chaotic. A figure in red and blue webs up a man with massive mechanical wings. But the camera pans, and for a second, I see another hero—the girl in the white hood I saw earlier—assisting, her movements fluid and deadly. Then the footage cuts to a different clip, a "man on the street" interview. "I mean, which Spider-Man is your favorite? I'm partial to the classic, but my kid loves the one with the electric powers."
Multiple. Not one masked vigilante, but an army of them. My paranoia, a low hum until now, spikes into a piercing shriek in my mind. This isn't just a few masked freaks operating outside the law. This is the new world order. A circus of costumed clowns, celebrated by the media, loved by the sheep they pretend to protect. It's Ozymandias's lie writ large, a city-wide pacifier to keep the masses docile while the real corruption festers beneath. The masks are not a rejection of society; they are its most popular product. The thought makes my stomach turn.
I can't breathe. The clean air of this city is suffocating me. I break from the crowd, shoving people aside, ignoring their startled cries, and dive back into the sanctuary of a dark, narrow alley. The reek of overflowing dumpsters is a welcome relief. It's honest.
My hands tremble slightly as I pull out my journal and a pen. I need to record this. To impose order on the chaos. To make it real. I find a dry patch of concrete under an overhang and crouch down, balancing the book on my knee.
I begin to write, the familiar scratch of the nib a small comfort.
October 27th, 1985. No. Date is meaningless now. Journal entry… one.
New York. Not New York. City of ghosts and holograms. Imposter world, built on a lie. Streets crawl with masked clowns, chromatic insects swinging from towers of glass. They are celebrated. Vermin treated as pets. Smell of rot is still here, but it's hidden beneath a perfume of technology and false hope.
My hand moves across the page, forming the words, but then something happens. Something impossible. The pen seems to drag, the ink flowing in a way that feels alien. The words I'm thinking are not the words that are appearing on the page.
They are celebrated, I write, but the sentence twists as the ink dries, the letters reforming.
Threads fray, the journal now reads.
I stop, my breath catching in my throat. I stare at the page. My handwriting is precise, cramped, angry. This is… different. Sharper. More elegant, but somehow more menacing. I try again, forcing my will into the pen, my knuckles white.
A conspiracy. A system of control.
The ink bleeds and settles into a new sentence, one I did not conceive.
Anomaly arrives. Mask where none should be. A stain on the Web.
I freeze. A cold dread, colder than the rain, colder than Dr. Manhattan's gaze, seeps into my bones. I re-read the lines. They mock me from the page. This isn't a delusion. It's real. My journal, my own thoughts, have been compromised. Violated.
Is this psionic? Some kind of mind control? A lingering effect of whatever brought me here? The questions spiral, each one darker than the last. I slam the journal shut, as if I can silence the intrusive voice by closing the cover. But the feeling remains—a sense of being watched not by eyes, but by something woven into the fabric of this reality.
Above the drone of the city and the patter of the rain, a new sound reaches my ears.
A faint, sharp skittering from the rooftops high above.
It's not the sound of a man running. It's too fast, too light. It's the sound of claws on wet metal, of something inhuman moving with predatory speed. Instinct makes me look up, peering into the oppressive darkness between the glowing skyscrapers.
For a heartbeat, I see it. A blur of motion, too quick to register a shape. But I see the eyes. A pair of intense, glowing red eyes, fixed directly on me. They are not the passive optics of the city's drones. They are the eyes of a hunter that has found its prey.
Then, as quickly as it appeared, it's gone, darting away into the concrete canyons.
My hand instinctively goes to the grappling gun at my side. I thumb the trigger, the solid, mechanical click a small act of defiance against the unreality of this place. This, at least, is real. This works. This can kill.
"Predators here too," I growl into the rain-soaked air. "Always predators."
A gust of wind whips through the alley, flipping open the journal I dropped on the ground. It lands on the page I was just writing on, the rain starting to blur the ink. But across the bottom of the page, a new phrase has appeared, scrawled in jagged, angry letters that look like fractured spiderwebs. I never wrote it. I never even thought it.
But it is there. A verdict. A declaration.
The Web has noticed you.