Serial Spider

6/16/08

Issue Five

"Bite Me"

"Hi. This is Kurt Connors. I'm calling for Peter P—"

"Hi, Dr. Connors! It's me! I mean, it's Peter. Hi."

"Oh, hi, Peter. Yeah, I just got your message. You're really eager to work here, aren't you?"

"Oh, yes, sir!" Peter exclaimed, sitting down at his desk chair to stop from shaking. He had hardly woken up yet. In fact, it had been Dr. Connors' call that pulled him from his sleep. But it pulled him with gusto, and Peter's whole body was alive with excitement.

"Well, Peter, we have no paid positions, but I can offer you an internship at the lab. And you'll be working with me directly. I can't promise it'll be exciting, but—"

"I'll take it, sir! If that's alright."

"Peter, you can stop calling me sir," said Dr. Connors.

"Yes, uh, Dr. Connors."

"Just Kurt would be fine."

"I don't think I could—"

"Alright." He paused to hold in a laugh. "Well, can you start on Monday? I won't be in there in the morning, so just check in with my wife."

"Is there any way that I could come in sooner, sir? Just to get a feel for the layout and stuff? I don't want to bother you."

"Um. Well, I'll call my assistant and see if he can give you a tour this afternoon. Here, I'll give you his number so you can reach him if you get lost. His name's Eddie Brock. That's rock with a B. Got that?"

Gwen rolled over, reaching for her alarm clock. She smacked it hard, but it didn't stop buzzing, so she hit it again and again.

And then she realized her alarm clock didn't buzz.

So her hand dropped to the end table and grabbed her cell phone, which shook like a trapped bee in her fist.

"Harry?" Gwen asked, flipping open the phone.

"Hey, Gwen. Did I wake you up?"

"Yeah, but it's okay. I needed to get up anyway." She yawned. "What time is it?"

"About eleven. Do you wanna sleep some more, and I'll call you back?"

"No, it's fine. It's uh… what's up?"

"Nothing. Got an hour to kill in the hotel room; I just felt like catching up. How did science fair go?"

Gwen rolled over, plunging her face into the pillow.

"I got third place. Peter took home the gold, and the Dr. Connors talked to him for like three hours."

"Who's Doc Connors?"

"Oh, never mind, Harry. How was… what colleges are you looking at?"

"Uh: Cornell, Vassar, B.U., Brown, the big names up north."

"Anything good up there? What did you think of Vassar?"

"I don't know. Everyone here has too much money. I'm tired of money. I'm tired of it all, you know. I can't wait to get out of the house, but I want to get somewhere quiet. My dad wants me somewhere prestigious though. I want to go south, like Miami. Or Duke. Have you seen Duke's campus?"

"Oh, that's right!" said Gwen, sitting up a bit. "Harry, did you get in a lot of trouble with your dad the other day?"

"What? No. He didn't care."

"Harry, come on. That's so not him. Tell me the truth."

"What? Gwen? I can't… you… underpass."

"Harry, don't feed me that bull. You just said you were in your hotel room."

But the line went dead. Gwen closed her phone and stared at it. She squinted pensively and then put it back on her end table, turning over to lie back down.

"You must be Peter Parker."

"And you're Eddie Brock?" Peter shook his hand. Eddie's grip was tough. He was big enough to be a football player: all muscle like Flash Thompson. But there was something easy-going about Eddie. He was much more relaxed, and his speech was warm.

"I've heard a lot about you," Eddie commented.

"Dr. Connors talked about me?"

"A little. I meant from Gwen though. I used to be friends with Gwen back in middle school. I transferred freshmen year. I doubt you'd remember me, man. I don't think I knew you either. Granted, there were like 600 guys in our grade, right? But Gwen talked highly of you. She's jealous, bro, to put it honestly. She thinks she's gonna lose you to this place. So don't let that happen, a'ight?"

"Uh," said Peter, taken aback by Brock's forwardness. "Yeah. Sure thing."

"Alright," said Eddie, taking a deep breath that cleared the air. "Let's, uh, let's get this tour started. So, uh, up here we've got the break room, and there are bathrooms down here, and at the end of this hall down there on the right."

Eddie was patient with Peter, who was brimming with questions. His nose squished up against every window, before it occurred to him that Brock had a key card and was more than happy to let him inside and look around.

"Right here is Kurt's work on bio-electricity."

Eddie swung around and sat up on a table. As he leaned casually back against the glass behind him, Peter realized that somewhere in his nerd brain, Eddie Brock was, for lack of better word, cool.

"What's he doing?" Peter asked. "I haven't heard about that."

"Okay, so think about his genetic augmentation concept, right. Map the genome, toy with the gene that you're interested in, and then basically learn to enhance the strength by toying with transformation, and a little bit of in-vitro. Just altered enough not to be cloning, so there's no real intervention. Study the results, try again. You follow so far?"

"Yeah," said Peter. "Yeah, I gotcha."

"Okay, so now he's looking at species that produce bio-electricity, or something along those lines. Like eels. They produce a solid 500 volts of charge. He figures if he can engineer an eel to withstand greater shocks and resultantly produce greater charge, he could then get some company like Oscorp to build a machine to harness that juice and save millions on electrical production. It's clean, efficient, and lasts as long as the eel's lifespan. You could put it in a conducting gel, for instance, and then pull the charge from there. I mean, obviously the eels aren't producing much more than one found in the wild, but it's a cool idea, right?"

"It's brilliant!" Peter exclaimed. "I can't believe the stuff he comes up with. Are there any success projects in the lab right now?" he asked.

"Well, sure," said Eddie. "But I want to show you something else first."

Peter followed Eddie into another room. It was a conference room of sorts, with the residual odor of Dry-Erase markers perfuming the room. White boards commanded the walls around a large oval table. Two projection screens were wound up on either end.

With reverence, Peter entered the brainstorming chamber of his scientific hero.

"Viral DNA," said Eddie, flipping one of the boards to reveal a diagram of virus duplication. "OK," said Eddie. "This is gonna blow your mind. You ready?"

Peter merely gawked with the concept. "Uh, ch'yeah."

"OK, so any Bio student understands how viruses duplicate, right. They're a protein shell containing DNA. They inject the DNA into the cell of an organism, and then enzymes dissolve the containment of the genetic material. The cell copies it and spits it back out in a container that usually kills the cell."

"Usually?" Peter asked, catching on.

"Well, exactly," said Brock. "You see, the process of the virus attaching and injecting is called endocytosis. And then the copied viruses exit through one of three processes, not just the two you usually hear about. The other is called reverse endocytosis, which is exactly what it sounds like. Rather than using the cell's membrane to shell the new DNA and kill the host cell, instead it uses vacuoles to store the material and move along. This is a completely natural process, we didn't craft it.

"But what we did craft," Eddie continued, "is something called the C-zyme. It's a combination of enzymes that we coat the virus with. The first enzyme is a genetic locator, which locates the place on the cell's DNA that we want to remove. The second extracts it, and the third inserts the DNA that we're injecting. The fourth and final enzyme is a catalyst for the viral replication process, so that the virus spreads within hours to every cell in the body, before the body has a chance to fight back. And by that time, the organism has completely-altered DNA. It's an even faster way to try genetic enhancement too."

"Holy… holy shit," was all Peter could think to say. "And this works?"

"Well," Eddie smiled. "Almost."

Peter followed Eddie back out of the room. They went to the last room on the left, which was like a pet store. There were all kinds of small creatures in cages. The room was a beautiful, shining steel. It seemed more polished than jewelry. The glass boxes were labeled with all sorts of small animal names like rats, bees, spiders, and fish. There was a green bat and several plants that Peter didn't recognize.

"Some of these took the virus well, others haven't seemed to change. The green tabs indicate success. The yellow indicate a change we didn't expect. The red, like the spider cage is a failure. We've tried—"

Eddie's phone rang.

"Hang on, sorry." He pulled it out to silence it, but then realized that it was Dr. Connors. "Hey, Peter, it's Kurt. I was gonna finish you off in here, anyway. The rest is just labs and computers—Hey, Doc, hang on just one second—Just see yourself out, Pete," he said, pointing to the right down the hall. Peter left after one last look around. "I'll see you on Monday, bro!" called Eddie. "Have a good weekend!" he shouted, returning to his phone.

"You too," mouthed Peter, shaking his head in disbelief. The things he had seen in the building were ideas he hadn't ever comprehended. Fresh air came as a beautiful reminder that these things were happening in his world, his New York. And he would have a chance to be a part of this genetic revolution.

Peter Parker smiled all the way out of the facility.

"Oh, May, get that. Maybe it's Peter."

Uncle Ben was sitting in his armchair in the living room, reading the Daily Bugle absentmindedly. When he and May awoke, Peter had gone, and he left no note or clue as to where he'd gone to. May and Ben were worried, but they also recognized how absent-minded Peter was. Ben was astute enough to assume it had to do with the new job, but it didn't change the fact that he was angry at Peter's irresponsible nature.

May hung up, flicking her hand at a fruit fly buzzing around the kitchen. "That was Jodi. She was calling about bridge. No luck with Peter."

"You know," said Ben, "I talked to him the other night, and I thought he understood what I was trying to say. But, I don't know. I think we need to talk again. He needs to learn something about responsibility. This behavior's just not acceptable."

"Don't worry, Ben. I'm sure he's fine. It's only been a few hours."

"Still," said Ben, turning back to his paper briefly. But he folded it and put it in his lap. "There has to be something I can say that will hit home with that kid. And how does he think he can handle this lab, his tutoring work, and school all at once?"

"Ben," said May, but her sentence trailed off. She agreed. Peter was putting too much on his plate.

"Taxi!" Peter called, flinging his hands in the air. The yellow car didn't slow, but instead just flew on. Peter stood on the curb, waiting impatiently for the next drove of cars to pass.

It was a terribly muggy day: hot and cloudless as the summer. But it was only a mid-spring tease.

And then Peter felt a sharp, stinging prick on the back of his hand.

"Ouch!" he cried, slapping his other hand on top, splattering bug against palm. "Jesus Christ!" he said, rubbing the mess over his pants. "Damn mosquitoes."

"Alright, Doc. I gotcha. I'll see you on—"

Eddie Brock froze. Directly in front of him, the containment case (a white label) for a virally-injected spider was empty. At first he thought it was just nerves, but he checked closer, and sure enough, there wasn't even a strand of web.

"Doc. We have a problem. We've got a hot-subject out of its cage. A spider. Still white—we don't know if it worked or not."

"Eddie, get that Peter Parker back inside."

"It couldn't have been him, Kurt. He left while I was still in the room. I'm closing down the lab. You should get over here so we can sweep the place. I mean, it could have just died in some vent by now or something, I don't know. But we got to check."

"I know that, Eddie. I'm leaving now. Good thing you went in today. God knows what would have happened if that thing, I don't know, bit some other organism. Whites are still at their prime. Let's find that thing, Brock."

"You got it, boss."

As Eddie Brock initiated lockdown in the lab, an unknowing Peter Parker climbed into a taxi cab outside with the blue stain of a spider's body smeared across his khakis and a strand of enhanced spider DNA swimming rapidly through his bloodstream.