Nature Versus Nurture 3: Project Scorpion

by The Master Planner

Octavia Jones is no longer uniquely alone, she has discovered another clone. But handsome Mack might have sinister intentions up his sleeve, and the government is far from through with them. This story concludes the NVN series.

9. The Darkest Shadow

Chapter 9: The Darkest Shadow

"Thou changed and self-covered thing, for shame,

Be-monster not thy feature. Were it my fitness

To let these hands obey my blood,

They are apt to dislocate and tear

Thy flesh and bones: however thou art a fiend,

A woman's shape doth shield thee."

William Shakespeare, King Lear

A silent figure stalked in the shadows of Manhattan, becoming one of the shadows. When she had to see the light of day, the shadow receded with a mental flick of the will, disguising itself as an elegant black business suit.

"Agent Cypher, do you read me?"

"I hear you, Director," she told her vehicle's computer interface.

"Do you remember what your objectives are?"

"Of course I do."

"Good, because if you fail this time, you might be handed a fate worse than that of Carlyle."

"Is that a threat?" Cypher hissed. She was feeling bolder, more aggressive.

"No, Cypher, it's a promise. I don't suffer fools lightly. Our national security is at stake. The War on Terror is at stake. Get in, get what you need, and get out. Do what ever it takes to get it, Melitta needs it badly."

"Yes…"

"And don't kill him, for God's sake. He's a very well-known and respected figure in this city. If he's murdered, they'll notice. There are some things even we can't cover up."

Cypher drove to the Upper East Side, and Inverness, the Osborn penthouse, was her destination.

"Hello, Mr. Osborn," Agent Cypher greeted the off-duty supervillain.

If Norman was scared at the quite unexpected entrance, he didn't show it. "Who the hell are you? And how did you get in here without setting off the security system?"

Cypher smiled and held up her identification. "I'm Agent Cindy Cypher of the SDSI-CIA. Stands for Subdivisionof Scientific Intelligenceof the Central Intelligence Agency.Agent Clark Carlyle once numbered among my colleagues. I trust you were acquainted with him."

Norman sneered and carefully set his baby granddaughter on the sofa. "Yes. He told me all about his little 'Project Octopus' super-soldier and his attempts to improve on it. The latest advances in human biology, sold to the highest bidder for taxpayer dollars. Did you ever catch the fat freak?"

"Nope. He crawled back into his little underwater den, apparently."

"And the clone? Just curious."

"She got away too. But our scientists say she's useless for reproduction. We need a whole army of them. We have the blueprints for the tentacles, obviously. However, we never were able to duplicate the Oz formula."

"A feat my dear departed Harry never managed either." By the tone of his voice, Harry, whoever he was, was not dear at all.

"Let's cut the crap. We want the formula itself. The exact chemical formula. I'm offering one million dollars in uncirculated cash for it."

Norman chuckled. "The formula's not for sale, my dear Cypher."

Cypher took a step towards him. "The formula. Now. Do you realize that I'm an agent of the United States government and that our experiments go to further the War on Terror? Your resistance might be construed as treason."

"Treason? I'm the living embodiment of the capitalist American Dream. I repeat: The Oz formula is not for sale. If you try to intimidate it out of me—well, I am well-versed in the arts of self-defense. I can fight you back."

Cypher raised her eyebrows. "Very well. You've forced my hand."

Norman gasped; Cypher's black business suit started to shimmer, melt, spread across her body. Quicker than lightning, the shadow stepped toward him, grabbed his throat with one taloned hand, and punched him in the stomach. The businessman cried out in pain. He hadn't been hit that hard in his entire life—not even by Spider-Man himself, not even after he had murdered Parker's little blonde girlfriend in the guise of the Green Goblin.

To hell with this, Norman thought. He was going to have to use his own powers if he was going to get out alive. Cypher was hit with a right hook powerful enough to kill an ordinary human, but she didn't even catch her breath.

"I see you've enhanced your own strength," she observed. "Only the most intrepid—or crazy—scientists would think of testing their formulas on themselves."

Norman was starting to show his age—which was, around late forties, comparable to his fellow super-criminal and chief competition, the fat freak. Even with his superhuman strength and endurance, Cypher was coming on too fast and too strong. She slammed his head into the floor and pinned him.

"The formula. Now."

"It—it's in the basement, in the safe, the combination is—" Cypher listened carefully for the numbers and dashed off. Norman smirked, but not for long.

"Idiot! You didn't tell me it had a retinal scan!" She picked him up and dragged him to the identification unit, then held his face up to the scanner. She fumbled through the safe, taking out a CD-ROM. "You made a backup copy. That's nice if your computer runs on Windows."

She turned to him again, snarling. "Well, given the nature of my work, I can't leave any witnesses behind." She grasped him at the throat, slowly drawing out his life energy. Norman became progressively weaker; Cypher growing stronger at the same time. She could feel her muscles thickening, too distracted by her rage to wonder why.

Norman gasped. "But—what about my daughter—?"

Cypher's eyes opened wide. She knew what it was like to be the mother of a baby. At least she did—until the plane carrying her husband and toddler son slammed into a New York skyscraper early one September morning.

"Little Noreen—who will take care of her? Her father's dead. Her mother doesn't want her. Her grandpa is all she has."

Cypher let go suddenly. Norman rubbed his throat—his superhuman healing powers, with any luck, would return him to full strength in half a week. "You're a mother yourself—aren't you?" Nothing else could explain the shadow's sudden attack of conscience.

"Was," she said. "Timothy and his father were killed on September 11th."

"My condolences."

"Don't give them. I have what I need. Get over there and thank Noreen for saving your life."

The shadow slipped out the door.

Another silent figure stalked the shadows of Queens, making her way home from a marathon meeting of the Shylock High Physics Club. She stood around five-foot-ten, tall for a girl, her unusually large hands shaking under the stress she was increasingly unable to withstand. She fisted them, jammed them into her coat pockets. A fedora was pulled low over her round, strikingly attractive face, dark sunglasses covering huge, intense brown eyes. Shoulder-length, rich chestnut hair whipped in the breeze. Even in this unseasonably warm early October night, she wore a long black trench coat. Neither heat nor bitter cold affected her in the slightest, nor pain or fear.

When she quickened her pace, the coat billowed behind her like a cloak, revealing a black halter top, black cargo pants, and if the harvest moonlight was right, the silvery flash of four metal tentacles. With a hood and a sickle, she might have passed for Death himself.

Perhaps murderous compulsion and madness were woven into her genes. After all, she was cloned from a supervillain.

The darker byways of New York City were humming with illegal enterprise. If anything, they ought to have cloned former mayor Rudy Giuliani.

The muggers didn't notice the tall girl in the trench coat. Not in the pitch-black shadows. Octavia could hear snippets of conversation.

"No, please don't hurt me—"

"Come on! We know you want it, blondie! What did you expect us to do, strutting around in a dark alleyway by yourself in a shirt down to there and a skirt up to there like that? You act like a whore, we treat you like a—" The girl to whom the question was directed struggled in the muggers' grip, a futile endeavor. She, after all, didn't have superpowers.

The girl saw Octavia first, and her widening eyes caused one thug to turn.

"It might be a good idea right now to release her," Octavia advised.

The thug snickered. "You walk real fast away from here, Wonder Woman, and you just might leave alive—ah!"

Octavia had seized her adversary's right arm and bent it behind his back with such force that the shoulder broke with a loud crack. She pitched the thug away with a powerful human arm, reasoning that the sight of the tentacles would only scare the girl more.

Briefly airborne, the thug landed face first and tasted gravel.

The other thug recklessly charged into the fray.

Octavia heard the whoosh of a swung chain. She turned to the source and sighed. "Sometimes it's better to learn from others' mistakes than to learn from your own."

Instead of dodging the chain, Octavia stepped towards the assailant. The chain lashed around her right arm. She simply flung back her arm, knocking him off balance.

The thug had a ponytail. It served quite nicely as a handle. Ponytail cried out and fell; Octavia helped him up by collar and crotch and tossed him into Gravel Mouth, who was stumbling back up, helping both to a good helping of pain. Neither of them felt like doing much of anything right then except going back into a nice warm bed, or under a rock, or maybe even their mothers' wombs.

"Are you alright?"

Blondie's eyes widened. She didn't know what to make of it. Sure, she'd seen superheroes like every other New Yorker, but this living shadow who had the strength of forty grown men, who fought with the unbridled ferocity of an animal—she was clearly afraid. She had good reason to be. The action at the alley hadn't diminished Octavia's aggression by one iota—aggression that had steadily risen over the past few days.

"These alleys aren't safe for you," Octavia told her. "You should have known better than to walk here alone. Do you have someplace to go?"

Blondie nodded. "Home."

"Here? In Manhattan?"

"No, up in Schenectady. My family doesn't seem like such losers now."

Now envy and jealous rage were mixed with Octavia's fury; as a clone, she by definition simply didn't have a real family. There were the Jordans, of course, and Octavius himself, but they did not truly qualify, as much as Octavia wished them to. A wild desire raced through her head to smash the girl simply because she had something Octavia could never have. She just nodded and turned away. "Call them up and tell them you'll meet them at—" She looked at the brightly lit street corner, read the street signs.

Blondie was as bewildered as she was frightened. Octavia was painfully aware of how she shuddered at the sight of her. "Why did you do it? No one else would."

Octavia turned away. "Let's just say I have a lot to atone for." Then, she simply melted back into the shadows.

"Do you understand why you are here, Spider-Man?"

The superhero sat in a surprisingly comfortable armchair in a spacious office. "You called me over to get a cat out of a tree. A lot of little old ladies ask me to do that."

The man in the chair facing him smiled. He was tall, broad-shouldered, fit, with brown hair streaked with gray. An eye patch covered his right eye; the left was clear blue. He leaned back in his chair, stroking the white kitten in his lap. "I'm sufficiently secure in my masculinity to be immune from any wisecracks about Fluffy here."

"But the cat was just a cover."

"As is that mask. Enjoy the secrecy while you can, Mr. Parker. Congress is trying to push through a bill requiring all superheroes to be publicly registered."

"Why am I really here?"

"I need to ask you some questions concerning your knowledge of Project Octopus and Operation Apollo."

The names were unfamiliar to Spidey.

The one-eyed man smiled. "I am Colonel Nick Fury, Chief Agent of the SHIELD division of the CIA." He gestured to an older man on his left. "This is Theodore Rockefeller, Director of the CIA Subdivision of Scientific Intelligence." Fury then pointed to an attractive, slim black woman sitting primly to his right. "This is Dr. Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State." Next was a florid, gray-haired man. "George Tenet, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Mr. Rockefeller, Dr. Rice, Mr. Tenet, this is Peter Parker, otherwise known as Spider-Man."

"You know my secret identity." A statement, not a question.

"Yes, we do. We know the identities of all superheroes, even if their identities, like yours, are not publicly known. Rest assured that your identity, along with everything else said in here, will not leave this room. These officials are only observing, by necessity. I will be asking the questions. You will answer them truthfully, to the best of your knowledge—or I will shout your real name from the rooftops. Understand?"

Spidey nodded. Fury turned on a video camera and fiddled with it a bit.

the following is a partial transcript of Colonel Nicholas Fury's debriefing of Spider-Man, concerning events published in dramatized form by unknown source in Nature Versus Nurture 2; identities of both speakers confirmed by CIA voiceprint analysis; observed and recorded by the Secretary of State

Col. Fury (in background): "This is a debriefing taken by Col. Nick Fury of SHIELD-CIA. The contents of this tape are highly classified and only to be seen by those working on Project Octopus and Operation Apollo. Your true name and superhero identity, please."

Parker: "My name is Peter Benjamin Parker. I have been working as the superhero Spider-Man since I was 16 years old."

Fury: "What is your relationship with Dr. Otto Octavius, the super criminal called Doctor Octopus?"

Parker: "He has been, for most of my superhero work, one of my archenemies."

Fury: "Is it true that you assisted CIA agent Cindy Cypher in the capture of Dr. Octopus?"

Parker: "Yes." He had, in fact, been blackmailed into the whole thing.

Fury: "Your efforts in capturing him failed, did it not?"

Parker: "Yes."

Fury: "Could you elaborate on why that happened?"

Parker: "I almost had him until Green Goblin stepped in and started fighting with Doc Ock."

Fury: "Who is Green Goblin and what is your relationship with him?"

Parker: "Goblin is actually Norman Osborn, the father of my late best friend. He is another one of my archenemies. He found out my secret identity and then killed my girlfriend—" Spidey began, trying to impress upon these government officials exactly why a secret identity was so important.

Fury: "Stick to the question at hand, please. What were the exact circumstances of your work with Agent Cypher?"

Parker: "I was pursuing Dr. Octopus down Manhattan shortly after he robbed a bank and taken a teenage girl hostage. I was met by Agent Cypher, who then sought my help to capture him. I was reluctant to do so, but she threatened to leak my identity to the media—"

Fury: "Please stick to describing what you did with Agent Cypher."

Parker: "Shortly thereafter, I discovered that Octopus was stealing equipment to build a radiation ray capable of destroying a large city. I deduced that he only needed one more piece to finish it, and where he could get it.

"I was able to subdue Octopus, but not until after he had taken what he needed. However, the teenage girl, Octavia Jones, fought and then severely injured me." Spidey was going to remember what those broken bones felt like for a long time.

Fury: "Did you know she was a clone created by the SDSI-CIA?"

Parker: "Not until after I made my second attempt to capture Octavius in front of Phoebus General Hospital. The Green Goblin then tried to interfere with the fight. He told me that the girl was a clone of Octavius, that the CIA wanted him to 'bring her in,' and that her genetic pattern was flawed. Goblin knocked Octopus into a car. I was able to prevent Agent Cypher from using lethal force."

Fury: "You convinced Agent Cypher not to shoot Octavius?"

Parker: "I believe she might have had some personal vendetta against him. She kept telling me that Octavius killed her mother. I told her that—"

Fury: "Please stay on the subject. What did the Goblin want with Octavia?"

Parker: "Like I said, Goblin told me the government wanted their experiment back. I don't know anything else. Agent Cypher kept saying the whole thing was highly classified."

end of transcript

The Director's eyes widened. It wasn't Cypher's incompetence that led to the failure of Project Apollo, after all. It was Spider-Man's interference in the mission. Still, Cypher had asked for his assistance, but the Director had suggested she go to her enemy's enemies. "It was hinted that Carlyle was going behind our backs, working with Goblin. We were never aware of the Oz formula before Carlyle had it injected into the clone."

Spidey's jaw practically touched the floor, just realizing the full implications of what he saw that day. "That girl, Octavia—she's a clone of Doc Ock—and you injected her with the Green Goblin formula!"

Nick Fury sighed. "The last super-soldier experiment of this scope was during World War II. That experiment resulted in Captain America—and ever since then, the SDSI has sought to recreate that great success. However, much of the Captain America files—including the secret formula—were later destroyed. We went on to other methods."

"For Pete's sake, you cloned a supervillain and then gave her a formula which could make her even crazier! What is this government coming to?"

Fury's voice was even. "The War on Terror has to be won at all costs, Parker."

"I'm not sure I like the costs. See, when your experiments go crazy, it's us superheroes who have to chase them down. And in return, you demand our secret identities, the only thing that protects our families and friends from our enemies."

"Do you like what you do—your superhero work?"

"Hell no. But I know I have to do it."

"If you don't like it, why do you?"

Spidey shook his head. "You guys wouldn't have a clue. You guys don't have enough of a sense of responsibility. Am I free to go now?"