Ah, almost to the end of the road. Almost. Don't get complacent.
To Song With No Soul: Sorry for the long wait, nothing like someone trying to install a new operating system on your computer and mucking up your Microsoft Word along the way. Here's where you will discover the fate of Dr. Melitta, and where I explain that Octavia thought she had to blow up the Blue Tower because that was where all the Projects research and equipment was. Knowing firsthand her own torment at being a clone and Macendale's torment secondhand, she would not permit them to create another one. Happy reading!
Whether old or new, read and review!
Epilogue: The Omega and the Alpha
"God does not play dice with the universe." –Albert Einstein
"Stop telling God what He must do!" –Niels Bohr
The reporters were quickly gathering around the ruins of the former headquarters of the Subdivision of Scientific Intelligence. Miraculously, they noted, the nearby September 11th memorial and the great flag were spared the destruction. They converged on the street corner, well away from the fire engines. The official word, given by leg-crossing, disturbingly perky morning news anchors in pancake makeup, was that it was the work of Islamic terrorists, just like the attack on the World Trade Center so many years ago, still burned into New York City's collective memory. Some people, not normally given to thoughts of the paranormal, said the site was cursed. And most otherwise worldly and cynical New Yorkers swallowed the story whole.
But some knew better.
One had slipped into one of his many underground laboratories, amusingly reading tabloid rumors that he had fathered a son through a California lady lawyer he'd picked up at a bar half a year ago—and then, once more, plotting another revenge on that accursed arachnid aberration that stubbornly placed himself between him and the good graces of the scientific community.
One stood in front of the ruins, blonde hair ash-covered and streaming in the wind, remembering Octavia's final request. Remembering that Shakespeare's Hamlet ended with bodies littering the stage, how Horatio, one of the only survivors of the tragedy, swore to carry out his friend's final request… "If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story." She caught sight of one reporter, currently interviewing a young SDSI computer scientist identified as Dr. Carolyn Trainer.
One had escaped from the burning building from the skin of her teeth, quietly slipping into the crowd, and later quietly slipping into the helicopter that would take her to the second SDSI-CIA headquarters in Virginia. Octavia had died unknowing that her creator was still free to wreak havoc at the genetic level.
And one was contentedly walking home to his home in Queens, never minding that it was a long walk and his car was trashed. He was grateful to be alive, hard as his life was, and grateful to feel the wind on his unmasked face. His costume had been ripped to shreds in the incident, when he finally got free of the webbing and got caught in the crossfire of glass shards while trying to protect the bystanders—a total loss. Spider-Man was going to have to lay low for a while, and Peter Parker had a lot of lost time with his adored wife to make up for.
Something in the street caught his eye. He peered at the black goo, slowly crawling on the pavement unnoticed—until now.
Cindy Cypher's living armor, he thought, bending over to pick it up. I could use something like this, especially with no costume.
In the laboratory of the CIA headquarters in Longmont, Virginia, Drs. Miles Warren and Nancy Melitta gazed upon the newest product of her ongoing experiment. That experiment was nearly destroyed by a previous version of that experiment, resulting in the death of the outmoded model and the destruction of the Manhattan laboratory. The loss was regrettable, but the clone was never of any use to the security interests of America anyway. Her death was no skin off their backs. The ruined Manhattan facility was, though, as was the obliteration of several years of research. Most fortunately though, the creation of the newest model was fully covered with private funding; a certain businessman-cum-supervillain had proved most generous with his money.
The newest version of the experiment was greatly improved on the first and second. First and foremost, his progenitor was a superhero, not prone to violence, madness, or criminality like the supervillain progenitors of the first and second. Those characteristics had shown most markedly in the second, even though as a female she was initially thought to be less aggressive.
The new model lay on his stomach in the incubator. Dr. Melitta was meeting with William and Mary Reilly; the new model was now nine months old and soon to be placed with his adopted family. He had a shock of fuzzy light brown hair and crystal blue eyes. He was a beautiful baby, peaceful and serene. He was completely unaware of the immense power in his genes laying in wait until puberty, blissfully unaware of the curse that had weighed so heavily on the previous models. The second, especially, had had the intelligence to realize she was a monster, a doomed Creature created by man and not God. According to one small New York newspaper, the first had eventually realized that too; the paper carried an obituary of one Macendale Jackson. Cause of death: suicide. Gunshot to the head, as a matter of fact.
God created man on the sixth day, and eventually man developed Science and used Science to become modern-day gods. God made man in His image, and now man used Science to create baby gods in his image. With Science, man no longer needed God, no longer needed a Creator, to the peril of both God and man. With Science, man could not create gods; he could only create monsters.
But like the first and second models, the third bore the sign of his identity, the identity of his own progenitor, a modern-day mark of Cain, on his right shoulder blade: a tiny, dark brown image of a Spider.
Dr. Warren crooned the new model's name softly: "Benjamin…Benjamin, are you ready to meet your new mommy and daddy?"
Finis