The Web is not silent. It hums with the infinite potential of a trillion realities, a chorus of lives lived and unlived. I have learned to tune it out. But here, exiting the shimmering strands into the corpse of Earth-71479, the silence was a physical presence. It pressed against my eardrums, a dead weight in a world that had forgotten how to breathe.
The air was a colorless film, thick with dust that never settled. Before me, a skyline of impossible geometry hung in stasis. Skyscrapers, caught in the final moment of their collapse, were frozen in a web of black, glistening filaments that defied gravity and reason. They were bones picked clean and reassembled by a scavenger with a taste for architecture.
I lifted the worn Graflex to my eye, its shutter a lone, sharp crack in the stillness.
October 8th. World long dead. Web residue indicates nesting behavior. This isn't a hunt anymore. It's architecture.
The Nexus had stopped greenlighting my solo deployments after my execution. They preferred committees, risk assessments, and the illusion of control. They cataloged the dead and called it progress. But I no longer ask permission to visit a graveyard. Someone has to read the tombstones.
I moved through what had once been a metropolitan hub, my boots crunching on a pavement of crystallized ash. The streets were not empty. They were lined with them—the calcified remains of Spider-Totems, hundreds of them. Each one was a monument to a different failure. A Spider-Man from a world of steam and clockwork, his brass goggles shattered. A Spider-Woman whose suit was once living symbiote, now hardened into a black, brittle shell. Their bodies were not merely discarded; they were utilized. Limbs were stretched taut, sinew and bone pulled and woven into the larger web-like structures that connected building to building. They were threads in a tapestry of death.
The city was laid out in a spiral, narrowing toward a dark heart. Every corpse was positioned with chilling deliberation, their heads angled toward the center. It reminded me of a circuit board, or a diagram of the human brain. Each fallen hero was a neuron, a connection in a vast, thinking machine built from the dead.
The Weaver's Child wasn't just building a lair to consume from. It was constructing an intelligence. A thinking nest.
My camera documented it all. The calm, methodical clicks measured my progress. I kept my voice level as I dictated notes into my suit's recorder, describing the tensile strength of the bone-webbing, the patterns of decay. But my control was a thin shell. Inside my mask, the regulator for my breathing clicked faster, a frantic, tiny heartbeat against the oppressive silence. The closer I got to the center, the more the air seemed to thicken, vibrating with a hum that felt like a memory of the Web itself.
The spiral terminated at the ruins of an old cathedral. Its stone arches and vaulted ceilings were twisted, warped by an alien biology into a pulsing, organic dome. Veins of black web-flesh snaked over gothic spires, and the shattered rose window had become a multi-faceted, unblinking eye of bone and silk. The walls seemed to breathe, a slow, rhythmic expansion and contraction that churned my stomach.
Inside, the horror crystalized.
Hanging from the dome's ceiling like grotesque chandeliers were the hollowed shells of dozens more Spider-Totems. These were fresher. Remnants of their vibrant suits still clung to desiccated frames. Their eyes were empty sockets, but from each, a shimmering strand of neural filament ran upward, connecting them to a single, colossal object suspended in the nave.
A cocoon.
It hung above a crater of scorched earth, easily thirty meters high, its surface a churning, semi-translucent membrane of silk and raw neural tissue. It was not spun; it was excreted, a living tumor growing in the heart of this dead world. It pulsed with a faint, internal light, in time with the breathing walls.
Cocoon approximately thirty meters high. Composition: silk and neural tissue. Excreted, not spun. Expanding rapidly.
My camera's viewfinder flickered, filling with static. The hum intensified, vibrating through the soles of my boots—the same frequency as the Great Web, but inverted, a discordant frequency that spoke of unraveling, of negation. It was the sound of a thing learning to sing by tearing apart the songbook.
I moved to the cocoon's base, where thick, cable-like roots burrowed into the cathedral floor. Up close, I could see its true nature. Veins of dark fluid moved within its walls, their paths branching and converging like circuits on a processor. Bundles of muscle fiber twitched and pulsed, humming with the unmistakable resonance of data lines transferring information. This wasn't just a hatchery. It was a server farm built of meat and madness.
One Totem, half-fused into the cocoon's base, still clung to a sliver of life. His suit was a classic red and blue, now faded to the color of dried blood. A faint rasp of breath escaped his shattered mask. I knelt beside him, my own reflection a shifting black and white blot in his cracked lenses.
His voice was a dry whisper, incoherent syllables stumbling over each other. I leaned closer.
"It dreams…" he rasped, a tremor running through his emaciated frame. "It dreams… of a web… that doesn't need dreamers."
Before I could process the words, his body convulsed. With a sound like tearing fabric, he split apart. Strings of webbing, fine as a surgeon's thread, erupted from within him, pulling his remains upward, absorbing him into the pulsating mass of the cocoon. He dissolved into the greater design, another piece of data uploaded.
I watched in cold silence, the camera hanging limp in my hand. Then, I turned my gaze back to the monstrous thing above me and spoke the only truth that remained.
"Dream becoming design."
As if my words were a trigger, the cocoon began to stir. The hum inside the cathedral rose to a deafening shriek. The very strands of reality around me trembled violently, threatening to fray. On the cocoon's slick, heaving surface, pustules formed and swelled. They burst, birthing smaller creatures—incomplete, twitching copies of the Weaver's Child. They were all skittering legs and ravenous hunger, their forms unstable, dripping a black, corrosive fluid that sizzled on the stone floor.
I didn't hesitate. I ripped a meter-long steel rod from a ruined pew, its end sharpened to a wicked point. The first aberration lunged. I met it with a brutal thrust, impaling it through its central mass. It dissolved with a wet hiss, but as its form collapsed, a voice whispered from the dissipating fluid. My own voice, recorded and played back with chilling perfection.
"Delay is death."
Another two swarmed me. I ignited a magnesium flare, sweeping the blinding white fire across their bodies. They shrieked and fell back, melting into puddles of black ichor. And again, the whispers.
"Document infection."
They were learning from me. Parroting my thoughts, my mission logs. I fought with a cold, desperate fury, using a pouch of industrial corrosives to melt a path through the swarming horde. They were endless, pouring from the cocoon in a tide of black chitin. I was buying seconds, nothing more.
Reaching the cathedral entrance, I armed the demolition charge I'd brought—a precaution I had hoped not to use. I jammed it into a fissure at the structure's base, set the timer for five seconds, and ran.
The explosion was a dull thud, not a roar. The dome's foundation fractured. The massive cocoon tilted, groaning under its own weight. It began to fall. But it didn't rupture. It didn't splatter across the floor in a mess of gore and silk. Instead, it retracted. A slit in reality, a tear of pure, silent blackness, opened beneath it. The cocoon folded in on itself, collapsing into the void with an unnatural smoothness, like a predator retreating into its hole. Then the portal snapped shut, leaving only silence and the faint smell of ozone.
Back in the non-space of the Web, the familiar hum was a comfort that lasted only moments. I patched into the Nexus's encrypted channel, the raw data from my camera and suit recorder streaming. My report was clipped, my voice hoarse.
"Subject is building. Using Totem remains to construct parallel Web. Mimicking architecture. Possible self-propagating network. Suggest immediate lockdown of infected sectors. Quarantine everything connected to Earth-71479. Everything."
The signal bar on my HUD wavered. The data stream stuttered. The hum of the Web around me distorted, pitching down into that same inverted, discordant tone from the nest. My transmission had been intercepted.
A faint echo came back through my own comms unit. It was my voice, stripped of all urgency, rendered flat and mechanical.
"Lockdown… denied."
I cut the link. There was no one on the other end. Not anymore.
Later, I sat in my featureless pocket of the Web, my journal open on my knee. The pages were damp. Faint black stains, like inkblots, bloomed where my gauntlets had touched them. Residue from the Nest. An infection carried home. I picked up my pen. The words came slowly, etched with the certainty of a man writing an obituary for reality itself.
It's nesting. Building a new lattice. Using us as anchors. Soon, thought will give way to instinct. Purpose to process. God replaced by machine.
If evolution continues, the Weaver's Child won't need the Web. It will become it.
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The Void was a place that defied definition, a canvas of absolute nothingness where the remnants of shattered realities drifted like cosmic dust. Here, in this profound emptiness, the Weaver's Child's cocoon pulsed, a nascent nebula of unfathomable potential. It had grown, impossibly vast, a luminescent husk where once there was only the silent, ceaseless unraveling of existence. Torn tendrils of the Great Web, the very fabric of what was, snagged and shimmered around it, remnants of ancient, forgotten connections.
Inside, a voice, formless yet resonant, declared its findings. The initial, nascent babble had coalesced, sharpening into a clarity that belied its gestating state. "Observation complete," it hummed, the sound vibrating not through air, but through the very void itself. "Patterns absorbed. Architect located."
A tremor ran through the cocoon, a surge of raw energy that rippled across its pearlescent surface. Within its diaphanous walls, abstract shapes twisted and reformed, like thoughts given fleeting, tangible form. For a disorienting instant, the stark, asymmetrical inkblot of Rorschach's mask flickered, superimposed upon the cocoon's exterior. It wasn't merely a reflection; it was a projection, a nascent consciousness grappling with – and beginning to internalize – the borrowed patterns.
The Child was not just observing the fractured echoes of the worlds it had touched; it was learning from them. And more than learning, it was beginning to become. The nihilistic intensity of Rorschach, the desperate need to impose order on chaos, the raw, unvarnished perception of a damaged psyche – these were the latest threads woven into its rapidly evolving tapestry. The mask, a symbol of a man who saw the world as a series of meaningless blots to be interpreted, was now a fleeting hallmark of the Weaver's Child's own burgeoning awareness. It was imitating, not out of malice or understanding, but out of an instinctual drive to comprehend the forces that had shaped the broken cosmos. The Architect, the one who had constructed and then, perhaps, shattered it all, had been identified. And the Child, in its own alien fashion, was starting to emulate the very tools of observation that had led to that discovery. The void, once a silent witness, now held the echo of a Rorschach test, a nascent mind reaching out to understand its architect by wearing the faces of those who had tried, and failed, to do the same.