This book may start off odd, due to my protagonist lacking in most human aspects, but give it a try. I worked hard on this, and I want money.
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Kaine sat cross-legged on the ceiling, gravity a negotiable suggestion rather than a law. The plaster above him was cracked in thin, spider-web fractures from where his boots had pressed for too long, yet he hadn't bothered to adjust. Black hair fell in uneven curtains around his face, too long to be practical, too short to be styled—neglected rather than chosen. It brushed his shoulders when he breathed, which he did slowly, deliberately, as if each inhale was a calculation rather than a necessity.
The room was dim, lit only by the city bleeding in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Red and white lights crawled across the glass like restless insects, reflections of traffic far below. His eyes caught everything. Bright red, sharp, unblinking. In the gloom they glowed faintly, predatory, unmistakable. His face looked young in a way that irritated him—soft lines, the lingering fullness of baby fat that never seemed to disappear no matter how much his body had been torn apart and rebuilt. Exhaustion sat on him like a second skin, not physical but existential, the kind that sleep never touched.
Beneath his eyes, the six black beads remained perfectly still. Three under each eye, round, matte, unnatural. They didn't reflect light. They didn't pulse. They were simply there, as if reality itself had accepted them as permanent fixtures. He rarely thought about them anymore. They were a solved problem.
He focused.
Time aligned itself neatly in his head.
It had been exactly fifty-one hours, forty-five minutes, and either thirty-two or thirty-three seconds since the denial. The discrepancy irritated him—not because it mattered, but because it meant an external variable had interfered. Someone had spoken while he was calculating. Someone had wasted his time.
The Cure.
He didn't call it that for drama, or arrogance, or because it sounded benevolent. He called it that because it was accurate. A correction to a disease state. Humanity, as it existed now, was an unstable system running on corrupted code. Crime wasn't a symptom; it was a predictable outcome. You could dress it up in alien invasions, multiversal collapses, gods falling from the sky—but strip all of that away, ignore the spectacle, and the baseline reality remained unchanged.
People hurt each other.
Constantly. Efficiently. Creatively.
Heroes responded by treating individual wounds while refusing to acknowledge the infection. They fought battles, saved cities, posed for cameras, and then went home satisfied while the same patterns re-emerged the next day. Statistically, hero activity correlated with survival rates—not with long-term behavioral correction. The data was clear. He'd run it hundreds of times, adjusting variables, accounting for outliers.
The conclusion never changed.
So he had proposed a fix.
Not a paradise. That idea was childish. Static. Unmaintainable. Utopias collapsed under the weight of human variance. No—his approach targeted the root. Humans were biologically inclined toward self-interest. Altruism existed, yes, but it required reinforcement. Effort. Emotional investment. Violence, greed, and cruelty, on the other hand, emerged naturally under stress. Evolution had rewarded those traits.
But biology was not immutable.
Neurochemistry could be altered. Gene expression could be guided. Emotional thresholds could be raised, suppressed, redirected. Empathy amplified where needed, aggression dampened where excessive. Not erased—never erased—but regulated. A global adjustment, subtle enough to avoid immediate detection, broad enough to matter.
A cure.
Theoretical? Yes. Impossible? No.
And that was why it scared them.
He remembered the voices with perfect clarity, even if the faces had already blurred into irrelevance.
"This is a denial of human rights and freedom. You can't be serious, Spider-Man."
The emphasis on the name had been deliberate. A reminder. A leash.
"That's classic villain talk. First you start out good… then you end up in jail."
A laugh had followed that one. Nervous. Performative.
"This is a joke, right? You don't get to play god over people."
Play. As if the world weren't already a game rigged by biology and chance.
He'd listened. He always listened. Input was valuable, even when it was wrong. But none of them had offered counter-data. No models. No alternative solutions beyond the same tired mantra: we save who we can and hope for the best.
Hope was not a strategy.
The meeting had ended predictably. Gentle voices layered over hard decisions. Smiles masking fear. The media would call them comrades. Friends. Family. Kaine had walked out without argument, without threats, without ceremony. There was no point. You didn't debate gravity. You worked around it.
Who could stop him, anyway?
The thought surfaced without pride, only assessment. His body was a weapon refined through suffering and iteration. His mind had earned him the nickname long before the mask, long before the spider. Plague Doctor. The hero who understood that sometimes survival required controlled infection. He had dismantled syndicates, erased black-ops programs, brought down threats that other heroes hadn't even known existed.
And still—force wasn't the answer here.
If he imposed the Cure unilaterally, it would fail. Someone smarter, or simply more numerous, would dissect it. Rebrand it. Weaponize the narrative. Turn it into a disease in the public consciousness. Heroes would unite against him. Scientists would scramble to reverse it. The system would reject the change.
Annoying.
He clicked his tongue softly, the sound barely audible in the vast office.
"…Hypocritical saviours," he murmured, voice flat, emotionless. "Basking in praise while refusing to cut the problem short." But don't care about that...nothing but the words of a defeated spider.
The words didn't echo. The room absorbed them, as it absorbed everything else. This wasn't a lair. No dramatic cave, no gothic hideout.
Just his office at Parker Industries—glass, steel, minimalist design. Clean. Efficient. The company that funded Spider-Man. Sponsored him. Owned his image, his tech patents, his public goodwill. A corporate halo wrapped neatly around vigilantism.
Below him, screens slept in standby mode, ready to wake at a thought. Files upon files of data rested behind encrypted firewalls. Prototypes waited in sterile labs floors beneath his feet. Resources weren't the issue.
Time was.
Kaine stared at the city upside-down, watching New York breathe. Sirens flared and faded. Somewhere, a crime was happening. Somewhere else, a hero was arriving just a little too late. The pattern continued, unbroken.
All the battles. All the enemies. Every incremental gain in strength, speed, intellect.
Meaningless, if he couldn't fix this world.
His fingers flexed against the ceiling, tiny cracks spreading like veins. Not anger. Just pressure. A reminder that systems yielded when enough force—or precision—was applied.
The Cure had been denied.
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[Auther: So? Confused? Don't worry, I'll explain this later, just keep reading.]