The city didn't sleep. Queens never had. But tonight, it felt like it wasn't just awake — it was watching.
Aaron Parker walked with the same calm stride he always did, hands in his pockets, head slightly lowered, posture relaxed. To anyone passing by, he was just another teen cutting through the night on his way home.
But Aaron's mind wasn't on the streets. It was above them. Around them. In the air currents that didn't match, in the electromagnetic flickers across power lines that hummed wrong.
Oscorp had tightened its net.
He felt it the moment he stepped out of the apartment.
This wasn't passive surveillance anymore. This was a containment grid.
It started subtle.
Streetlights on certain blocks pulsed in rhythm—slightly out of sync with the city's electrical patterns. Portable maintenance vans had popped up overnight, stationed in spots where they had no reason to be. Their innocuous exterior branding barely disguised the signal emitters humming beneath their chassis.
Aaron's Super Senses tuned in, his hearing filtering layers until the world became a clean signal map. The drones above were moving differently now—more aggressive in their sweep patterns. Their orbits tightened, their reaction latency shaved down by fractions.
But they still weren't perfect.
Aaron smirked to himself.
Oscorp was escalating carefully. They weren't ready to confront. They were herding.
They want me to react. To show them what I am.
He had no intention of giving them that satisfaction.
He took a left turn into a commercial district, the glass windows of closed shops reflecting more than just neon signs. In those mirrors, he saw the subtle glint of surveillance drones adjusting their angles, their paths crossing in choreographed patterns.
Oscorp was good.
But he was better.
He let them track him through an open plaza—an intentional exposure. He knew their grids relied on line-of-sight synchronization. By entering a space too wide, he forced them to overlap coverage, creating micro-delays in their data relays.
A van shifted position two blocks down, adjusting for the blind spot.
Manual repositioning. They're not fully automated. Still human hands behind the wheel.
Aaron catalogued every move.
Then came the probe.
It was clever—he'd give them that.
A delivery drone, marked with a generic courier logo, flew casually past him. Harmless, invisible in a city saturated with flying gadgets. But Aaron felt the pulse before it even passed overhead.
A low-grade electromagnetic wave brushed against his skin — harmless to civilians, but designed to test bio-adaptive responses.
It was a poke.
A quiet challenge.
Aaron didn't flinch.
His steps remained measured, his breathing calm. He walked beneath the drone as though it didn't exist, but in his mind, he dissected the pulse structure, reading the way it scanned muscle density, energy dispersion, skeletal feedback.
So that's what you're after.
They weren't just watching.
They were mapping.
He passed by a storefront window, its reflective surface curving slightly. Perfect.
Aaron's fingers brushed against the glass casually as he walked by, but his senses were sharp. He focused on the delivery drone's data signal, his Super Brain reconstructing the data packet in real-time as it bounced off the window.
The pulse contained more than a scan. It was a two-way collector. Oscorp was feeding queries into the environment, expecting passive returns.
But Aaron wasn't passive.
He memorized the structure.
Frequency pattern. Signal strength. Uplink nodes.
Oscorp's questions were now his answers.
He didn't break pace.
The net was tightening, but Oscorp hadn't realized yet — their prey wasn't trapped.
Their prey was observing.
Across the city, in a high-rise surveillance hub, Oscorp operatives monitored data streams, unaware of the silent chess game unfolding.
"Subject 02 is non-reactive to pulse scan," one technician reported, eyes fixed on cascading data charts.
Another analyst frowned. "No acceleration in muscle response. No adrenaline spike. Either he's ignorant, or…"
The sentence trailed off.
Or he's outpacing them.
Their system flagged a recommendation.
"Phase 3 — Controlled Encounter Suggested."
The command wasn't given yet. Oscorp didn't act on assumptions. But the wheels were turning.
Back in Queens, Aaron's route wound back toward familiar streets. But his eyes weren't on his path. They were on the patterns unfolding in the glass, in the metal, in the currents.
He knew Oscorp's next moves now.
They wouldn't engage.
Not yet.
They would provoke. Test thresholds. Nudge until he made a mistake.
He wouldn't.
As he neared the apartment, he paused by a vending machine, pretending to scan its contents. In its reflective panel, he watched a drone adjust its altitude, recalibrating for a better scan angle.
Aaron allowed himself a thin smile.
Watch me all you want. I'll be watching back.
That night, in his room, Aaron sat at his desk, his notebook open, his pen moving swiftly.
Oscorp Surveillance Protocols — Phase 2 Observations:
Drone triangulation adapted to 0.7-second recalibration.
EM pulse probes deployed via disguised civilian drones.
Human oversight remains — manual repositioning of ground units.
Objective: Provoke adaptive biological response.
He underlined the last point.
Conclusion: They don't know. They're guessing. Testing.
He flipped to a new page.
Counter-Strategy:
1. Remain passive. Do not engage provocations.
2. Harvest probe data through reflective surfaces.
3. Map signal uplink nodes — locate mobile hub positions.
4. Prepare false data trails (next phase).
Aaron leaned back in his chair.
Oscorp had made the first real move tonight.
Next, it would be his.