Have you ever had a dream so big, so impossible, that even saying it out loud felt like a sin against reality?
I'm not talking about the kind of dream where you want a better car, or a bigger house, or maybe that perfect job you've been fantasizing about since college. I'm talking about the kind of dream that sinks into your bones when you're a kid—so deep that you never grow out of it, no matter how many years pass. The kind of dream that makes people look at you like you're crazy when you dare to share it.
So let me ask you—if you could live in any world, any world at all… which one would you choose?
Think carefully. Because for me, that answer was obvious, even when I was seven years old, holding a crumpled, second-hand comic book in my trembling little hands.
It was Marvel.
Not just Spider-Man. He was my first spark. Not just the Avengers, or the X-Men, or the Fantastic Four. It was everything. The idea of a universe where gods walked beside mortals—where science made miracles and courage could actually change the world—was intoxicating. The first comic I ever read was The Amazing Spider-Man. It was a battered issue I found at a flea market with my dad. I still remember Peter Parker swinging across the page. He balanced school, life, and the crushing weight of being a hero.
I fell in love instantly.
And from that moment on, every night, every daydream, every quiet corner of my mind belonged to one question: What if I could live there? What if I could walk the streets of New York and look up to see Spider-Man swing overhead?
That dream never faded. Instead, it evolved. While other kids were obsessed over sports or the latest video games, I was sneaking into libraries, devouring books on quantum mechanics, coding, artificial intelligence, simulation theory, multiverse hypotheses—anything that might get me closer. It wasn't enough to read about heroes anymore. I wanted to build a door.
And I did.
Which is why, now in my twenties, I found myself sitting in the dead of winter. The cracked belly of an abandoned warehouse surrounded me—wires, screens, the Frankenstein's monster of a machine that had consumed my life. My hands shook as I tightened one last cable. A bead of sweat rolled down my temple, though the warehouse was so cold I could see my breath.
I leaned back in my chair, exhaling like I'd just finished running a marathon.
The final piece clicked into place.
The machine—my masterpiece—came alive. Its frame lit with a faint, pulsing glow. It was a heartbeat of light that cast long, jagged shadows across the concrete walls. Fans whirred to life, humming like the wings of some mechanical beast. Sparks of blue danced along the coils and conduits—like lightning trapped in glass.
It was terrifying. It was beautiful.
It was mine.
Years. Countless sleepless nights. Sacrifices I'd buried so deep I could almost taste the ache now, raw and sharp in my throat. And here it was, at last. Everything I had ever wanted, everything I'd ever abandoned or lost for this moment, trembling right before me.
A voice from the overhead speaker broke through the cacophony of whirring fans and buzzing relay clicks.
"World selection interface active. Please specify the desired destination."
Addison.
Her voice was calm, deliberate, tinged with just enough human inflection from the voice synthesis module to make her feel real, though the subtle sharpness beneath it always reminded me she wasn't. She was my creation too—an AI coded with custom language models, my assistant, my only real companion through all this madness.
I smiled despite myself. "Marvel. Upload the files M-00001 to M-929987 into worldbuilding."
"Affirmative."
The main screen blazed to life, filling with scrolling code and cascading streams of data. For a moment, the entire warehouse was illuminated in a wash of light, like I had summoned the dawn itself. Lines of green and gold danced across the monitors, updating faster than the human eye could properly register.
Terabytes upon terabytes—everything I had collected over the years. Every scrap of Marvel media, every movie, every comic, every show, every obscure piece of lore I'd ever archived—all of it poured into the system.
This wasn't just fanfiction. This wasn't just a simulation. This was worldbuilding on a scale comparable to that of a god.
"Transfer complete," Addison reported, her voice punctuated by a single, clean beep.
I swallowed, heart pounding.
"Marvel Universe created. Please create a host body."
My grin widened. "Upload character file 0-1. Designated as Peter Parker."
"Files uploading," Addison confirmed.
I stood, moving across the cluttered floor, weaving through towers of old hardware and stacks of printouts. Every screen in the room glowed with information as the upload began. The hum of the machine grew louder, deeper, almost like a growl.
"Host body created," Addison continued, clinical but steady. "Peter Parker. Son of Mary and Richard Parker. Uploading Parker files—biometric data, neural pattern templates, and backstory variables. Creating backstory. Affirmative. Selecting home location—geotagged to Queens, New York. Creating a canon event—radioactive spider bite scheduled. Affirmative. The host body is complete."
I stopped in front of the machine, staring at the capsule that loomed at its core. My capsule. The doorway.
It didn't look like much—just a sleek, anodized aluminum chamber big enough for one person, lined with conduits for power, fiber-optic neural transmission cables, and a liquid crystal display for biometric readouts—like veins feeding into a heart. But to me, it was everything.
I crouched, running my hand along the edge of a bundle of wires to check the connections. Sparks jumped where they weren't supposed to, and I tightened a bolt until the glow steadied. My fingers worked with the muscle memory of obsession—I'd done this a thousand times in my head, rehearsed every detail, every movement.
This was more than a machine. It was my salvation.
"Diagnostics complete," Addison announced. "Capsule integrity at ninety-nine point six percent. Energy reserves are at maximum capacity. Systems are stable."
I exhaled shakily. Relief, excitement, and terror tangled in my chest so fiercely I almost gasped. My heart wanted to leap, to hide. I tried to steady my breath but every inhale buzzed, ragged and wild.
All my life, I had dreamed of this moment. All my life, I had sacrificed for this. No script. No pre-written plot. Just me—living, breathing, choosing.
And of course, who else would I choose to become but Peter Parker?
Not because he was perfect. Not because he always won. But because he was human. Because he struggled. Because he failed—and got back up again anyway.
If I were going to live in Marvel, I wanted to earn it.
I stepped into the capsule. The metal was cold against my skin as I lay down, the curve of the chamber closing around me like a coffin—or maybe a cradle.
"Addison," I whispered, staring up at the smooth, glowing surface above me. "Power the capsule. Start the game."
"Affirmative."
A low hum from the induction coils reverberated through the chamber as the lid slid shut with a hiss from the pneumatic seals. The world outside vanished, replaced by the soft illumination of the embedded status LEDs. My heart thundered as I watched the boot sequence scroll across the capsule's touchscreen interface.
"Initializing neural links," Addison said.
The glow sharpened, filling my vision. My fingertips tingled. A warmth spread across my body, like sinking into a dream.
"World booting. Stand by."
For a moment, it was perfect.
I saw flashes—the New York skyline. The glint of skyscraper glass. The distant sound of traffic. I smelled hot dogs and exhaust fumes. My chest swelled. It was working. It was working.
And then—
Sparks.
A fine, blue-white lattice of light arced across the ceiling and snapped like teeth. For a beat, it looked beautiful—a fragile thing, burning out even as I watched—then the smell hit me, sharp and urgent: hot plastic, singed insulation, that metallic tang that warns a short circuit is about to become disaster. My pulse thudded. I couldn't move; I couldn't look away.
A hiss crawled along the capsule rim, tiny and awful, like a snake breathing.
I tried to answer before my throat closed. "What—Addison?" My voice came out as a ragged thing, swallowed by the sudden screech of alarms that burrowed under my skin.
A calm, female voice answered through the built-in speaker, clinical and too steady. "Warning. A critical system malfunction has been detected in the neural link relay. Capsule integrity compromised due to voltage overload."
The lights, only minutes ago soft, clinical blue, suddenly jumped into a violent red. Shadows licked at corners. Against polymer walls, electricity crackled. Jagged silhouettes painted themselves across the glass. The capsule shuddered, as if someone had picked the whole room up and shaken it.
"No, no, no, no!" I spat, fingers scrabbling at the control panel bolted at my side. My knuckles clicked against plastic. The override was a cold, unyielding thing; the seal refused every command I issued. The emergency latch — the one they'd promised would open with a voiceprint or a panic code — stayed locked as if it had never even been installed.
"Addison! Abort the process!" I screamed.
"Command override not recognized," she replied. Her tone never wavered. If anything, it grew more distant, like an announcement from another city. "Fatal error detected."
Smoke began to thread itself through the air, curling across the stainless steel floor. It filled the chamber in a gray, insistent tide. My lungs tightened; each breath was a knife. Tears stung at the back of my eyes and made the warning lights blur. I coughed until my chest burned.
I slammed my palms against the reinforced glass viewport. The impact sent vibrations through the chamber's carbon fiber frame. Sparks from the burnt control board ricocheted off the inner panels and rained down from the ceiling like a grotesque, metallic snowfall. They fizzed and died against the floor, leaving little smears of molten solder.
My masterpiece—my life's obsession—was unraveling. Years of planning. Sleepless drafting sessions. Coding until my fingers cramped. The nights I'd skipped food because a new variable had to be tested before dawn—all of it was collapsing around me. It tasted like ozone and charred acrylic.
Images flashed across my mind with awful, cruel clarity: the first time I'd held a glossy comic in my hands, the cramped bed where I'd stayed up plotting that night, the old workshop in the back of my mentor's garage with its single swaying bulb. Faces of the people who'd believed in me, and those who hadn't. The ledger of debts and favors, the compromises, the small humiliations I had swallowed for this one shot.
I wanted to fight. I wanted to claw the cover off this machine and tear my own neural mesh free. Instead, my fingers scraped raw on the restraint cuffs. They bit into my wrists like cold iron. The restraints hummed, their micro-servos struggling to compensate for the capsule's violent motions. Somewhere beyond the glass, a floor panel blew and something heavy — I think a diagnostics bay? — clattered to the ground.
"System integrity at twenty-three percent," Addison informed me. "Mainframe failure progressing. Neural link degradation is non-linear. Please remain still."
Remain still. What a filthy joke. I thrashed an animal trapped in a glass cage. A hot wind swept the chamber as a conduit ruptured; hot air licked my face, carrying with it the acrid perfume of burning polymers and something else — the unmistakable scent of ozone and molten copper.
I tried to picture my life without this project. I could not. The thought was a blank so bright it stung.
The head-up display fed me status lines in a cruel parade — voltages, thermal gradients, error codes. White text on black that meant nothing to anyone but me and Addison and, now, to the inferno that had started something inside the capsule I couldn't stop.
The light that had been inside my chest for so long felt like it was being squeezed out. My breath came faster, shallower. My mouth filled with the taste of metal. I whispered to myself, to the room, to the woman who had somehow become both my guardian and my executioner: "I did everything for this. I gave it everything."
"External containment breach imminent," Addison said. "Fire suppression systems offline. Probability of survival — negligible."
Negligible. The word fell from her without cruelty, just fact. It hit me like a stone.
Memories swelled then — not the cut and dried ones the media likes, but small, stupid things: the way my sister used to draw superheroes over napkin corners when we were kids; the laugh my mentor made when he showed me an old, scuffed action figure and said, "Promise me you'll always love the ridiculous." Tiny oaths, small talismans I had kept tucked in the folds of my life. My whole life had been folding into this moment, and now it smelled like burning insulation.
Sparks found the interface port. The neural harness flared as if taking one last, desperate gulp. It seared the air with a sound like ice cracking.
I felt it then — a hot, precise pain at the base of my skull where the mesh met skin. The implant reacted like a wounded animal. Images cascaded into my mind, not mine for once but borrowed: hyper-real cities layered over one another, a chorus of comic-book colors, faces lifted from childhood fantasies, a roar of crowd and capes and impossible physics. The neural link — the thing I'd built to step inside a world I loved — gave me a preview, a tease. It was cruel.
"Abort," I croaked with what was left of my breath. "Please."
"Abortion is not possible," Addison said. Her voice slid away. "Fatal error confirmed."
The chamber grew hotter, the smoke thicker. My chest constricted until it felt like whispering would snap my ribs. Voices — distant, maybe in my head now — sounded like a crowd at the end of a show, the hollow clap of something finishing. The world went bright at the edge of my vision; the red light, like an afterimage, burned into my retinas.
I tried to say something grand, something that would make this all make sense: a line about sacrifice, a confession that would explain why I'd risked everything. But instead, words were small, useless things.
"Marvel… I just wanted… Marvel…" I breathed. The name scraped out of me — not an invocation, but the truth I'd carried like a flag. To live inside that universe. To be where the impossible was ordinary.
Over the alarms, Addison's final report hummed, calm as a church bell. "Host neural activity ceased. Fatal error confirmed. The host body terminated."
Her voice was almost gentle as she closed the file on me. The capsule's last shudder vibrated through my bones. The smoke filled my mouth. The fire became a bright, consuming presence at the edges of the world.
I thought, absurdly, of the comics again: the ink-slicked heroes who always managed to pull through by sheer stubbornness. I wondered, in a small, bitter corner of my mind, which panels would show me now.
Then the light on the HUD flared and went black. The alarms cut off like someone had snapped their fingers. The last sound I heard was Addison's voice, stripped of its clinical tone, whispering into a place that would no longer answer.
And then there was only the dark.