September 14th.
Trapped. Not in a cell of brick and steel, but in one of light and data. They call it The Web. A digital Valhalla for their fallen spider-saints. To me, it is a clean asylum, humming with a sterile emptiness that grates on the soul. The air has no smell. The corridors have no end. A prison all the same. They brought me here after the meeting. The one with the bleeding-heart captain and the angry girl in the hood. They do not trust me. Good. Trust is a vulnerability.
A whisper of movement behind me, too fluid to be one of the costumed boys who swagger through these halls. This one is different. A predator's grace.
I stopped, my boots silent on the glowing floor. I didn't turn. The sound of my pen scratching against the cheap paper of my journal was the only defiance I offered.
"Hello?" Her voice was… careful. Not afraid, but measured. Like someone testing the ice on a frozen lake.
I continued writing. Presence detected. Female. Agile. Scent of ozone and something sweet, like synthetic sugar. Another spider, sent to mend the tear I made in their tidy web.
"I'm Cindy Moon," she said, her footsteps finally coming to a halt a few feet away. "Some people call me Silk."
I snapped the journal shut. The sound was a gunshot in the silent corridor. I turned slowly, my face a shifting canvas of black and white. She wore a suit of white, red, and black, her features obscured by a mask that covered her lower face. Her eyes, wide and dark, watched me without the raw anger I'd seen in the others. There was something else there. Curiosity. A dangerous thing.
"I was hoping we could talk," she said, her posture relaxed but ready. "Maybe do some training. Get to know how we each operate."
My face remained impassive, the inkblots swirling lazily. I saw the word for what it was. A prettier cage. A handler. "Surveillance," I grunted, the sound muffled by my own mask. "You were sent to watch me."
She didn't flinch or deny it. A flicker of something—respect?—crossed her eyes. "They're worried. You're… a variable they can't account for. Me, I'm just trying to see if the variable is a threat or an asset."
I looked past her, down the identical, branching hallways of this digital purgatory. Leashed. They all were. Chained to a code of conduct that would get them killed against a true enemy. An enemy who doesn't play by the rules.
"Another spider on a leash," I muttered, the words more for myself. I met her gaze again. "Fine. Let's see if you can bite."
The "training room" was another white box, larger than the corridor, with a raised platform in the center. Silk tapped a console, and the walls dissolved into a panoramic view of a city in ruins. Broken concrete, skeletal rebar clawing at a perpetually grey sky. The illusion was nearly perfect. I could almost smell the dust and decay. Almost.
"Standard simulation," she explained, her voice echoing slightly in the vast space. "Inheritor-class threat, multiple civilian targets to rescue. The objective is to secure the civilians and neutralize the threat."
I snorted. The air was sterile, the danger artificial. A puppet show. "Child's games."
"Maybe," she said, a new edge to her voice. She gestured to a flickering data node floating in the corner of the simulation. "But the data inside those nodes isn't. We've been seeding intel from Karn's archives into the sims. Tactical readouts, Inheritor weaknesses. Real information. You have to complete the objective to access it."
Information. The word was a key turning in a lock. Information is a weapon. The only weapon that truly matters. Suddenly, the game had stakes.
"Begin simulation," I said.
The world solidified around us. The distant scream of a simulated civilian cut through the air. Silk was gone before the sound finished echoing. A white blur, she moved through the rubble with an unnatural speed, a living thread weaving through chaos. I saw her web up a chunk of falling debris the size of a car, then cocoon three holographic figures huddled beneath it and whisk them into a designated "safe zone." Fast. Efficient. Clean. She was a surgeon.
I was a butcher.
I moved into the shadows, the grey cityscape a more familiar environment than the clean white of The Web. A hostile signature appeared on my periphery—a simulated Inheritor, tall and regal, its face a mask of predatory glee. It was stalking a group of cowering civilians.
Silk was on the other side of the map, performing another elegant rescue. She wouldn't get here in time.
I didn't wait. I dropped from a shattered overpass, my trench coat flaring. The creature turned, surprised. Its mistake. I didn't use fancy acrobatics. I used momentum. My shoulder connected with its knee, sending it off-balance. I grabbed a rusted piece of rebar from the ground as I rose. It was heavy. Good.
The Inheritor lunged, its claws extended. I sidestepped, not with her grace, but with the brutal economy of a cornered animal. I drove the rebar into the joint of its elbow. The simulation registered the hit with a sickening crunch of code. It roared, a sound of digital fury. I didn't give it time to recover. I used its own forward momentum to slam it face-first into a concrete pillar. Then again. And again. The simulation wavered, the creature's form flickering as its programming fought to keep up with the damage.
I found its throat and squeezed. There was no hesitation. No second thought. Just the cold, hard logic of the situation: a threat exists; it must be removed. The light in its eyes faded, and it dissolved into a shower of green pixels.
By the time Silk arrived, all that was left was me, standing over the fading data-ghost, and the rescued civilians she had deposited in the safe zone. We had both completed the objective. The contrast could not have been more stark. She saved lives. I ended threats.
The simulation dissolved, leaving us back in the sterile white room. Silk stood with her arms crossed, her mask hiding her expression, but her posture screamed disapproval.
"You don't have to break everything to win," she said, her voice quiet but firm.
I wiped a smear of imaginary dust from my glove. "The objective was to neutralize the threat. It is neutralized. The 'civilians' are safe. Explain my failure."
"That wasn't neutralization. That was… overkill. You could have incapacitated it. Distracted it."
I turned to face her fully, letting the ink on my mask bleed into a harsh, symmetrical pattern. "Incapacitated is temporary. Distracted is a risk. Broken is a solution. Mercy is another mask. You wear it to feel clean after crawling through the filth. I prefer to just burn the filth away."
I expected the anger, the flash of moral outrage I'd seen from the others. It didn't come. Instead, she tilted her head, her eyes analytical. She was studying me, trying to solve an equation. She wasn't enraged. She was curious.
"Let's run another," she said, her tone shifting from accusatory to challenging. "Level two."
The second simulation loaded. Another ruined city, but this one felt different. The air was heavy, the code unstable. The grey sky flickered with static, and the sound of the wind was a low, corrupted howl.
"Something's wrong," Silk said, her body tensing. "The parameters are degrading."
Before I could respond, a figure coalesced from the glitching data in front of us. It had the shape of an Inheritor, but it was wrong. Its limbs were too long, its movements jerky and unnatural. Patches of its form were missing, replaced by screaming blocks of raw code. A data-wraith. A ghost in their machine. This wasn't part of the test. This was real.
It shrieked, a sound of dial-up modems and tearing metal, and lunged.
My instincts screamed. This was not a game. This was a rabid dog to be put down. I drew a grappling hook from my coat, the sharpened anchor ready to find a soft spot in its corrupted code.
"Wait! Together!" Silk yelled.
For once, her logic cut through my own. The thing was unpredictable, its movements erratic. A frontal assault was a gamble. Teamwork was tactics.
I gave a curt nod.
The wraith swiped at me, its claws passing through a glitch in the simulation and carving a hole in reality itself for a split second. I dodged, the raw energy of the exposed Web singing the edge of my coat.
As it turned, Silk shot past me. She didn't attack. She laid a trap. Thick, organic webbing erupted from her fingertips, not to encase the creature, but to bind its limbs to the shattered environment. She pinned its right arm to a broken wall, its left leg to a collapsed bus. She was the strategist, creating the opening.
The wraith roared, thrashing against the restraints. It was strong, its corrupted data tearing at her webs. It wouldn't hold for long.
"Now!" she shouted.
I didn't need to be told. I moved in, not at its head, but at its own trapped arm. It was still trying to swipe at me with its free hand. I grabbed the restrained wrist, twisted, and aimed its own claws at its chest. With a guttural roar, I shoved.
The creature's own weapon, a tool of pure destruction, became its undoing. The claws, designed to tear through the fabric of reality, sank into its own unstable data-stream. It screamed, a sound of pure digital agony, and then imploded. The simulation shattered around us, the white walls of the training room snapping back into place.
We stood in the silence, breathing heavily. The fight had lasted less than thirty seconds. Faster, cleaner, and more decisive than either of us could have managed alone.
Silk finally lowered her arms, a slow, weary motion. She looked at the empty space where the wraith had been, then at me.
"You're effective," she admitted, her voice low. "Just… terrifying."
I wiped my hands on my coat, a habit from a world with more grime. "Terrifying gets results. You know that. You just don't like admitting it."
I watched her, waiting for the denial, the platitude about a better way. It never came. She just stood there, the admission hanging in the air between us. A silent acknowledgment of a hard truth. It was the first honest moment I'd had since I arrived in this place. The first crack in her pristine, heroic façade.
As we walked out of the training room, the silence was different. Not hostile, but thoughtful.
"If you're staying," she said, breaking it as we reached the corridor, "at least learn our patterns. Our comms signals. The way we move. We'll both get more done."
It was an offer of truce. A practical one. An olive branch stripped of its leaves, leaving only the functional wood beneath.
I didn't answer. I just walked past her, my journal already in my hand. Later, in the empty room they had assigned me—another white box—I sat and opened it to a fresh page. The pen scratched out the day's events.
Addendum.
The spider, Silk. Not like the others. They see a monster and recoil. She sees a weapon and wonders how it works. The angry girl wants to break me. The captain wants to fix me. Silk wants to understand me. A dangerous sentiment.
She does not flinch from the truth. She saw the necessity in the simulated city, the efficiency in the glitched reality. Her disgust is a veneer. Beneath it is a pragmatist. The Web still owns her, its rules still coiled around her throat. But she looks at me and sees the mask, not the monster. Understands its function.
Possible tool. Possible ally.
Watch her.