Summer Slipped Away Quietly

It was August 2013, the final month of summer. Peter Parker swung through New York, marveling at how peaceful everything seemed.

The biggest recent news came from the Ultimate Team. Months after announcing its formation without any further updates, the department finally released new information: Elijah Bradley, a sixty-two-year-old Black Super Soldier from the Vietnam War era, would join the Ultimate Team as the superhero Patriot.

But that was not the explosive part. The real bombshell was that, to explain who Patriot was, the Pentagon held a special press conference and exposed the United States government's brutal Super Soldier human experiments during the Vietnam War. Out of three hundred test subjects, only one had survived, and details of how he had been persecuted because he was Black were all laid bare. They publicly apologized to the victim as well.

If they had added a bow to the apology, it would have felt very much like District 11.

The White House was "quite proud" of this, proudly declaring that "America had the courage to admit its mistakes." As for that—

"Without question, we all know that President Matthew Ellis has tremendous courage when it comes to admitting mistakes that were not made by his administration." J. Jonah Jameson mocked him mercilessly from a giant screen in Manhattan. "As always, he has portrayed himself as the 'rectifier of America's mistakes,' but who is going to pay for the countless mistakes made by this administration?"

"When Obadiah sold Stark Industries weapons to terrorists, did our intelligence agencies truly know nothing? How did A.I.M., a military-industrial conglomerate that worked closely with terrorist organizations and even Hydra, obtain Pentagon contracts and become a supporter of the American Avengers? And then there are the investigation results for that underwater human experimentation lab at the bottom of