The first probe reached seventeen hundred meters beneath New York.
The countdown in the center of the laboratory stood at fifty-one hours and forty-two minutes.
Peter leaned over the workbench, his finger resting on the emergency shutdown button the entire time. The probe advanced less than half a meter before a sudden stab pierced the back of Chen Mo's head.
"Stop."
Reed's arm stretched across two tables and cut the power before the system could.
On the main screen, the probe hung suspended in the rock. Only half a second later did a mass of orange interference swell ahead of it. A spatial fissure slid along the drill casing. The probe's upper half appeared beneath New York, while its lower half was sent above the Atlantic Ocean.
Cameras on both sides captured it simultaneously.
Rubbing the back of his head, Chen Mo approached the screen.
"Great. We haven't saved Earth yet, but the surveying robot's already learned to commute across the ocean."
The first person to think of using Spider-Sense to defuse a bomb was an absolute genius. That was right-that person was Chen Mo.
Peter had wanted to relieve Chen Mo for a while, only to discover that his Spider-Sense wasn't as strong as Chen Mo's. Several times, he failed to detect any danger at all, and Chen Mo was still the one who sensed it and called a halt in time.
Peter dutifully stuck to desk work and overlaid the two sets of footage. The missing section in the middle of the probe wasn't damaged; its temperature and current remained continuous. Once the orange interference receded into the rock, the whole thing reappeared beneath New York.
"Energy will take this route too when it passes through the rift." Peter pulled up the explosion curve from the previous run,