Inside the package was a cutting-edge smartphone bearing the S.H.I.E.L.D. logo.
Peter smiled.
It looked like Fury was willing to trust him on this.
He took the phone into the basement and began examining it carefully.
Peter knew perfectly well that tracking chips had to be installed inside.
Only after finding three whole tracking chips did he begin dealing with the real problem.
He needed somewhere to hide the phone.
Somewhere he could stash it when it wasn't in use, yet keep it with him when he wore his suit.
In the end, Peter decided to make an electromagnetic clip that drew power directly from the black, weblike Parker's Blood energy conduits running throughout his suit.
Those conduits were essentially a conductive network covering the suit. Once he connected the device, they could power the clip directly.
With the carrying problem solved, Peter quickly set up accounts on Twitter and other social media platforms.
However, he had to put some thought into his username.
There were already hundreds of fake Spider-Man accounts created by fans online, and most names he could think of had already been taken.
In the end, he chose the handle "Amazing Spider-Man."
Luckily, no one had used that name yet.
Peter logged in on his phone and quickly posted his first tweet:
"Hey, everyone! Your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man himself is here! My other social accounts use the same name, so go follow them!"
However, the message didn't go out immediately.
The S.H.I.E.L.D. logo popped up on the screen, with a message displayed beneath it:
Under review.
It looked like S.H.I.E.L.D.'s technicians really would review everything he posted.
A minute later, the tweet went live.
Peter grinned.
With that, he was officially online!
He posted another:
"I just realized I can do more than swing around on the web now. I can surf it, too!"
Soon, the first batch of replies appeared:
Holy shit, is this account real?
A fake account is a fake account.
You don't even have a profile picture!
Peter clicked his tongue.
Of course.
Why should these people believe him?
He quickly put on his suit and swung out of the house.
Spider-Man swept past the buildings and headed straight for the Brooklyn Bridge, where he wove a hammock out of webbing between its suspension cables.
He flipped into the hammock and took a selfie with the traffic flowing beneath the bridge as his backdrop.
Twitter:
"Ah, new year, new me. Do you like the new suit? This thing cost a fortune!"
Peter set the selfie as his profile picture and posted it to his other social accounts, then leaned back and quietly waited.
Holy shit, it's really him!
Spider-Man's on Twitter?! What the hell?!
Quick, quick! Someone hack his phone!
Bro, even a masked superhero is online now. How does Iron Man still not have an official account? What the hell!
Mr. Spider-Man, I'm your biggest fan! Thank you for always protecting this city!
Peter replied to everything he could.
He thanked people for their support, accepted their thanks, and occasionally cracked a little joke.
By the end of the day, his Twitter account and every one of his other social accounts had surpassed a million followers.
Peter beamed.
Yes.
Life was good.
He could never understand why not a single one of these superheroes used social media.
Peter stared at the screen in front of him and rubbed his temples, his head aching.
"This makes absolutely no sense."
"Tell me about it."
Reed stood beside him, muttering too.
"When you first asked me for help, I never thought it'd be... this defies science, Peter."
"No shit. Didn't I just say that?"
Peter rolled his eyes.
"Have you tried exposing it to ultraviolet light?"
Sue sat at the computer typing an email and asked casually.
"We tried. There wasn't any change."
Reed clawed at his hair in frustration.
"This is impossible! How could something like this happen? It completely contradicts basic biology!"
"And yet here I am, standing right in front of you."
Peter raised an eyebrow.
"Peter, your blood is a bug. I genuinely can't find any other word to describe it."
Reed enlarged the microscope image.
The screen displayed a single blood cell from Peter, with its double-helix DNA structure slowly rotating on its axis.
This equipment was used to examine his blood at the cellular level.
"It looks like... it assimilated the spider's traits on its own, and only selected the beneficial parts to absorb."
Sue said thoughtfully:
"As though it has the ability to screen things independently and retain only what benefits it."
"Impossible! DNA isn't alive! How could it actively make choices?!"
Reed completely lost it.
"Damn it, Peter, what the hell is this stuff?!"
Roaring, he flung the notes in his hands into the air and stormed out of the lab with a thunderous expression.
"Don't mind him. He just can't accept that there's something in this world he can't understand."
Sue sighed.
"Simply put, it's his pride getting in the way. Still, it's understandable. He's a physicist, after all, not a geneticist."
Peter nodded.
"Got it. Then... could you take a look for me?"
"I'll try."
Sue got up and walked over to the screen, studying Peter's DNA strands carefully.
"Have you done a genomic analysis?"
"Yes, all the data's here, but I can't make sense of it anyway."
Peter handed her a smart terminal.
Sue took the terminal and began scrolling through it quickly, making notes beside her as she examined the data.
After working at it for quite a while, she finally finished reading an entire sequence, set the terminal aside, and let out a long sigh.
"Reed was right. This really does defy science."
"Your DNA seems to... actively adapt to foreign substances. It assimilated and absorbed the spider's genes, which is how you acquired those abilities."
"You mean... my blood already had this property before the spider bit me?"
Peter pressed.
"It looks that way."
Sue pointed to one of the gene strands.
"Look here. This section of your genes would give you spiderlike agility and strength on its own. It has no direct connection to the mutation induced by the foreign substance."
Peter raised his eyebrows.
"So I'm a mutant?"
Sue shook her head.
"No. Mutant genes have very distinct markers you can recognize at a glance. If you really were a mutant, Reed wouldn't be hiding in the kitchen eating ice cream."
Peter froze for a moment.
Sue added:
"Yes, this is what he's like whenever he encounters a problem he can't solve."
Peter was amused.
"Unbelievable."
"In short, your blood, your DNA... is even more unusual than a mutant's."
Sue explained:
"Put it this way: your situation is somewhat similar to ours. Your genes mutated into something else. You don't qualify as a mutant, but you're definitely no longer an ordinary human either."
"Then... a metahuman?"
Peter tried using a term from DC comics.
"Hmm... that's a fairly accurate way to describe it."
Sue nodded, then sank back into thought.
"But it's so strange. Why does your blood work this way...?"
She almost seemed to enter a meditative trance.
Peter had the sense not to disturb her and let her study it at her own pace.
Peter returned to his workstation.
The Doom Robot he had "confiscated" sat on the desk, now dismantled into pieces.
There was no harm in studying more of Doctor Doom's technology.
Honestly, this stuff really was interesting.
While Peter was studying it, the smartphone S.H.I.E.L.D. had given him suddenly buzzed.
He tapped it open and saw that tens of thousands of messages had already piled up on his social media apps.
There was no way he could reply to so many messages, so he simply ignored them.
As Peter scanned the Doom Robot's schematics and saved the data to his computer, he considered how this technology might come in handy someday.
Once he finished saving the data, he turned his attention to another little problem.
City Councilman Nick Daves.
This was the man who had "lost" the relief funds for New York's homeless, leaving them with no choice but to sleep on the streets in the cold.
On the surface, the man looked respectable, and his record was absurdly clean.
But after a little digging, Peter discovered that he owned two beachfront villas in the Hamptons, as well as a vacation home in Greece.
Using the half-baked hacking skills left behind by his body's original owner, Peter hacked into Davis's personal laptop.
The man used a public network to log into his accounts every time he went to work.
Peter went through the files inside.
Davis certainly had plenty of porn on his computer, at least four hundred gigs.
But Peter found no substantive evidence that could actually convict him.
Peter stared at the screen and sighed.
It looked like he would have to do this the old-fashioned way.
Follow him and catch him in the act.
Or plant a tracking chip on him?
Like his future self would do?
Hmm.
That was the plan.
"Peter, you'll never guess what I found!"
Sue suddenly spoke, drawing Peter's attention back.
"What?"
Peter stood up, putting the matter of Davis aside for the moment.
"Your blood... is evolving."
Sue spoke as she worked on the data tablet:
"No, evolving might not be quite the right word... I should say it's undergoing a metamorphosis."
"What do you mean?"
"Like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. But instead of spinning silk to make a cocoon, it's using scattered DNA fragments or foreign substances to reshape itself."
Sue brought up a video.
"Look, I injected the common cold virus into the blood sample. Watch what happens next."
Peter stared at the monitor.
The moment the virus was injected into the blood sample, his blood began rapidly absorbing it.
The blood cells broke the virus down directly, leaving only a few gene fragments. Everything else was "digested."
"Holy shit... my blood is vaccinating itself?"
Disbelief covered Peter's face.
At the same time, he had a vague feeling that the scene was familiar.
Where had I seen this before?
"That does seem to be the case."
Sue nodded.
"If you follow that line of thinking about 'self-vaccination,' you'll understand why the radioactive toxins couldn't kill you."
"Your blood absorbed the spider venom, first making itself immune, then converting the spider's traits into your abilities."
"Peter, have you ever been sick before?"
Peter blinked, digging through the memories the original owner had left behind.
"I think... once?"
"And after that, you never got sick again, right?"
Peter's eyes widened in shock.
"Holy crap... you're right! I haven't even caught a cold since then!"
"Judging by what we're seeing, you probably won't get sick in the future, either."
Sue pulled up a few more screens.
"Peter, I really don't know what your blood actually is, but I want to find out."
"This stuff could very well be the key to curing every human disease!"
Peter swallowed.
"Girl, that's a pretty bold claim."
"Of course! This is incredible, Peter!"
Sue's eyes shone, and her tone even took on a slightly coaxing quality.
"This stuff inside your body really could, in theory, save the whole world! Let me keep studying it in depth, okay? Please!"
"All... all right."
Peter shrugged.
"But whatever you do, don't clone me. I really don't want to go through that bullshit."
Sue froze.
"Why would you worry about that?"
"It's nothing. Just saying."
Of course Peter wasn't going to tell her.
Fighting my own clones gives me a headache just thinking about it!
It wasn't as though he hadn't thought about what he should do if the "Clone Saga" storyline started.
He had even worked out how to deal with it in advance!
That goddamn storyline really was stupid.
He couldn't understand the point of its existence at all!
Fuck, Marvel is brain-dead!
Peter left Sue a few more blood samples, which made her incredibly happy.
Then he started packing up, getting ready to leave work.
It was two in the afternoon.
Normally, he could keep working until evening, but he had other plans today.
That afternoon, Peter changed into his Spider-Man suit and swung toward Felicia's apartment.