The room was silent but for the hiss of a 56k modem clawing its way onto the phone line. Ethan leaned close, elbows braced on a desk cluttered with the detritus of late nights. Cola cans and scattered scraps of paper covered in notes and passwords. The phosphorescent glow of the CRT monitor lit his face, washing him in cold green light.
Each sound from the modem was music—crackles, hisses, the digital shriek of a connection struggling to be born. To anyone else, it was chaos. To Ethan, it was a language.
The screen blinked alive.
"Welcome to Oscorp Technologies Remote Access Server."
A cursor pulsed, patient and demanding.
Username:
Ethan smirked. This was the easy part. The classics always came first.
guest / guest → rejected.
test / test → rejected.
admin / admin → rejected.
Expected. He tapped his pen against the desk, flipping through his memory. The day before, he had slipped into Oscorp headquarters under the cover of wide-eyed curiosity. Adults underestimated children—especially a polite, curious one who seemed fascinated by the future of science. It had been almost too easy. He had shadowed a junior sysadmin through the building, asking dumb questions until he caught a glimpse of a username and password scrawled on a sticky note taped to a monitor.
RonaldT.
The name had been burning in his mind all night.
He typed carefully:
ronaldt / vision123 → access granted.
The modem gave a low, satisfied whine, almost like approval. Ethan grinned.
"Thanks, Ronald," he whispered. "You left the door open."
Before digging deeper, Ethan made a safety move. He picked up his burner phone, turned on the voice changer, and dialed Oscorp's late-night helpdesk.
"Hey, it's Ronald," Ethan said, affecting the weary tone of a tech pulled into after-hours duty. "Line two's shaky again. Can you confirm the backup dial-in number?"
The clerk on the other end yawned, too underpaid to question. "Uh, yeah—secondary's 555-3789. Should work if the first one doesn't."
"Perfect. Appreciate it." Ethan hung up with a faint smile. Two doors into Oscorp now. Insurance.
A lot of companies in this current time didn't have permanent internet connections. Instead, employees working from home—or sysadmins logging in after hours—would "dial in" to the company's network through phone lines hooked up to modems.
Knowing just the primary might not be enough. If the system only had a couple of modem lines, and both were tied up, he'd hit a busy signal. Worse, the primary number might be more closely monitored. But the secondary? That line was usually quieter, less used, and sometimes with weaker oversight. Getting it was like finding the side door to a building—fewer people around, easier to slip through.
Back on the terminal, he typed: dir.
Folders spilled onto the screen in stark white text:
/projects/
/finance/
/research/
/assets/
He entered /assets/ first. Property records, warehouse inventories, shipping manifests. Exactly what he needed—addresses and cover companies. These would be the bones of the Insight exposé plus his little side project. He queued the files for transfer, watching the percentage crawl across the screen at a painful one kilobyte per second.
But his eyes wandered. He couldn't resist. He backed out, dipped into /projects/.
And there it was. A directory labeled /arachnid/.
Ethan chuckled as his pulse quickened.
Inside was a list of prototype files, each more specific than the last. He opened them one by one, the green text crawling across the screen like venomous scripture.
Arachnid Capture Net
Description: Microfilament mesh, tensile strength tenfold Kevlar, laced with oscillating current designed to overload neuromuscular adhesion in wall-crawling subjects.
Ethan whistled softly. "A net tuned to cancel out spider-cling. Norman, you're really an obsessive bastard. I guess that means Oscorp is probably web-crawling proof, a good thing to note."
Web-Solvent Formula Gamma
Description: Pressurized dispersal unit, chemical compound dissolves synthetic silk proteins within four seconds. Prototype canisters designed for drone delivery.
Ethan tapped the side of his can of Jolt Cola. "Four seconds. That's all it would take to leave Peter dangling helplessly. Looks like webs are also out. I need to make sure I grab this file later."
Magneto-Laminate Boots
Description: Prototype combat footwear lined with reverse-polarity laminates. Negates static adhesion forces on vertical surfaces, forcibly destabilizing arachnid locomotion.
Ethan leaned back. "Boots just to kick him off the walls. That's petty even for you, Norman. Norman, Norman, Norman, with all this money and genius, you could do so much more than this."
Oscorp Sonic Disruptor Array
Description: Tuned to arachnid vibrational sensory ranges. High-frequency pulses induce vertigo, nausea, and reflex suppression. Portable and stationary units in development.
His lips pressed into a thin line. "Vertigo cannon. That could kill a lot more than spiders if deployed widely. That might actually hurt Peter. File that under dangerous."
Cortical Override Harness
Description: Crude neural interface mapped to arachnid-derived cortical patterns. Intended to induce paralysis. High risk of seizure or neurological trauma.
Ethan's fingers stilled on the keyboard. "Jesus. He's building a torture rig. That's mutilation."
Glider-Optic HUD
Description: Early prototype visor, predictive targeting software integrated with aerial maneuver control. Notes flagged by N. Osborn.
Ethan chuckled darkly. "Oh, I know this one. You've been sketching this out for your Halloween costume, haven't you?"
He sat back, eyes reflecting the list of somewhat useless inventions. Not one of these weapons had broader use. They weren't for corporate security. They weren't for defense.
They were for Spider-Man.
Norman wasn't utilizing Oscorp to its fullest potential. He was obsessively, vindictively, designing a playbook to either kill or ruin Peter Parker.
The transfer from /assets/property/ beeped completion. Ethan disconnected, scrubbing logs with the precision of someone who knew exactly how sysadmins slept through the night. No alarms. No trace.
He leaned back, pen tapping the desk.
"Six days," he murmured. "Six days and I bleed Norman's empire dry."
His eyes lingered on the /arachnid/ directory.
"Not tonight," he said softly. "But when the presses roll, I'll take your toys too. Every last one."
He imagined the headlines Insight would run:
INSIGHT EXPOSES OSBORN.
SPIDER-MAN CLEARED.
CORPORATE CORRUPTION UNMASKED.
Each word a nail in Norman's coffin.
For now, the modem hissed one last time before falling silent. The room seemed heavier in its absence. Ethan closed his notebook, but his thoughts still churned.