Father Jennifer D'Angelo's Apartment, Downtown New York, February 2100, Three hours before dawn.
Revelations.
Gabriel O'Hara breathed a deep sigh as he relaxed on the couch. "Can't tell you how great it is to get that weight off my shoulders. I mean, I've been wanting to talk to somebody about this for so long. I've been wanting to say that my brother, Miguel O'Hara, is Spider-Man. But who could I talk to about this?"
Father Jennifer D'Angelo smiled as she sat in her chair, feeling quite a bit like a psychiatrist in the middle of a session. Still, that was part of the job of being a religious leader. "Well .. you could have talked to your brother. After all, it is his secret."
"Yeah, but ... that's the point, y'know?" Gabe shrugged, staring at the ceiling. "He and I talk about this, but we don't really talk. I mean, most of our conversations turn into shouting matches. I'm supposed to be there so he has somebody to talk to about being the S-Man, but I don't really have anybody to talk to about my brother being Spider-Man." He glanced over to her. "Until now, that is."
"If it's any consolation," Father Jennifer informed him, "you did make the right choice when you decided to talk to me about it. After all, if you can't trust a preacher with a secret, who can you trust?"
Gabe thought about this. "Wait ... I didn't 'decide' to talk to you about this. I just slipped up and blabbed."
"Yes, but you'd been holding this back for so long that it was going to come out sooner or later. At least you trust me to keep this between us."
"So ... you're not gonna go running to Miguel with this."
She nodded.
"And ... come to think of it I did come to your place so I could talk to you about the problems I've been having with Miguel."
She nodded again. "That's right. And keeping this secret for him, while admirable, is still dishonest. It's a source of tension between the two of you."
He propped his head against the old sofa's armrest, trying to process the many questions and concerns he had in his head. Finally, he glanced at her once again. "So how do you feel about this? About Miguel's secret, I mean. Seemed like you hated the S-Man a half-hour ago."
"That's ... not important, Gabriel. What's important is the way you feel about your brother's dual life."
He thought about it. "Well ... it's kinda cool that my big brother is the guy everybody talks about...."
"'But'?"
"But ... he treats me like crap. I mean, keeping his secret's a thankless job, y'know? We barely get along, and he ... he acts like he's better than me. He acts like he's the big hero, and he doesn't even acknowledge that I was Firelight. I helped save the 'Net from crashing a few years back, y'know that?"
She raised an eyebrow. "No, I didn't know that. Firelight was a cyberspace avatar, right?"
"Yeah, I was a hero long before Mig ever thought to be one, but to him that doesn't count, 'cause it's 'not real'." Gabriel held up his fingers to shape air-quotes.
"And you believe that's unfair."
"Well, yeah! It was real to me, jammit!" He blinked at her. "Uh, 'scuse my language."
Father Jennifer dismissed it with a wave of her hand. "It's all right. It seems like you have a lot of resentment toward your brother."
"I guess...."
"But ... if you were given the choice between forgiving him and getting even, which would you choose?"
Stone Enterprises headquarters, Outskirts of New York, Two hours before dawn.
Legalese.
"Okay, I've decided it's long past time for an infodump, Tyler," Spider-Man growled as he locked eyes with a group of Stone Incorporated guards. "What are you trying to pull?"
"Oh, come now, I thought I'd already explained that," Tyler Stone commented as he directed a pitying smile at his shackled guest. "I am attempting to recover the symbiote, and you are to assist my team in accomplishing this task. After all, the creature is my property."
The blue-and-red-clad wall-crawler, who'd been fidgeting against restraints that bound his wrists and ankles and held him upright, stopped fidgeting. "Yours? I thought the Venom symbiote was Alchemax's property."
Tyler chuckled as his hoverchair slowly circled around a gurney that held his son Kron's unconscious body. "Hardly. It was Alchemax's prisoner. Alchemax's test subject. It was not your corporation's legal property."
Spider-Man's sneer wrinkled the fabric of the mask covering his face. He didn't like the insinuation that Alchemax was his company -- even though it was -- but he let it go in favor of the larger issue. "So what makes you think Stone Incorporated has any claim to it?"
"Legal documentation." Pressing a button on his hoverchair's armrest, Tyler brought up a text document on a screen near Spider-Man's head. "You are looking at a file from the late twentieth century, one that has stayed in this corporation's records long before it was ever named Stone Incorporated."
Spider-Man speed-read through the legalese. "This is the vaguest wording I've ever seen. For all I know you have the legal rights to a slice of bread shaped like the Madonna, not the twencen Venom symbiote."
"I never said I had any claim on the twentieth century's Venom," Tyler corrected. "Contrary to popular belief, this is not the same creature that had gone by that name a century ago."
"Then why all the interest...?"
A groggy Kron Stone started to stir, opening his eyes. "Where ... where'm-- aw, shock. I'm back in the lab again."
"Not the same lab, Kron," Tyler corrected, gesturing for the guards to stand down; they were ready to open fire at the first sign of trouble. "You're with me now."
Kron obviously recognized the voice. "Oh, no. Not him. This just gets better and better." Turning his head to the side from where he rested on the gurney, he found himself staring at a certain wall-crawler. "You too? 'Least you're tied up."
"Yeah, don't get cocky," Spider-Man retorted. "So are you. And at least I'm not naked."
That got Kron's attention. He glanced at his own bare flesh. "My other ... where is it?" Glancing around the room wildly, he let loose the full measure of his rage, thrashing against his restraints. "What have you done with it?! I swear, I'm gonna kill every last one of you!" At his outburst, Tyler gestured for the soldiers to fire their weapons. Tranquilizer darts flew from their multi-purpose rifles and embedded in Kron's skin, drugging him.
Tyler shook his head as his son slipped back into dreamland. "And you wonder why I disowned you. Rest assured, the symbiote will be back here soon enough." He glanced up at Spider-Man. "Isn't that right?"
"You make it sound like I agreed to hunt down the symbiote."
"You make it sound like you have a choice."
Spider-Man muttered under his breath.
Gabriel O'Hara's apartment, Midtown New York, One hour before dawn.
Missed Call.
"Hey, you've reached Gabriel O'Hara, freelance artist extraordinaire. Well, maybe 'reached' isn't the right word, since I'm out and about. Or asleep. Or, uh, working hard on my latest project for a client, or something. Yeah, uh, something like that. I'm rambling, so just leave your name and contact info after the--"
The answering machine built into Gabriel's kitchen counter beeped. A moment later, it began recording a woman's voice.
"Gabri? It's your mother. I know it's late ... or early ... but I've been trying to get a hold of you all night. You're not answering your headphone, so you're either asleep ... or you're in that Downtown place where your headphone doesn't get a signal. And you know I worry when you go down there, or when you go online and lose yourself."
After a few moments of silence, Conchata O'Hara's voice cracked as she added, "I ... I'm worried about you, Gabri. We ... I don't think we've talked since Dana's death, and I know how much you cared about her. Whatever you're feeling, I want you to talk to me about it. And if not me, then someone; I understand Dana's sister's a Father at a church somewhere. Just ... someone. Even Miguel; maybe you two had a chance to talk when you went to lunch earlier."
Another pause. "I suppose I'm running out of time on this message. So I'll just say, gimme a call as soon as you get this. Even if you have to wake me up. Okay? Love you. Oh, and please, Gabri, do something about that greet--"
The message ended, and Gabriel's apartment was once again silent.
Stone Incorporated headquarters, Midtown New York, A half-hour before dawn.
Punching In.
Spider-Man had stayed silent and kept his ego in check as Tyler Stone had him released from his shackles. But when the lead security officer started giving him tactical orders, he couldn't stay silent any longer. "Okay, this is stupid,” he ranted as he worked some feeling back into his tired muscles. “Why do you need me, Stone? You have your own corporate soldiers; wouldn't they be enough to capture Venom?"
The leader of the security team stepped in front of Spider-Man, getting in his face. "Stand down and do as you're told, maggot. Like it or not, you're taking orders from us now."
Spider-Man's glare was undiminished by his mask. He read the soldier's nametag. "Patric, is it? Back the shock off ... or I promise I'll dent your armor so bad they won't be able to pry you out of it."
"Gentlemen, gentlemen..." Tyler soothed. "The wall-crawler raises a perfectly legitimate point, and it's one I would be happy to address."
But before he could, Crothers the security chief piped up. "Sir? I just received confirmation from the front lobby." He gestured toward his earpiece. "We have a visitor by the name of Kenneth Zimmerman...."
"Oh? Well, that's peculiar. I don't believe he has an appointment, and he's certainly not a member of this company. Yet." Tyler turned to the guard. "Escort him in."
Spider-Man raised an eyebrow. Yet? "So, uh, who's this Zimmerman guy?" All this stuff was common knowledge to Miguel O'Hara, but Spider-Man wasn't supposed to know this.
"Oh, Mike didn't brief you?" Tyler asked, glancing up at him.
"I'm pretty sure that whoever 'Mike' is, there were no briefs involved."
Everyone in the room who was still conscious stared at him.
Spider-Man winced. "That came out wrong."
Saint Patrick's Cathedral, Downtown New York, Dawn.
Roadtrip's End.
Xina Kwan had slept wrong last night, and as a result, her back ached. Her eyes and the rest of her body were tired; she and her traveling partner, John Tensen had tried to grab what little sleep they could since their decision hours ago to return to New York and part ways. They’d awakened an hour before dawn, packed their things, and headed for Downtown via one of John’s teleportational rifts. "Not much to look at, is it?" she asked as she looked around at the church’s decor.
John shrugged. "It's an improvement over what it used to look like." The cathedral was ancient, and while it showed signs of recent cleaning, it had still sustained heavy damage in a lot of areas -- most notably the largest stained-glass window, which had been shattered and was now covered by a tattered blanket.
Plus, the pews were populated by a variety of homeless people, who had apparently been spooked when she and John had teleported in. "It's the Prophet!" one of them blurted out. "He has returned!"
Xina turned to John and whispered. "'Prophet'? Oh no, don’t tell me they’re hung up on that stupid nickname of yours."
"Well ... I did call myself the Net Prophet when I visited here previously," John admitted, running a hand across his graying five o'clock shadow. "These people just took it ... kind of literally. And it’s not a stupid nickname."
"What was the point of it, anyway?"
"It was a pun. I found out I could travel through cyberspace a while back, and ... never mind. Long story."
The parishioners converged on them, oblivious to their conversation. "You've come back to us, O Prophet of God," one woman declared, attempting to touch John's face. "Have you brought a message for us?"
An older woman leaned in to get a good look at Xina with what remained of her eyesight. "He's brought someone with him ... very beautiful. Is she a prophet, too? Is she here to save us?"
Xina gaped. She and John had visited this place so that John could visit his friend, Father D'Angelo, after which Xina could be dropped off Uptown and attempt to reconcile with Miguel O’Hara. But this.... "John, what have you gotten me into?"
Stone Incorporated headquarters, Midtown New York, Minutes after dawn.
Meeting Like This.
A blond-haired man with faint stubble was escorted into the laboratory by security. "Spider-Man," Tyler began, "I'd like you to meet Ken Zimmerman, a former Alchemax scientist who is angling for a position in my company. Ken? This is the S-Man, as the kids are calling him these days."
Ken grinned and strode to Spider-Man, holding out a hand. "Delighted. Mind if I call you S-Man?"
Spider-Man stared at Ken's hand, refusing to shake it. "I didn't mind being called that until just now."
"Now, now, don't be rude," Tyler admonished. "Ken here is a guest, just as you are. Though ... I have to admit his appearance here is something of a surprise."
Ken shrugged, then he fidgeted with the sleeve of his simple dark-blue attire. "Sorry about that, Tyler. I should have called first, but now that the Venom symbiote is on the loose, I thought I'd make myself useful and help your corporation reel it in."
"How noble," Spider-Man retorted, "considering your last act at Alchemax was setting the symbiote loose in the first place."
Tyler frowned in confusion. "I thought you didn't know who he was?"
"Er--" Desperate to cover his tracks, Spider-Man's gaze darted around ... and focused on Ken's sleeve. The same accelerated vision that could read an ID tag from a block away zoomed in on the material and detected movement. "Ty? You might want to scan this guy for symbiotes. "Now."
"Don't bother," Zimmerman asserted as he reached out to Spider-Man. His sleeve metamorphosed into a slimy substance that covered his hand.
The substance then morphed into a spiked wrecking ball that struck Spider-Man in the jaw and sent him flying.
Raising their rifles, the soldiers moved in while Spider-Man landed painfully on a bank of monitoring equipment.
"Tell them to hold their fire," Ken told Tyler as his dark-blue dress-shirt and matching slacks and shoes reshaped themselves into the skin of Venom, but his face remained uncovered. "Like I said, I'm here to help. I've delivered the symbiote to you."
"Stand down," Tyler ordered his men. "Thank you. Now, Ken, I have to say this is a surprising display of initiative. But how is it you came to be bonded with the creature?"
"As the Spider said, I had set it and your son free from Alchemax in the first place. Predictably, the two rejoined, and when they fought the Spider, I followed them." Ken/Venom held out his wrecking-ball extension, which returned to the shape of his hand. "I ... it was weakened in the fight. After it left Kron's body ... it sensed me. Sought me out. I wanted to ... it wanted to kill me. Dissolve me. Pay me back. But I was ... it was weak. It knew it was weak, and it joined with me instead. I welcomed it."
The symbiote covered Ken's face and shaped itself into Venom's skull-like mask. Green ooze dripped from his serrated teeth and snakelike tongue. "Now we are one." Reaching out toward Kron's gurney, Venom shaped his arm into a long blade, which pierced Kron's skull and cleaved the rest of his body in two. "And we -- I don't need him."
Kron's monitoring equipment flatlined. Spider-Man gasped.
"Fascinating," Tyler replied, sounding bored. "Security? Zap him."
Surprised, Venom whipped his blade-arm toward the soldiers, slicing through their multi-purpose machine rifles before they could fire sonic pulses. Another wave of his arm, and the blade sliced through the soldiers themselves. "Too slow."
A weakened Spider-Man hauled himself onto a crouching position atop the monitors, then leaped at Venom, talons extended.
Venom sidestepped him and slammed his fist downward onto Spider-Man's back, sending him face-first to the floor. Crouching over Spider-Man, Venom held him by the back of his neck, preparing to plunge his blade-arm into the wall-crawler. "And you're even slower." He glanced around for effect. "Look at this: we're in a lab, I'm a scientist, and you're a spider. Time to dissect."
His gaze landed on the hoverchair-bound Tyler Stone, who was making a break for the lab's exit, pressing the emergency lockdown button on his way into the hallway corridor. "Oh, no you don't!" Venom bellowed, leaping after Tyler as the heavy lockdown doors slid down from the ceiling. He slammed into the back of Tyler's chair, sending him careening into the corridor; the doors locked into place.
Spider-Man sat up and groggily looked around. "Wh ... where'd ev'rybody go?" Then he spotted the corpses of the Stone Enterprises soldiers and his half-brother. "Oh, yeah ... shock...."
Tranquilizing gas started seeping into the laboratory from the vents.
"We've got to stop meeting like this," Venom commented as he ripped open Tyler's hoverchair. He'd just spent the last couple of minutes laying waste to the rest of Tyler's security force. "I tried to kill you once before ... now here I am again." He tore out some wiring. "Now, where's that life-support...?"
Tyler stared at him, refusing to give him the satisfaction of seeing him in terror.
"See, what I don't understand is ... I go through the trouble of bringing you this symbiote...." He ripped out another fistful of wiring. "And I get rid of your son, whom you hate so much." Another fistful. "I do all that, to prove how much I want a job with your company ... and what do you do? You try to kill me."
Tyler continued staring, though his breathing was labored. "I ... have plans for you ... and plans for the ... symbiote. But not the same plans. Have to ... separate ... you."
"We don't want to be separated!" Venom roared.
Tyler smiled. "Is ... that plural...? I ... thought your control made you and ... the symbiote one mind. One entity."
Venom reared back, enraged. "I AM one mind!"
"You don't seem ... as sure of that ... as you'd like to be."
"Then I'll prove it," he hissed. "I'll cut you into ribbons ... and see how much blood I can get from a Stone."
"Cute ... but then what? Kill me ... and you remain ... unemployed. You ruin ... Ken Zimmerman's life ... sabotage yourself ... and then where will you be?"
Venom paused, thinking about it. "You have a point ... no. No. Nice try, but you had your men shoot at me!"
Tyler shrugged weakly. "Wouldn't ... have been fatal."
"No more games," Venom shouted, reaching for Tyler's throat, ready to rip it out like another handful of wiring.
The laboratory's lockdown door slid upward, filling the corridor with knockout gas as it opened. Venom coughed as the cloud engulfed him, and turned toward the lab, seeing a dark figure emerge from the cloud. It was Spider-Man, ready for payback.
The symbiote covering Venom's face rippled, forming a gas filter from the substance. Spider-Man landed a solid punch on the filter, followed by six more, causing it to lose its shape.
Taking the cue, Tyler removed an oxygen mask from a compartment in his chair and clamped it to his face.
Desperately, Venom reached for Spider-Man's face, but the wall-crawler raked his talons across Venom's arm. The pain roared through the symbiote, further affecting its control over its shape.
Five powerful kicks followed, as Spider-Man kept weaving in and out of Venom's reach, keeping the creature off-balance. Each strike exposed more of the human within the symbiote, until only Kenneth Zimmerman remained, naked and battered.
Spider-Man balled up his fist, ready to cave in Zimmerman's face with a punch. At the last moment, he changed his mind and thumped Ken in the forehead.
Ken slumped back to the floor, unconscious as the gas finally dissipated.
"Nice gas mask..." Tyler remarked, pointing to the bulge beneath Spider-Man's facemask. "Makes you look ... a bit like a Spider-Pig." He slowly removed his own mask. "But how'd ... you get the doors open?"
Spider-Man stepped to the side, and Crothers emerged from the laboratory, also wearing a gas mask. "I found him hiding under a desk in there," Spider-Man explained, his words more muffled than usual. "Heckuva security guard you've got there."
"As far as I'm concerned ... he was in the right place ... right time." Movement on the floor caught his attention, and Tyler spotted the symbiote oozing away. Reaching out to a dead security guard beside him, Tyler grabbed his shock baton, clicked it on, then stunned the alien puddle with it. "Crothers? See that the symbiote, Mr. Zimmerman, and the bodies in the lab are stored for further genetic experimentation."
"Right away, sir," Crothers replied, pulling off his gas mask as Spider-Man carefully did the same.
Once he was satisfied that his removal of the gas mask hadn't exposed the face underneath, Spider-Man let Tyler have it. "That's it? After all that, they're just lab rats to you? Just test subjects?"
Tyler crawled out of the wreckage of his own chair. "Why wouldn't they be?"
"Time to spill, Stone: you said earlier that the symbiote wasn't the original Venom. What was it?"
Crothers stepped between them. "That's classified proprietary information."
"The symbiote was part of a batch artificially grown in the twentieth century by the Life Foundation," Tyler replied, "from genetic material obtained from the original Venom. This symbiote had apparently escaped and stayed in hiding for a century, but Stone Enterprises has obtained legal ownership of it."
Crothers paled, glancing at Tyler as if the old man had lost his mind.
"It's all right, Crothers," Tyler assured him. "Spider-Man will have to know this in order to take this information back to his company."
Spider-Man sneered beneath his mask. "That's the second time you've insinuated that Alchemax is 'my' company. There will not be a third."
"Oh, my apologies for not understanding the subtleties of your working relationship with Mike O'Hara. But please, tell him I said 'hi'."
Turning and striding angrily toward the elevator at the end of the corridor, Spider-Man stopped, but didn't turn back to Tyler. "Y'know what? If you really want O'Hara to know about your ownership of the symbiote, send the info to him yourself. I'm not your little errand boy." He entered the elevator and took it up to lobby level.
Tyler watched him go, waiting a few moments after the door closed. "But you are my boy," he whispered.
Crothers, who had reentered the lab to fetch a container for the symbiote, stopped and turned to Tyler. "Did you say something, sir...?"
"Nothing, Crothers ... it's nothing."
Saint Patrick's Cathedral, Downtown New York, A half-hour after dawn.
Charlatans.
Xina Kwan and John Tensen had been mobbed by the parishioners for almost a half-hour, inundated with questions like, "is she your wife, O Prophet?" "Are you two married?" "Are you the next Adam and Eve?" "Will you bless my baby?"
"'Baby'?" Xina raised an eyebrow at the old woman who had asked that last question. "I don't think that's a baby. Looks more like a grocery bag."
The senile-looking woman held the bag up to Xina's face anyway, and the whiff of rotted produce almost made her pass out. "Beam me up, Tensen," Xina insisted.
"I don't think I can," John shouted, barely audible as the crowd swept him away from her. "I just 'ported us cross-country, so I'm a little low on juice."
"That's all right," a male voice asserted as a flash of bright green light washed throughout the church. "I brought enough for all of us."
The crowd of people all turned toward the speaker, who was hovering in midair, held aloft by batlike wings. The morning sunlight seeped in through the holes in the blanket, casting the figure in golden back-lighting. He wore a green bodysuit that contrasted with the purple color of his batwings and his horned facemask. Whispers of a name circulated amongst the crowd as the citizens of Downtown recognized him; that name was "Goblin."
"Yes, I am the Goblin of Downtown," he announced. His voice was deep and dramatic to the point of caricature, which combined with his bizarre appearance made the overall effect somewhat … unsettling. "I have come to expose a charade and denounce a pair of charlatans!" He pointed at John and Xina with a taloned index finger. "Regardless of what they'd have you believe, they are not prophets of God! They desecrate this holy place with their lies. And there is only one punishment for that."
He swooped toward Tensen and Xina, firing beams of energy from his fingers.
To Be Continued.
Next Issue: "Shadow of the Goblin"
Once again, we’re jumping from one storyline right into another, in the grand tradition of Spider-Man 2099. And now, let’s jump into a letter from Luke, a faithful S-Man reader, about issue #6:
Another really good read. You really seem to have latched onto the essence of the key players in the world of the S-Man, Dave. Although Venom has been a bit one-dimensional and used to death in the past (The next time I hear "We will eat your brains", I'll be tempted to torture the writer responsible for writing Venom's dialogue) you've managed to make good use of the symbiote and its host, Miguel's morally corrupt and forlorn half-brother. Another "Spider-Man vs Venom" battle may seem a little played out / worn-out on the surface, but I think that with the way things have turned out, in your hands, it should make for an entertaining read.
- Luke, via message board
Thanks, Luke! I hope you (and the rest of the readers) liked the way I’ve handled Venom 2099 in this storyarc. What do you think of Ken Zimmerman as the new Venom? Let me know!
-- David Ellis, 03.08.2006_
Next Issue:
What does the Goblin of 2099 have in store for Xina Kwan and John Tensen? Find out in "Shadow of the Goblin" by David Ellis. >