Peter woke up and went through his morning routine before heading to school, catching Felicia the moment he saw her by her locker.
“Hey,” he said.
“Any word on your dad?” Felicia shook her head, dark circles still faint under her eyes.
“Nothing yet.” “I’m sure Spider-Man’s looking into it,” Peter said.
“He seemed serious about it when I talked to him.
I really think you can trust him with this.” Felicia studied him a moment, something unreadable crossing her face, then nodded slowly.
“Okay.
If you say so.” He found MJ shortly after.
“Hey,” Peter said carefully.
“I heard about what happened.
Are you okay?” MJ’s arms crossed loosely over her chest.
“They denied bail,” she said.
“So, I guess he’s not going anywhere for a while.” She shrugged, though it didn’t quite land as casually as she wanted it to.
“It’s fine.
I’m fine.” Peter didn’t push.
He just nodded and let her have the space to be however she needed to be about it.
The rest of the day passed normally enough.
After school, Peter went with Harry to Oscorp, riding up to a private floor Harry badged them onto — a floor with exactly two occupants: Norman, resting in a hospital bed that had been moved in specially, and his wife in the room beside him, still and unresponsive in her coma.
A cluster of doctors and researchers stood nearby, checking vitals, murmuring quietly among themselves.
Norman brightened slightly at the sight of them, and gestured Peter forward.
“This is the team,” he said, and one by one, the researchers introduced themselves — mostly PhDs twice Peter’s age, a couple with Nobel-adjacent credentials Peter recognized from papers he’d read for fun.
They all shook his hand politely enough, clearly confused about who exactly he was supposed to be.
“Peter will be leading the research going forward,” Norman said simply.
The confusion in the room deepened instantly.
A few exchanged glances.
One of the older researchers, a woman with sharp eyes and sharper skepticism, spoke up first.
“Mr.
Osborn, no offense to the young man, but he’s still in high school.
He hasn’t even graduated yet.” Norman opened his mouth to explain further, but Peter got there first.
“You’re right to be skeptical,” Peter said evenly.
“I’m new here.
I don’t have the credentials any of you have, and I’ll absolutely need guidance from people who’ve spent decades on this.
But I care about this project more than I can really explain right now, and I intend to prove that with results, not titles.” He paused.
“I’d like to show you something, if that’s alright.” The honesty in his tone visibly softened a few skeptical faces in the room, if only slightly.
He took the tablet Norman’s assistant had given him day earlier and connected it to the main display, pulling up a working document he’d put together the night before.
“As you all know,” Peter began, “there’s currently no functional cure for genetic disorders like this beyond partial fixes — bone marrow transplants, healthy protein grafting, things that manage symptoms without addressing the root cause.” He glanced around the room.
“From what I’ve read of your research, you’ve been trying to artificially replicate the missing genes, or replace the damaged ones directly.
Cloning’s off the table, obviously — it just reproduces the same defects.
You’ve also tried growing the corrected genes in animal models, breeding them with the human DNA strand introduced, hoping the animal would tolerate it.
But the animals themselves ended up dying from genetic collapse — their bodies couldn’t accept a foreign genome stable enough to survive.” A few nods around the room, cautious but engaged now.
“So I tried working backward from that failure,” Peter continued.
“Instead of transplanting the human gene into an animal and hoping the animal’s body accepts it — what if we did the opposite?
Implant the animal’s gene to replace the broken human one instead.” Nobody looked especially surprised by that — it was close enough to their own cross-species genetics work already in progress.
But Peter wasn’t finished.
“Instead of trying to transplant a gene directly into a human patient,” he went on, “we create an artificial cellular clone of the patient first.
Introduce the corrected genes into the clone.
Then extract only the successfully integrated genes from that clone, and implant those specific genes into the actual patient.” One of the scientists raised a hand.
“What does that actually achieve, though?
Practically speaking, there’s still significant mutation risk either way you approach it.” “Exactly,” Peter said, nodding.
“And that’s the whole point.
We do selective cloning in batches.
The first generation of tissue will carry all the same genetic deformities we’re trying to fix.
We isolate only the pairs that come out stable, discard the rest, and repeat the process across successive generations until the gene actually stabilizes on its own.” “Even a stabilized gene is still an animal gene at the end of the day,” the same scientist pointed out.
“The human body may still reject it.” “That’s why I developed something to handle that part specifically,” Peter said.
“When we implant a corrected gene into an insect model, for instance, we force it to adapt to the foreign material in order to survive.
With each successive generation, we introduce a behavioral trait — essentially training the genome to discard its own waste or incompatible genetic material naturally.
Once we’ve isolated the final, fully stabilized set of genes, we extract only the corrected genes themselves, while preserving that discarding behavior, and implant that final version into the patient — under carefully controlled high-survival conditions to maximize the chance of acceptance.” He looked around the room.
“And with any luck, the patient’s body accepts it as its own.” Silence settled over the room for a long moment.
Several of the scientists exchanged looks — the kind of look that said they’d considered pieces of this exact approach themselves and abandoned it, assuming it was too theoretical, too unstable to attempt on a living human being.
“How would we even clone the cells accurately enough for this?” one of them finally asked.
“And control the rate of gene isolation without losing viable tissue at each stage?” Peter pulled up a formula on the screen.
“I call it the decay rate algorithm,” he said.
“It controls how quickly a cellular structure begins to collapse relative to when new genetic material is introduced — basically giving us a predictable window to work within at every stage of the process, instead of guessing.” The room went completely still.
Norman, from his bed, stared at the formula with something between disbelief and quiet awe.
Every person in that room understood immediately what this could mean if it actually worked — not just for one disease, but potentially for an entire category of things previously considered untreatable.
Genetic disorders.
Degenerative conditions.
Possibly even certain forms of disability, certain psychiatric conditions rooted in genetic malfunction.
“How would we clone their cells with this level of precision, and at what rate exactly—” someone started, already reaching for a notepad.
“It’s all in the formula,” Peter said.
“I can walk through the math with whoever wants to go over it in detail.” Harry, standing off to the side, looked at Peter like he was seeing him for the first time.
“I knew you were smart, Peter.
But — how?
How did you even come up with this?” Peter smiled, a little sheepish.
“I didn’t really invent anything new, honestly.
Everything except the decay rate algorithm was already something your dad’s team had already achieved or attempted.
I just connected the pieces differently.” “You provided the single most important piece,” Norman cut in, his voice shaky but firm.
“Without it, this is just a theory none of us could ever actually execute.
This changes everything.” Norman turned to the lead researchers.
“Timeline, if we move forward with this?” They conferred quietly for a moment.
“Six months to a year, realistically,” one finally said.
“Less, if we push it hard and get lucky with early trials.” Harry pulled Peter aside a moment later, voice quiet.
“Peter — this could help my mom too, couldn’t it?
If it actually works.” Peter met his eyes.
“I think it could.
I really do.” Harry broke down completely at that, pulling Peter into a hard hug, repeating quiet, broken thank-yous into his shoulder.
Only Peter knew, standing there accepting his best friend’s gratitude, that none of this would have been remotely possible a few weeks ago.
He’d always been smart — genuinely gifted, the kind of kid who used to read scientific papers for fun on weekends nobody else spent that way.
But this was different.
Something in him now processed genetics with a clarity that felt less like intelligence and more like an entirely new sense he hadn’t had before, patterns simply resolving in his head faster than he could consciously follow the logic behind them.
I came up with all of that in one night, he thought, a small chill running through him even as Harry’s arms were still wrapped tightly around his shoulders.
That’s not normal.
That’s not even ‘genius’ normal.
That’s something else.
What else can I do that I don’t even know about yet?