ELECTRIC BLACK WIDOW
The irritating discovery was that I could not simply make myself human again. I spent close to an hour trying to prove otherwise.
Arcadia had reconstruction profiles for baseline humans. It had host-genome archives, phenotype restoration models and enough secondary-conversion research to make the possibility look almost reasonable if you stopped reading before the failure reports. My own original genetic record could theoretically be reconstructed from surviving human sequences in my body and the medical data I had copied from the hospital.
The problem was that human was no longer the architecture keeping me alive. Too much of me had been rebuilt.
The hospital hadn't painted rabbit traits over a human body. It had used leporid biology as scaffolding for sections of me that the truck had destroyed. Trying to force a purely human genome back into control would mean asking reconstructed bones, organs, nerves and vascular structures to simultaneously remember shapes they no longer possessed.
Arcadia's simulations were remarkably consistent about what happened afterward. Death. Sometimes immediately. Sometimes creatively.
I leaned back in the laboratory chair and rubbed my eyes.
Leona: "Fuck."
Spider Six sat on the desk beside the terminal.
Leona: "Technical term."
The machine offered no objection. I could, however, cheat. That realization arrived gradually. The problem wasn't looking human.
Appearance was relatively easy compared with rebuilding a complete baseline-human internal system. Arcadia had dozens of projects where researchers preserved or reconstructed human external phenotype while installing decidedly nonhuman anatomy beneath it.
Skin. Hair. Facial proportions. Height. Hands. Feet. Human skeletal geometry. Those were traits. I didn't have to become biologically baseline human to look like Leona Voss again.
I could build something else underneath. That thought should probably have disturbed me more than it did. Instead I smiled.
For the first time since arriving at Arcadia, designing my future body became fun. Not desperation. Not escape.
Design. If I was already committing genetic treason against a rabbit genome, there was no reason to be boring about it.
The first requirement was obvious. Human size.
I wanted my height back. Not necessarily the exact centimeter. I wasn't sentimental about measurements. I simply wanted to stand in a kitchen without countertops becoming architecture. I wanted adult proportions, adult reach, adult stride length and enough mass that carrying my own laptop didn't count as endurance training.
The second requirement was appearance. Human face. Human torso. Human arms and legs. White hair could stay but i prefer being blonde. The red eyes was a no, I preferred my blue eyes back even if with a predator look.
Then I thought about spiders. That part was inevitable. I'd loved them before Arcadia. People who don't like spiders usually begin with the wrong question. They ask why something needs eight legs.
I ask why we settled for four limbs. Redundancy. Stability. Climbing. Independent manipulation. Weight distribution. Low profile. Sensory coverage. A spider is an engineering argument nature has been winning for hundreds of millions of years.
And black widows? Elegant little monsters. Small. Efficient. Extremely clear about personal boundaries. I approved.
I looked toward Spider Six.
Leona: "You know, I could do better."
The drone tilted slightly because one of its balancing routines adjusted. I chose to interpret this as offense.
Leona: "Don't be sensitive."
Then the word returned. Matriarch. The thing beneath Arcadia. The spider project that had gone too far. Arachnid integration. Regeneration. Containment.
I glanced toward the facility map. Sub-Levels Three through Five remained sealed. I wasn't going down there. Absolutely not.
There was a difference between using research from a catastrophic experiment and voluntarily introducing myself to the catastrophic experiment.
Still... Seeing the containment architecture might be useful. Just the architecture. Maybe there was another maintenance route. A ventilation shaft. A service conduit. Something small enough for a drone.
I opened the map and marked the nearest ventilation branch leading toward the restricted section. Spider Three was functional.
Small. Quiet. Expendable. I hesitated at that last word. Then changed it in my head. Repairable. Much better.
Leona: "Three."
The drone turned.
Leona: "Reconnaissance only. You see anything moving, you leave."
I programmed a strict return condition. Signal instability, unexpected temperature shift, motion detection, structural obstruction, anything strange enough to make me uncomfortable.
Which, considering where I was sending it, included almost everything. Spider Three climbed into the open maintenance duct and vanished.
I returned to designing myself. That was probably mistake number nine hundred and something. I've lost count. I called the project Arachne.
Partly because it sounded better than Please Stop Being A Rabbit Version One. The name appeared at the top of my tablet.
PROJECT ELECTRIC BLACK WIDOW
PERSONALIZED DOMINANT-REPLACEMENT HYBRID
HOST: LEONA VOSS
PRIMARY DESIGN GOALS:
- Complete suppression of leporid phenotype
- Restoration of adult human proportions
- Preservation of predominantly human external appearance
- High survivability during secondary conversion
Then came the fun part. Four additional limbs.
Not permanently extended. That would make clothing irritating, chairs worse and sleeping an architectural project. Arcadia had limb-bud research involving thoracic integration, and Chimera had explored distributed arachnid motor control extensively.
Retractable. Four spider limbs folded into reinforced structures along my back, emerging when needed from around the thoracic spine.
That gave me eight functional limbs total without sacrificing human appearance when they were retracted.
Leona: "That's objectively cool."
Spider Six remained silent.
Leona: "Your opinion is wrong."
Next came electricity. That idea began because I wanted a weapon that didn't depend entirely on muscle. Electrocytes.
Biological electrical storage and discharge structures existed in several aquatic hybrid lines. Arcadia had experimental integration notes for them. The problem was control and insulation. Generate enough voltage inside an ordinary body and the first thing you defeat is yourself.
So the system would need specialized channels, conductive pathways and heavily insulated surrounding tissue. The spider limbs were the obvious endpoints.
Electrical nodes near the tips. Contact discharge. Potential absorption from external electrical sources if the cellular structures could tolerate reverse flow.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
I added resistance to heat and electrical injury as a requirement because designing an electrical weapon that burn or electrocuted its user seemed unnecessarily embarrassing.
Then claws. I hesitated over those. Human hands mattered to me. I built things. I typed. I soldered. I needed delicate fingers.
So no permanently monstrous claws. Retractable keratin structures. Feline-derived reinforcement had produced remarkably dense edges in one Arcadia strain. The reports compared the hardness to advanced industrial ceramics.
Good enough. Hands stayed human until I needed them not to. Fangs followed.
The hospital had already proved that mouths could accommodate interesting modifications without destroying speech. Kira had spent ten years insulting me perfectly clearly despite having venomous teeth.
For venom, I wanted options. A fast neurotoxic response for immediate threats. A paralytic component. That brought Kira's marker incident back into my head.
I smiled.
Leona: "Fine. You inspired something."
She would hate hearing that. Silk came next. Modified glands integrated into the wrists and palms, borrowing from Arcadia's arachnid secretion work.
Again, practical. Restraint. Climbing. Emergency line. Repair material. Possibly fabrication if I could control composition well enough.
I was beginning to understand how Arcadia researchers had lost perspective. Once biology became a design space, stopping was difficult.
Strength was unavoidable. My current body had taught me exactly how much I hated being physically helpless.
Big-cat hybrid lines provided the best available combination of explosive muscle density, acceleration and reflex architecture without requiring absurd body mass. I didn't want to look like a bodybuilder. I wanted ordinary human proportions hiding something that could move fast.
Dense muscle. High tendon strength. Reinforced attachment points. Enhanced reflex pathways. Dexterity mattered as much as strength.
There was no point being able to tear through steel if I couldn't still repair a circuit board. Vision followed.
True nocturnal vision. Not merely good low-light sensitivity. Arcadia had several predatory ocular adaptations capable of functioning in near-darkness.
Then I found something stranger. Bioelectric perception. Experimental sensory structures capable of detecting the tiny electrical fields produced by living tissue and active circuitry.
I stared at that research for nearly five minutes. Seeing electricity. Seeing a heartbeat through darkness. Seeing wiring through a wall if the sensitivity became good enough.
Seeing whether a machine was powered before touching it.
Leona: "Yes."
No debate. Added. Venom resistance followed for obvious reasons. General toxin resistance if I could manage it.
Electrical resistance. High metabolic resilience. And beneath all of it: Regeneration. The system that made every other system possible.
Not Matriarch-level uncontrolled regeneration. Absolutely not.
Arcadia's nightmare regenerated so aggressively that destroying tissue barely mattered. That sounded wonderful until one remembered the part where the same biology had consumed the host architecture and continued growing.
I wanted something stabilized and i NEEDED that much change too for the serum to rebuilt over the hybrid rabbit dna.
Reptilian repair factors gave me a better foundation. Slower than Chimera, but more predictable. Arcadia had spent years working on tumor suppression, growth limits and cellular stop signals precisely because the earlier strains had a tendency to interpret heal this injury as continue building forever.
I combined the safer architecture with selected elements from the more aggressive research. Not enough to regrow from ash.
Enough to survive what I was about to do to myself. That was the hope.
By the time the preliminary design filled three screens, I had something that looked less like a medical treatment and more like the wish list of an angry twenty-one-year-old who had recently discovered mortality was negotiable.
Which, to be fair, was exactly what it was. I read through the integrated design. Human appearance. Human size.
Four retractable spider limbs. Human traits. Bioelectric generation. Claws. Fangs. Venom. Silk. Predatory muscle and reflex architecture. Night vision. Bioelectric perception. Electrical resistance. Toxin resistance. Regeneration.
The rabbit genome wouldn't merely be suppressed. It would be buried under a network of mutually supporting systems so aggressive that leporid expression would have nowhere left to reassert itself.
I smiled. A real smile. Not the exhausted kind. Not the hysterical kind. For the first time since waking beneath that hospital bed, I wasn't thinking about what had been done to me.
I was deciding what happened next.
Leona: "There."
I rotated the crude anatomical model. Human silhouette. Mostly. Still no rabbit ears is a win.
The extra limbs appeared only when deployed. I could live with that. More importantly, I wanted to and needed to because yeah i had to replace a whole system after all.
Then the simulation warning appeared.
ESTIMATED HOST SURVIVAL:
INSUFFICIENT DATA
MAJOR RISK FACTORS:
MULTI-SYSTEM DOMINANT REPLACEMENT
EXTREME METABOLIC LOAD
NEURAL RESTRUCTURING
SKELETAL RECONSTRUCTION
REGENERATIVE CASCADE INSTABILITY
CARDIAC FAILURE
CEREBRAL EDEMA
SYSTEMIC IMMUNE COLLAPSE
Leona: "You're very negative."
I wasn't making the serum yet. Not properly. I could begin building the genetic architecture, test compatibility models, identify which Arcadia samples were still viable and prepare the synthesis equipment. But I needed time. Hours at minimum. Preferably days. I needed to test every interaction I could simulate, because I only had one Leona available for clinical trials.
I had just begun another stability model when Spider One transmitted from outside.
That drone had stayed near the surface entrance specifically because getting trapped underground by an Authority search party would have been extremely funny to everyone except me.
Its motion detector triggered. Then thermal. Multiple contacts. I froze. Opened the feed. Dark hillside. Trees.
Flashlights. A lot of flashlights. The camera zoomed. People moved through the woods in an organized line. Not civilians. GHCA personnel. Some human. Several hybrids.
At least four wolves in field equipment, identifiable even at distance by their ears and long muzzles. Perfect tracking units.
Of course they'd brought wolves. Why use expensive sensors when evolution had already invented a nose capable of ruining my evening?
They were still far away. Maybe a kilometer. Possibly more through the hills. But they were moving toward Arcadia. Searching systematically.
Leona: "Fuck."
The drone shifted its camera. Someone much larger moved behind the search line. Long. Low. Orange beneath the flashlight beams. Blonde hair caught the light when she turned her head.
I stared. Kira. Of course. My sister was moving through the woods with the Authority team, her long orange tail sliding over limestone while she searched for me.
Even through the shitty low-light feed, I recognized the way she held her shoulders when she was angry. Or scared.
Probably both.
Leona: "Fuck."
Again. Apparently technical vocabulary had limits. I started calculating. They hadn't found the hatch. Yet. Kira knew my drones. She knew how I thought.
She also knew that if I disappeared into the hills and there was an abandoned structure nearby, I would absolutely enter it because my sense of self-preservation was apparently theoretical.
That shortened my available time considerably. Then another alert appeared. Spider Three. The drone inside the lower ventilation network.
I had forgotten about it. That sentence tells you approximately how focused I had been on designing myself. Its signal quality had dropped to forty-one percent. Position estimate placed it below Sub-Level Three. Farther than I'd intended.
Leona: "Three, return."
No movement. The command registered. The drone didn't reverse. I frowned. Opened the feed. Static. Darkness. Then image.
The vent ahead had partially collapsed. Rusted metal panels bent inward around a narrow opening perhaps twenty centimeters across.
Beyond it was blue light. Not illumination. Electricity. Heavy electrical discharge crawled periodically across something beyond the gap, bright enough to wash the drone camera white for fractions of a second.
Containment field. It had to be. The drone's electromagnetic sensor was nearly saturated.
Leona: "Okay. That's enough. Come back."
Spider Three moved. Forward. I stared.
Leona: "Three?"
Then I realized. The rear section of the ventilation shaft had collapsed behind it. Recent collapse. Maybe vibration. Maybe corrosion. Maybe the drone itself had disturbed it. Return route blocked. Only forward remained.
Leona: "Goddammit."
I took manual control. If it couldn't return, I wanted to know whether another path existed. The drone squeezed through the gap.
Static exploded across the feed. For two seconds I lost everything. Then the camera stabilized. My laboratory disappeared from my mind.
So did Kira. So did the Authority. Spider Three stood on the remains of a ventilation grille overlooking an enormous chamber.
The containment field formed a luminous grid across the far side, arcs of blue-white electricity crawling between emitters mounted in the walls and ceiling. Several were dead. Others flickered irregularly.
Beyond the field was darkness. Not empty darkness. Shapes. At first I thought they were rocks. Then one moved. My hand stopped above the tablet. The camera adjusted. Something enormous occupied part of the chamber floor. Arachnid. But wrong.
Too large. Too many overlapping shapes. I couldn't immediately determine where one body ended and another began. Chitin reflected the containment flashes in wet black curves. A leg shifted. Another followed.
Farther back, thousands of smaller forms clung to the walls. Spider-like. Human-sized. Some larger. Some much larger. None of them moved normally.
They twitched in little synchronized adjustments, as though responding to the same invisible thought. I stopped breathing.
The old report came back to me. *Progeny. **Hive intelligence. **Asexual reproduction
Spider Three's camera zoomed without my instruction.
No. Not zoom.
Something was moving closer. On the other side of the electrical field. Slowly. A shape unfolded from the darkness. One leg. Then another. Then another. Far too tall. Its body rose until the drone had to tilt the camera upward. The containment field flashed.
For a fraction of a second, I saw a face. Human enough to be worse. Female. Pale skin stretched between black structures. Eyes far too numerous around the temples. A mouth that might once have been ordinary. Then darkness returned. My stomach clenched.
Leona: "Three. Don't move."
The creature stopped. So did everything else in the chamber. Every smaller shape on the walls. Every limb. Every twitch.
Stillness. Perfect. Hundreds of bodies becoming motionless at exactly the same moment. Spider Three's microphone picked up nothing. Then one sound. A faint scrape. Closer.
The large figure approached the containment field until blue electricity illuminated her again. Her head tilted.
Not toward the drone. Toward the wall. Toward me. Three levels above. My rabbit body reacted with a terror so pure that for an instant I couldn't move my hands. The thing couldn't see me. There were walls between us. Concrete. Steel. Containment.
It couldn't possibly know I was there. Then every creature in the chamber turned its head in the same direction.
Up. Toward me. Spider Three's audio feed crackled. At first I thought it was interference from the containment field. Then the waveform repeated. A wet clicking pattern.
One creature. Then ten. Then dozens. Then more... Answering one another. The large figure lifted one hand. Placed it against the electrical field.
Blue arcs swallowed her fingers. Skin burned. Chitin cracked. Smoke rose. She did not pull away. Instead, damaged tissue closed almost as quickly as the electricity destroyed it.
Again. Burn. Repair. Burn. Repair. Testing. The containment display on my terminal changed.
CONTAINMENT LOAD INCREASE
AUXILIARY POWER: 17%
16%
I stared at the number. The Matriarch pressed harder against the field.
And through Spider Three's microphone, beneath the electrical screaming and the synchronized clicking of her brood, I heard something that sounded almost like a woman trying to remember how to laugh.