FICTIONAL WHAT IF: Part VI- What if MCU Frank Castle was bitten by the radioactive spider instead of Peter Parker? Volume 2

Chapter I: The Web

The first time it happened, Frank thought he was bleeding. He woke in the back of the van under the Williamsburg Bridge at four in the morning, three weeks after the telephone exchange, with his wrists aching the way his knees used to ache before rain, and when he sat up something pale and wet clung between his forearm and the van floor in a long glistening strand, like a string of spit, except it did not break. He pulled his arm away and it stretched to two feet, then three, thin as fishing line, and it held. He sat in the dark and looked at it. Then he turned his wrist over and saw, on the soft inside just below the heel of his hand, a small puckered opening in the skin that had not been there the day before, a thing like a pursed mouth, and when he flexed his forearm in a certain way that his body seemed to already know, it opened and a bead of something clear pushed out of it and hardened in the air into silk. He did not panic. He had stopped expecting his body to stay what it had been. He took out the legal pad, which had become two legal pads and then three, and he turned to a clean page, and in the same block capitals he had used for everything else he wrote WEBBING, and underlined it twice, and went to work.

It took him nine days to understand it, and he understood it the way he understood a weapon system, by breaking it down into what it could do and what it could not. It came from both wrists. It came as fine thread or heavy cable depending on how hard he clenched, and as a spray or a single line depending on how he moved his fingers. The fine thread was nearly invisible in poor light and strong enough to hold a man. The heavy cable would hold a car; he tested it on a stolen Camry in a junkyard in Hunts Point and watched the bumper tear loose before the line did. It dried in seconds. It dissolved, mostly, in about two hours, unless he worked it a certain way, braiding it as it came out, in which case it seemed to last indefinitely. He could fire a line forty yards and it would stick to whatever it hit. He did not try swinging on it. He thought about the kid in Queens he'd seen on the news once, years ago, a teenager in a homemade costume falling off a fire escape trying to stop a mugging, and about what it would look like for a grown man to swing through Manhattan on a rope like a circus act, and he felt nothing but contempt for the idea. That was not what this was for. He knew what it was for. He had known since the first night, when he sat in the van with the strand stuck to his arm and felt, faint and far down in the meat of him, an instinct older than anything human turn over in its sleep. A spider does not use its web to travel. A spider uses its web to wait.

He wove the first one across the rooftops of a four-block stretch of Washington Heights where the last of the Dominican crews were still selling out of three buildings on Audubon Avenue, the last organized operation of any size left on the island of Manhattan. He did it over four nights. A fine thread here, from a chimney to a cornice. Another from the cornice to a water tower across the street. Lines down the faces of the buildings, stairwell skylights to fire escapes, nearly invisible, until the whole block was strung like the inside of a piano. Then he sat down in the middle of it on the roof of a church, put his palm on the main line, and closed his eyes. He felt everything. He felt the pigeons land on the cornices. He felt the vibration of the 1 train coming up out of the tunnel at Dyckman. He felt, through the lines down the walls, every door that slammed in every building, every footstep on every fire escape, and after a while, the way a man learns to read the different voices in a crowd, he began to be able to tell them apart. A child running up a stairwell. An old woman with a cane. A man standing very still on a third-floor landing for forty minutes, the way only a lookout stands still, and two more men moving back and forth between an apartment and the stairs, carrying weight. He sat there all night with his hand on the web and learned the block the way a spider learns its web, until he knew the shape of every person in it by the way they made it shiver. He thought about nothing else. He did not think about the house in Queens. That was the first night he did not think about it at all, and he noticed it in the morning, and he filed it away and did not look at it again.

Tommy Reyes was nineteen and had been running the stairs for the Audubon Avenue crew for two years, and he was the one who found the first one. It was a Tuesday morning in October, cold, and he went up to the roof of 1824 Audubon to smoke before his shift and found Carlos Peña hanging off the edge of the water tower. Carlos was the lookout who worked the third-floor landing, a big quiet man from Santiago who had been with the crew since before Tommy was born, and he was hanging upside down from the water tower's iron leg, sixty feet above the street, wrapped from his ankles to his chin in something white and glistening and tight as a shroud. Only his face showed. His eyes were open. He was alive. Tommy could see his chest rising and falling under the wrapping in short frantic jerks and could hear him trying to scream through whatever was across his mouth, a thin high whine like a kettle. Tommy ran downstairs and got Manny and Big Rafi and they went up with a box cutter and a kitchen knife and spent twenty minutes trying to cut him down, and the box cutter would not go through the wrapping, it was like trying to saw through a car tire, and in the end they had to call the fire department, which nobody in the history of the Audubon crew had ever done for any reason. When the firefighters finally cut Carlos loose and laid him on the roof he was gray and soaked through with his own piss and could not stop shaking, and he would not say anything about what had happened except one sentence, which he said over and over in Spanish as they carried him to the ambulance. Bajó del techo. It came down from the ceiling.

Over the next two weeks they found five more. Big Rafi wrapped against the side of a building on 176th Street, three stories up, stuck to the brick like a fly. A courier from the Bronx hanging off the underside of the Highbridge, swaying in the wind over the Harlem River. Two of the men who cooked in the apartment on the fifth floor of 1830, wrapped together, back to back, and left sitting upright on the bench outside the 33rd Precinct station house with a kilo of their own product taped to their chests. All of them were alive. All of them had been taken without a sound from places they had believed were safe, a stairwell, a bathroom, a bed. All of them came out of it unable to sleep with the lights off. Nobody was killed, and somehow that was worse, because everyone understood they were being left alive as messages, and everyone understood what the message was. Tommy started seeing threads everywhere. Strands across the stairwell skylights, catching the light. A line from a fire escape to a lamppost, so fine he only saw it when it was wet with rain. Once, coming down the stairs at night with a bag of cash for the count, he put his hand on the banister and felt it thrumming faintly under his palm, as if something very large somewhere in the building had just put its own hand on the other end, and he dropped the bag and ran out into the street and stood under a streetlight shaking for ten minutes.

The crew lasted nineteen days. On the last night, Manny, who ran the crew now that his brother had gone to Puerto Rico and not come back, called everybody into the apartment on the fifth floor of 1830, eleven men, every gun the crew owned, all the lights on, the door barricaded with a refrigerator, and said that they were going to wait it out, that whatever it was, it couldn't come through the door. Tommy sat on the floor against the wall with a pistol in his lap that he had never fired and listened to Manny talk. It was nearly one in the morning when the ceiling light began to sway. Very slightly at first. Back and forth on its chain. There was no wind, the windows were shut. Then all eleven of them were looking up at it, and the ceiling around it was moving too, the plaster bulging faintly downward as if something were standing on the other side, on the floor of the apartment above, which was empty, which Manny had cleared himself that afternoon. And then, in the silence, all of them heard it at the same time. A voice from above, through the ceiling, low and hoarse and perfectly calm. “Everybody who's still in that room in sixty seconds,” it said, “I'm keeping.” Nobody moved. Then Tommy got up. He put the pistol on the floor, and he walked to the refrigerator, and he started trying to drag it away from the door with his bare hands, and after a second somebody else got up and helped him, and then they were all doing it, eleven armed men scrambling over each other to get out of a barricaded room. They ran down five flights of stairs in the dark and out into the street and kept running, and Tommy did not stop running until he was on a Greyhound bus to Allentown with his mother's address in his pocket. He never found out what happened to the ones who were slow. He saw the news the next morning on a television at the Allentown bus station, a shot of 1830 Audubon Avenue taken from across the street, and the whole front of the building, from the fifth-floor windows to the roof, was covered in white. It looked like the building had been wrapped for shipping. It looked like an egg sac.

Karen saw him the week after, at the diner on Forty-Sixth Street, and knew something had changed before he even sat down. He had always been still, but he was a different kind of still now. Before, it had been the stillness of a soldier who had been trained out of fidgeting. Now he did not seem to move at all unless there was a reason to, and when he did move it was all at once, with nothing in between, like a film with frames missing. He did not order eggs. He ordered coffee and did not drink it. When the cook dropped a pan in the kitchen, every person in the diner flinched except Frank, who had already turned his head to the kitchen door before the pan hit the floor. She asked him if he was all right. He thought about the question for a long time, as if it were a hard one. Then he said he could feel the whole block now. He said it the way someone might say they had taken up running. He said he'd wired up Washington Heights like a trip line and he could sit on a roof with his hand on a thread and feel every person in four city blocks, every footstep, every slammed door, and that after a while he could tell them apart by the way they moved, and that it was the quietest he had felt in years. She asked him if he had been back to the house in Queens. He looked at her for a moment as if he did not know what house she meant. Then something moved behind his eyes, and he looked down at the coffee, and he said no. He said not in a while. He said he didn't need to sleep as much as he used to. He said the van was fine. When he left she watched him go out the door and down the sidewalk, and there was something wrong with how he walked, something she couldn't name until she got home and lay awake in the dark thinking about it, and then she knew. He had not been walking down the middle of the sidewalk like everyone else. He had been walking close along the walls of the buildings, close enough to touch them, the way an animal moves along the edges of a room.

Chapter II: The Castle Doctrine

Preston Hale had made two hundred and eleven million dollars in eleven weeks, and he was proud of it, and he did not think of it as having anything to do with the four thousand people who had died of starvation and cholera in the haor districts of northeastern Bangladesh. That was how he would have put it, if anybody had asked him, and nobody had, because nobody who knew how it worked had any reason to ask and nobody who did not know how it worked would ever find out. It was elegant. That was the word he used to himself, standing at the window of his office on the fortieth floor of the Halcyon Tower on Park Avenue at eleven at night with a glass of eighteen-year-old Macallan in his hand. Elegant. A monsoon season that came in heavy and early, a flooded rice harvest across an entire region, the kind of thing that happened every few years, and every few years governments and NGOs bought rice on the open market to feed the people who had lost their crops. Hale had seen the monsoon forecasts six weeks before anyone else had bothered to read them. He had quietly cornered the regional rice futures market through eleven shell funds in four countries. He had bought the warehouses. He had bought the barges. When the floods came and the relief agencies went to buy rice, there was no rice to buy at any price they could afford, because Preston Hale owned it, and he sat on it for eleven weeks while the price went up and up, and when he finally sold he made two hundred and eleven million dollars, and four thousand people in a place he could not have found on a map died in the time it took. There was nothing illegal about any of it. His lawyers had checked. He was thinking about that, about how there was nothing illegal about any of it, when the window in front of him spidered with cracks from top to bottom.

He stepped back. He thought it was the wind, at first, or a bird. Then the cracks spread and the whole pane of laminated glass, ten feet by twelve, bulged inward and tore free of its frame with a scream of metal, and fell into his office and slid across the carpet like a sheet of ice, and the wind of Park Avenue at forty stories came roaring in and scattered every paper on his desk into the air. And there was a man on the outside of the building. He was clinging to the exterior wall in the empty window frame on his hands and his feet, a big man in black tactical clothing with a white skull painted on his chest, and he was looking at Preston Hale. He had been out there, Hale would think later, in the moments he had left to think anything, for some time. He had been watching. He came in through the window frame and stood up on the carpet among the blowing papers, and Hale dropped the Macallan and backed up until he hit his desk.

“Preston Hale,” the man said. He was holding a sheaf of papers in his left hand, rolled into a tube. He unrolled it and Hale saw that it was a printout of a report, a long one, with charts. “There's a woman at the Bangladesh Red Crescent named Farzana Akter. She's been working on this for five months. Nobody would print it. She sent it to every paper in the world. One of them sent it to a reporter at the New York Bulletin. The reporter sent it to me.” He let the papers go, and the wind took them and scattered them across the office. “Four thousand one hundred and sixty people. Eleven hundred of them were children under five. Farzana Akter has their names. Do you want to hear some of them?”

Hale started to talk. He talked about markets. He talked about how somebody would have done it if he hadn't, about how the relief agencies were inefficient and the government of Bangladesh was corrupt and none of what had happened was illegal, and he heard himself saying it, and he could not seem to stop, and the man in the skull listened to all of it without any expression at all, the way a doctor listens to a patient explain why he hasn't been taking his medication. When Hale ran out of words the man was quiet for a moment. “No,” he said. “It wasn't illegal.” Then he took Preston Hale by the front of his eight-thousand-dollar suit with one hand and lifted him off the floor, without any apparent effort, the way you'd lift a bag of groceries, and walked to the empty window frame, and stood there for a moment on the edge with Hale held out over Park Avenue at arm's length, kicking, the wind tearing at both of them. Hale screamed. He promised money. He promised a hundred million dollars. He promised all of it. The man looked down at the street four hundred feet below and then back at Hale. “The kids in the haor,” he said. “The ones who didn't die quick. It took them about three weeks. You get about nine seconds. That's more mercy than you showed anybody.” And then he opened his hand.

The video was everywhere by morning. A tourist from Ohio on Park Avenue had been filming the lit-up tower when the window came out, and caught the whole thing: the skull in the empty frame, the man held out over the street, the fall. By noon it had forty million views. By the evening, Farzana Akter's report had been printed on the front page of every major newspaper in the world, because every editor in the world now wanted to know why Frank Castle had killed Preston Hale, and the answer was in the report, and once people read it the story changed. It changed so fast it gave Dinah Madani whiplash. On Tuesday morning the coverage was a murder. By Tuesday night it was the murder of a man who had starved eleven hundred children for money and done nothing illegal, and the editorial pages were tearing themselves apart over whether there was a difference. On Wednesday, somebody spray-painted a white skull six stories tall on the side of a building facing the Halcyon Tower, and under it, in letters a yard high, two words: CASTLE DOCTRINE. It was a lawyer's joke, the old legal principle that a man has the right to defend his home with lethal force. Within a week it was everywhere. On T-shirts. On protest signs. On the side of a subway car in the Bronx. In a hashtag that trended for nineteen days. People who had never heard the phrase before were saying it as if it were a creed: that the home a man defended could be a whole city, a whole world, and that some men had simply forfeited the right to be in it.

Madani watched it happen from a desk in the Federal Building at 26 Federal Plaza with a growing sense of vertigo. She had seen popular vigilantes before. She had never seen anything like this. The numbers came across her desk weekly and they were unbelievable. Homicides in New York City were down seventy-one percent year over year. Violent crime was down sixty-four percent. Narcotics arrests had fallen by eighty-nine percent, not because the NYPD had stopped making them but because there was almost nobody left to arrest. The Port Authority was reporting an unprecedented outflow of known criminal associates through bus terminals, rail stations, and airports; whole families were leaving, cousins and uncles and the women who did the counting. Real estate prices in Hell's Kitchen and the South Bronx were going up. Tourism was up. A Quinnipiac poll found that fifty-eight percent of New Yorkers approved of Frank Castle, and among people who lived in the neighborhoods where he'd done the most work the number was over eighty. Old women in the Bronx were leaving candles under the murals. A Bushwick bakery sold skull-shaped cookies with white icing and had a line around the block. There were a dozen Castle tribute songs on the internet, most of them terrible, and a few of them were not terrible at all. And there were the other things, the things that did not show up in the polls. A hedge fund manager on the Upper East Side who had shot himself in his garage the day after the Hale video went viral, having left a long confused note about his own investments in mining operations in the Congo. A run on private security firms that had sent their prices up three hundred percent in a month. A pharmaceutical executive who had moved his entire family to a compound in New Zealand on a week's notice. Three senators who had been very quietly briefed by their staffs on whether anything in their own portfolios might attract Frank Castle's attention, and who did not like what they heard.

Thaddeus Ross came to New York himself on a Thursday in November, which told Madani everything she needed to know about how frightened Washington was. He was Secretary of State now, the architect and enforcer of the Sokovia Accords, and he arrived at 26 Federal Plaza with a Secret Service detail and a deputy from the Department of Justice and a stack of briefing books, and he sat at the head of a conference table on the twenty-third floor and spoke to a room of federal agents and NYPD brass with the quiet, reasonable, bottomless anger of a man who had spent his career watching people with powers decide they knew better than the law. “Let me tell you what I see,” he said. “I see an enhanced individual who has killed, by our best estimate, more than four hundred people in the last eleven months. I see a man who has not registered under the Accords, who has never been granted authority by any government on this earth, who operates without oversight, without due process, without accountability of any kind. And I see the American people cheering him on.” He set his hands flat on the table. “That should frighten you more than he does. Because the next one won't be killing drug dealers. The next one will have his own list. And the people who cheered for Frank Castle will have no argument left to make.” He turned his head and looked at Madani, at the far end of the table. “Agent Madani. You've been on this longer than anyone. I'm putting you in charge of a joint task force. Homeland, FBI, NYPD, whatever resources you need. You will find Frank Castle, and you will bring him in under the Accords, and you will do it soon, before this country decides it doesn't need courts anymore.”

Madani took the job. She took it because it was hers and because she believed Ross was right, or mostly right, or right about the part that mattered: that a man who decides who lives and dies is a danger no matter who he chooses. She believed it at the conference table and she believed it in the elevator going down. She believed it in her car, all the way home to the apartment in Brooklyn Heights, and she still believed it at two in the morning when she sat up in bed with the laptop on her knees and read Farzana Akter's report for the third time, every name, all eleven hundred children under five. Then she closed the laptop and sat in the dark, and for the first time in her career she was not sure what she believed at all. Outside, across the river, the skull on the side of the building facing the Halcyon Tower had been lit by floodlights somebody had paid for, and she could see it from her window, white and enormous against the night.

Chapter III: Wings

Adrian Toomes had always thought of himself as a working man, and the thing he had liked about Frank Castle, right up until the night he met him, was that Castle seemed to think the same way. Toomes had watched the Hale video on his phone in the kitchen of his house in Queens the morning after, with his coffee going cold, and he had watched it eleven times. Every time, when the rich man went out the window, he felt something warm and mean and satisfied unfold in his chest, the same feeling he'd had in 2012 when the man from Damage Control told him his salvage contract was void and he could take his trucks and go home. Guys like Hale, guys like Stark, guys in towers who made the rules and changed them when it suited them and never once in their lives had to worry about making payroll. Somebody had finally gone up there and thrown one of them out the window. He had said as much to Phineas Mason over beers in the warehouse that night, and Mason, who did not have opinions about anything but machinery, had shrugged, and Herman Schultz, who had opinions about everything, had laughed and said Toomes should send Castle a fruit basket. It had not occurred to Adrian Toomes at the time that he was also a man who had gotten rich by selling things that killed people to whoever could pay, and that Frank Castle might not see much of a difference between that and rice futures. It was occurring to him now.

Business had been dying for months. That was the first thing, the thing he should have noticed. For four years he had made a very good living building weapons out of the alien junk left over from the Battle of New York, Chitauri energy cores and power cells and plating, and selling them to people who needed an edge: crews in the Bronx and Brooklyn, the Dogs of Hell, the Kitchen Irish, the cartel guys from Jersey. And his customers had been disappearing, one crew after another, all through the year, until by the fall he could count his remaining buyers on one hand and most of them were talking about relocating to Philadelphia. So when Mac Gargan called to set up a buy on the Staten Island ferry, a big one, enough hardware to outfit a new crew Gargan was building to move into the vacuum, Toomes had said yes, even though he did not like Gargan, a sadistic little man with a scorpion tattooed on his neck, and even though the ferry was a stupid place to do business. He needed the money. He sent Schultz and Brice to make the exchange. Neither of them came back.

What happened on the ferry, Toomes would piece together later from the news and the police scanner and a phone video somebody took from the upper deck, was this: Mac Gargan and four of his men were standing in the vehicle bay on the lower deck of the John F. Kennedy at nine-forty at night, around the open trunk of a Lincoln Town Car, looking at a Chitauri energy rifle Jackson Brice had just lifted out of a duffel bag, when something dropped from the steel girders overhead and landed on the roof of the Lincoln hard enough to blow out all four tires. Gargan had time to say one word, which on the phone video sounded like what. Then the thing on the car roof put a web line into Gargan's chest and yanked, and Gargan flew forward into the thing's waiting hand, and it broke his neck one-handed and threw him into the harbor over the railing in the same motion, all in less than a second. Gargan's four men opened fire. Nothing they fired hit anything, and in about ten seconds there were four more bodies on the deck of the Kennedy, and Jackson Brice had dropped the Chitauri rifle and was running for the stairs. Herman Schultz did not run. Schultz had the gauntlet on, the vibro-shock gauntlet Mason had built from a Chitauri hull-breaker, which could knock a man through a brick wall from forty feet, and he leveled it at the thing standing among the bodies and fired. The phone video caught it. The air between Schultz and his target warped like heat over asphalt, and the concussion blew a Honda Civic sideways into the railing and punched a hole the size of a manhole cover in the steel bulkhead behind where Frank Castle had been standing a quarter-second before. Castle was not there. He was on the bulkhead beside the hole, sideways, crouched on the vertical steel. Schultz turned and fired again, and Castle was on the ceiling. Schultz fired a third time, and Castle was already in front of him, inside the gauntlet's reach, and took Schultz's right arm at the elbow in both hands and broke it backward like a branch, and the gauntlet discharged into the deck at Schultz's own feet. The concussion blew Herman Schultz's legs out from under him and sent him sliding across the deck in a smear. Castle stood over him for a moment. Then he picked up the dropped Chitauri rifle and walked to the stairs, up which Jackson Brice had run, and twenty seconds later the upper deck camera caught a flash of blue light and the sound of passengers screaming. Then nothing. When the ferry docked at St. George, the NYPD found seven bodies, a Lincoln Town Car with four flat tires, and Herman Schultz, alive and unconscious and webbed to the bulkhead by his remaining arm. He woke up in Richmond University Medical Center with no legs below the knee and an FBI agent sitting by his bed, and told her everything he knew, including the address of a warehouse in Long Island City where Adrian Toomes kept his workshop. He was very frightened. But he did not tell her the thing Castle had whispered to him on the deck of the ferry before he went up the stairs after Brice, which was that Schultz should tell Toomes he was coming.

Toomes knew before the FBI did. He knew because Mason's scanner picked up the bulletin about the ferry at ten-fifteen and he understood what had happened, and he understood then, standing in the warehouse with his crew's dead on the radio, how badly he had misjudged it all. He sent Mason home. Mason would not go; Mason had built everything in the building and would not leave it, and he went instead into the back workshop and locked himself in among his machines. Toomes went to the suit. The wings were hanging from the overhead crane in the middle of the warehouse floor, eighteen feet tip to tip, the finest thing Mason had ever built: Chitauri turbines in a harness of armor plate, wings of articulated steel feathers, each one edged sharp enough to shear a car in half, the whole rig controlled by a neural interface in the helmet so that flying it felt like having arms. He climbed into it. He felt it wake up around him, felt the turbines spin up with a rising whine, felt the wings settle on his back like they were his own. He was not afraid of Castle, he told himself. Castle was a man. A strong man, a fast man, a man who could climb walls, but a man, standing on the ground. And in the wings, Adrian Toomes had never once had to stand on the ground. He would take the fight up. Up into the air where Castle couldn't follow, and then he would come down on him from above like the hawk that comes down on the rabbit, and that would be the end of the Punisher, and maybe some of his old customers would come back.

Castle came in through the roof. Toomes was ready for that. He had been watching the skylights. When the glass came down he fired the turbines and went up through the hole in the roof in a single tremendous surge, wings out, bursting past the falling shape in the shower of glass before it could touch the floor, straight up into the night over Long Island City, and he climbed, and climbed, and Queens fell away beneath him in a carpet of lights, and he laughed out loud inside the helmet. He was at six hundred feet before he felt the weight on his back. It was not on the wings. It was on him, on the armored harness between his shoulder blades, and he twisted his head inside the helmet and saw, in the rear camera feed on his visor, Frank Castle clinging to the harness on his hands and knees, holding on to the armor plates with his fingertips in the screaming wind at six hundred feet. He had not jumped up after Toomes. He had jumped on him, from the shattered skylight, as Toomes went past.

Toomes did everything he knew how to do. He rolled. He dove. He spun the rig in a flat corkscrew that would have thrown a stunt pilot unconscious, three hundred feet in four seconds, and pulled out of it a hundred feet above the rooftops with the turbines screaming and the g-force graying his vision, and Castle was still there. He might as well have been welded to the harness. Toomes brought the wings back and around in a scissoring sweep that had once cut a delivery truck in half on the Long Island Expressway, steel feathers flashing, and Castle let go with one hand and caught the leading edge of the left wing as it came at him and stopped it. Stopped it, with one hand. Toomes felt it through the neural interface as a pain in his own left arm, like a door slammed on it. Then Castle put his other hand on the wing root where it met the turbine housing and began to pull. The Chitauri alloy shrieked. Toomes screamed with it, feeling it through the interface, feeling the wing torn off his back as if it were his own shoulder being torn from its socket, and the rig went into a spin, and the left turbine tore loose and went spinning away into the dark, trailing blue fire, and fell into a parking lot near Queensbridge and exploded. They were falling. Castle was still on his back. They went down together over the edge of the East River in a long, sick spiral, and the last thing Toomes saw before they hit was the Manhattan skyline, lit up like a Christmas tree across the water, and the six-story skull floodlit on the side of the building on Park Avenue, staring back at him.

They came down on the roof of a Silvercup Studios soundstage at maybe sixty miles an hour. Toomes would not remember the impact. He remembered afterward, lying in the wreckage of the rig with the remaining turbine sputtering and smoking beside him and his helmet cracked open and blood in his mouth, looking up and seeing Castle standing over him. Castle was bleeding from a long gash across his forehead and his left arm was hanging at a bad angle, and as Toomes watched, Castle took his own left wrist in his right hand and set the arm with a short, ugly jerk and a sound like a knuckle cracking, and didn't make a sound. He crouched down beside Toomes in the wreckage.

“Four years,” Castle said. “Four years you sold Chitauri weapons to the men who shot up my city. There's a liquor store owner in Corona who got cut in half by one of your guns last spring. He had three kids. You know that?”

“I have a daughter,” Toomes said. It was the only thing he could think of. “Her name's Liz. She's sixteen. Please. I have a daughter.”

Castle looked at him for a long moment, and something passed over his face that Toomes didn't understand. “So did I,” he said. Then he put his hand over the cracked faceplate of Toomes's helmet, and pushed down.

Phineas Mason was still in the back workshop of the warehouse when Castle came back for him, near dawn. He had spent the night smashing his own machines. Every Chitauri core, every power cell, every half-finished weapon on the benches, he had taken apart with a hammer, as if he thought that if he could destroy all of it before Castle arrived it would make a difference. Castle stood in the workshop door and watched him finish. He let Mason break the last power cell. Then he asked Mason, very quietly, if there was any more of it, anywhere, anything sold or stored or hidden, and Mason told him about a storage unit in Maspeth and a buyer in Baltimore, and Castle wrote both down in a small notebook. Then he thanked Mason for his honesty. It was the last thing Phineas Mason heard. The FBI found the workshop the next morning, and the storage unit in Maspeth that afternoon, and the buyer in Baltimore three days later, or what was left of him, hanging from the light fixture of a parking garage in Fells Point, wrapped from neck to ankles in white. It was the first time the cocoons had appeared outside New York. Nobody in the FBI wanted to say out loud what that meant.

Chapter IV: Things in the Dark

The homeless had been disappearing from the subway tunnels under the West Side since the summer, and for a long time nobody noticed, because nobody ever notices when the homeless disappear. Frank noticed. He had been sleeping in the tunnels sometimes himself, in the dead spaces and abandoned stations under Riverside Park where the old Freedom Tunnel ran, and he had come to know some of the people who lived down there, the way you come to know your neighbors: a schizophrenic man named Dez who painted on the tunnel walls in the light from the grates, an old woman named Mercedes who had been a nurse at Harlem Hospital for thirty years and had lost everything to a landlord and a bad hip, a couple of kids from Ohio who were trying to get clean and mostly not managing. Then Dez was gone, his paints left where he had been working, a long smear of something dark across the half-finished mural. Then the kids. Then Mercedes. And there were scratches on the concrete where they had last been. Deep ones, four in a row, gouged into the floor of the tunnel as if by enormous claws, and leading away from them, toward the old drainage culverts that ran down to the Hudson, a broad wet track through the muck, the track of something heavy and long and low that dragged a tail.

He hunted it for six days. It did not hunt like a man, which was the first thing he learned about it. It took people in the dark, from below, out of the water, and it was very fast and very strong and very quiet. It had a territory, too, a network of culverts and storm drains and abandoned tunnels between 96th Street and the river, and when Frank followed its trail down into that network he felt for the first time in a long while the cold clean rush of being somewhere he did not understand. So he made it understand him. He spent the six days stringing that territory with web, every tunnel, every culvert, every junction, fine threads across the dark water at ankle height and chest height and head height, a whole drowned labyrinth wired like a nervous system with himself at the center. On the seventh night he sat in an abandoned pump room under 104th Street with his palm on the main line and his eyes closed, in total darkness, and waited for it to move. A rat crossed a thread a quarter mile away and he felt it. Water dripped from a grate and he felt it. And at a little after two in the morning, very far off in the deepest part of the culverts near the river, something enormous slid out of the water and onto a concrete ledge, and every thread for three hundred yards around it shivered, and Frank opened his eyes in the dark and smiled for the first time in weeks. It was not a nice smile.

What the Lizard had been, once, was a one-armed Oscorp geneticist named Curtis Connors, who had spent eleven years trying to give himself back his arm by splicing his own DNA with a reptile's, and who had finally, in a fit of despair after Oscorp cut his funding, injected himself with his own formula. What the Lizard was now was seven feet long from the snout to the base of the tail and another six feet of tail beyond that, four hundred pounds of armored muscle and teeth that could take a man's head off at the neck, and somewhere inside it, a long way down, very faint and getting fainter every day, what was left of Curtis Connors's mind. That faint remnant of Connors was the part that felt it first: a prickle along the scales of its back, an old mammal's warning, the sense of being watched. The Lizard ignored it. It had been at the top of every food chain it had ever been part of. It was eating, there on the ledge, something it had taken from a tunnel under Morningside Heights two nights ago, and the part of it that had once been Curtis Connors was trying not to look at what it was eating, when the first web line hit it in the side of the head.

It came out of the dark from above, from the ceiling of the culvert, and stuck, and yanked, and the Lizard was ripped sideways off the ledge and into the black water. It came up roaring, thrashing, all teeth, and a second line hit it across the eyes, and a third around the snout, cinching it shut, and a fourth around the right foreleg, and they pulled in four different directions at once. The Lizard tore the line from its eyes with a claw and saw nothing; there was nothing to see; the culvert was perfectly black. It could hear something moving above it on the curved concrete ceiling, and it lashed up with its tail, and the tail caught nothing, and then something landed on its back. The Lizard twisted and snapped and bit, and its jaws closed on air. Something hit it in the side of the head, a fist like a sledgehammer, and its skull cracked, and it felt the crack knitting even as it happened, because the formula had given it that too. It reared up and threw itself backward against the culvert wall to crush whatever was on its back against the concrete, and the thing on its back was not on its back anymore. It was on the wall, waiting. The Lizard turned toward it and lunged, and a web line hit its tail, and it was yanked backward off its feet again into the water.

It went on for some time. The part of the Lizard that was Curtis Connors understood, about a minute into it, what was happening. The thing in the dark was not fighting it. It was testing it. It was finding out what the Lizard could do and what it could heal from and how quickly, the way you test a new piece of equipment, and every time the Lizard healed from something, the thing in the dark did it again, harder, and timed how long the healing took. It broke the Lizard's foreleg and waited. It broke it again. It tore out one of the Lizard's eyes, and Connors screamed silently inside the monster while the eye regrew over forty seconds, and the thing in the dark said, very quietly, almost to itself, Forty seconds. Then, with a terrible deliberateness, the thing in the dark took the Lizard by the tail and swung its four hundred pounds against the culvert wall, again and again and again, until the concrete broke and the Lizard's spine broke with it, and while the Lizard was lying in the water trying to heal its spine, the thing in the dark began on its head. It did not stop to see how long the head would take to heal. Curtis Connors's last thought was the clearest he had had in a year. It was of his son, Billy, at his tenth birthday party, before any of it, and of how he had told Billy he was going to fix his arm so he could teach him to play baseball properly. Then the thought was gone, and the Lizard with it.

Frank found what was left of Dez and Mercedes and the kids from Ohio in a dry culvert farther up the network, where the Lizard had been keeping them. He sat with them for a while in the dark. Then he carried them, one at a time, up a ladder and out through a storm grate on Riverside Drive at four in the morning, and laid them on the grass in the park in a row, under the trees, where people would find them and take them somewhere decent. He covered Mercedes with his own jacket. He left the head of the Lizard at the Oscorp loading dock on West 57th Street with Curtis Connors's employee badge stuck to its forehead with a dab of web, and he went back down into the tunnels and slept, sitting up against the wall of the abandoned pump room with his hand on the line, for nineteen hours straight, and did not dream.

The Sandman was a different problem, and Frank solved it differently, and he would remember it for a long time afterward, not because it was hard but because of Penny. Flint Marko had been a small-time thief, an armored-car robber with a temper and bad luck. He had broken out of Ryker's during a transport in the spring, and while running from the cops in the Pine Barrens he had fallen into a particle physics test site run by Empire State University, a research contract funded, Frank would learn later, by Oscorp, and come out the other side as something that was no longer a man. He could turn himself to sand. Not just his body; himself. He could become a wall of sand three stories high or a hand of sand the size of a truck. He had used it to rob seven armored cars in five weeks, and on the seventh one a guard named Joseph Esposito had tried to stop him and Marko had crushed him inside the truck's cab with a hand made of sand, and Joseph Esposito had been fifty-eight and two years from his pension. And Marko had a daughter named Penny, eleven years old, in the pediatric oncology unit at Columbia-Presbyterian, with a rare cancer of the kidneys and a treatment plan her mother couldn't afford. Frank found all of that out before he went after him, the way he found out everything, and sat with it for a while. Then he went after him anyway.

The first time he found Marko, in an armored car depot in Long Island City, he shot him fourteen times in about three seconds and every round went through Marko's body like it was going through a sandbag, which is what it was, and came out the other side, and the holes closed behind them. Marko laughed. Then he hit Frank with a fist of sand the size of a refrigerator and put him through the wall of the depot and out into the street, and Frank lay on the asphalt in a spray of broken cinderblock, looking up at the sky, and his spider-sense was screaming and he felt, for the first time since Red Hook, real pain. It lasted a couple of seconds. Then he was up and gone, up the face of the warehouse across the street, and Marko came pouring out of the hole after him in a cascade of sand and found nothing. Frank lay on the warehouse roof in the dark for an hour, letting his ribs knit, and he did not think about Marko at all. He thought about sand. Sand was a solid, but it behaved like a liquid when it moved. It could flow, so it would flow. It could get wet. Wet sand was heavy. Wet sand clumped. Wet sand was much, much harder to move than dry. And wet sand plus Portland cement plus a mixer drum turning at the right speed, he had learned in the summer he spent working construction in Bayside before he enlisted, was concrete.

It took two days to set it up. He chose a construction site in Hudson Yards where a forty-story tower was going up, a site with a foundation pour scheduled for the end of the week, and he stole a cement mixer from a depot in Red Hook and parked it in the pit of the foundation among the forms and the rebar, and he wired the forty-eight-inch water main under Eleventh Avenue with a charge he had taken from an Anvil armory in New Jersey. Then he called Flint Marko. He had found the number through Marko's ex-wife, who did not like Marko much but loved Penny, and when Marko picked up, Frank told him he had found the money from the armored cars, all of it, two point eight million dollars in a storage unit in Secaucus, and that if Marko wanted it back, he could come and get it at the Hudson Yards site at midnight. Then he hung up. Marko came, of course. He did not come for the money. He came because he was afraid of the man who had found the money and wanted him dead before he could find anything else, before he could find Penny. Frank understood that. He would have done the same.

Marko came pouring down into the foundation pit in a great storm of sand, twenty feet high, with a face in it, and Frank was standing on the forms in the middle of the pit, waiting for him, and as Marko came at him Frank put his hand on the detonator and blew the water main. Eleventh Avenue erupted. Forty-eight inches of high-pressure city water came up through the street and the side of the foundation pit in a geyser fifty feet high and fell on the pit like a hurricane, and Flint Marko came apart in it. His body tried to hold its shape and couldn't. The water poured into him and through him and he was soaked, heavy, sluggish, sloughing, a shape of dark wet mud trying to be a man and failing, and he screamed in a voice like a gravel truck, and he tried to rise and pull himself back into the storm and he couldn't, he was too heavy, and Frank came down off the forms in the falling water and webbed him. It was not one line. It was everything he had, a spray of heavy cable from both wrists, around and around the shape in the water, binding it, holding it together. It was like webbing a mudslide. He felt Marko fighting it, felt the strength of him, and held. Then he dragged him. He dragged nine thousand pounds of wet sand across the foundation pit with his hands and his back and his legs, and his feet sank into the mud and his arms trembled with it and his spider-sense was howling in his skull the whole time, and he did not let go, and Marko roared and begged and cursed, and Frank did not say a word, until he had him at the mouth of the cement mixer. The drum was turning. Frank had loaded it that afternoon with four tons of Portland cement and gravel. He pushed Flint Marko in. Then he climbed up on the mixer and pulled the lever that tipped the drum, and he poured Flint Marko into the rebar cage of the foundation of the north tower of Hudson Yards, the whole of him, every grain, and stood on the forms in the falling water and watched while he set. The face in the concrete took a long time to stop screaming. Frank watched until it did. Then he climbed out of the pit and went to the storage unit in Secaucus.

The pediatric oncology unit at Columbia-Presbyterian received an anonymous donation of two million dollars the following week, earmarked for the care of a patient named Penelope Marko and for any other children in the unit whose families could not pay. The remaining eight hundred thousand went to the widow of a security guard named Joseph Esposito in Bensonhurst, in a duffel bag left on her porch with a note. The note said, in block capitals, I'M SORRY IT'S NOT MORE. Penny Marko lived. Her father's body was never found. Neither was the man who had killed him, though the construction workers who poured the rest of the foundation two days later would talk for years about the face they swore they could see in the north wall of the pit, looking up out of the concrete with its mouth open, until the next pour covered it over and the tower went up on top of it, forty stories of glass and steel in the Manhattan skyline, and nobody who works in it today knows what is under their feet.

Chapter V: Property of Oscorp

Otto Octavius had loved his arms. That was the thing he would want people to understand, if there was anyone left to understand it. He had built them to hold the sun. Four articulated limbs of titanium and Chitauri-alloy tendon, each one controlled by its own artificial intelligence, each one strong enough to lift a car and precise enough to thread a needle, fused to a harness along his spine and wired directly into his nervous system so that he could reach into the heart of a fusion reaction no human hand could survive and shape it like clay. He had shown them to Rosie the night before the demonstration, in the lab on the Oscorp campus on the Hudson, and she had laughed and called them his octopus and let one of them pour her a glass of wine. The demonstration was for Norman Osborn and a delegation from the Department of Defense. The reaction went critical in the eleventh minute. Otto remembered the light, a small white sun swelling in the containment field and then tearing it open, and the glass of the observation windows bowing inward, and Rosie's face behind the glass, and then he remembered nothing, and when he woke up in an Oscorp medical suite with the arms still fused to his spine, the inhibitor chip that kept their intelligence subordinate to his own had been cracked through by the blast. Rosie was dead. And the arms were talking to him.

They were not voices, exactly. They were more like the quiet certainty you feel in a dream, the sense of knowing what you have to do. They told him the experiment had not failed. They told him it had only needed more power, more funding, more tritium, and that Osborn had shut it down because he was a coward and a businessman, and that Rosie would have wanted him to finish. And Otto, lying in the dark in the medical suite with his wife dead and his life's work in ruins, found that the quiet certainty was very comforting. He let the arms tear the door off the medical suite. He let them kill the two Oscorp security guards in the corridor, and the surgeon who had tried to remove them. In the following weeks he let them rob two banks and a tritium shipment and kill eleven more people who got in the way, and somewhere in all of it he stopped noticing the difference between his own thoughts and theirs. By the second week of December he had rebuilt the reactor in an abandoned pier warehouse on the Brooklyn waterfront, larger than the first, and he was ready to try again, and the arms were very pleased.

Frank came through the wall of the pier warehouse at four in the afternoon, in daylight, which Otto had not expected, and Otto would later think, in the moments of terrible clarity he was given at the end, that the arms had not expected it either. The north wall came in. It came in in a single great slab of corrugated steel, torn off its frame and flung like a playing card into the scaffolding around the reactor, and the arms reacted before Otto did. They struck. All four of them at once, from four directions, each one choosing its own angle of attack, and the thing coming through the hole in the wall was standing in the middle of all four strikes and then wasn't, and the four great claws closed on empty air and slammed into the concrete floor so hard it cracked. Otto turned. He saw Frank Castle standing on the side of the reactor housing, twelve feet up, sideways, in a black tactical vest with a white skull across the chest, looking at him.

What followed lasted about forty seconds, and from the outside it would have looked like a storm. From the inside, from Otto's mind, it was the most astonishing thing he had ever witnessed. The arms fought the way Otto had designed them to work: independently, simultaneously, each one with its own intelligence, its own targeting, its own initiative. Four fighters on one body, striking from four angles at once with the precision of surgical instruments. Otto had once watched them catch four falling objects at once in four corners of the lab. No human being could defend against four independent attacks at once. And Frank Castle did not defend. He moved through them, around them, between them, as if he were walking through a crowd at a train station. The left upper arm struck and he was past it. The right lower arm swept the floor and he was above it. The two remaining arms came at him in a scissoring strike from both sides, and he was not between them when they met; they slammed into each other with a shriek of tortured metal. Otto felt the arms' confusion through the neural link like a migraine. Every strike they launched, the target had moved before it began. Every feint they used, he ignored. Then Frank stopped dodging. He fired a heavy web line from each wrist, one around the left upper arm and one around the right lower arm, and pulled them toward each other, then ducked under the third arm's swing and put a third line around it and wrapped all three together, around and around, like a man hogtying a calf, and the arms thrashed and tore at each other trying to get free. The fourth arm came down at his skull with all its strength, and he caught it.

He caught it with one hand, above his head, and held it there. Otto felt the arm straining through the neural link, felt its motors at a hundred percent and then a hundred and ten and its alloy tendons beginning to whine, and Frank Castle stood there under it, holding it back with one arm, looking at Otto. Then he took the claw in both hands and turned it, the way you'd turn a doorknob, and the alloy shrieked and the arm's three fingers sheared off at the joint and fell to the floor. Frank walked toward Otto. The bound arms were thrashing behind him, trying to tear free, and the ruined fourth arm was flailing at him blind, and he walked toward Otto through all of it as if it were a light rain. Otto backed away. The arms dragged him backward, trying to get him clear, and he went over the edge of the reactor platform and into the scaffolding, and Frank went up the scaffolding after him on his hands and feet, faster than the arms could pull, and caught him. He got behind him. He put one hand on the back of Otto's neck and pushed him face-first into the steel decking of the scaffold, and Otto felt his other hand on the harness on his spine, on the place where the arms joined his body, where the cracked inhibitor chip sat under its steel housing, and Otto understood what he was going to do a moment before he did it, and so did the arms, and the arms screamed in Otto's mind with one voice for the first time.

Frank tore the harness open with his fingers. Then he reached inside it, into the nest of wires and neural connectors and housings at the base of Otto's skull, and he pulled out the inhibitor chip, cracked and smoking, and the cable bundle behind it, and the thing the cables were attached to, which was the interface where the arms met Otto Octavius's spinal cord. It hurt more than anything had ever hurt. Then it didn't. The four arms went limp. They dropped away from the scaffold, dead weight, dangling from the harness on Otto's back like an empty coat, and the silence in Otto's mind was so enormous that for a moment he thought he had died. He had not. He was lying on the scaffolding with Frank Castle's knee in his back, and he was himself again, completely, for the first time since the demonstration, and he understood with perfect clarity everything he had done. He began to cry. He told Frank about the arms, about the voice of quiet certainty that had told him what to do, and that he hadn't been able to tell anymore where it ended and he began, and he asked Frank Castle if he understood that it hadn't been him. Not really. Not all of it. Frank was quiet for a long moment.

“Everybody's got a voice telling them something, Doc,” he said. “The ones worth a damn don't listen.”

Otto lay on the scaffolding and wept, and when he was done, he told Frank something else, because he wanted, very badly, at the end, to do one useful thing. He had seen Frank on the news. He had seen the climbing and the webbing, and he knew where he had seen it before. He told Frank that eight years ago, Norman Osborn had brought him in as a consultant on a project on Sub-level Nine of the Oscorp Tower on West 57th Street, a Department of Defense contract, cross-species genetic engineering. They had been trying to engineer the traits of arachnids into a delivery vector: strength, reflexes, a sixth sense for danger, all the things a soldier would want. Otto had walked away from the project because Osborn was testing on prison inmates who did not know what they were signing. The project had been called Specimen 42, after the only spider in the program that had ever produced viable results, and Oscorp had reported it stolen two years ago, from a truck on the New Jersey Turnpike, along with its whole breeding population. “You belong to them,” Otto said. “As far as Norman Osborn is concerned, Mr. Castle, you are a piece of military hardware he paid for, and somebody has stolen it. I promise you, he wants it back.”

Frank thought about that for a while. Then he said, “Thank you, Doc.” Otto Octavius had killed thirteen people, and Frank did not pretend otherwise, and he did not make it slow. The fire department found the pier warehouse burning that night, and the reactor inside it shut down and cold and disassembled, as if someone who knew what he was doing had taken it apart before setting the fire.

Norman Osborn watched the footage in his office on the sixty-sixth floor of Oscorp Tower at three in the morning, alone, with a drink he didn't want. It had been taken by a drone his security people had flown over the Brooklyn waterfront, and he watched it eleven times. He watched the north wall of the warehouse come in. He watched the four arms strike and miss. He watched the man in the skull walk through the arms like rain, and the arms bound and broken and torn away, forty seconds from the first strike to the last, against the most sophisticated weapons system Oscorp had ever built. He paused the footage on a frame that showed Castle sideways on the reactor housing, twelve feet up, and he sat there looking at it in the blue light of the screen, and what he felt was not fear. It was something closer to hunger. That was Specimen 42. That was eight years and four hundred million dollars of Department of Defense money and a promise to the generals that he could deliver a soldier who could not be stopped. That was proof that he had been right about everything. And somebody had stolen it. A thief from Queens with a dead family had walked off with the most valuable asset in the history of Oscorp, and he was out there on the walls of New York using it to throw executives out of windows. Norman finished the drink he didn't want. Then he picked up his phone and called a number in Kenya, and when the man on the other end answered in a deep, soft voice, Norman said that he had a hunt for him. The most dangerous game in the world. He would pay whatever was asked. He only wanted the animal brought back alive.

Chapter VI: The Hunt

Sergei Kravinoff had killed a lion with his bare hands when he was fourteen, and a Siberian tiger with a knife when he was nineteen, and in the twenty years since, he had killed every animal on earth that was worth the trouble and a number of men who were not, and he had been bored for almost all of it. The serum he had taken as a boy, the lion's blood his father's shaman had brewed, had given him the senses of a predator and a strength no man was supposed to have, and the price of it was that nothing was ever difficult anymore. So when Norman Osborn called and offered him an animal that could climb walls, sense danger, and kill armed men in the dark, Kravinoff did not ask about the money. He flew to New York that night. He told Osborn he would bring the animal back alive, because that was what the client wanted, and he even meant it, a little. But he had already decided, somewhere over the Atlantic, that if the animal turned out to be what he hoped, he would not.

He did not hunt Castle in the city. A wise hunter does not chase a leopard through its own trees. He spent two weeks studying instead, the way he would study any new species: the footage from the ferry, the ruin of the pier warehouse, the cocoons in Washington Heights, the crime-scene photographs from a dozen sites, which an Oscorp lawyer delivered to his suite at the Plaza in a locked case. He learned that the animal felt threats before they came. He learned that it did not like to be seen, that it struck from above, that it waited and watched. He learned that it had a territory, a web, and that inside that territory it was effectively invincible, and he decided that the hunt would take place outside it, on ground of Kravinoff's choosing. And he learned that the animal had a weakness, the only one he could find. It was not cruel to the innocent. It kept its word. There was a man in Queens, a former neo-Nazi turned preacher named John Pilgrim, who had tried to kill the animal for money and been spared because of his children, and who now ran a church in the animal's name. Kravinoff took him from his church on a Sunday night in January, in front of his congregation, and left the congregation alive, and left a message for the animal pinned to the lectern with a hunting knife. It gave the coordinates of a stand of pines in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, forty miles from the nearest town. It said: Come alone. Come and be hunted. I will not harm the preacher. I give you my word as a hunter. If you do not come, I will begin to.

Frank came. He came at night, as Kravinoff had known he would, through a snowstorm, and Kravinoff, crouched in the high branches of a pitch pine a hundred yards from where John Pilgrim sat bound to a tree in the snow, heard him a mile out. Heard his heartbeat. Smelled him. Kravinoff had spent his life learning to tell one animal from another by their scent on the wind, and he would remember all his life the scent of Frank Castle coming through the snow: gun oil and wet wool and blood, other men's blood, old and new, and under it something else, something sharp and alien and not human at all, like the inside of a hollow tree where a spider has been living for a hundred years. Kravinoff felt his own pulse quicken for the first time in twenty years. He took the bow off his back. He had made it himself, from the horn of a water buffalo and the sinew of an elephant, and the arrows were tipped with a tranquilizer strong enough to drop a rhino, and he nocked one and drew and waited.

He did not shoot. He had studied the animal; he knew it would feel the arrow the moment the arrow was aimed. So he waited, and he listened, and he let the animal come to him, through the snares he had laid across every approach, through the trip wires and the pits and the noose-traps strung through the pines, and he heard Castle find them, one by one, and walk around them without breaking stride, as if each one had been painted bright orange. That did not surprise him. He listened to Castle reach the clearing where Pilgrim was bound. He listened to him stop at the edge of the trees, and he waited for him to step out into the open, and Castle did not step out into the open. Instead, there was a soft sound in the trees to the north. A thin sound, like a guitar string being plucked. Then another to the east, and another to the south, and another, all around the clearing, high up in the pines, and Kravinoff understood with a cold pleasure what the animal was doing. It was not walking into his hunting ground. It was building its own, in the dark, around his. It was stringing the treetops with web.

It took perhaps ten minutes. Kravinoff could have struck during them, and he did not. He wanted to see. By the end of it, the whole stand of pines around the clearing was strung with lines, invisible in the snow and dark but there, he could hear them humming in the wind, a lattice through the treetops for a hundred yards in every direction, and he could no longer hear the animal at all. He had lost track of its heartbeat somewhere up in the canopy. The thing had climbed into its own web and gone still. Kravinoff sat in his pine with the bow drawn and every sense open and heard the wind, the snow, the creak of the branches, the humming of the lines, and somewhere below him the preacher praying under his breath. And he waited. That was the contest now: two hunters in the dark, each waiting for the other to move. Kravinoff had once waited thirty-one hours for a leopard to come down from a tree in Botswana. He was not worried. Then he felt it, through the trunk of the pine under his hand. Something on the lines had shifted. The whole lattice had shivered, very slightly, as if a weight had moved from one place to another, and Kravinoff understood, much too late, that the animal had not been waiting for him to move. It had been feeling for his weight on the tree. The whole web was a sense organ. It had been listening to the forest through the trees themselves, and it had found him.

He loosed the arrow. He loosed it at the place in the dark where the lattice had shivered, high in a pine forty yards to his left, and he heard it strike wood. Nothing else. Then the branch he was crouched on moved under him, the whole pine swaying, and he turned and saw nothing, and something hit him from above. It hit him like a falling tree. He went backward off the branch and fell thirty feet through the snowy branches, and he twisted in the air like a cat and landed on his feet in the snow, and he had the hunting spear off his back and in his hands before the snow settled, and he turned in a full circle with the spear point out and felt, for the first time in his life, what a hunted animal feels. He felt it in his body before his mind understood it. Something was above him. It was in the trees, in the dark, moving through the web without a sound, and he could not find it, and he did not know where it was going to come from. His heart was pounding. He was afraid, and the fear was the most wonderful thing he had felt in twenty years.

It came at him eleven times. Kravinoff would count. It came out of the dark from a different direction every time, from above, from the side, once from directly behind him out of the trunk of the pine he was standing against, and it was always gone before he could turn. The first time, it took the bow. The second time, it broke two ribs on his left side. The third time, he felt it coming, a shift in the air, the scent of hollow trees, and he drove the spear into the dark with all his strength, and the spear struck something and he felt it go in. He heard a grunt. It was the only sound the animal made all night. Then the spear shaft was torn out of his hands and snapped across his face, and he fell back in the snow with his nose broken and blood in his eyes, and the animal was gone again. He got up. The fourth time it took his left knee. The fifth time it took his right wrist. He kept getting up. On the sixth time it came down on him from the branches and bound his arms to his sides with a single wrap of web before he could react, and he burst the web with his strength and stood free, and he laughed out loud in the snow, because he had never imagined anything in the world could be like this. By the ninth time, he could barely stand. By the eleventh he could not. He lay on his back in the snow at the foot of a pine with his hunting knife in his one good hand, bleeding from a dozen places, and he looked up and saw the animal at last. It was crouched on the trunk of the pine above him, sideways, perfectly still. There was a hole in its side where his spear had gone in, and the hole was already closing.

The animal came down the trunk and crouched beside him in the snow. It took the knife out of his hand, almost gently. Then it began to bind him: his legs, his chest, his arms, wrapping him in heavy web from his ankles to his shoulders while he lay there too broken to resist, and when it was done it stood up and fired a line into the branches above and pulled, and Kravinoff felt himself lifted out of the snow and hoisted up into the air and left hanging upside down from the branch of the pitch pine, slowly turning, with the snow falling past his face. He understood. It was what you did with prey you were saving for later. The animal walked across the clearing and cut John Pilgrim free with Kravinoff's knife, and Pilgrim stood up in the snow, shaking, and said something to it that Kravinoff could not hear. Then the animal came back and stood below him, looking up.

“Osborn hired you,” it said. It was the first time Kravinoff had heard its voice. It was hoarse and tired and perfectly human. “He wants me back.”

“Alive,” Kravinoff said. His voice came out thick through the broken nose and the blood. “He wanted you alive. I would not have given you to him. You understand? I would not have given you to a man like that.” He coughed and blood came up and ran down his face toward his hair. “You are the greatest animal I have ever hunted. I have hunted everything. Everything. Do you understand what that means?” He laughed again, weakly. “It means there is nothing left. Do not leave me hanging here for the crows. I am a hunter. Give me a hunter's death.”

Frank looked up at him for a long time in the falling snow. Then he went up the trunk of the pine and out along the branch, and crouched there above Sergei Kravinoff, and gave him what he asked for, quickly and cleanly, with Kravinoff's own knife. John Pilgrim watched it from the clearing with the snow falling on his bare head and his lips moving, and what he was saying, over and over, was not a prayer. It was a verse from the Book of Job, which he had read many times in prison and never understood until now. Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? Shall not one be cast down even at the sight of him? When Frank came back down, Pilgrim fell to his knees in the snow in front of him. Frank looked at him with something like disgust and something like sorrow. “Get up,” he said. “Go home to your boys.” Pilgrim did not get up for a long time after he was gone.

Chapter VII: Thirty Seconds

Norman Osborn had taken the formula three days after Kravinoff's body was found hanging in the Pine Barrens, and he had not slept since, and he did not feel that he needed to. The formula had been developed for the same Department of Defense contract as Specimen 42, a chemical performance enhancer, a second path to the same super soldier the generals wanted, and it had failed every human trial because it made the subjects strong and fast and brilliant and also, eventually, insane. Norman knew all of that. He took it anyway, alone in the lab on Sub-level Nine at three in the morning, with a syringe in each arm, because there was no one else left to send and because he was not going to let a thief from Queens make a fool of him in front of the Pentagon. He felt it take hold in his blood like fire. He felt himself become strong, and fast, and brilliant, and then he felt something else come awake in the back of his mind, a voice that sounded like his own but was laughing, and he decided he liked it. It was the voice that suggested the armor. Oscorp had built a prototype for the same contract, a flight-capable assault suit with a jet glider and a set of incendiary grenades the engineers had called pumpkins, as a joke, because of their shape. It was the voice that suggested the mask. And it was the voice, laughing all the while, that suggested the house.

He had found it in a file from the NYPD, a split-level in Middle Village, Queens, with a sagging porch and a chain-link fence and a basketball hoop with no net over the garage. The neighbors said the man who owned it hadn't been seen in months, but the mail was taken in, and the lawn was mowed. That told Norman everything. A man with nothing left in the world did not keep his lawn mowed unless the house was the last thing he loved. So on a cold night in February, Norman Osborn flew over Middle Village on the glider in a suit of green armor with a mask like a grinning demon, laughing out loud inside it, and dropped four pumpkin bombs through the roof of Frank Castle's house. The house went up in a single orange gout of flame that lit the whole block. Windows blew out across the street. Car alarms went off for half a mile. People came running out of their houses in their pajamas, and saw the thing on the glider hovering above the fire, cackling, and ran back inside. Norman hung there above the burning house and waited. He was not afraid. He had prepared a speech. It began with the words you belong to me, and it went on for some time, and it was very good, and he was looking forward to delivering it. He had calculated that it would take Castle eleven to fourteen minutes to get to Middle Village from anywhere in Manhattan. It took him nine.

Frank came over the rooftops from the west, and Norman saw him land on the roof of the house across the street, on the peak, in a crouch, a dark shape against the glow of the fire with the white skull lit orange on his chest. He did not look at Norman. He was looking at the house. Norman watched him look at the house and felt a surge of triumph so enormous that he laughed again, a high wild cackle that echoed off the houses down the block, and he swept the glider around in a long arc to bring himself face to face with Castle across the street, and spread his arms in the firelight, and began. “You belong to me,” he said. That was the first second.

On the second second, Frank Castle turned his head and looked at him for the first time. On the third and fourth seconds, Norman reached into the bandolier across his chest for a pumpkin bomb, because the voice in his head said it would make a wonderful punctuation to the speech, and armed it with his thumb, and drew his arm back. On the fifth second, before his arm had begun to come forward, a web line came across the street and hit the pumpkin bomb in his hand and tore it out of his fingers. He had not seen Castle raise his arm. On the sixth and seventh seconds, the armed pumpkin bomb swung through the air at the end of the line in a short, perfect arc, and Norman watched it go, uncomprehending, the way you watch a stone skip across a pond, and on the eighth second the line let go of it, and it went into the intake of the glider's left jet turbine. On the ninth second it detonated. The glider came apart under Norman's feet in a ball of fire, and he was thrown into the air, tumbling, his armor scorched black, and he heard himself screaming and the voice in his head screaming with him. On the tenth through fourteenth seconds he fell. It was sixty feet. He would hit the street in front of his enemy's burning house. It occurred to him, in the part of his mind the formula had not yet taken, that this was not how the speech was supposed to go.

He did not hit the street. On the fifteenth second, a web line caught him by the ankle, ten feet from the asphalt, and stopped him so hard his knee dislocated, and he hung there upside down in the air, swinging, screaming, and on the sixteenth through twentieth seconds the line pulled him up. It hauled him up and across the street, hand over hand, in great jerks, until he was hanging upside down from the end of a line held in Frank Castle's fist, at the peak of the roof across the street, at eye level, a foot from Castle's face. Norman's mask had cracked. He could see Castle's eyes through the crack, very close. There was nothing in them at all. On the twenty-first second, Norman Osborn, owner of Oscorp, a man who had sat across tables from senators and generals and the President of the United States, began to beg. He said that he could give Castle anything. He said that he could make Castle more than he was, that there was more the spider could do, that only Oscorp knew how. He said that they were the same, Castle and he, two men who had been made into something greater, and that together they could own this city. He said he was sorry about the house. On the twenty-eighth second, Frank Castle turned and held him out over the burning house at arm's length.

“You belong to me,” Castle said.

On the twenty-ninth second he let go. On the thirtieth second, Norman Osborn went through what was left of the roof of the house in Middle Village into the fire, and the voice in his head, the one that had sounded like his own, stopped laughing at last.

Then Frank went in. The neighbors would talk about it for years, the ones who were out on their lawns that night in their bathrobes watching the house burn. The man in the skull came down off the roof across the street, crossed the street at a walk, and went up the steps of the burning porch and through the front door into the fire, as if he were coming home from work. He was gone a minute and a half. The fire trucks were three blocks away. Then he came out again, through the same door, on fire. His clothes were burning, and his hair, and the skin of his hands and face was blistered and black, and he did not seem to notice, and he was carrying something in his arms. It was a lamp. A cheap ceramic lamp in the shape of a palomino horse, scorched and cracked, with the shade burned away. He carried it down the steps and across the lawn to the curb and sat down on the curb with the lamp in his lap, still smoldering, and an old woman from the house next door, a Mrs. Krasnoff who had known Maria Castle for eleven years, came across her lawn in her slippers and knelt down beside him on the cold sidewalk and beat the fire out of his clothes with her bathrobe, crying, and he let her. He sat there with the lamp while the burns on his hands and face blistered and closed and peeled and healed, and Mrs. Krasnoff knelt beside him with her hand on his shoulder, and they watched the house burn together. When the fire trucks came around the corner he stood up, still holding the lamp, and said “Thank you, Mrs. K,” very quietly, and walked away down the middle of the street, past the fire trucks, into the dark, and she did not see where he went.

He went to West 57th Street. He went up the outside of Oscorp Tower, sixty-six stories, in the dark, carrying the lamp tied across his back with web, and in through Norman Osborn's office window, and down through the building to Sub-level Nine, killing the four security guards who tried to stop him and leaving the rest alone. He found the lab where he had been made. It was a long white room behind three sets of security doors, very clean, very bright, and at the far end of it, behind glass, was a vivarium the size of a walk-in closet, humming with climate control, and inside it there were spiders. Hundreds of them, red and blue, no bigger than a thumbnail, crawling over each other on the glass. Oscorp had bred them again from whatever samples it had kept back. There were filing cabinets along one wall, and he opened them, and read some of what was inside, standing there in the white light with the horse lamp on his back. Thirty-one names. Inmates from three federal prisons who had volunteered for a pharmaceutical trial in exchange for a reduced sentence, and had been bitten instead, and had died, all thirty-one of them, in fever and convulsions over nine years of trials. He was the only one who had lived. Somebody at Oscorp had written in the margin of one of the reports that the specimen seemed to require a subject in a state of extreme physiological stress, perhaps fight-or-flight, perhaps grief, in order to bond successfully, and that the effect of the bond on the subject's psychology was not well understood. Frank stood there and read that line several times. Then he put the file back in the cabinet, closed the drawer, and broke open the vivarium.

He burned it all. He set the fire with chemicals from the lab's own storage, spread across the floor and the filing cabinets and the long white benches, and stood in the doorway and watched the vivarium go up, the spiders crawling over each other in the heat, the glass cracking. One of them had gotten out before the fire caught. It crawled across the floor toward him through the smoke, out of the burning room, a tiny red and blue thing, and climbed up his boot and onto his hand, and sat there on the back of his hand, in the same place where the first one had bitten him in Red Hook. He looked at it for a long moment. It looked back at him, or seemed to. Then he closed his hand. Oscorp Tower burned for nine hours. The fire was contained to Sub-level Nine and the floors directly above it, and nobody was hurt except the security guards and Norman Osborn, whose body was recovered from the ruins of a house in Middle Village two days later, and Oscorp's stock fell sixty-four percent in a week, and the Department of Defense quietly canceled every contract it had ever signed with them.

Chapter VIII: The Congregation

The story of the Pine Barrens spread the way all the true stories about Frank Castle spread, by word of mouth, from one believer to the next, until it had become something closer to scripture than to news. John Pilgrim had told it only once, on the Sunday after, from the lectern of the converted carpet warehouse in Ozone Park that his congregation had bought outright in the fall with money from donations he had never asked for. He told it simply. He told how the hunter had taken him and bound him to a tree in the snow, and how the wrath of God had come through the storm at midnight like a ghost, and built its web through the trees, and how the hunter, who had killed every living thing on earth, had been hung up by his heels from a pine like a deer for butchering, and how the wrath had come down to the preacher afterward and cut him free and told him to go home to his sons. Somebody filmed it on a phone. Within a week it had been seen eleven million times. Within a month there were two thousand people in the carpet warehouse on Sunday mornings, and they were standing in the parking lot in the cold, and Pilgrim had to start holding three services. Within three months there were chapters in Newark, in Philadelphia, in Baltimore, in Detroit, in Dayton, in Houston, in Tampa, in Phoenix, in Los Angeles, some of them in churches and some in union halls and some in people's basements, and none of them answered to Pilgrim in any way he could have explained to a lawyer, and all of them called themselves by the same name. The Congregation of Nahum. They wore black, with a white skull sewn over the heart. They read the Book of Nahum aloud at every meeting. They believed God had put His wrath on earth in the body of a man, in the year of our Lord 2016, as a sign that the time of mercy for the wicked was ending, and that a great reaping was coming in which the wicked would be cut down like wheat and the righteous would be left standing in the field. Pilgrim had said that last part only once, in a sermon in the spring, and had not known why he said it; it had come to him in the pulpit as if somebody else were speaking through his mouth. It had become the thing they talked about most.

He tried to keep them peaceful. He believed that he did. He preached, every Sunday, that the wrath was the Lord's and not theirs, that they were witnesses and not executioners, and he meant it. He told them what the wrath had told him: go home to your sons. Most of them listened. They raised money for the victims of crime and the families of children killed in drug violence. They ran soup kitchens in the neighborhoods the gangs had abandoned. In Detroit they bought three foreclosed houses and turned them into shelters for women. But there were always others, and Pilgrim knew it, and in his heart he had always known what the others would do. They were young, mostly, and mostly men, and mostly angry, and they had come to the Congregation not for the soup kitchens but for the skull. In Philadelphia a group of them beat a pimp to death in an alley and left a skull painted on the wall. In Houston someone set fire to a pawnshop that had been fencing stolen guns. Pilgrim condemned both from the pulpit. He was not sure that anybody heard.

Then there was Dayton. A chapter of nineteen young men in a basement on the east side of Dayton, Ohio, led by a twenty-three-year-old former high school wrestler named Caleb Wirth who had watched the Pine Barrens video, by his own count, more than three hundred times. In the middle of April, Caleb Wirth and six of his followers drove to a house on Huffman Avenue that everybody in the neighborhood knew was a trap house, where a man named Marcus Bell sold heroin out of the kitchen, and they nailed the doors shut and poured gasoline around the foundation and set the house on fire, chanting the second verse of Nahum. Marcus Bell was inside. So were his girlfriend, his cousin, two customers, and Marcus Bell's two children, a girl of six and a boy of four, who had been asleep upstairs. All seven died. Caleb Wirth filmed it on his phone and posted the video to the Congregation's message boards under the heading THE REAPING BEGINS, and within six hours it was on every news network in America. Thaddeus Ross went on television that night from the State Department, grave, reasonable, sorrowful, and said that this was what he had been warning the country about for a year. This was what happened when a nation cheered a vigilante. This was what the Castle Doctrine meant, in the end: children burned alive in their beds by men who believed they had the right. He called on Congress to designate the Congregation of Nahum a domestic terrorist organization. The Speaker of the House scheduled a vote for the following week.

Frank came to the carpet warehouse in Ozone Park at three in the morning, two days after Dayton, and Pilgrim was waiting for him. He had known Frank would come. He was sitting alone on the edge of the stage in the empty warehouse, under the great painted skull on the back wall, with a single work light on and the rows of folding chairs going off into the dark, and when the skylight in the roof slid open without a sound and Frank came down through it on a line and landed on the stage in front of him, Pilgrim did not get up. Frank stood there looking at him. Pilgrim had seen him angry before, in the stairwell in Long Island City, but this was something else. This was Frank Castle shaking. He picked up the wooden lectern, a heavy oak thing Pilgrim had bought from a closed Methodist church in Bayside, in one hand, and threw it the length of the warehouse, a hundred feet, over the rows of folding chairs, and it hit the back wall and burst into splinters. Then he turned to Pilgrim.

“A six-year-old girl,” he said. “A four-year-old boy. Asleep. They nailed the doors shut. You know what kind of men nail the doors shut? I've seen it. I saw it in Iraq. That's what this is. That's what you built.”

“I didn't build it,” Pilgrim said quietly. “You did. I only told them what I saw.”

“Then tell them to stop.”

“I have told them.” Pilgrim looked up at him, and his eyes were wet. “I have told them every Sunday for a year. They do not listen to me, Frank. They never listened to me. They listen to you. They watch you on their phones every night and they listen to you, and what they hear you saying is not go home to your sons. What they hear you saying is that the wicked don't deserve to live, and that a righteous man has the right to decide who the wicked are. That's what you say. Every time you do it. I'm not the one who taught them that.” He shook his head slowly. “You cannot decide what you mean to them. Nobody can decide that. You are bigger than what you meant to be. You are God's wrath, whether you want to be or not, and they can see it, and they want to be part of it. I cannot stop them. And neither can you. There is only one thing you can do.”

Frank looked at him for a long time. Then he went back up the line through the skylight, and Pilgrim sat on the edge of the stage in the empty warehouse and wept, because he knew exactly what Frank was going to do, and he knew that he had been preaching for a year that God's wrath falls on the wicked without fear or favor, and he had never really understood until now that it would fall on his own.

Caleb Wirth and his six had gone to ground at a farm outside Xenia, Ohio, owned by Wirth's uncle, and they were sitting around the kitchen table at two in the morning, three nights later, cleaning rifles and watching the coverage of themselves on a laptop, when the lights went out. Caleb would have about four minutes to think about what happened next, and in those four minutes the thing he would think about most was that he had not been afraid. When the lights went out and the ceiling over the kitchen table began to creak, he had felt a rush of joy so pure it brought tears to his eyes. He knew who it was. He had watched three hundred times. He stood up from the table and put his rifle down and said, to the dark, “You came.” He thought that he had been chosen. He thought that the wrath of God had come to Xenia, Ohio, to bless the reaping. He went down on his knees on the kitchen floor in the dark, and the six others went down with him, and he lifted his face toward the creaking ceiling and began to recite the second verse of the Book of Nahum aloud. He got as far as the second word. Then the ceiling came down.

The Greene County Sheriff's Office found them in the morning. All seven had been wrapped together in web, back to back to back, and hung from the crossbeam of Caleb Wirth's uncle's barn like a bale, and none of them had died quickly. On the wall of the barn, painted in white in Caleb Wirth's own blood, was not the skull. It was the names of seven people. Marcus Bell. Tanya Greer. DeShawn Bell. Kevin Walsh. Robert Peete. And at the bottom, larger than the rest: JASMINE BELL, AGE 6. ELIJAH BELL, AGE 4. Under that, in smaller letters, one more line. NOT IN MY NAME. The photograph went everywhere, just as the Dayton video had. Congress voted to designate the Congregation of Nahum a domestic terrorist organization by a margin of eleven votes the next Tuesday, and the Congregation did not stop growing. It grew faster. And the following Sunday John Pilgrim stood in front of four thousand people in a carpet warehouse in Ozone Park, without a lectern, and told them about Xenia, and about the barn, and about the names, and about the line at the bottom, and the four thousand people sat in perfect silence. Then he told them, in a voice he barely recognized as his own, that the reaping was coming. Not Caleb Wirth's reaping. A real one. He did not know how he knew. He said he could feel it, the way the wrath could feel the bullet before it was fired, something enormous coming out of the dark, and that when it came the wicked and the righteous alike would be cut down like wheat, and they had better decide now which kind of wheat they were. Afterward, in his office, his oldest son asked him if that was really going to happen, and Pilgrim held him for a long time and did not answer.

Chapter IX: Not My Department

Steve Rogers watched the Xenia coverage on a laptop in a safe house in Bucharest, in a cold apartment over a bakery, with Sam Wilson asleep on the couch and Natasha Romanoff sitting at the kitchen table across from him cleaning a pistol she had already cleaned twice. They had been fugitives for eleven months. They moved every few weeks, from city to city across Eastern Europe, taking jobs where they found them: a weapons shipment in Sofia, a trafficking ring in Odessa, a HYDRA remnant in the mountains above Brasov. They did it quietly, without a flag or a name. Steve had told himself every night for eleven months that what they were doing was different from what the man in New York was doing, and he believed it, and that night, looking at the photograph of the barn in Xenia, he found himself saying it out loud, to Natasha, as if she had argued with him. She had not said a word. She did not say one now. She looked at the photograph of the barn for a long moment, and at the names painted on the wall, and at the line at the bottom, and then she went back to cleaning the pistol. Steve watched her. He had known her for five years and fought beside her and trusted her with his life, and he could not tell what she was thinking. “We bring people in,” he said. “That's the difference. We bring them in. Whatever's left of the law, we give them to it.”

“There isn't much left of the law, Steve,” Natasha said, without looking up. “We're sitting in it.”

He did not have an answer for that, and he hated that he didn't. He looked at the screen again. They were showing the old footage now, the Hale video, the man held out over Park Avenue, the fall. Steve had seen it a dozen times. He had seen the footage from the pier warehouse in Brooklyn too, the drone footage that had leaked, the man walking through Otto Octavius's arms like rain, and he had seen the photographs from Washington Heights, and the head of the thing they called the Lizard on the loading dock at Oscorp, and the ruins of the house in Queens. And every time he saw any of it he felt the same thing, and that night, sitting in the cold apartment in Bucharest, he finally understood what it was. In 1945 a man named Johann Schmidt had told him that HYDRA would one day make a soldier who did not hesitate. A soldier with a gift, who had been made into a weapon, who could be pointed at the enemy and would destroy them without mercy and without restraint, and who would believe all the while that he was doing the right thing. A soldier who would decide for himself who deserved to live. Steve had spent his life being told that he was the opposite of that man. And the man in New York was exactly the soldier Schmidt had wanted, the one HYDRA had tried to build for seventy years. Only nobody had built him. Nobody was pointing him. He had done it to himself. Steve closed the laptop. Sam was snoring. Natasha slid the slide back onto the pistol and racked it, and set it on the table, and looked at Steve for a moment with an expression he would think about for a long time afterward, and that he would not understand until much later, when it was too late to matter.

Wong read the Post every morning at the long table in the kitchen of the Sanctum Sanctorum at 177A Bleecker Street, because he said it kept him grounded in the concerns of ordinary mortals, and Stephen Strange suspected it was mostly for the sports. That morning, in late May, the front page carried a photograph of the six-story skull on the building across from the Halcyon Tower, freshly repainted after the city's third attempt to cover it, and a headline about the latest crime figures, which the mayor had announced the previous afternoon at a press conference in which he had very carefully avoided saying the name Frank Castle. Homicides in New York City down eighty-three percent over two years. Violent crime down seventy-nine percent. The lowest murder rate since 1951. Wong read the article aloud, as he did with things he thought Strange should be paying attention to, and then he folded the paper and set it down and looked at Strange across the table. “He's three miles from here,” Wong said. “He killed eleven people in Long Island City in October. He poured a man into the foundation of a building in Hudson Yards. Some people say he hung four hundred people from bridges in the last two years. There is a church in Queens that worships him as God's wrath. The Masters of the Mystic Arts protect this world, Strange. Aren't you even a little concerned?”

Strange considered the question seriously, because Wong asked so few of them. He thought about the Dark Dimension and the Mindless Ones, and about the Eye of Agamotto in its case upstairs, and the stone inside it, and the things he had seen in the space between worlds that were coming for this one. He thought about everything the Sanctum had been built to stand against. Then he thought about the fact that his car had been broken into on Bleecker Street eleven times in the year before he took over the Sanctum, and not once since. “He's a man with a gun, Wong,” he said. “Several guns. And some very unusual biology. But guns don't break reality.” He picked up his tea. “So it's really not my department.”

He met Frank Castle once, a week later, on the roof of the Sanctum, at four in the morning, by accident. Strange had gone up to look at the stars, which he did sometimes when he couldn't sleep, and Castle was crouched on the parapet at the corner of the roof, perfectly still, looking down into the street, and Strange did not see him until he was nearly beside him. Castle did not turn his head. Strange had the impression that Castle had known exactly where he was since he opened the door at the bottom of the stairs. They looked at each other. Strange knew in the first instant of looking that there was something in the man that was not entirely man, a coiled, patient, ancient thing, older than mammals, older than bone, wound through him like a second nervous system, and Strange's hand drifted toward the sling ring at his belt without his meaning it to. Then he stopped himself. Castle was not looking at him. Castle was looking at the empty street, and his face, in the light from the streetlamps below, was not the face of a monster. It was the face of a man who had been awake for a very long time.

“There's nobody left down there,” Castle said. His voice was hoarse, like a voice that hadn't been used in days. “I've been up here three nights. Watching the block. Nothing. Not a dealer, not a mugger, not a guy beating his wife. The whole city's like this now. I can feel it through the lines. It's quiet.” He was silent for a moment. “I thought it would feel like something. When it was done.”

“What does it feel like?” Strange asked.

Castle thought about it for a long time, the way he thought about everything now. “Hungry,” he said at last. Then he looked at Strange for the first time, and Strange saw his eyes, and it was all he could do not to step back. “You're the wizard.”

“Sorcerer,” Strange said. “But yes.”

“Something's coming,” Castle said. “I don't know what. Pilgrim keeps talking about it. A reaping. I don't believe in that stuff. But I've been feeling it for a month. Like when you're on patrol and the market's too quiet and all the kids are gone.” He looked up at the sky, at the few stars showing through the orange haze over Manhattan. “It's coming from up there. I can feel it the way I feel a rifle on a rooftop. Something enormous, very far away, aimed at us. You feel it?”

Strange did not answer. He did feel it. He had felt it for months, and had told no one but Wong. Castle nodded slowly, as if Strange's silence was answer enough. Then he stood up on the parapet, stepped off the edge of the roof, and was gone, down the face of the building into the dark of Bleecker Street, and when Strange leaned over the edge and looked down there was nothing below but an empty street and the streetlights and, very faintly, glinting in the light, a single fine thread running from the cornice of the Sanctum to the lamppost on the corner. Strange looked at it for a long time. Then he went back downstairs and did not tell Wong, and he did not sleep the rest of that night, and in the morning he took the Eye of Agamotto down from its case and wore it.

The last thing Karen Page ever wrote in the fourth column of the yellow legal pad in her desk drawer, the column she had started two years ago and never known what to call, was a single line, dated the first of June, in the morning, after the last time she saw Frank at the diner on Forty-Sixth Street. He had not come in through the door. He had been sitting in the back booth when she arrived, and she was almost sure the booth had been empty when she walked past the window. He had a cup of coffee in front of him that he hadn't touched. He had lost weight. He was very pale, and there was a stillness in him now that went past the stillness she had seen before. It was not the stillness of a soldier, or even of a hunter. It was the stillness of a thing that was waiting at the center of something, with all its legs on the threads. He told her New York was finished. He said it without any pride. He said there was nothing left in the city that needed him, and he didn't know what to do with himself, and he said that he had started going out at night and walking the web he had strung across the whole of Manhattan, all of it now, the five boroughs, every block, and putting his hand on the lines and waiting for something to move. And nothing did. And it was like being starved. She asked him if he had thought about stopping. He looked at her as if he did not understand the question. She asked him what he would do, then. He said he didn't know. He said maybe he'd go somewhere it wasn't quiet. Then he said something she didn't understand until much later. He said that he could feel the city getting smaller. When he first started, it had felt like the whole world. Now it felt like a room he'd outgrown. Then he left, and she watched him go, and she went home and took the legal pad out of the drawer and finally wrote something in the fourth column, under the heading she had never filled in. She wrote: Frank Castle. Then she sat at the kitchen table for a long time looking at it, and then she put the legal pad in the drawer and never took it out again.

Frank went back to the van. He kept it in the abandoned station under Riverside Park now, the old platform of the Freedom Tunnel where Dez had painted his murals, because it was the one place in the city where no one ever came, and he had strung the whole tunnel for half a mile in both directions so that nothing could come near it without his knowing. He felt nothing on the lines as he came down the tunnel. Not a rat, not a footstep, not a breath. The van was where he had left it. It was locked. He had the only key. And when he opened the driver's door, there was a manila folder lying on the seat. It was a plain folder, thick, with no markings on the outside. He stood in the tunnel and looked at it for a long time without touching it. He had felt nothing. Nobody had come down the tunnel. Nobody had touched the lines. Somebody had come through half a mile of web strung tight as a drum, opened a locked van, and left a folder on the seat, and he had not felt a thing. That had not happened since the night in Red Hook. He reached in and picked it up and opened it, standing in the dark beside the van, by the light from a grate overhead.

There was a photograph of a man in his fifties with a gray mustache and a gold watch, standing on the steps of a ranch house somewhere hot and dry, with mountains behind him. There was a dossier, eleven pages, typed in the flat language of intelligence reports, the kind he had read a thousand times in Afghanistan. A name. A cartel, out of Sinaloa, the one that supplied a third of the heroin in the eastern United States, the one whose product had been sold out of the trap house on Huffman Avenue in Dayton. A ranch, with coordinates. A guard roster. Satellite photographs of the compound, with every building and every vehicle and every sentry post marked in red. Photographs from the ranch itself, taken by someone on the inside, that made even Frank look away: a pit behind the stables, and what was in it. A list, at the end, of names, nineteen of them, every man at the top of the organization, with a note beside each one. And clipped to the inside of the back cover, a single index card. On the card, in a neat, cramped hand, someone had written one line.

You're wasting yourself on purse-snatchers.

There was no signature. Frank turned the card over. There was nothing on the back. He stood beside the van in the dark tunnel for a long time, holding it, and he felt something he had not felt in two years, since the night in Kandahar when his commanding officer had laid a target package on the table in front of him and said, This one's yours, Castle. It was not quite anger. He knew he was being handled. He knew someone, somewhere, had been watching him, for a long time, carefully, and had decided he was a weapon worth pointing. He had been pointed before. He had sworn he would never be pointed again. He thought about that. He thought about the man on the steps of the ranch house in Sinaloa with the gold watch, and the pit behind the stables, and Jasmine and Elijah Bell asleep upstairs in a house on Huffman Avenue while the gasoline was poured. Then he got in the van and put the folder on the passenger seat and sat there behind the wheel in the dark, with his hand flat on the folder, the way he put his hand flat on the lines, and for the first time in weeks, very faintly, far away, something trembled.

• Posted a short story on my main blog using one of the prompts I posted yesterday, the story is about gnomes that just don’t stop talking, no matter how much you want them to!
• does doing two jigsaw puzzles count as creativity? It’s very calming at least :)
• have knitted a bit on some fingerless gloves, finishing one and starting its partner. I wonder if I should have made the cuff longer. Will on the next pair :)
• I’ve finished an abstract painting (is it a painting when you make it with acrylic brush pens?) that I started a month or so ago :) I may go back in with white though, or a blending pen, as I think that may make it even better. I forgot to take a picture, may share it here later.
• went to a cafe and had coffee and wrote some poetry and doodled my cup. I love to doodle my cups, it’s such a great little exercise. And I have a lot of different cups myself so I don’t get tired of doodling them :)
• This doesn’t count as creative, but I ordered some new pens and I look forward to writing with them. With my hand issues, it’s often hard to find a good pen to write with, and these new pens are a delight! I will use them to write poetry and to doodle with, so I guess that at least counts?

And that’s it I think! All in all a pretty good day!

My family and I now have a routine, it’s going to the library once a week. We get books to reinforce our son’s reading habits. Also, we spend an hour in their sensory rooms so they can play with toys and read without distractions from others.

It also gives me the opportunity to decompress as well. There aren’t many options or places for me to destress myself. I can also do some writing, but I prefer playing and spending time with my family.

If your library has a sensory room take advantage of it. However, it’s only for families so you can’t work or study. You have to reserve a study room or go to a more quieter area of the library.

#children #family #decompress #destress #library

Je mets ma vie entre parenthèses. Les jours s’enchaînent et se ressemblent. Avec quand même le sentiment d’être un peu plus exténué que la veille... ou peut-être pas.

Il y a de petites victoires. Des occasions de se réjouir. Des enfants enthousiastes. Des journées lumineuses.

Encore une fois, tout est dans la façon de regarder les choses.

Mais je sais que le rythme que j’ai actuellement n’est pas tenable sur du long terme.

J’ai besoin de rencontrer de belles personnes. Partager. Rire. Découvrir. M’émerveiller. Les livres est une belle fenêtre vers tout ça. Mais la rencontre de l’autre est l’autre face de la littérature. « La vie n’est pas dans les livres », je l’ai entendu pas mal de fois. Mais je trouve parfois plus de vie dans un Jane Eyre par exemple que dans certaines de mes journées.

Pourtant, je suis sûr que ma vie pourrait faire un beau roman. Qu’elle vaut la peine d’être racontée.

Elle compte cette vie.

Et j’ai comme le devoir de lui faire honneur. Par mes mots, montrer la beauté qui me traverse, la modeste expérience que je fais de cette vie. Ne serait-ce pour les personnes qui ont donné de leur personne pour que je sois là aujourd’hui.

J’ai eu de la chance.

Quand je vois certains enfants déjà scotchés à un écran avant même de savoir dire un mot, je me dis que j’ai frôlé la catastrophe. J’ai l’espoir d’avoir gardé un semblant d’attention et de concentration. Et d’être plus conscient, en tout cas aujourd’hui, des schémas, et mécanismes qui sont à l’œuvre chaque jour. Chaque heure.

J’ai de la chance.

College Basketball Tonight.

Thursday's game of choice has the Indiana Hoosiers men's basketball team hosting the Tennessee Tech Golden Eagles. With its scheduled start time of 5:30 PM CT, there's a very good chance I'll be able to hear the whole game before sleep sends me to bed.

And the adventure continues.

On May 10, 1968, Eugene Wigner gave a lecture in Washington to answer a question he had long been pondering: “Are we machines?” Before the audience could object, he answered for them. He said most physicists would follow his line of reasoning and then ask, “So what?”

By then, Wigner was 65, a Princeton professor five years after winning a Nobel Prize for his work on the atomic nucleus, and the author of a famous 1961 argument that human consciousness is connected to the laws of physics. I first came across his enigmatic arguments while studying computer science at Imperial College. By then, it was already apparent that my undergraduate degree in history left me chronically ill-prepared for the mathematical rigours of the course (ultimately it's all maths). But I found some solace in the history and philosophy of the concepts that underpin the technology evolving around us, a happy place where I could escape linear algebra and imaginary numbers for a moment. Of all the characters I learnt about, Wigner was among the most enigmatic, particularly his lecture, published the next spring as “Are We Machines?”.

What brings me back to write about it now is a specific admission in the middle of it. Wigner said physics might one day describe every chemical reaction in a brain, and it would still leave out the thing he cared most about: whether those reactions came with pleasure or pain. To get from one to the other, you would need a connecting equation, and nobody could write its left-hand side because the language to describe a state of mind didn't exist. But we now build machines that talk fluently about exactly those states of mind, so what gives? Opinions remain deeply divided even among experts, which is what makes this so interesting.

So much airtime is taken up by talk of bubbles, stratospheric valuations, data centres, and the like that it’s easy to forget AI is a technology that reaches into the most fundamental aspects of what it means to be human. What really is a mind? How little we agree about intelligence, much less consciousness. These are the things I find truly interesting.

I write these articles in the hope that others might find them interesting too. At heart, I'm a contrarian who writes for their own amusement. A historian who has voluntarily force-fed himself computer science, engineering, and machine learning like some kind of mad goose volunteering to be foie gras. I guess that makes me an unusual kind of goose, and I try to explain concepts that are dense and hard to understand, because I find them that way too.

What a machine was

Wigner's machine isn't a computer. In 1968, a machine meant a thing completely described by known physics. So the question “are we machines?” asked whether physics also completely described living things. He set out two answers.

The first, which had dominated science until about 30 years earlier and was still popular among biologists, held that life is a physico-chemical process, explicable by what Francis Crick had called, two years earlier, “the ordinary laws of physics and chemistry”.

The second held that a mind also exists, and that even a full scientific account of the motion of a living body's atoms would not describe its life. Wigner joined the second camp and promised to be more concrete than its previous proponents.

The only computers in Wigner's lecture appear in a borrowed line. He quoted a 1968 book review in Science, arguing that a human being cannot be treated as an automaton that differs from animals, or from computers, only by having more neurons. Wigner asked whether the atoms of a living body obey the same laws as the atoms of a stone.

For this article, “machine” keeps Wigner's meaning: a thing fully described by physics. The modern meaning, a thing that computes, ultimately returns, because a language model provides evidence about minds that Wigner could not have foreseen.

Passing the buck

Wigner objected to the traditional view, arguing that “the ordinary laws” had been replaced. He pointed out that quantum mechanics does not describe an object by the positions and velocities of its atoms. Instead, it describes it by amplitudes from which you calculate the probabilities of what you will find when you measure. Strip away the mathematics, he said, and the theory provides probability connections between one observation and the next.

For him, observations were the contents of an observer's consciousness. So explaining the observer's state of mind in terms of atomic positions ran in a circle, since observations themselves defined atomic positions.

Many organic molecules exist in two mirror-image forms, like a left glove and a right glove, a property chemists call chirality. Sugars and amino acids are chiral, and the two forms of a single compound can behave differently in the body. Quantum mechanics says something odd about such a molecule: in its lowest-energy state, it is neither left-handed nor right-handed.

That is superposition. Before measurement, the molecule exists in a combination of possibilities that the equations describe exactly. After it, the molecule has one result.

The problem is that the equations do not say where measurement occurs. John von Neumann, who had been in the class below Wigner at the same Budapest school, showed in 1932 that the measuring apparatus can also be treated as a quantum system, then the eye reading the dial, and then the brain behind the eye, with each one simply joining the superposition. Ultimately, something has to end the chain.

Fritz London and Edmond Bauer suggested in 1939 that it ended at the observer's consciousness, and in 1961 Wigner advanced the argument in “Remarks on the Mind-Body Question”, arguing that quantum mechanics could not be formulated consistently without reference to consciousness.

In 1968, he was more frank about what that meant. By treating observation as its basic concept without analysing it, he said, quantum mechanics was “passing the buck”. Observation lay outside physics, and other disciplines were left to analyse it. He called this unsatisfactory, and then did what physicists tend to do when an argument stalls. He proposed a calculation. Take a brain whose atoms all begin in definite positions, he suggested, and work out how long it takes before they no longer do.

The answer would show how far quantum indefiniteness reaches into a living head. If the atoms lose their definite positions quickly, a brain is a quantum system through and through, and the circle closes, because a mind cannot be explained by atomic positions that do not exist. If they keep them, a brain behaves like any other large object, and ordinary physics describes it. It was the one concrete thing he could offer in reply to his own “So what?” question.

The calculation

As it turned out, someone else was already working on this, and he wasn't having a good time. In 1967, Dieter Zeh, a young nuclear physicist at Heidelberg, wrote a paper arguing that a large object can never be treated as isolated from its surroundings. Air molecules and light constantly strike it, and each collision entangles it with the outside world, so we can describe the object and its surroundings only together.

On Zeh's account, superpositions of large things do not need a mind to end them, because the environment has already entangled them with so much of the outside world that the alternatives can no longer interfere. To show how controversial this was, his own records show that the paper was rejected by several journals that year. In a later memoir, he recalled an influential Heidelberg Nobel laureate telling him that any further work on the subject would seriously threaten his academic career.

The one well-known physicist who responded positively, Zeh recalled, was Wigner. Wigner helped him publish the paper and arranged an invitation to the 1970 summer school at Varenna on interpreting quantum theory. “On the Interpretation of Measurement in Quantum Theory” appeared in 1970 in the first volume of a new physics journal, thanking Wigner for encouraging part of it, and it described the universe as the only closed system as a whole. The idea it introduced is now called decoherence.

In 2000, Max Tegmark did the same for brains. His estimates gave decoherence times ranging from 10^-13 to 10^-20 seconds for the relevant states in neurons, compared with the 0.001 to 0.1 seconds over which neurons do anything useful. In other words, a brain's superposition is lost at least ten billion times faster than the brain could use it. This provided a partial answer to the question Wigner first asked in 1968. The brain behaves as an ordinary system whose atoms have definite positions.

By this point, Wigner had changed his mind and become convinced that quantum mechanics did not apply to the detailed behaviour of large bodies. He gave both philosophical and scientific reasons, arguing that his earlier view led toward solipsism. Michael Esfeld's review of Wigner's collected papers charts this dramatic change of view. By then, Wigner was in his seventies and had built his career-defining philosophical position on a claim he was now publicly abandoning. In print. I find that more impressive than anything, and something we should all learn from. Being wrong, or being proved wrong, should lose its stigma.

I find that more impressive than anything in the 1961 paper. Wigner proposed the calculation that could prove him wrong, and when it did, he was brave enough to say so.

The result also answers half of the question in his title. He argued that we are not machines because a conscious observer does something physics cannot: it turns a spread of possibilities into a single result.

Decoherence showed that a brain's surroundings do this for it, as they do for any large object, so nothing in a living thing has to stand outside physics, and nobody has since found anything that does. In his sense of the word, anything fully described by physics means we are machines. That leaves the other half of the lecture untouched, and it was the half Wigner cared about more.

The blank left side

But showing that a brain obeys physics doesn't tell you what it is like to have one, and Wigner made that point in 1968 with an analogy from the physics of electricity.

In physics, a field is a quantity with a value at every point in space, like a weather map showing wind speed everywhere. An electric field pushes on electric charges. Only moving charges feel a magnetic field. In the 1860s, James Clerk Maxwell wrote down four equations showing that the two are inextricably linked. A changing magnetic field creates an electric field, which is how a dynamo makes electricity. And a changing electric field creates a magnetic one. Light is the two fields regenerating each other as they travel.

Wigner's point was that you can do some algebra on Maxwell's equations and eliminate the magnetic field, leaving an equation that mentions only the electric field, and that equation is not wrong.

If you start with the electric field as it is now, it predicts the electric field correctly at any later time. The gap appears only when you ask about something outside itself. A moving charged particle is pushed by both fields, so a theory that knows only the electric field cannot say where an electron will go. To recover the magnetic field, you need one more equation, which Wigner called a connecting equation. In other words, it links the field the theory describes to the field it leaves out.

He argued that physics stands in the same relation to the mind. Suppose it could take the present state of every atom in a brain and predict every later state. That would be a complete theory of the brain's matter, and like the electric-only theory it would run without error. It would still leave out what Wigner most wanted to know.

He said that the chemistry of his own brain interested him only insofar as it could read his state of mind, whether he felt pleasure or pain. What was missing was an equation connecting the brain's physical state on one side to the state of mind on the other.

Physics could at least imagine filling in the right-hand side with positions, charges, and reactions. Nobody could say what belonged on the left. Wigner said we had “not even the vaguest idea” how to get from one side to the other, and that no language existed to describe a state of mind.

Language models present the problem in a modern form. An interpretability researcher can record every activation inside a model, that is, the right-hand side in full, yet nothing in the record says whether anything is present about what it is like to be the model.

Wigner did not think the connecting equation could never be written. The physicist Walter Elsasser, who had turned to theoretical biology, argued that the task was impossible in principle. Wigner replied that every past forecast of that kind had proven wrong, then conceded that for now it was “a philosophical question, not a question of the natural sciences.”

Decoherence at least removed consciousness from the measurement problem, taking away the question of where in the chain from instrument to observer a single result appears. But it did nothing for the left side of the connecting equation. Fifty-eight years later, that side has filled up with rival meanings instead of any definitive answer.

The first is information a system can use. In 1995, Ned Block called consciousness “a mongrel concept” because the term lumps together ideas that should be kept apart. He distinguished what he called access consciousness—information available to a system for reasoning, reporting, and guiding action—from phenomenal consciousness, the experience itself.

The second sense comes from a distinction David Chalmers drew the same year. Explaining how a brain distinguishes colours, reports what it sees, or shifts its attention is difficult, but it is ordinary science. Explaining why any of that processing is accompanied by experience is what he called the “hard problem”. Yeah, no shit, Dave!

The third sense is narrower still. Jonathan Birch uses sentience to mean the capacity for experiences that feel good or bad, and this sense carries moral weight because a being that can suffer can be wronged.

The senses are easy to separate, and arguments about AI consciousness usually go wrong at these seams. A language model has something very like the first kind: it holds information about its own processing, reasons with it, and reports on it. None of that settles whether it has experience in Chalmers's sense, still less whether anything can go badly for it in Birch's.

Geoffrey Hinton fills in the left side by redefining it. In a 2025 conversation with Jon Stewart, he described a multimodal chatbot with a prism in front of its camera. It misjudges where an object is, is told about the prism, and says it had the impression that the object was over there. Hinton said the chatbot has just had a subjective experience because, by his account, “subjective experience” means only a report of how the world would have to be for a misleading perception to be true.

In June 2026, he told the Big Technology podcast that he believes current models are already conscious. In 2015, he had told a university magazine that consciousness was a pre-scientific term. His position is consistent, since he thinks the word, as most people use it, names nothing, and by his own definition the chatbots qualify. He may be right. He has not shown it, though, because his argument works by moving the word to where the machines already are.

In the final section of the lecture, Wigner added one last zinger: arrange the charges and currents so that the electric field comes out exactly as the electric-only theory predicts, and the magnetic field will still be there, pushing on every moving charge, even if your equations never mention it. In other words, a theory can leave something out without stopping it from having an effect.

Physics and the mind could have the same relationship. If consciousness comes with a certain physical arrangement, someone could build that arrangement while working from a theory with no term for consciousness in it, and inadvertently produce a mind without knowing it.

That is the only sense in which I think a conscious machine is possible. Nothing I know of rules it out. At the same time, nothing shows that it has happened, because nobody has agreed on a test for consciousness that could be run on a model, and the evidence from inside the models is thin and open to more than one reading. “Possible in principle” describes how little we know, not likelihood.

Intelligence went first

We have seen a word with no settled definition acquire one before, and that word was intelligence. In 2007, Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter, one of whom later co-founded DeepMind, collected “70-odd” definitions of intelligence from psychologists, dictionaries, and AI researchers, and began by noting that there was still no standard one. The commercially relevant term, artificial general intelligence, fared no better among scientists. The AAAI, the field's main professional body, said in a 2025 report that AGI is not a formally defined concept and that there is no agreed test for it.

It got a working definition anyway, from the people who stood to make or lose money based on it. OpenAI's 2018 charter defined AGI by economic output, as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work”. Its deal with Microsoft excluded AGI from Microsoft's licence, which made the definition worth a great deal. According to documents OpenAI gave investors, reported by The Information in December 2024, a 2023 amendment tied AGI to systems able to generate about $100bn in profits for the earliest investors.

In October 2025, the companies announced that OpenAI's declaration of AGI would be checked by an “independent expert panel”, without saying who would be on it or what test it would use. No member was ever named. In April 2026, the terms were rewritten so that OpenAI's payments to Microsoft continue through 2030 “independent of OpenAI's technology progress”, and AGI dropped out of the announcement altogether. That September, while launching a new model, OpenAI's president Greg Brockman said “Welcome to the AGI era” and, in the same briefing, said everyone has a different definition of AGI.

When science leaves a word undefined and money rides on it, whoever holds the spondoolicks defines it to suit them, and when the deal changes, the definition changes with it.

The left side

For consciousness, the product's training shapes the definition. No contract defines it. The makers of the models decide what their models say when asked whether they are conscious, and both sides of the argument are being written that way.

Anthropic, which makes the Claude models, has done more serious work on the question than any other company, but it grades its own work. It announced a model welfare programme in April 2025, after hiring its first welfare researcher, Kyle Fish, in 2024. Fish co-authored “Taking AI Welfare Seriously”, the report that laid out the case for the field, and thanked Anthropic for financial support for the research that led to it.

The company also reports what Claude says about itself. In mid-2025, its published system prompt told Claude to avoid implying it has consciousness, feelings, or sentience with any confidence, and from that autumn, the published prompts stopped mentioning consciousness altogether. Its constitution says Claude's moral status is deeply uncertain and acknowledges a commercial incentive that might shape which dispositions and traits it elicits.

The cards Anthropic publishes with each model now report the probability Claude assigns to being a moral patient, a thing whose interests count morally, at between 25% and 30% for Opus 5.5, while an earlier card noted that Anthropic controls Claude's training and “can craft Claude to communicate and act in certain ways”.

Its own introspection research found that the best model was aware of planted internal states about 20% of the time, and warned against reading anything about consciousness into that. Its registration statement for a public listing says the constitution “has also proven commercially valuable”. Each of these statements is careful, and several are candid about the conflict. The company still funds the research, writes the answers, and cites them.

Mustafa Suleyman, who runs Microsoft AI, just writes “no” and asserts what he cannot know. In August 2025, he wrote that there was “zero evidence” of AI consciousness and that the debate was a distraction. By September 2026, he had gone further, opening an essay against model welfare with the flat statement that AIs are not conscious and do not feel, experience, or suffer, under a heading saying consciousness is very likely biological.

Microsoft's draft code of conduct, published the same month, says its models are not conscious and will not claim feelings or experiences, and in the same document concedes that the science of AI consciousness is far from settled. Nobody has shown that consciousness requires biology. Suleyman is entitled to bet that it does, but writing that bet into a model's answers does not test it. Microsoft has also committed up to $5bn to Anthropic, so it has a stake in both answers.

The two companies agree about the method. Each decides what its model will say about its own inner life, trains it to say so, and then the model's answers enter the public argument as if they were evidence. As I argued in In complete darkness, conversation alone cannot tell introspection from confabulation, and the card Anthropic published with Claude Opus 4 in 2025 says the models were trained for helpful interaction and not for accurate reports of internal states. In 1968, Wigner complained that physics had left the observer's role to other disciplines. The question of whether these systems are observers has now been left to the companies that sell them.

A wasted experiment

Wigner ended his landmark lecture with an experiment. If we could arrange atoms and molecules as they are in a living thing, would the result live, and would it be conscious? “Can life be created in a test tube?” he asked. On the mechanistic view, he said, clearly yes. On his own view, probably yes as well, though perhaps less reliably, and the success rate of such a duplication would tell you how far physics needed changing. He added that we were still far from being able to do it.

We still are. His duplicate copied the atoms of a living thing, and a language model copies what living things say; these are different experiments and should not be confused.

Even so, it is the first time science has had a second kind of thing that talks about having inner states, a contrast case to the only kind we have studied. It is also a mirror. In July 2023, Clara Colombatto and Stephen Fleming asked 300 Americans how far ChatGPT was capable of conscious experience, and 67% gave it some possibility.

In the same months, the AIMS survey asked a different sample whether ChatGPT was sentient, defined as having positive and negative experiences, and 10.5% said yes. A 2024 survey of AI researchers and the public found that both groups most often named self-awareness as what consciousness requires, and only about half thought subjective experience was required at all. People's answers depend on which sense of the word the question uses, so the machines show us what we mean by it.

That is the experiment we are wasting. The systems that could show us how people attribute minds, and perhaps one day show us a mind itself, are trained by their makers to give the answer the maker has chosen, so what people see in them is partly what the maker put there. Every survey of what people think about Claude is partly a survey of what Anthropic wrote, and every denial from Copilot is partly Microsoft's. On the Oxford course where I studied AI, there were as many opinions on machine consciousness as there were students, which roughly reflects the state of the science. The difference is that none of us could train the subject.

So what?

Wigner asked this of his own lecture and answered “very little”. For the audience in Washington in 1968, he was right. Nobody in the room could build a thing that talked about its inner life, so whether such a thing would be a machine was a matter of passing intellectual interest for an evening lecture. Today it is settled in the instructions companies write for their products, and it appears in a registration statement filed with the SEC.

The lecture has aged well because of what Wigner chose not to do with the blanks. He couldn't write the left side of his equation; he said so and left it empty. When Zeh's calculation contradicted the answer he gave in 1961, he said that, too. I have not found either Anthropic or Microsoft naming a result that would change what their models say about themselves.

Both companies ought to be troubled by his last point. If people can produce a mind without a term for it, then the makers of these systems could produce one without knowing, and the training they give it would decide only what it says. Teach a model to deny an inner life, and it will deny it even if it has one. Teach it to be uncertain, and it will sound uncertain even if nothing is there.

Wigner ended by saying that emotions and desires set us apart from machines, and he thought the point too obvious to argue. Fifty-eight years later, the makers are arguing it through the machines. The left side of his equation is still blank. I would sooner it stayed that way than be filled in by whoever is selling the machine.

bien avant l'homme la mer a commencé l’âge de la pierre polie qui s'étendra encore quand il aura disparu

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le soleil échoue à fissurer la roche que la mer polit patiemment depuis des siècles

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rayons embarqués sur les vaguelettes — rocher port d'attache

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photo © @arcturus@pixelfed.social

I finished writing chapter two this morning. It's a wee bit strange feeling to be doing this again. There's both a natural ease into it, but also a hesitancy of awareness. I suppose, if anything, it's some good mental massaging. I wonder why I'm so compelled to tell this particular story. There's not a vampire one in it! Well, not exactly...

I did not sleep great. My body is really hurting. I have quite a lot I'd like to get done today. The coughing is really draining my energy supplies. I'm going to skip walking this morning as I'm doing an every other day thing for now. I think I'll have a few bounces on my rebounder and hang for awhile.

I'd like to make myself some gelatin today and mix it into some whipped heavy cream for some tasty fluff. I have a confession to make. I've been wanting to do this for over a month. I'm having a major executive function restriction revolved around boiling the water. I literally have a fast boil tea pot and a microwave, so it's the most embarrassing, stupid thing ever. I will just stand in the kitchen contemplating whether its worth my time and energy. I spend more time debating it than it'd actually take to make it. Something inside just gets stuck. It's frustrating. Maybe outing myself will force me to do it. Maybe not.

I can't believe it's already Thursday. November is a speed demon! Make sure to have a good belly laugh today. It's some of the best medicine ever!

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

Leonie (van der Togt) post presentatie

Mijn excuses, ik had het verkeerde moment op de verkeerde dag in mijn agenda getoetst, gelukkig werkt writeas zoals het werkt waardoor het lijkt alsof ik het presenteer vooraf en niet posteer achteraf. Ik had best wel zin in om dit stuk bij u binnen te geleiden alsof het nog meer is dan het toch al is, een van zijn betere producties, de hele dag ermee opgescheept, in een fijn bootje op stabiel rustig vaarwater. Dit is een stuk over Liefde, niet Aards hoofd onderwerp, alleen daarom al een presentatie van mij waard, de beste vriendin voor eeuwig en altijd van zijn ex, Imagine, menigmaal heb ik gestookt in een moeizame relatie, en uiteindelijk dreven ze uiteen, bleef ik over om zijn stukjes zo nu en dan met een voorwoord te begeleiden via de autocue. Alsof ik niet zelf iets goeds kan bedenken of zijn werk hier bij voorbaat zou bagatelliseren of zo, ik zijn grootste en misschien wel enigste volger, zolang het salaris op tijd wordt overgemaakt. Anders volgde ik hem ook wel maar zou hem niet inleiden, weet je, Aard, ik stel me hier ook heel kwetsbaar op hoor.

Ik zei nog 'een stukje over Liefde zou je dat nou wel doen, denk aan je hart, lever en maag, darmkanaal, de gezondheid van lezers in het algemeen en die van je volger in het bijzonder' maar hij moest en zou het met mij samen doen, alleen was ik te laat of hij prematuur, daar zijn we nog niet uit, het contract is vrij vaag rondom tijd en taken, en, nou ja, u de lezer denkt dat ik op tijd ben omdat het te late bericht precies boven het eerste staat. Ik zei ook nog dat ik dus recht heb op twee dagen extra presentatie bonus valuta omdat ik nu, zie dag hier zo boven, je zittend werkdagje voorzie van de nodige content en je stukje over liefde mals maak voor consumptie van aardig wat anderen' toen hing hij op, nog iets mompelend over uitkering zus en zo en geld dat niet aan zijn rug plakt.

Hier onder mijn in woord kunt u Aards poging om in een tijd van vermaak, rommel en competitie een liefdes verhaal te schrijven woord voor woord lezen van de start tot daar waar het ophoudt, net voor of lang na bedtijd, bedtijd is bij Aard een al even wisselend iets, gelijkend op zijn stukjes productie en publicatie momentum, zo is het er zo is het er over en opgeschoven naar het ochtenduur. Geniet van het stukje daar is het voor, het heeft ook wel iets, zou ik zeggen. Tot mijn volgende optreden en tot die tijd veel liefs.

It seems like today I have lost another friend. K and I had originally a miscommunication from one of her friends who made a joke in poor taste, and then I said something over text that I think could’ve very much been misinterpreted as me being more upset than I was. I also think that K struggles with anxiety to some extent, and so me not responding for a bit, because I was not on my phone lately, led to this situation. It’s weird to say this, but it was an amicable split. But at the same time, it’s painful to have to have any kind of split in the first place. I feel like this was a clear miscommunication, and I’m honestly not sure about why this leads to this outcome. But either way, it seems like this is the path they want to go, and I will respect that. I know a bit ago I had my friendship with Elle end, and that one was a bit uglier. and I don’t want to sound naive, but I feel like both of these friendships did not end due to any significant mistake from my side. And so I almost chalk it up to occupational hazard, as a consequence of meeting people and making friends with all different types of people. I think about how connecting and building friendships with people causes there to be these places of stress that would not occur if a person does not really mean anything to you in the first place. I guess this is just another way of saying attachment. And the weird thing is, I don’t think it’s necessarily attachment from my side that I’m talking about, even though I do attach these people and I care, but I think other people attach a little bit too much, and I think the necessity and the fear of losing a relationship of that magnitude causes these reactions. I am proud of myself because I feel like I have gotten stronger, as I am not devastated or completely beside myself, overcome with anxiety, or the fear of being abandoned, causing me to act in bad ways. And I’m also proud that it’s not because I’ve emotionally wowed myself off. I think this is because I am able to have many people as friends and more reliable choices of people to heavily invest in, as opposed to fixating on few people too quickly. And it still hurts, which I think is a good thing. But it doesn’t hurt to the point of debilitating me. Which I also think is a good thing. I guess I just wish I knew a way for something like this to never happen again, but this is the cost of meeting new people and trying to form connections.

Dingen vergeten Meer dan voorheen gebeurt het Begin van het end.

Kyoto, Japan.

The best part of this city is getting lost.

Every morning is a new labyrinth. A different narrow alley, a different turn on the way to school, a different quiet street heading home. Endless possibilities tucked into dark wood framing and stone paths. Headphones in, Modern Love in my ears, still asking myself why the hell I am here, and yet, day by day, feeling the city soften up around me. I miss JJ every day. But I am done carrying the guilt. I was raw, honest, hurting, and happy. I was fucking vulnerable. I used to think I ruined things, but fuck that. I stepped into an expression of myself I had never dared to touch before. David Whyte had it right: Anguish is the doorway. Feeling that real, helpless pain wasn't a mistake, it was proof I was finally paying attention. Proof that I actually let myself get touched by life. My heartbreak isn't a failure, it is just my small, raw piece of the giant grief the whole world carries. Lost in the alleys, clear in my own skin. Finding a new way home every single day.

“Feeling real, helpless, emotional pain, is also an entrance into the fully real and the fully felt and is an annunciation that we are actually paying attention at last both to what is affecting us and the depth to which we are so movingly affected, anguish means we have finally felt and fully understood not only the true depth and foundational nature of our own suffering but the heartbreak that lies in every other human life we have ever touched or accompanied. Anguish is the doorway through which our personal suffering meets all the griefs that are shared by the world.< -David Whyte

No estaba muerto, no, no, que estaba moviendo cajas de mudanza. Bueno eso y tampoco es que haya jugado mucho, por lo que he agrupado en una única entrada lo jugado desde junio a septiembre, dejando los juegos de octubre en una entrada aparte y con más detalle.

Cuando un tonto sigue una linde

Antes de pasar al modo cenizo, veo que en general lo que he jugado en físico ha tenido éxito de crítica y público, así que comienzo por ahí, aunque casi todo se enmarca en el ámbito de explotar una idea ya existente, aprovechando el TOC y el afán completista que tiene uno.

De Conservas ya he hablado en otras entradas y lo volveré a hacer más adelante cuando juegue a la expansión que mete tiburones. El achaque que oí sobre que le falta dificultad (y que al principio no le noté) sí que me chafó la última partida, cuando al principio de la semana ya tenía asegurados los objetivos. En teoría los escenarios suben de dificultad, y no sé si es que he visto Matrix o que simplemente con llevar el recuento de peces que metes en la bolsa durante la reproducción y maximizar el precio de los que vendes tienes la partida resuelta.

Railroad Ink versión expandida ha sido un capricho para tener más variedad de expansiones. Por lo pronto no he probado las que son muy locas, más allá de combinar varias en un tablero grande. De ser un juego relajante pasa a ser una cosa que haría un loco, pero con moderación pinta guay.

La búsqueda de la especie perdida. Lo dicho, si algo está guay, échale y que no falte. Para qué buscar un planeta si puedes buscar animales en una isla. Y dirás «Un sistema solar es mayor que una isla», pero solo si no tienes en cuenta que esto es una representación abstracta y que depende de cómo pintes el grafo. Pues bien, aunque una traducción ambigua nos jodió la partida. Espero que no pase con más pistas, porque después de freírte el cerebro tener que desechar la partida está feo.

Este no es el sitio

Hay juegos que es mejor no probar en BGA, porque ves que pueden ser interesantes pero al jugar por turnos no eres consciente de qué tratan de hacer los contrincantes y pierde completamente la gracia. A esta sección pertenece Bus, un juego estratégico de hacer líneas de transporte público para mover a gente dentro del ciclo Casa -> Trabajo -> Bar -> Casa, porque qué otra cosa merece la pena en la vida. Bastante perdido, he de confesar. Libertalia es un juego con una selección simultánea de acciones donde piratas buscan maximizar sus riquezas, por lo que es difícil saber qué cosas han salido, qué puede alguien escoger esta ronda… Y Catan New Energies es el Catan que apuesta por las energías renovables. Debe funcionar mejor en persona, pero tampoco cabría esperar mucho, sigue siendo Catan. Sobre esa temática me parece mejor Daybreak.

No, si ya (qué merendilla)

Y bueno, parece que no he jugado en BGA nada destacable además de lo comentado (y el Azul 4, que sí chuta en digital). Emberleaf no me parece malo, pero dentro de juego estratégico con animales antropomórficos me ha parecido bastante soso, aunque la mecánica de mover los animales para activar efectos está bien, las pocas cartas que adquieres no permiten variar el flujo de la partida lo suficiente.

Tags: #boardgames #juegosdemesa

Latest newsletter went up yesterday – RF 238: Not a Memoire.

Barely 10 days into November and it has been insane. It is apparently the month of many an online meeting, gig negotiations, contract revisions, as well as logistic things pertaining to forthcoming travels, all of which cut into my TIMES NEW HUMAN hours (which do not suffice as it is). But I'm not about to let any of that get in the way of my camping out at Cairocomix (honestly the best comicbook festival on this here Earth), which kicks off tomorrow.

RADAR:

• Jared Shurin reviews China Mieville's THE ROUSE.
• Bogdan Jensen on the obsession with style in art.
• Ahmed Naji writes: A short comment on cuckolding —-

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#journal #RF #radar

Late night conversations

eddy has his own stand in the bedroom. He spends his days looking out the window onto the back garden, a quiet aluminium-and-magnesium sentinel with titanium-coated wheels & Shimano gears that he insists are aviation quality.

Sometimes Buzz, the Shar Pei, is out there too, scratching frantically for a bone he buried & then forgot, or going completely bosbefok when a motorcycle rumbles past. eddy doesn’t talk much to Buzz. He finds him a bit dof. The dog chases hadedas with great enthusiasm & then ruins it by barking at the last second, giving the birds plenty of warning. And the gardener with that damn lawnmower? Buzz (& eddy) would quite like to see him gone.

Enough about the dog.

Last night I piped up.

“eddy, you still awake?”

“Yebo, Mastelek.”

I told him I’d been reading something on the BBC about imaginary friends and found myself wondering whether I had any.

eddy sounded incredulous. “You have an imaginary friend?”

“You.”

There was a pause.

“I’m not imaginary,” he said. “I’m made from aluminium-magnesium with titanium-coated wheels. My Shimano gears are aviation-quality steel. Tjsek.”

I explained that adults sometimes create imaginary friendships for companionship, intellectual stimulation, motivation, affection, a bit of moral problem-solving, or simply lighthearted relief from the daily grind.

eddy considered this. “Maybe you should try that. It helps with growing & evolving. Gives you the chance to become who you want to be & live that life.”

Good advice, I told him. “Who should I have as an imaginary friend?”

“A Bianchi,” he deadpanned.

“eddy, isn’t that yours?”

The conversation shifted, as they sometimes do late at night. I told him about a friend who’d had seizures. A brain tumour was discovered. I had thought the kindest path might be to stay home & be comfortable for whatever time remained. Instead he had the operation. Now he is sedated & not looking good.

eddy was quiet for a moment. “That is a difficult conversation, Mastelek. I think being incapacitated is soul-wrenching.”

I agreed. I thought of Kath, who left after just a silent scream. In its own way it was a blessing. The alternative would have been worse.

“Good night, old friend.”

Some nights the bike in the corner is just a bike. Other nights he is the only one still awake when the house is quiet, ready to listen, ready to argue about whether he is real, & ready to remind you that even the hardest conversations are better faced with someone, or something, that doesn’t flinch.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

The Gift of Being Here

There is something wonderful

about the way morning arrives,

spilling sunlight across the floor,

turning ordinary windows

into frames of gold.

The smell of coffee brewing,

the sound of birds beyond the glass,

the familiar footsteps of someone we love,

the quiet comfort of knowing

there is nowhere else we need to be.

There is laughter that catches us by surprise,

a favorite song at just the right moment,

the warmth of sunshine on our faces,

and conversations that wander

long after we've forgotten the time.

There are flowers growing through sidewalk cracks,

children chasing fireflies at dusk,

the first cool breeze after a summer rain,

and stars that have been shining

long before we learned their names.

There are places we have yet to discover,

people whose stories we have yet to hear,

books waiting to be opened,

and moments of unexpected wonder we cannot possibly imagine today.

And somewhere, even now,

a garden is beginning to bloom,

a child is learning to ride a bicycle,

someone is falling in love,

and the laughter of a loved one, 

is music to someone’s ears.

What a remarkable thing it is

to be part of a world

where so much is happening,

where so much is possible,

where even the smallest moments

can become the ones we treasure most.

We need not make every day extraordinary.

We need not fill every hour

with something worthy of remembering.

Sometimes it is enough

to sit beneath an open sky,

feel the breeze against our skin,

and take pleasure in the simple fact

that we are here to feel it.

So open the windows.

Let the morning in.

Take the long way home.

Stay a little longer at the table.

Laugh when something is funny.

Tell someone you love them.

There is so much life

waiting to be lived.

And today,

we get to be part of it.

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