Chapter 12: Chp 11 – The Heist (Part 2)

Chapter 11 - The Heist (Part 2)

Tyler Riddle

Home sweet home

The field trip ended 2 hours before school did, but we were seniors, so our teacher let us go home. Now that I'm home I need to finish my preparation for my heist. I don't really need anything for my heist as I can just create what I need on the fly. Guns are too complex for me to create in a short amount of time right now, so I have to just go with cold weapons. But it's not like I want to just fight everyone I come across, so maybe I can just incapacitate most people. My best bet is to use smoke grenades made on the fly. I can navigate without sight while most humans can't, so it's best if I use that to my advantage. The grenades can just be balls full of reactants separated by a thin plastic card. The card is removed and smoke is released. It's not designed to be transported. It's so incredibly simple that for most people, they wouldn't be able to use them. The designs will no doubt keep professionals very perplexed.

The EMPs I made earlier though will need to be consumed so I don't leave any obvious traces. I couldn't make all the parts, so I had to make a large purchase of old school cameras and miniature radios. If the FBI or SHIELD investigates, it'll be child's play to track me down based on my purchases. I imbed them into the sole of my shoes so I don't have to worry about pat downs. Scanners won't see anything since the casings for the EMPs are just plastic and the metal inside is too small to be seen on a scanner. 

With that, my preparations are finished. Time for a cat nap to make sure I'm well rested.

=÷=

3 hours later….

I was in the Oscorp lobby, waiting on Gwen. She's almost late and she's not answering any of my texts. I might be plotting to steal from the company, but timeliness is a sacred bind that can only be broken when you plan to be late, otherwise called fashionably late. 

I feel my phone buzz and I look down to see that Gwen texted me.

Gwen: 'I'm walking in now.'

Sure enough, I look to the entrance and see her just passing through the door. Why text me now of all times when I would see her seconds later. And why not before, when she was heading over here, or when she decided to leave.

*Sigh* The mentality of females is truly perplexing.

"What's wrong Tyler? Today is our date night!" She says jubilantly while giving me a kiss on the cheek.

"I'm fine Gwen. What took you so long?'

"Today's our date night, so of course I had to put on makeup and prepare myself." She whispers. Of course it was makeup. How could I guess anything else?

"I thought that I told you that you didn't need makeup."

"It's not for you. I have to intimidate other girls to keep them away."

"Or it's to catch the eye of other boys." I jest. I can see from the look in her eyes that she didn't like that.

"You want me to prove myself like Nia?"

"Uh, no. Sorry, that joke went too far." No need for another Nia. I still love her, but one of her is enough.

"Well be warned. Come on, let's get going." She says, walking over to the reception desk.

We tell her why we're here, and she calls someone on the phone. A few minutes later and we see Harry Osborn, the loveable tool himself. 

"Hey Tyler, Gwen. Since I'm the one who recommended you both, I'll actually be introducing you to some of our research that's hit a few walls and to the teams who are trying to find work arounds. We've had no luck recently and we're all hoping some fresh minds can find a solution. Well enough chit chat, let me show you the way. Oh, and here are your IDs. I had them made earlier. And these are Non-disclosure agreements that I need you two to read and sign." He said, handing us our IDs and two copies of an NDA. It was pretty standard. It boiled down to us agreeing to not disclose anything that has yet to be pattened. The rest was essentially safeguards against loopholes.

He led us to some elevators and pressed a button for one of the lower floors. We passed a few checkpoints along the way before we landed ourselves in a lab simply called 'Spider Silk.' This is the one the tour guide was really verbal about. A small team of 3 scientists, 2 male and 1 female, all slightly past middle aged and hovered over a few monitors. A few lab assistants scurried about.

*Cough* Harry made a noise to catch their attention.

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"Dr. Williams, Dr. Madison, Dr. Doofenshmirtz, might I introduce you to Mr. Riddle and Ms. Stacy. They are inexperienced, but they're both outstanding intellectuals in the field of biology with some novel ideas. Hopefully they can provide the project some help."

"I'm Dr. Madison, the chemist on this team. I assume we need to catch you up on what we're working on?"

"I'm Dr. Williams. Dr. Doofenshmirtz and I work together as the biologists and DNA analysis experts of the team."

"As Dr. Williams said, I am Dr. Doofenshmirtz. Our current problem is that we're struggling to increase the capabilities of the silk. The powers at be want our product to be able to sold at different tiers with more variation in it's uses."

"Ok, I have to check up on something else. I'll come by later to see how everyone is doing." Harry says, before leaving the lab. 

The trio of scientists showed us the current model for the spider silk, as well as what DNA was changed in the spiders to change how the silk is made. It was all very interesting and I could tell that they've worked really hard on this. It may be called spider silk, but the silk isn't just harvested from the spiders. The spiders are used like miniature factories to make a material that is very different than anything a spider would actually produce since it won't find those materials in it's ordinary diet. The spiders are actually quite large and they constantly secrete a thick web at a slow but steady pace. The spiders themselves could theoretically live 20 years, but they die if they aren't constantly eating. A few spiders are kept sperate for breeding purposes, but most of the spiders feed out of a sort of troph and their webbing falls off a ledge where it's spun into spools. A little cruel to make them live that way, but it seems they turned off the genes that enable most of their behaviors and emotions. All that's left is their ability to produce webbing and their instinct to mate periodically.

I can see a more secured offshoot of the lab behind a couple of doors with reinforced plexiglass windows. In it, there are a few spiders  with different colorings and labeled with different numbers. Since the numbers skip around a lot, I'm guessing that the spiders representing other numbers have died already. 

Gwen got really excited about it all, but I was mearly intrigued. There really wasn't much you could do to improve upon the spider silk without making it more inorganic so that it could no longer be produced biologically, but if all they need is to make it into a product or products then…

"I think I have a solution to your problem." I announce.

"Well what is it?" Dr. Madison asks. 

"There really isn't much you can do to improve the spider silk. You can only really change its properties. But what you could do is weave it. On the sub macro level, more material means more strength, but we need this to work on a much larger scale. And large hollow structures often withstand higher forces than there solid counterparts since they can redirect those forces to specified locations."

"And how would we make the silk hollow? We can't exactly drill out the center." Dr. Williams wasn't following.

"Simple. You weave it, like rope. One of the first inventions of mankind. In general, the more strands that are weaved together, the stronger the rope. Multiple stands of rope are wrapped around each other in the opposite direction of the previous ones. This continues until you get thicker rope. There are different ways of weaving it you allow for more or less flexibility.  It also increases the lifetime of the product since a few strands can fray without compromising the structural stability of the rope as a whole. If a rip or tear appears on a solid piece of material, then the rest will become bigger and bigger in until the material ultimately fails. Of course you'll need to make the spiders and the silk threads smaller, but that's really it."

"How could we not have thought of that? One of the simpleste inventions in history, right there next to the wheel itself!" Dr. Doofenshmirtz face palms when realizing that there was such a simple solution.

"Don't beat yourself up, all of you focus on chemistry or biology. Rope is something engineers come up with. This is why theoretical or experimental scientists need engineers, to make the science into an actual object. Companies often forget that engineers are needed in groundbreaking sciences just as much as they are needed in optimizing current technologies."

"Well thanks. In all truth, we have meeting in front of the board in a week, and we had no idea what we were going to tell them. We have other side projects that we like better, but we were running out of funding."

"Is the lab through those doors your side project?" I ask, gesturing over to the radioactive spiders.

"No, that's Mr. Norman's pet project that he has us work on occasionally. What we're interested in is making the spider silk and other organics sythetically. Production would be faster and easier to scale. It would be more ethical as well."

"Maybe I could help you guys with that one of these days. Oh, could you tell me where the restroom is located. I was here a few hours ago, but I already forgot."

"Sure, it's down the hallway on the left and it will be on your right after the security checkpoint."

"Thank you."

-:(--):-

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