I woke up with a jolt, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. The mild ache on my nose meant I'd fallen asleep on my glasses again. The surface under me felt wrong and the temperature was too low. City sounds leaked in as my brain came online - bass thump, a distant car. Brick walls covered in graffiti on either side. An old mattress beneath me.
I hadn't noticed being kidnapped, so I'd been definitely drugged. I checked my torso first, irrationally. No stitches. Probably still had all the organs I was born with. My pockets still had cash and small change. No smartphone. Principled kidnappers, at least.
While I got my bearings I scanned the graffiti. Generic tags, mostly - the seething mass you get in any rough neighborhood. Then one caught my eye: "MORLOCKS RULE." Last I checked, Morlocks were fictional. An X-Men fan, or someone who'd read too much H.G. Wells.
I shoved myself up off the mattress. Standing, I could actually read the street signs. New York. A rougher neighborhood by the look of it - people walked eyes-forward, storefront windows were barred, trash piled the sidewalks. A cluster of young guys hung around a shuttered corner store, smoking.
Something was off about them, though. The cut of that jacket, for one.
That woman walking by had aggressively teased hair and shoulderpads. Fashion trends cycle back, sure, but this was too committed. Then a Ford Escort came down the street - vintage enthusiast, I figured. Then a Cadillac Cimarron. Nobody cared enough to restore a Cimarron.
I followed the traffic sounds to a proper arterial and got hit with a wall of classic NYC yellow cabs and a sea of 1980s cars. Not a single modern vehicle. I stood there on the sidewalk running through the alternatives. Full mental break, or...
A newspaper stand across the street. I waited for the light and crossed.
The stand operator was the standard-issue weather-worn older guy. "Hey, can I get a paper?"
"Daily Bugle'll run ya fifty cents."
I handed over two quarters and took the paper. The date read May 8th, 1984. The front page screamed: HEROES MISSING? SPIDER-MAN TO BLAME! Color photo of Spider-Man mid-swing.
The Marvel 616. Of all the fictional universes.
Secret Wars was happening right now - that's why the heroes were gone. But that was just the start. The Beyonder would show up next year, a cosmic toddler with reality-warping powers who'd treat Earth like his personal science project. Then the Mutant Massacre in '86, hundreds of people slaughtered in the sewers. The X-Men would die on live television in '88. Inferno would turn cars into demons and buildings into screaming nightmares.
I stopped walking. Jean DeWolff was going to get murdered by a serial killer who'd nearly beat Daredevil to death. Kraven would bury Spider-Man alive for two weeks. The alien costume would turn out to be a symbiote.
I was just some guy. No powers. No way to warn anyone who'd believe me.
But then my brain did what brains do. You have knowledge, though. You know the disasters, the reveals, the tech leaps.
The rational part pushed back immediately. You'd need resources first. And the sliding timescale makes your timeline assumptions garbage - events that happened "ten years ago" in the comics could be yesterday here, or decades out.
The whisper persisted. The sequence holds even if the timing doesn't. Secret Wars before Secret Wars II, Inferno after the Massacre. Relative positioning is enough.
Relative positioning, the rational part shot back, while time itself is elastic. What happens when the sliding scale compresses twenty years into five? When some hero you've never read about changes everything because their origin got a rewrite?
A low engine rumble cut through my internal argument - a turbocharger whine layered over it. I'd been retracing my steps without noticing, heading back toward the alley I'd woken up in. I was passing the cluster of smoking guys when a white Jaguar XJS rolled slowly down the street, windows completely blacked out.
The car moved strangely. Weaving slightly, maybe fifteen miles per hour. Rich guy took a wrong turn, I thought. The XJS was absurdly out of place here, like a penguin in the Sahara. The pearly white contrasted with the barred storefronts and piled trash.
Then it stopped directly in front of the smoking men.
The door flew open. A figure in a crisp three-piece suit and fedora jumped out, a massive silenced pistol in hand and a full-coverage harlequin mask on its face - bright primary colors that seemed to shift in the afternoon light.
The Harlequin Hit-Man.
Two muffled cracks. The apparent leader dropped. The suited figure was back in the Jaguar before the other men could reach inside their jackets, and then I stopped thinking and ran.
In my peripheral vision I caught the survivors pulling weapons - pistols, what looked like a sawed-off - and focused entirely on my feet. The Jaguar roared away from the curb. Staccato gunfire erupted behind me.
I sprinted into a side alley and didn't stop for several blocks. Pressing my back against the brick wall next to a garbage bin, I tried to breathe. An open manhole sat nearby.
A nervous laugh came out of me. The XJS didn't come with a turbo from the factory in 1984 - I was almost certain of that. Which meant the Harlequin had custom work done. Of all the things to fixate on.
The more useful thought: where was Daredevil? This looked like it was near Hell's Kitchen. But with the Avengers, Fantastic Four, X-Men, and Spider-Man all on Battleworld, whoever was left had to be covering three times their normal ground. Daredevil was probably dealing with crime spillover from four boroughs. Hence a (minor -league) costumed hitman operating in broad daylight.
The criminals knew the heroes were gone. That assassination told me everything about the current state of the city.
On the upside, the Harlequin Hit-Man confirmed this was the 616. The husband-and-wife team was too obscure to show up in most elseworlds even as background filler.
I needed to get to ground and think. A homeless shelter crossed my mind and got crossed off just as fast - there was a Captain America arc with some Hydra plot involving shelters, late 70s or early 80s, and I had no interest in finding out whether it had already happened or was still coming.
The manhole caught my eye again. I remembered the Morlocks - mutants living in the sewers. But they wouldn't set up this far from Central Park, and I wasn't staying long-term. Just somewhere to sit and plan without getting shot.
I thanked ConEd for their inattention, stared at the grimy ladder, and climbed down.
The ladder got dirtier the further down I went. I dropped into the water at the bottom and stayed still while my eyes adjusted. Storm drain, not sewer - it smelled better than I'd feared. The concrete walls stretched dark in both directions. A branch-off further down the tunnel.
I waded against the water flow, jeans getting heavier with every step, and reached the junction after three minutes. A wider maintenance area opened up, pipes running the ceiling, electrical conduits along the walls. A door further down the hallway.
My waterlogged sneaker caught on something under the water. I stumbled, slapped my palm against the wall - and instead of concrete I felt smooth metal or plastic. A soft click. A section of wall swung inward an inch, and through the gap I saw the faint blue glow of electronics.
Behind the panel: a computer terminal. Not city maintenance equipment. Something that looked current, sleek, with a numeric keypad and indicator lights.
This was 1984. Networked city infrastructure was still mostly theoretical. But this was (presumably) Earth-616, where technology lurched forward in bizarre fits and starts. The Mad Thinker had androids, Spencer Smythe had built city-scale tracking systems, Mendel Stromm had remote telepresence robots.
Technological development was...uneven to say the least.
A hidden terminal in the sewers meant someone's private installation. They'd put real effort into concealing it.
Could be booby-trapped. I tentatively tapped the keyboard anyway. I figured that someone who'd gone to this much trouble to hide the installation probably hadn't expected anyone to find it, so trapping it was low on their priority list. The screen flickered on. No electrocution, no anvil falling on my head.
"Please enter your password."
I cracked my knuckles and started typing. The longest string of gibberish I could manage, well past any reasonable password length, just hammering the same characters over and over. Memory vulnerabilities were universal in this era, and whoever wrote this software probably hadn't been thinking about buffer overflows.
I hit enter.
The screen went black. Then a mechanical click came from the door beside the terminal.
The buffer overflow had overwritten something critical and the system had read it as valid authentication. The door swung open.
Warm air came out - electronics and cleaning supplies. Battery-powered emergency lighting cast everything pale green.
I'd just accidentally broken into someone's secret installation by typing too much. I was also a homeless man in 1984 New York during what was shaping up to be a historic crime wave.
I stepped inside.