In Spectacular Spider-Man #16, the Queen is temporarily sent to ground by a coalition of military forces including Captain America, Nick Fury and the agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. but not before she forces a fateful kiss onto Spider-Man's lips. In the aftermath, Peter Parker begins to experience strange dreams. His body seems to be undergoing a bizarre transformation and worse, he now seems to share a telepathic connection to his foe.

In Spectacular Spider-Man #17, while Fury and his agents search for the Queen, unaware of the strange secret she holds, Peter Parker's condition worsens. His encounter with the Queen has triggered an awakening of the long-dormant insect gene inside him. He is literally becoming a spider!

ACT 1: The story opens up with MJ and Peter discussing the recent growth of a second pair of eyes in Peter's face; the result of the Queen's fateful "kiss". Notwithstanding his current condition, MJ tells Peter that he has to attend the wedding of one of their neighbors; and she is very serious about it. The story then switches to Captain America who is visiting his old friend Tommy in a nursing home. A war veteran bound to a wheelchair, Tommy sheds a tear when Cap tells him that he needs help with the "Ana" problem. Whether Tommy feels a great amount of pride in being asked by Captain America to help or whether he is afraid remains unknown for now.

ACT 2: Somewhere beneath Manhattan, in her newly reconstructed "hive", the Queen sits at a table; one of her mindless drone standing next to her. She tries to strike a conversation with him but the drone remains speechless. She seems frustrated but realizes quickly that in the end, it won't matter as it is all about the survival of the fittest. Meanwhile, MJ and Peter are attending the wedding mentioned earlier. Peter's grotesque appearance – although masked by a large pair of sunglasses – is nothing compared to the other guests attires, which mainly consists of "Star Trek" costumes; since it is a Klingon-themed wedding. Suddenly, Peter begins to feel sick so he rushes out of the ceremony and begins vomiting green goo. Having a hard time breathing, he switches to his Spider-Man costume and web-slings away (unseen by the guests of course). Blood pouring out of his mouth and nose, Peter lands on a nearby rooftop, where his transformation into a spider seems to continue.

ACT 3: Back at the nursing home, Captain America takes Tommy for a "drive" around the building. Cap tells him that they shouldn't have kept the "secret" for so long. At that moment, Nick Fury emerges from the shadow and demands that Cap break his silence about what he knows about Ana. Cap tells him that a program was created for the army by the government with the goals of creating a new breed of super-soldiers or "better soldiers". Recruits were brought into the program and the army tried to tap into their potential. However, they were wrong in assuming that they could recreate the formulas that gave him (i.e. Captain America) his "abilities". When the times changed and those results never came, the military decided to shut down the operation. The project was abandoned and so was Major Adriana Soria of the Women's Army Corps. Cap goes on explaining how Ana had been a natural soldier in an unnatural environment and how tough she was compare to the male soldiers; this pushed the military to prod, poke and test her to determine the exact nature of her mutant ability. However, once the project failed, she was thrown into a military asylum near Miami, from which she escaped in 1957 and went to the ground. The military assumed she was dead and promptly forgot about her. By that time, however, more was known about her mutation; she'd split from other members of her species and had become a new subphylum: Homo Insectus. In literal terms, she'd tapped into a part of human DNA that connected human beings to the point where they split from insects on the evolutionary tree. The short version is that Ana controls every insect on the planet, and roughly one-third of the world's population that still carries the insect gene.

ACT 4: Meanwhile, back on the rooftops where Peter/Spider-Man was last seen, Peter's transformation into a spider continues as two new sets of limbs grow out of his body. Back at the nursing home, Nick Fury feels that Cap is not telling him the whole story, but just the parts that will make him shut up and go away. Cap goes on saying that there is a bomb, a bomb that will kill every single human being within a six hundred mile radius and leave everything else intact. He explains how the device will emit a chemical and radiological burst designed to interrupt only the human cognitive procedure and when activated, will shut down every human brain within six hundred miles of the epicenter; and right in the middle of this insect utopia will be the Queen and her chosen few. Fury asks Cap how Ana managed to create a bomb of that magnitude without them known about it. Cap replies that she didn't create it...but that they did (meaning the US government). To be continued.