Post-game spoilers. Do not read until you’ve finished the game.
What really happened?
Here’s what really happened, I think.
(It helps to follow along with the map.)
You picked the lock on the front door, went north to the Corridor at Doors, jumped up to a hole in an open ceiling panel, opened the ventilation grille, and stashed your gun there, because it’s metallic, and you knew that you could never sneak it past the scan web without being detected. You left a few drops of blood on the hole’s lip, which the interrogator detected later.
With your gun safely stowed, you could walk through the scan web undetected. At the Tee Junction, you went east to Dead End South and used the lockpick to break into the Wiring Closet. The guards showed up just as the closet door opened, so you hid from them in the closet; you tried to grab the lockpick as you went in, but it slipped through your fingers and clattered to the ground.
(You can see a similar scene to this one if you use the lockpick to go south from the Tee Junction. “You hurl yourself towards the open door, snatching at the lockpick as you go by. Nearly – but your fingers close wrong, and the silver rod clatters to the floor behind you as you dive over the threshold. The door slides closed; you are left in quiet dark.”)
Inside the Wiring Closet, you prepared the blast tab and the radio module, not yet realizing that the key transmitter was “broken, jammed, or sabotaged.” When the guards left, you were able to sneak over to the laboratory.
Outside the Laboratory, without access to the blast tab or your lockpick, you had no way to penetrate the door. (Perhaps you’d intended to use the acid tab? But the door was protected from that.) You returned east to the Lab Junction, where the guards were luckily(?) summoned away, allowing you to slip past them to the Security Annex.
There, you predicted that you would be caught and interrogated at some point. You used the timer and the scan scrambler to enter the Interrogation Chamber, placing the acid pack and the voice module in the pedestal of the interrogation chair. You also entered the Security Storage Room, where you grabbed the neurotoxin stun pen. Then you left, fleeing toward the Dead End south of the Diagonal Branch. (The timer broke after this, somehow.)
There, you met a guard, whom you stabbed with the stun pen, and attempted to activate the blast tab, which is where/when you discovered that the key transmitter was broken. Knowing then you would be captured, you hid your toolcase in the ventilation duct.
When the interrogator had you in the chair, following your training, you avoided thinking about the key components of your plan. (“The ventillation grille isn’t important,” the game would say, in italics, during the simulation. “The metal door to the north [leading to the Wiring Closet] isn’t important.” “The pedestal under the chair isn’t important.”)
Your lies, then, were as follows:
- When the interrogator discovered your blood drops on the ceiling panel, you concocted a story about the package, so he wouldn’t figure out that you’d stowed your gun there.
- Instead of losing the lockpick sabotaging the wiring closet, you claimed to throw the lockpick to distract the guards.
- The interrogator knew that you deactivated the scan web in the Security Annex four times (in and out of two rooms), and you both knew that you’d been to the Security Storage Room to steal the stun pen, but you couldn’t let him know that you’d been in the Interrogation Chamber, so you pretended that you searched his Security Office for the lockpick instead.
- Finally, you pretended to hide the “package” in the ventilation duct along along with your other tools, knowing that the interrogator would bring all of your belongings straight to you in the interrogation chamber.
Once the voice transmitter was in the room with you, you activated the acid pack, knocked out the interrogator, and the rest of the story is as you played it out: back to the wiring closet to knock out the scan web—by hand, like some sort of neanderthal—then back to your gun. Bang bang, pick pick, you’re in the lab, plans in hand, teleporter activated, and you bamf out, just as the guards blast their way into the room. Blackness slaps into you with a silent snap.
And that’s how you made a difference.
P.S. Spider and Web makes no direct reference to your gender, leaving it up to your imagination. Some of you might not have considered this, but this game is 10x better if you imagine that your character is a woman.