He released documents proving Elias Vance's clandestine employment via an intelligence shell company, linking the young agent directly to his uncle, Director Vance. He didn't have proof of the neuro-agent yet—that required a physical sample—but he had enough to imply a sinister plot.
The Nthomi Network—the coalition of journalists and academics inspired by his novel—took the story and ran with it. The headline that exploded across every major news outlet wasn't about national security or Aris Thorne's genius; it was about corruption: "INTELLIGENCE DIRECTOR VANCE ACCUSED OF POISONING GENIUS PHILANTHROPIST THORNE IN ENERGY CONSPIRACY."
The response in Langley was sheer panic. The phones in Director Vance's office melted off the hook.
"The President is demanding an explanation, Bill," the National Security Advisor shouted over a secure line. "You used your own nephew? You look nepotistic and criminal! And poisoning the 'Architect of Free Energy'? The optics are catastrophic!"
Vance was on the ropes. Sarah Jenkins watched the internal chaos with a detached sense of dread. Thorne had won this round using minimal force, simply by understanding how stories work in a media-saturated age.
"He's using public opinion as a shield," Sarah explained to Vance, who looked like a ghost. "He understood that we couldn't just arrest him after the energy patent release. Now, if anything happens to him, the world will blame you personally. He’s made himself immune through narrative immunity."
The operation was officially aborted. The team was ordered to stand down, and Vance was placed under immediate internal review.
But Thorne wasn't finished. The physical effects of the neuro-agent lingered. He was still slower, fuzzier around the edges. He needed a definitive solution, not just a temporary reprieve. He needed the agent out of his system, and the physical vector eliminated.
He looked at his AI. "Janus, lock down the Aeon Core. No one in, no one out. Immediately."
"Lockdown protocols initiated," Janus confirmed.
Aris walked to his medical bay, a sterile area reserved for the physical maintenance of his lunar project astronauts. He ran a self-diagnostic, drawing blood and tissue samples. He was an engineer; the human body was just the most complex system he had ever encountered. He had the best medical tech on Earth in his lab.
He just needed his brain to work well enough to interpret the data and synthesize an antidote. The neuro-agent had dampened his genius, but it hadn't destroyed it. The fury fueled his focus.
He sat down at his computer terminal, ignoring the blueprints and the novel for a moment, focusing purely on biochemistry. The words on the screen swam, the data points felt fragmented, but he forced them into sequence.
He wasn't the blazing polymath genius of a week ago, but he was still Aris Thorne. He was still smarter than anyone chasing him. He just had to work harder.
In Langley, Sarah Jenkins received an automated alert: the Aeon Core had gone dark. "He’s in lockdown. He must know we were poisoning him."
"We're compromised, the Director's finished, and the asset is contained in his lab," Dave summarized grimly. "What's the play now, Sarah?"
Sarah stared at the blank screen where Thorne’s data used to be. "The play now is we wait. We just made Aris Thorne our greatest and most dangerous adversary. He’s an architect trapped in a cage of his own making, feeling desperate. And that means he’s about to build something unpredictable."
Aris, focused entirely on the complex data stream of his own compromised biology, wasn't thinking about Langley or Director Vance. He was thinking about survival, about synthesis, about the perfect antidote.
He would not be diminished.
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