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CHAPTER EIGHT: The Blind Spot
The celebrations around the world were deafening, but in the sterile quiet of the Langley War Room, the silence was heavy. Director Vance stared at Sarah Jenkins, the weight of the moment pressing down. Thorne had outplayed them. The white knight gambit was a masterstroke of psychological warfare and systems architecture.
"He's made himself a symbol," Vance ground out. "The public views us as the old guard hoarding energy, and him as the future."
"We can't attack the symbol," Sarah agreed, the data streams showing approval ratings for Thorne skyrocketing globally. "We have to attack the man. There has to be a blind spot. A genius like that, working in isolation, will have one."
"He lives online and in his lab," Analyst Dave added. "He has no physical presence outside the Aeon Core. No weak social ties."
Sarah narrowed her eyes, reviewing every tiny detail of Aris Thorne’s profile, searching for something that wasn’t a patent or a paragraph of poetry. "He thinks he's covered every angle because he understands all the variables. He understands physics, data, and human narrative. But he’s missing something."
She pulled up the data logs from the coffee incident. Thorne’s reaction had been immediate, precise, and disproportionate. He destabilized a nation over a bag of beans.
"He reacts when his personal comfort is challenged," Sarah hypothesized. "He’s a man of intense routine. The coffee wasn't just a vice; it was a necessary cog in his intellectual process."
"So we disrupt his routine until he cracks?" Vance asked, skeptical.
"No, we exploit the very thing he thinks is his greatest strength: his isolation," Sarah said. "He trusts his AI, Janus. He trusts that his lab is an impenetrable fortress of logic."
She zoomed in on the Aeon Core's logistical supply chain, a heavily encrypted but ultimately physical sequence of events. Everything he ate, every piece of equipment that came in, was vetted. Everything except one thing: waste management.
"They have to take the garbage out," Sarah noted with a faint, predatory smile. "And that requires a human interface with the outside world."
Vance understood immediately. "A clean insertion agent. Someone invisible who can interact with the facility's low-level staff."
"We don't need to penetrate the lab to compromise the man," Sarah concluded. "We just need to compromise his environment."
Aris Thorne felt a strange disquiet settling in. The global applause for the energy patents felt hollow. He had just finished a passage in his novel detailing the moral exhaustion of a revolutionary who achieves their goal only to find themselves isolated by their success. The parallel was not lost on him.
He was in his lab, organizing his antique books, when the main service elevator chimed. It was scheduled maintenance time.
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