the obsidian proxy
Julian spent the next twenty-four hours deep within the RPO code, subsisting on cold coffee and adrenaline. The code base was a masterpiece of paranoia, written in Arthur Thorne’s unique, highly obfuscated style, designed to be resistant to rapid human comprehension. It was a tribute to his father's genius and a testament to the deadly nature of his opposition.
Julian’s goal was simple in concept but brutally complex in execution: reverse the RPO’s lethal function. He needed to preserve the Isolation and Cloaking protocols while nullifying the Extraction component—the sequence designed to digitally neutralize the Proxy's unique signature and, by extension, the Proxy himself.