Hadrian Black is a U.S. Army black ops operative.
He worked for the military for several years before agreeing to go undercover to find out information about and a means to bring down a powerful, nefarious corporation known as Redrum Industries. Created in or before the mid 20th Century by U.S. government for research it would rather be able to deny, Redrum was let go by a different Administration though not shut down but rather just allowed to survive on its own. Survive it certainly did as its research allowed it to go into various often seemingly innocuous fields. The key was seemingly as nothing Redrum did was strictly for profit. Power was its motivator.
After nearly 30 years of going its own way, Redrum had acquired enough of a reputation to cause its former benefactor to worry about it. The fact that the name of the company spelled backwards was less than friendly did not escape anyone. That was when a proficient and experienced officer named Jonathan Raby went missing and Hadrian Black came into existence.
Ten years later, evidence of an internal struggle at Redrum showed that Black had tried to destroy the corporation's operation. That evidence was convincingly that of Black except it showed he had not aged much if any in the previous decade. Another undercover operative learned that Black had joined with a key Redrum scientist named Doc McGee to deal a deadly though not fatal blow. Since then Black has been missing.
The destroyed facility was the site for chip implantation of key Redrum operatives. These chips were of a unique material that bonded to the recipient's brain tissue, making the chip work without issue with the mind. Through the chip, the agents were fed megabytes of data as well as the equivilent of years of training in whatever fields were necessary for the mission assigned. Whatever was needed to fill a role or perform a task was implanted. While this created extremely capable agents, it had a downside in that the operatives had a limited number of "upgrades", meaning that after eight to ten missions, the brain of the agent began to quickly breakdown. Since a rogue agent with all the data inside his or her head possibly willing to spill the beans was something that worried Redrum, it programmed the chips to self-destruct after about ten missions.
To Redrum's dismay, Black had had nearly forty upgrades without side effects and without the chip shutting down. Since he had now decided to rebel, he was a tremendous liability - a man with a genius off the charts and physical skills virtually unmatched. He is just one man but one incredible man with a desire to take down Redrum. How he fits in with the government's original plan, though, is up in the air.