Ad3620 Preview

Chapter 1

Dr. Linda Hamilstein was toast of the town to say the least. Over the past few years, she'd gone from relative obscurity to being a world renown, Nobel Peace Prize winning scientist for her achievements in micro biology, especially in manipulating the AD36 virus. Discovered in the early 2000's, the scientific world linked the virus with patients that produced excess body fat when consuming regular amounts of calories. Most scientist simply pushed the findings to the back of their minds as the said virus was extremely non virulent and had a mortality rate of zero, however, this was not true for Dr. Linda Hamelstein.

She and a fellow post Graduate, Peggy both saw the virus as a possibly naturally occurring Dawinian lifesaver in countries struggling to meet their population's caloric necessities. Within six months, the two post graduates and their team had discovered a way to introduce the virus into patients suffering from malnutrition. A few years later, the fully deployed vaccine was administered to large swaths of the world's developing populace.

Within days, starvation rates fell to zero and the two scientists and their team were estimated to have saved over 25 million lives, within the first year alone. Soon after they were awarded the scientific and world's communitie's greatest prizes.

While the whole team received praises, it was primarily Linda Hamelstein and her fellow associate Peggy Toth, that did the bulk of the work. Both were respected and both received acclaim, but it was Linda that everyone wanted to talk to. Peggy did her fair share of intellectual and Ted Talks, but when it came to primetime interviews, it was the beautiful and thin Linda who did them and likewise donned the covers of various magazines worldwide.

At first Peggy didn't let it bother her too much as she knew that "this" was the way of the world. Yeah, she was equally responsible and should have received just as much attention as Linda, but there was one big difference between the two ladies. Peggy was your typical, overweight and geeky scientist, cute in a plump way, but nothing in comparison when compared to her counterparts. Linda looked like a runway model, tall, thin, beautiful, and blessed with natural curves that attracted men and women from all walks of life. With such a beauty for a colleague, Peggy knew she would always be in the shadow of Linda, at least as long as she remaimed thin and gorgeous.

But then Peggy's whole perspective changed on day when Linda disregarded her opinion on national TV. Peggy kept quiet as not to bring any embarrassment or negative pressures on the companies' stock prices, but she was internally furious that Linda had treated her like a subordinate, and on National television of all places.

Embarrassed and pissed off, Peggy thought about quitting and going her own way, before deciding to go another route. She'd recently and sereptiscously just developed a weaponized and airborne form of the virus for the US military unbeknownst to Linda. She was supposed to turn over her findings next week, but decided to run a test trial instead. A test on her callous and thin colleague.