1 The New Medicine

Checking his fridge, Jacob saw that he didn't have any eggs or bread left. Knowing he had a few things to pick up, he decided to go to the store before it got dark out.

It was a cloudy Sunday evening. There were a lot of peddlers on the streets selling crackers and other cheap snack foods. Many of them were desperate to get rid of their merchandise because they would be homeless if they didn't earn this meager money. The closest grocery store was a few minutes away, so Jacob decided to walk there. When he got to the store, he went to the dairy section and found the eggs. There were only two more packs left so Jacob got both. Same with the bread, there were only a few more loaves left to buy.

Jacob slowly walked back to his house in Toronto, Canada. His last stop had been the local pharmacy where he had bought some high blood pressure medicine. Strolling on the crowded streets, he remembered the good old days when there was enough food for everyone to eat and the air quality had been good.

Jacob woke up early the next morning to make breakfast. He always liked to eat eggs and toast because it was simple and still delicious. While waiting for his food to finish, he turned on the TV. It was a habit of his to watch TV in the morning. Usually, the news was boring, but sometimes there would be something interesting that caught his eye. Today, unfortunately, it was the same old news.

Boring news again, he thought.

Turning off the TV, he decided to work a little bit on his research. As a data scientist, his job was to analyze data and use it to draw conclusions. This month, he was assigned to collect population data. Sometimes the assignments were exciting, and other times they were the complete opposite. He was lucky that he had a job that could sustain him, but he wished that it was possible for him to get a better one in the future.

Jacob procrastinated for a long time but finally started to work on his research. He hoped that something interesting was going to happen for the project.

Meanwhile, a manufacturing plant in a pharmaceutical company was busier than ever before. Everyone close by could hear the machinery and the conveyor belt rapidly moving around. There were employees making sure the right amount of ingredients were added to each vat. Managers were giving out orders; everything had to be precise—for this to work.

The CEO of the pharmaceutical company was sitting on his sofa drinking a root beer. He had just received a large sum of money from government officials in exchange for agreeing to manufacture some toxic medicine. Suddenly he got a call from the prime minister.

"Hello, what can I do for you today?"

"Have you guys finished preparing the medicine?" the prime minister asked.

"Yes, we have."

"Well, it's time to start rolling it out to the population. I'll be contacting advertisers to bring some more publicity to the medicine."

"All right. I'll open the products to the public soon."

After hanging up, the CEO contacted the COO and told him to make the medicine public. They decided to stock some medicine in big retail pharmacies in Toronto since that was where their headquarters were.

New and improved medicine? Jacob thought as he read the newspaper. It was the same medicine that he was using. Jacob made a mental note to himself to buy one of the new products the next time he went to the store.

He'd got a text message from his boss a few hours back. They were close friends since college and Jacob knew he was overall a pretty healthy person. His boss said that he had been feeling unwell but switched to the new medicine that was coming out and was feeling a lot better.

He had a meeting today with his manager, so he turned on his computer and joined the Zoom meeting. After talking a few minutes about his latest assignment, Jacob's manager said that he wasn't feeling well so the meeting ended early.

It was a bit strange, Jacob thought. His manager said he was feeling good only a few hours back.

Jacob sent his manager a get well message and started working on his assignment. He used multiple website trackers to find the overall population growth. A few of the websites' numbers were glitching, which Jacob found interesting. The number of people who were dying started spiking, but nothing else changed. Noticing that the websites were not secured, he just brushed the inconsistencies away as a mistake.

The day has been going really well for the CEO. Lots and lots of people had bought their new medicine, and the company had plans to sell the new medicine in other places as well. As far as he knew, the government had hacked into population data websites and made the website death count look convincing. As he sat down on his recliner, he counted all of the money he had made. It totaled up to about $50,000,000.

As Jacob was looking at the news the next morning, he got a call. Strangely, it was from his boss. Jacob didn't have to meet up with him until next week.

Maybe he got better and was going to tell me about it. Jacob thought.

He picked up the phone, but to his surprise, it wasn't his boss talking. Instead, it was Jassie, his boss's boss. It turns out that Jacob's manager died a few hours after his meeting with Jacob. Jassie was announcing the news to all of the employees working for the company.

After the call was over, Jacob lay on his bed and thought about what had happened. Suddenly, his mind wandered back to the glitching website. Curiosity got the best of him, and he opened his laptop again. The death count figures were dipping so fast that he was pretty sure more people were dying than being born. When he clicked on the different percentages of deaths in various cities around Canada, he found that Toronto had more than 30% of the current deaths being reported in the data. Jacob decided to go to the pharmacy and buy one of the products and give it to some chemists and let them examine it.

The prime minister knew that there would be people who would try to figure out why citizens were dying left and right. He had asked a special task force to monitor those who worked for certain jobs that study the population.

There are people following me, Jacob thought as he moved hurriedly along the streets. He tried to lose the men behind him in the crowd but to no avail. When he got to the store, he went straight to the medicine aisle and grabbed a package of the new medicine. He then ran out of the store as fast as possible and hid behind a bush nearby.

After a few minutes of silently waiting in the bush, he knew he had lost them. Looking at his phone, Jacob found the university nearest to him. He asked the person at the front desk where the chemistry students are. He showed them the new medicine that he had purchased from the store and told them about his suspicions on what it could be. The chemistry students seeing that it was a project that could change the world, agreed wholeheartedly on helping him find out whats inside the pills.

After giving them the pills that he had bought, Jacob decided to go back home after a long day and get some rest. As he walked back home, he thought he saw a figure down the street. Whoever it was, disappeared in the blink of an eye.

Jacob was getting ready take a nap when suddenly there was pounding at his door. The last thing he saw was a knife coming towards him, and then it was darkness.