---

 

Miles Armbruster, the long-revered physician-scientist, thought long and hard about the consequences he was watching play out on the nightly news.

The plan he had set in motion nearly thirty years earlier was nothing short of insanity, but he was brash and naïve when it first popped into his head.

And now, with Al Jazeera, CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews, and all of the other major media outlets covering the same story, he looked out the small window in his office and briefly caught the faint reflection of his own smile.

 

 

The ticker at the bottom of his television read, “China National Tobacco No More.”

---

 

CNT was the last of the international tobacco companies to fail, despite Dr. Armbruster instigating his poisonous plan with CNT over 10 years prior. Its demise had taken by far the longest of any of the tobacco giants and nearly cost him his life.

On his desk, the small LED light on his phone began pulsing. He lifted it with his good hand, and clicked the thumbprint. The text message read, “Congrats.”

The sender, President Jaime Obregado Garcia, was never one to mince words with Miles Armbruster, a man he had known for 37 years.

 

 

He set the phone back down on his shaky wooden desk in a small university office in Omaha and thought for a moment about what he had done. Back in 2001 he assumed the plan would take 40 years to complete. He was off by almost a decade to the day.

Spear-heading the eradication of two of the world’s most harmful species, Nicotiana Tabacum and Nicotiana Rustica, should have made him world-renown. Or at least seen him accept the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

 

 

But “Big Tobacco” had been quite resistant to the subterfuge carried out by a clandestine group. Rough estimates placed their economic downturn in the Trillions of dollars. That type of economic loss put Dr. Miles Armbruster in a wheelchair. Two other members of their group lost their lives.

 

 

But hundreds of millions of lives had likely been saved in the past three decades from their step-wise annihilation; the number would certainly climb in the next three decades.

Not since Alexander Fleming had discovered Penicillin in 1932 or John Franklin Enders conquered Polio in the mid 20th century had such a monumental scientific prevention occurred.

 

 

Alas, Miles Armbruster had attained several other significant recognitions during his medical career, most notably the 2024 Nobel prize for his discovery of Streptococcus Pneumoniae as a symbiotic microbe in the beating heart of every living human being.

Instead, this time Dr. Armbruster would have to accept a text message from the most powerful man in the world as a consolation prize. Few ever knew about his lead on the genetic assault against N. Tabacum and N. Rustica; even fewer were still alive to share this momentous day.

 

 

---

 

Just then his wife, Dr. Jane Armbruster, walked into his office and smiled at him, “You ready?”

She stopped in the doorway and glanced at the television screen.

“Can you believe it? Who would have thought tobacco would get wiped off the face of the Earth. It’s almost ironic. I’m gonna be out of a job.” She let out a half-hearted laugh. She was not one of the privileged few who knew.

“You’re the ever eternally optimistic oncologist, aren’t you, Dr. Armbruster?”

 

 

She rolled her eyes at him and took a few more steps through the doorway, grabbed his right arm, and helped him ease himself from his desk chair into the wheelchair he used to get around.

He moved himself up to the television perched on the wall across from his desk. He let the ticker scroll “China National Tobacco No More” one more time across the screen.

 

 

 

His left hand reached out and tapped the On/Off switch. He swiveled back to his desk, collected his cell phone, and plopped it on his lap before leaving the office.

Jane closed the office door behind him. “How was your day?”

 

 

“Class was fun. I’m always amazed by what these students think up. And I got a text from Jaime. He was checking in.”

“How is the President these days?”

“Busy as always. But never too busy for an old friend.”

Jane smirked, “I feel like he’s more your friend than my brother every time I see him.”

“Well, what can I say, we “Men of Straus Hall” stick together.”

 

 

She stopped, bent down, and kissed him on the cheek. “Yes, you most certainly do.”

…

{The Men of Straus Hall as they collegially referred to themselves while studying as undergraduates at Harvard College, had been covertly re-named The Agents of Archimedes in 1999 by now-deceased member Brett Elias Williams. Now only a Nobel Prize Winning physician-scientist, a scion of International Economy, and the President of the United States remained from the original thirteen members…}