| In 1940, while stationed near France, Private Clinton Mcintyre rebelled against his commanding officer, whose orders he feared would lead to his unit’s death, and was subsequently was charged with treason and with the officer’s murder, which Mcintyre claimed was accidental. Sentenced to death, Mcintyre was offered clemency by General Maxfield Saunders, one of the offers attached to Project: Rebirth, an experimental program designed to produce super-soldiers. Disdainful of Prof. Erskine’s chosen candidate for augmentation, Steve Rogers, and sceptical about the promised effects of Erskine’s super-soldier formula, Saunders designated Mcintyre as his own test subject in Operation: Prototype. Unfortunately, Saunders failed to realise Erskine’s procedure had three stages and gave Mcintyre only the liquid formula for ingestion, omitting the injection and vita-ray exposure necessary to stabilise the transformation. As a result, while Mcintyre indeed underwent complete physical augmentation, literally growing more muscular with each moment, the process induced dementia and intense pain, causing him to flee into the streets on a rampage. The newly mutated Prototype collapsed shortly afterward from heart failure, and General Chester Richard Phillips, Project: Rebirth’s head military liaison took Saunders into custody for Mcintyre’s murder. Shortly afterward, Steve Rogers was transformed into Captain America, and Prototype’s body was placed in storage, although it is unclear if he was truly dead or simply in suspended animation. |
| In recent years, Prototype’s body, sealed in a containment tube and long since forgotten, was discovered in a Virginia confiscation warehouse by S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, including Agent Billups, actually a double agent for S.H.I.E.L.D.’s enemy A.I.M. Billups bought the body to his A.I.M. superiors, who were able to resuscitate Prototype due to mutations in his circulatory system. Redubbed Protocide, he received implanted memories to win him to A.I.M.’s side, making him believe Captain America, supposedly his partner, had betrayed him and left him for dead, sabotaging Project: Rebirth and taking the honour and glory due to Protocide himself. |
