Ward Nine of the Central Vanguard Military Hospital was universally known as the Drowning Floor.
For over a century, the long, whitewashed halls on the hospital’s underground levels had smelled of phenolic disinfectant, high-pressure saline, and the distinct, coppery sweetness of rotting lung tissue. The ward housed three hundred patients in the end-post stages of Aether Crystallization Disease—the dreaded “Blue Lung” that plagued every miner, factory laborer, and frontline scout in the mega-cities.
Inside the human breathing tract, inhaled void foul fog didn’t cause standard bacterial pneumonia. It acted as an inorganic crystal seed. Over months and years, tiny stone-glass fibrils anchored themselves inside the lung alveoli. It drew trace minerals from the bloodstream to grow dense lattices of blue, crystal-clear fibrosis. Eventually, the patient’s lungs hardened into solid stone. Every breath became an excruciating battle against internal turning to stone, ending in choking agony behind heavy positive-pressure respirators.
Worse than the disease itself was the extortion that surrounded it. The corporate pharmaceutical conglomerates like ApexBio and Synthetix Air held strict patents on “Grade-An Alveolar Surfactant” and “Molecular Filter Cartridges.” A single week of high-pressure breathing treatments cost five hundred Vanguard credits. An impossible sum for common laborers, who routinely indentured their children to corporate work-gangs just to buy their parents another month of oxygen.
