Shift Seventeen at the Air Farm

• Chapter 1 Scrubbers and Spores
• Chapter 2 The Rhythm of Shift Seventeen
• Chapter 3 Algae Bed Three
• Chapter 4 Ghost Injections
• Chapter 5 The Five Percent Gap
• Chapter 6 Calibrating the Lies
• Chapter 7 Off-Grid Sensors
• Chapter 8 Nitrogen Secrets
• Chapter 9 Under the Canopy
• Chapter 10 The Manual Log
• Chapter 11 Silent Alarm
• Chapter 12 Shadows in Sector Four
• Chapter 13 Breathing Room
• Chapter 14 The Supervisor's Keycard
• Chapter 15 Depleted Stock
• Chapter 16 Counter-Currents
• Chapter 17 Pressure Drop
• Chapter 18 Locked Down
• Chapter 19 Poison in the Vents
• Chapter 20 The Backup Vault
• Chapter 21 Thin Air
• Chapter 22 The Main Turbine
• Chapter 23 Broadcast Protocol
• Chapter 24 The Last Shift
• Chapter 25 Breaking the Dome
• Chapter 26 The First Real Breath

The air inside the O2-Synthetics Facility always tasted like copper and old river water.

Rory adjusted his respirators, the cheap plastic strap pinching behind his right ear where the skin was already raw from four consecutive double shifts. At seventeen, he was the youngest shift-leader on the lower tier of the Air Farm, a title that sounded impressive until you realized it mostly meant he was the one who had to climb into the intake scrubbers when the filters clogged with fungal bloom.

Above them, spun out in a massive hemisphere of reinforced poly-glass, was the City of Aethelgard. From down here in Sector Nine, the city looked like an inverted forest of glowing quartz spikes, hanging suspended beneath the dark, smog-choked sky of the outer wasteland. Millions of citizens lived, worked, and slept up there, completely oblivious to the fact that their every breath was manufactured by three hundred acres of glowing blue-green algae, miles of stainless-steel piping, and forty exhausted teenagers carrying pressure wrenches.

"Hey, Boss," a voice crackled through the static of Rory’s earpiece. "Bed Four is spattering again. The bio-film is getting thick enough to walk on."

Rory sighed, leaning against the damp concrete bulkhead of the central catwalk. He pulled up his wrist-pad, tapping the scuffed glass screen until the telemetry for Algae Bed Four flickered into view. The numbers blinked back at him in steady, comforting neon green.

"Sensors say the flow rate is nominal, Jax," Rory said, tapping the screen again to clear a fleck of dried culture. "It’s showing seventy-eight percent oxygen output. That’s well within the safety margin."

"I don't care what your little wrist-calculator says," Jax replied. The muffled sound of scraping metal echoed down the conduit. "I'm standing on the gantry right now, Rory. It looks like black soup. The scrubbers are choking on spores. If we don't dump the violent-growth strain back into the digester, the main valves are going to lock up before the mid-shift bell."

Rory pushed off the bulkhead and started down the narrow iron ladder that descended into the lower mist zone. The humidity hit him immediately, a wet blanket of warm

The mist inside Sector Nine had its own pulse, a wet, rhythmic throbbing generated by the giant diaphragm pumps hidden beneath the catwalks. Shift Seventeen had officially begun twenty minutes ago, but down here on the lower grid, time didn't move by clocks; it moved by the low, resonant thrum of the nutrient injectors cycle-clearing every four hundred seconds.

Rory reached the bottom of the ladder and wiped a film of condensate off his safety goggles. Around him, the ambient glow of the cultivation tanks cast long, flickering shadows across the slick floorboards. Shift Seventeen was notorious among the farm hands. It fell right in the middle of the dark cycle, when the artificial sun-bulbs above the canopy were dimmed to forty percent to simulate a dawn Aethelgard never saw. It was the shift where gear broke, tempers frayed, and the air always tasted a little more like rot than usual.

"You down here yet, Rory?" Jax’s voice squawked in his ear again.

"At the base of Gantry Four," Rory said, unhooking his heavy torque wrench from his utility belt. "Hold your horses. If I slip on this grease, you’re the one who has to explain to Supervisor Vance why the shift-leader is floating face down in Algae Bed Three."

"Vance wouldn't care about the body," Jax grunted over the line. "He'd just fine your estate for polluting the yield."

Rory couldn't argue with that. He picked his way along the narrow iron catwalk, his boots making wet, metallic slaps against the mesh floor. On either side, massive open-air vats stretched into the dark mist. Each vat was fifty yards long, filled with a thick, emerald-colored slurry that bubbled continuously as mechanical paddles churned the surface. This was the lungs of Aethelgard. Millions of cubic feet of stale carbon dioxide were sucked down from the city's ventilation shafts every hour, bubbled through these glowing green soups, and pumped back up through the primary scrubbers as fresh, cool oxygen.

At least, that was how the orientation vids described it.

In reality, the machinery was older than Rory’s grandfather, held together by layers of gray sealant paste, improvised wire ties, and the sheer desperation of a crew that got docked half their rations if the daily yield dropped below target.

He found Jax leaning over the rail of Bed Four, poking at the surface of the tank with a long fiberglass sampling pole. Jax was sixteen, thin as a rail, with oily hair pinned under a faded yellow hardhat. He was smeared in bright green sludge from his elbows to his knuckles.

"Look at this," Jax said, pulling the pole out of the dark water. The tip was coated in a thick, gel-like substance that looked more like oil than algae. It dragged down in long, ropy strands, dripping back into the tank with dull splashes. "It’s mutating again. The wild fungal spores from Sector Twelve must have drifted over through the cross-vents."

Rory took the pole, sniffing the dark sludge on the end. It had a sharp, vinegary smell that cut right through the metallic bite of the ambient air. He pulled his wrist-pad around and brought up the telemetry stream for Bed Four again. The numbers hadn't changed.

O2 CONCENTRATION: 78.4% FLOW RATE: 420 L/MIN STATUS: OPTIMAL

"The reader says it's fine," Rory muttered, frowning at the screen. He flicked the glass with his fingernail, but the green digits remained steady.

"The reader is full of it," Jax said, wiping his brow with his upper arm, leaving a green streak across his forehead. "Touch the pipe, Rory. Feel the pressure."

Rory reached out and laid his gloved palm against the main intake valve leading from Bed Four into the riser pipes. The thick steel line should have been vibrating violently under the sheer volume of high-pressure gas being forced up toward the city. Instead, it felt dead. A faint, hollow tremor ran through the metal, like water trickling through a garden hose rather than the roar of a high-yield atmospheric converter.

"It's quiet," Rory admitted softly.

"It's stagnant," Jax corrected. "If Bed Four is putrefying like this, the gas output shouldn't be seventy-eight percent. It shouldn't even be fifty. But look at the wall display."

Jax pointed up toward the ceiling beam, where a giant, rusted LED array displayed the sector's total output for the current cycle. The red numbers hummed along cheerfully: SECTOR 09 - TOTAL O2 DISCHARGE: 102% OF DOMICILE REQUIREMENT.

"It’s just a sensor glitch," Rory said, though the words felt heavy and uncertain in his mouth. "The bio-film is probably coating the probe inside the tank. It reads high because the trapped gas bubbles are stuck around the sensor head."

"Then we need to pull the probe and scrape it," Jax said, holding up a heavy box wrench. "Before Vance does his mid-shift walk-through. If he sees black rot on the paddles while the panel is reading green, he'll write us up for falsifying logs."

Rory checked his wrist-pad clock. 02:15 AM. Shift Seventeen was barely a third of the way through. The night stretched out ahead of them like an endless tunnel of rust and steam.

"Alright," Rory said, swinging his wrench off his belt. "Grab the manual hoist. Let’s pull the probe box on Tank Four and see what’s actually happening inside that pipe."