The Silver Plague E-book Part 1 | Sci-fi by KM Sandling
PREFACE: THE SILVER PLAGUE
They called it progress.
The CE-FAG catalytic system—silver, iron, carbon in precise ratios—changed everything. Energy became cheap. Abundant. Democratic. For the first time in human history, power wasn't rationed by wealth or geography. It was everywhere.
The factories hummed. The cities grew. The economy soared.
No one wanted to see the cost.
It started small.
Groundwater turned gray in the industrial districts. Crops grew stunted, metallic-tasting. Animals died without visible wounds—just gray veining in their tissues, like roadmaps to nowhere.
The reports were buried. Labeled "inconclusive." Researchers who pushed too hard found their funding cut, their publications retracted, their careers quietly ended.
By the time anyone admitted the pattern, it was too late.
CE-FAG particulates were in the soil. In the water. In the air we breathed and the food we ate. They reacted to everything—sunlight, electrical fields, friction, heat. The environment itself became unstable. Contaminated zones appeared overnight. People collapsed in streets, markets, metro stations, seizing as their cells oxidized from within.
The hospitals called it "acute environmental exposure syndrome."
Everyone else called it what it was: the Silver Plague.
The corporate response was predictable.
Palliative treatments. Expensive, patented, minimally effective. Protocols designed to manage symptoms, not cure them. Insurance policies that covered "approved therapies only." Regulatory agencies that moved slower than the dying.
The cure existed.
It had existed for centuries.
But it wasn't profitable. And it wasn't human.
Vampires had known about silver poisoning long before CE-FAG. They'd developed chelation therapies, antioxidant cascades, redox stabilizers—compounds that could halt oxidative damage before it became irreversible. They'd used this knowledge quietly, treating their own, occasionally saving a favored human in secret.
When CE-FAG turned the world toxic, they tried to share.
The pharmaceutical companies buried it. The energy conglomerates lobbied against it. The governments, already captured by corporate interests, classified it as "unverified alternative medicine."
Then they went further.
They declared vampire medical practice illegal. Unauthorized. Dangerous.
They weaponized the very poison that was killing everyone.
UV-enhanced rounds that turned vampire tissue black from the inside out.
Aerosol oxidizers that triggered cascading cellular collapse.
Tactical raids on underground clinics where the dying were actually being saved.
The official narrative was simple: Vampires are hoarding cures. They must be stopped.
The truth was simpler: The cure threatens the profit model. It must be suppressed.
And so two wars began.
The visible war: military forces hunting vampire "insurgents" in contaminated zones.
The invisible war: scientists on both sides—human and vampire, military and resistance—racing to build what their institutions refuse to allow.
A cure that worked.
An energy system that didn't poison.
A future where survival wasn't a luxury good.
This is the story of that invisible war.
Of the medics who healed in the dark.
Of the scientists who defected.
Of the slow, desperate realization that predator and prey were dying together—and only collaboration could save either species.
It begins with a girl dying in the rain.
And a stranger who shouldn't have stopped.
But did.
They called it the Silver Plague.
But plagues end.
Monopolies don't—unless you burn them down.
The contamination economy was worth more than the energy economy it
had replaced. Medical treatments, environmental remediation contracts,
"clean zones" for the wealthy, protective equipment, monitoring systems—
an entire industrial sector built on managed poisoning.
A cure would collapse the fastest-growing economic sector in human history.
Kael saved his first human in 1847.
Silver poisoning from a mining accident.
The treatment costs him three days of work and a handful of herbs.
Two hundred years later, that same treatment became a capital offense.