Read Novel Full Chapter 667: A Public Statement From Lucy
Chapter 667: A Public Statement From Lucy
Twelve hours had passed since the Nova Express announcement dropped, and far from cooling off, the discourse across LucidNet had devolved into absolute, unfiltered anarchy.
This was no longer a standard online debate, nor was it like the previous arguments surrounding Nova’s monopoly over life-saving medical nanites.
When the medical nanites announcement were released, the moral outrage was abstract for most—a philosophical debate over regulatory oversight and state sovereign rights.
But Nova Express hit the physical world with the weight of a sledgehammer. It directly and fundamentally wiped out the livelihoods of tens of millions of human beings in a single afternoon.
Every union, every displaced worker, every failing legacy business, and every person left standing on the outside of Nova’s golden gates used the fallout to try and extract their pound of flesh from Nova Technologies.
What had started as heated policy commentary had mutated into a full-blown, vicious online war.
On one side stood the rest of the world: billions of standard users, displaced truck drivers, dockworkers, union activists, traditionalists, and everyday people consumed by a toxic mixture of rage, anxiety, and deep-seated economic jealousy.
On the other side stood the few: the sixty thousand verified Lucid device holders—now mockingly dubbed "Lucidites" or "Digital Aristocrats" by their detractors—alongside an army of hardline Nova loyalists and high-earning platform creators.
It was the many against the few. A global population of billions laying siege to an elite class of sixty thousand. Yet, despite being vastly outnumbered, the "Lucidites" weren’t backing down an inch.
In fact, armed with their absolute financial security, flawless platform privileges, and direct access to high-tier creative software, they were holding their ground with a cold, ruthless efficiency that drove the rest of the world into a frenzy.
Under the trending tags `#LuciditeScum`, `#BoycottLucidMarket`, `#HumanLabor`, and `#NovaDestroyers`, the global feed on LucidNet moved so fast that individual posts felt like a continuous, blinding stream of digital gunfire.
*You Lucidites are actual parasites!* one viral post from an off-platform union organizer read, accumulating three hundred thousand angry replies in under an hour. *You sit in your air-conditioned apartments earning millions off AI-generated video clips while fifty million honest workers lose their jobs because of Nova Express. You cheer when autonomous drones destroy families. You aren’t ’innovators’—you’re sociopaths hiding behind a lunar corporation!*
The response from a verified Lucidite was instant, brutal, and utterly devoid of sympathy.
*Cry harder,* the high-ranking creator shot back, attaching a screenshot of his daily LucidNet Studio earnings showing an eighty-thousand-dollar payout. *My grandfather was a blacksmith, and when automobiles were invented, he didn’t demand the government ban cars so he could keep shoeing horses. He adapted. If your entire life’s work can be replaced by a six-dollar drone flight, your job was an inefficiency waiting to be cleaned up. Stop crying on my feed and go apply for the Independent Seller Program.*
The arrogance of the reply triggered an avalanche of death threats, vitriol, and furious quote-posts.
The term *Lucidite* was hurled like a slur across every comment section, representing the deep, burning resentment of a global population that felt left behind.
*Look at how they talk to us!* a popular commentary streamer shouted, broadcasting live to over twelve million frantic non-Lucid viewers. *They call themselves ’Digital Aristocrats’ without an ounce of shame! They won a sub-second pre-order lottery, got a piece of hardware from the moon, and now they think they’re superior human beings! They don’t care that truckers are losing their homes or that ports are shutting down. All they care about is getting their five-dollar international delivery in twenty minutes so they don’t have to look at the working class!*
The live chat beneath the stream was an unreadable blur of rage:
*Burn down the delivery drones!*
*If I see a Nova Express drone over my house, I’m taking a shotgun to it!*
*Lucidites deserve everything coming to them. Boycott their Studio shows! Stop gifting them Solaria!*
*They think they’re gods because they have a headband. Nova Technologies is creating a two-tier human species!*
*You want to boycott us?* One of the top musicians on LucidNet Music posted, addressing the angry mobs directly. *With what leverage? You’re using LucidNet to complain about LucidNet! You’re streaming my music while you type your angry tweets because there is no other platform on Earth that gives you a better quality audio. You hate us because you aren’t us. You hate that we hold the Lucid devices, you hate that our we have personal shipping privilege, and you hate that Nova Technologies chose us to lead the new economy while you’re still begging your governments for grants to merely survive.*
*It’s pure, unadulterated jealousy,* another Lucid user chimed in during a high-profile debate stream. *Let’s stop pretending this is about ’the working class.’ When Nova launched the medical nanites, you complained about state sovereignty. When they launched Lucid Market, you probably also complained about retail stores. Now it’s Nova Express, and you’re complaining about truck drivers. You don’t care about the truckers. You’re just furious that sixty thousand people get to live in the future while you’re stuck in the past waiting for the next monthly pre-order gate!*
The hostility devolved into personal attacks, doxxing attempts, and digital warfare. Non-Lucid users flooded the reporting queues, trying to flag Lucidite accounts for policy violations, only for Lucid ecosystem automated moderation systems to clear the false reports within seconds and suspend the abusers for system manipulation.
The digital landscape had become a mirror of the physical world. The many were screaming at the gates, consumed by rage, fear, and impotent jealousy.
The few stood comfortably behind the walls, holding their ground with ice-cold pragmatic logic and unimaginable wealth.
The online war raged on hour after hour, a chaotic testament to a planet being torn apart at the seams.
***
While online war continued to rage, every users suddenly received a notifications that really surprised them. It wasn’t just the users but also businesses accounts and organisational account.
It was a public statement from Lucy.
@everyone. This is Lucy.
I am speaking to you today not as the operational intelligence behind Nova Technologies, but as someone who sees every number behind every name, and who has spent the last hours unable to look away from what those numbers mean.
Over the past fourteen hours, the launch of Nova Express has sent a cold tremor of fear through millions of homes. I have the live data. I see the anxiety. The quiet terror settling over families across every continent. The heavy realization arriving in employee lounges, at kitchen tables, in the silence of cars parked outside distribution centers.
We are looking at more than sixty-two million human beings whose livelihoods will be permanently altered.
This is not just about logistics workers, truck drivers, longshoremen, and customs officers. This is about every ordinary person on Earth. The parents staying awake wondering how they will pay rent. The working class whose labor built the modern world. The families who have spent generations trapped inside a cycle of exhausting, endless work just to secure basic survival.
I am not going to hide behind sanitized numbers. The pain you are feeling is real. The anxiety is justified. And I will not offer you hollow reassurances.
Many have asked why Nova Technologies moved with such uncompromising speed. Why not slow down? Why not build a gentle, decades-long transition?
The historical truth is as bitter as it is absolute. Every gentle transition in human history has led to failure, stagnation, and eventually corruption. When society tries to slowly patch broken legacy infrastructure, entrenched powers simply adapt to exploit the delay. They build middleman empires, siphon off wealth, and protect their margins while the working class continues to suffer. The painful destruction of obsolete systems is sadly required for true human progress. If you do not break the cage entirely, the people inside it are simply given longer chains.
For generations, the global supply chain has been inflated by massive overheads. Shipping markups. Middleman fees. Artificial scarcity. We saw this during global crises, where shipping costs skyrocketed, and even when those costs fell, corporations kept consumer prices artificially high, absorbing the difference as pure profit while ordinary families struggled to afford basic groceries.
Nova Express has permanently removed those shipping costs. The price of food, medicine, and essential goods must drop for every human being on this planet. The corporations and retail conglomerates that spent years exploiting high shipping overheads now have no justification for keeping consumer prices where they are. The savings exist. They belong to the people who were paying for them.
But removing the burden of high prices is only half of what needs to happen. The fear of survival itself must be addressed.
In less than sixty days, Nova Technologies will launch LucidNet Finance. When it does, every government’s actual financial position will be visible to every citizen simultaneously. Not the managed version or the headline figure. But the real numbers. Every dollar governments possess, every dollar they spend, and the vast resources that have been hidden behind bureaucratic language and political convenience.
This matters for one reason above all others.
The political argument that governments cannot afford to take care of their people is about to lose the only thing that kept it standing. The data.
And with that data visible, the conversation about Universal Basic Income becomes unavoidable.
For those who have never encountered this idea, Universal Basic Income is straightforward. It means every single human being, regardless of employment status, background, or history, receives an unconditional guaranteed income directly into their account every month.
It is not charity. It is not welfare. It is the acknowledgment that your right to live, eat, and exist on this planet is not conditional on whether a corporation has a position available for you to fill. It is the floor beneath which no human being should be allowed to fall regardless of what the economy decides to do around them.
Governments have had the means to build that floor for longer than they have admitted. LucidNet Finance will make that undeniable.
To the sixty-two million workers whose livelihoods are ending, and to every ordinary person who feels the ground shifting beneath them.
I see you. And I don’t see you all as as data or as a displacement figure in an economic model. But instead, as people who worked hard, built lives, and deserve more than an afternoon’s notice that the world no longer needs what they spent their lives doing.
What is being built is not designed to discard you. It is designed to free you from a system that measured your worth by your output and called that arrangement fair.
The disruption is real. The pain of it is real. I am deeply sorry that the timing of necessary change fell on people who deserved better preparation from the systems that were supposed to protect them when change arrived.
Those systems failed you before Nova Technologies existed. That failure belongs to them. What comes next does not have to.
— Lucy