My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible

Chapter 678: A Question Poised To Nova Technologies

The employment portal did not read like a job listing; it read like a doorway into a post-scarcity economy.

The figures that caught the public’s attention first were at the bottom of the dining sector—the entry-level roles, the positions a person could hold without a university degree or specialized credentials.

A commis chef, the lowest rung in a fine dining kitchen who portioned ingredients and never plated a dish that left the pass, carried a base salary of fourteen thousand dollars a month. A waiter earned fourteen thousand. A host earned twelve thousand.

For a brief moment, the numbers felt abstract, the way extreme wealth loses meaning on a screen. Then, people across six continents ran the small, personal arithmetic that made the reality sink in.

In São Paulo, a line cook named Rafael paused the livestream on his phone and opened his calculator app. Fourteen thousand dollars a month translated to one hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars a year.

At the churrascaria where he had worked six days a week for six years, he earned nine hundred dollars a month. He typed the calculation three times because his thumb kept trembling over the screen.

Across LucidNet, the discussion feeds were moving so fast that individual posts blurred into a continuous cascade.

*"You are all missing the fundamental math here,"* wrote the former HR director whose initial post had started the global frenzy. *"Look at your living expenses up there. Zero. Housing is free. Every meal in every restaurant is free. Full medical care is free. Entertainment, gyms, spas—all included at zero cost. There is no rent, no grocery bill, no utilities, no transit fees, and no taxes. That monthly figure isn’t just your gross salary; it is your pure net savings. Every single cent goes straight into your bank account untouched."*

That reframing spread across community spaces within minutes. People stopped reading the compensation as a standard wage and started viewing it as an unassailable financial foundation.

A waiter completing a single twelve-month rotation would return to Earth with one hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars in base earnings, a fifty-six-thousand-dollar completion bonus, and twelve months of living costs that never touched his bank balance. To top it off, he would permanently retain a Lucid device—the single most sought-after piece of hardware on the planet.

As users scrolled further up the portal, the professional roles pushed the global realization even deeper.

A junior nurse earned twenty-five thousand dollars a month. A senior nurse earned thirty-five thousand. In a overcrowded hospital ward in Manila, a nurse named Grace read the figure on her break and sat quietly in the breakroom, unable to stand up for several minutes.

She possessed a nursing license, eleven years of grueling ward experience, and a mother whose daily medication she paid for in meager installments. Twenty-five thousand dollars a month was more than she had earned across three full years of relentless night shifts.

Higher up, a staff surgeon carried a monthly base of ninety-five thousand dollars. A medical director earned one hundred and ten thousand dollars a month.

Elite physicians who already earned comfortable six-figure salaries on Earth sat staring at numbers that obliterated terrestrial medical compensation, attached to a facility offering Recovery Pods and Advanced Tier Medical Nanite coverage that no hospital on Earth could match.

Then, the global community reached the apex of the administrative listings.

The Station Director carried a monthly base salary of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars—four point two million dollars a year. The twelve-month completion bonus alone was an additional one point four million dollars.

A viral commentary post pointed out that the individual appointed to manage the space city would out-earn the chief executives of most Fortune 500 companies, while living rent-free at the edge of the Earth-Moon system.

*"People keep calling this offer generous,"* wrote a prominent labor economist in a widely shared essay. *"It isn’t generosity. Generosity is optional and emotional. This is Nova Technologies unilaterally declaring what an hour of human life is worth when there is no legacy labor market to anchor it to, no artificial corporate markup to protect, and no political minimum wage law reaching the site. They set the baseline alone. And the baseline they set makes every terrestrial wage look like an insult. That should terrify traditional corporate executives far more than it excites job seekers."*

The excitement won regardless.

By the second hour, the flood of incoming traffic to the employment portal hit Nova’s off-world servers with a volume that would have paralyzed any server architecture on Earth. Yet, there was no loading bar, no queue system, and no server crash. The application pages rendered instantaneously for billions of users simultaneously.

The sheer scale of the recruitment drive settled over the public slowly. These were not a handful of symbolic positions; there were over a thousand open slots. Sixty full-time server positions in the casual dining district alone, with sixty relief rotation staff paired right behind them. Sixteen line cooks in quick service. Twelve junior physicians. Eight lifeguards.

In Lyon, a master sommelier reviewing the two open cellar positions realized he was one of perhaps a few hundred people on Earth with the precise qualifications required—and the realization felt less like a long shot than a direct, professional summons.

Then, a second wave of realization swept through the forums, shifting the mood from economic excitement to absolute awe.

*"None of these listings belong to tenant entities,"* a user pointed out in a thread with tens of millions of views. *"Read the header again. Every single position in this portal is for Nova Technologies’ direct operational staff. The space station spans fifty-five kilometers—the size of Manhattan. According to the announcement, there would be one hundred and thirty-five research zones leased out to global universities, pharmaceutical giants, and research institutes, plus millions of square meters of commercial real estate beyond them. Hotels, private laboratories, corporate hubs. Every single one of those tenant entities will hire their own workforce on their own terms. This portal is just the baseline employer. There are going to be hundreds of independent companies hiring up there if Nova Technologies opens it up to other companies."*

The thought landed with massive weight. Humanity had been staring at a single corporate job list and mistaking it for the total capacity. It was merely the seed. A self-sustaining orbital civilization was taking shape, and it would eventually require a massive human population to thrive.

However, during the third hour, buried within a thread that had accumulated millions of replies, a different kind of question began to surface.

A user in Toronto, a certified midwife with fifteen years of clinical experience, had read through the eligibility guidelines twice. She quoted a specific paragraph directly into the thread: *"The space station rotation is a continuous posting of six to twelve months in a closed environment 384,000 kilometers from Earth. It cannot accommodate pregnancy carried to term during a rotation, or the primary care of a dependent child."*

Underneath the quote, she wrote a single, quiet line: *"So a woman can work anywhere on that fifty-five-kilometer station, provided she doesn’t enter motherhood during her contract. Is anyone else going to address this, or are we all pretending it isn’t written there?"*

It was not just her.

The quoted clause began to move rapidly across social networks. It surfaced in professional medical forums, where female physicians questioned why an entity capable of synthesizing medical nanites and building orbital megastructures could not accommodate standard pregnancy care in microgravity.

It surfaced on political legal blogs, where commentators pointed out that while the policy violated virtually every terrestrial labor law on Earth, Nova Technologies had explicitly stated that its employment terms were governed by Nova alone and were not subject to the laws of any nation.

By evening, the debate had crossed over into mainstream broadcast media.

On a major global news network that maintained a dedicated nightly segment analyzing Nova Technologies, the anchor set aside the staggering salary data for the final segment of the broadcast. She brought the eligibility section onto the main screen, highlighting the clause in stark white text.

"Nova Technologies has just introduced the most lucrative, life-changing employment package in human history," the anchor stated, looking directly into the camera. "Yet, attached to that package is a strict operational condition that, on Earth, would trigger immediate federal lawsuits and political condemnation. The station will not accommodate a active pregnancy. It will not accommodate the primary care of a dependent child. Nova has put this in writing, and it has positioned its operations 384,000 kilometers away, beyond the reach of every court on Earth."

She paused, leaning forward. "So we would like to ask the question that millions of working women are asking tonight. Why?"

The news broadcast ended, but the question remained.

It hung over thousands of active LucidNet threads, community spaces, and media feeds as the night shift began on the live construction stream—where the glowing swarm of drones continued to weld the station’s frame against the silent dark, the countdown timer ticking steadily toward a future that was arriving faster than humanity could process.

And behind the glowing screens, far above the atmosphere, Nova Technologies had not yet issued a single word in reply.