My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible

Chapter 680: The Nightmare Scenario They All Are Avoiding (2)

The foreign ministries were faring even worse.

A classified briefing crossed a European foreign minister’s desk, marked with the crimson flag reserved for matters of supreme state security. A non-state actor was now actively recruiting, vetting, transporting, and housing the minister’s own nationals, physically removing them from the planet, under contracts governed by that actor alone.

Nova’s background assessment, the briefing noted with deep concern, appeared to rival the analytical depth of a national intelligence service. The government would have no formal record of who among its citizens was on that station, what non-disclosure agreements they had signed, or what sovereign rights they had agreed to waive.

The minister read the line about jurisdiction twice—not subject to the laws of any jurisdiction—and looked up at his assembled aides, asking what leverage they held.

The room was dead silent. The honest answer was none. The construction site was 384,000 kilometers past the absolute edge of where their authority meant anything.

The labor regulators thundered, because thundering was the only administrative action that remained to them. A national labor board in North America issued a formal, highly publicized notice demanding Nova Technologies bring its employment terms into immediate compliance with domestic federal employment law.

The notice was legally sound, flawlessly drafted, and completely, laughably powerless.

There was no corporate office to serve it on. There was no terrestrial soil it applied to. There was no court, military, or police force that could enforce it past the edge of the sky. The board knew this. They issued the notice anyway, because the alternative was to stand before the press and admit that a private company had built a realm where the state’s writ simply did not run.

The geopolitical reactions split along a line that few diplomats dared to say out loud.

The large, historic superpowers felt the creeping shadow of irrelevance and reached for the language of concern—issuing statements about sovereignty, planetary oversight, the safety of citizens, and the urgent need for Nova to "engage responsibly with the international community."

But the small nations smelled something entirely different.

A finance minister in a small coastal state, whose entire annual GDP was smaller than the wages Nova would pay its medical district in a single year, watched the portal with quiet calculation.

He realized that a few dozen of his citizens working on that station could send home fortunes in remittances that would alter his nation’s economy overnight. He instructed his office to find out, discreetly, whether Nova Technologies wished to establish formal diplomatic ties.

The big states wanted to contain Nova. The small states wanted in.

And then there were the national space agencies, who took the deepest, most humiliating wound, and were allowed to show it the least.

Inside the sprawling campus of a premier state space agency, dozens of senior engineers and flight directors gathered around the live construction feed on the main mission control screen, watching the way people gather at a window to watch a hurricane make landfall.

Every single man and woman in the room had spent their entire career operating on timelines measured in decades. The structure assembling itself on the screen—a self-sustaining research city at a Lagrange point, complete with gravity, agriculture, medicine, and permanent habitation—was the exact vision their own agency roadmaps had promised for the last quarter of the twenty-first century. Funding permitting. Politics permitting. Physics permitting.

Nova Technologies had it turning against the dark that afternoon, and had already posted job openings for the staff canteen.

A veteran flight director, who had spent ten years lobbying Congress for the budget to launch a single orbital habitat module, watched a five-kilometer residential district lock into place in real-time. He said nothing for a long while. Then he muttered, to no one in particular, that they had been beaten so thoroughly they hadn’t even understood they were in a race.

Their official public statement, released to the press the next morning, called the station "an impressive and historic milestone for all of humanity." Every single word of the PR release cost them a piece of their pride.

The governments that funded those space agencies asked a much colder question, and they asked it in closed-door sessions. How were their flagship national programs, their multi-billion-dollar budgets, and their decades of accumulated expertise standing fifty years behind a single company that had never asked them for a dime and clearly did not need their help?

That question rapidly turned into blame, and the blame turned toward budgets. The bitter legislative fights began that same week, entirely out of sight, with everyone in the room already knowing that shifting a few billion dollars around would change absolutely nothing.

The reactions ran in every conceivable direction. Employers feared for their staff. Treasuries feared for their tax revenue. Foreign ministries feared for their geopolitical reach. Regulators raged at their own irrelevance. Space agencies mourned in public and panicked in private. Small states courted, large states postured, and every institutional camp had a different grievance and a different demand.

And yet, by the end of that chaotic first day, every road led back to the exact same place.

The wage argument, the tax argument, the sovereignty argument—all of them were arguments Nova could simply out-wait, out-build, and out-reach. There was absolutely nothing to be gained by pressing on ground where Nova Technologies had no equal.

So, one by one, from every direction at once, the terrestrial institutions arrived at the single clause where Nova had finally written down a limit. The one place the company had said no instead of more. And they closed in on it together.

A prominent global women’s medical association was the first to put it into a formal, highly publicized statement. The space station rotation, the association noted, could not accommodate a pregnancy carried to term, nor the care of a young dependent child. The statement asked, with sharp, clinical precision, how a company capable of rewriting material physics and building fifty-kilometer orbital cities could not solve a biological reality that every terrestrial workplace had been forced to solve.

A labor regulator, realizing they could touch absolutely nothing else about the off-world contract, seized on this specific line like a drowning man grabbing a life preserver, because it was the one line that looked like a civil rights violation they recognized.

A prestigious policy institute asked which authority Nova Technologies believed it stood above to mandate such a thing, and then bitterly answered its own question using the company’s own terms—none.

Applicants who had spent the entire day vibrating with the excitement of going now sat with the clause open on their screens. Millions of women read that single sentence and began doing a much quieter, heavier kind of arithmetic than the one about tax-free savings.

By nightfall, the debate had leapt from the digital feeds of LucidNet and reached the mainstream airwaves.

The overwhelmed hospitals, the panicked finance ministries, the forums and the humiliated space agencies. All of their institutional desperation narrowed down to one single word.

"Why?"

Nova Technologies had not said anything all day but everyone were hoping that they will say something, some good, some bad.