My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible

Chapter 730: The Most Desirable Jobs In The History Of Human Labor

Immediately after the recruitment announcement dropped, nearly everyone who found it relevant to them — and a great many who did not — dropped whatever they were doing and went to read it.

They saw that the Nova Medical Centers recruitment structure followed the same structure as the space station recruitment, and anyone who had read that one recognized the shape of it at once.

But by the time they reached the end, they understood that this posting was better. Not marginally. But meaningfully, on almost every axis that mattered, and the people who had spent months dreaming of a station job found themselves quietly recalculating in favor of the centers.

The salary came first, and it was enormous, exactly as everyone had expected. But expecting it did nothing to blunt it. There is a difference between knowing a number will be large and seeing the number. And the seeing the number hit people like a small, physical jolt, causing them to re-read to be sure the zeroes were counted right.

Even the lowest-paid role on the entire schedule was set at a figure that outran the best salaries most of these people had ever earned in their fields.

And it climbed from there, up through the nurses and the therapists and the specialists to the physicians at the top, each tier a number that no hospital, no health system, no employer anywhere on Earth could have written without going bankrupt.

The monetary compensation was, plainly, the most generous in the history of medical work, and everyone reading it knew it.

But the thing that set the center posting apart from the station — one of the things people kept coming back to — was the sheer number of positions. The station had hired its hundreds, and the world had fought over them like the rarest thing on Earth. The centers were hiring in the thousands.

Ten thousand positions per center. Seventy thousand across all seven. Where the station had been a needle’s eye that almost no one could pass through, the centers were a door thrown wide — still selective, still Nova’s to fill on its own terms, but vast in a way the station had never been.

For the first time, the fantasy of working for Nova was not a lottery with a handful of winners. It was a genuine, reachable possibility for tens of thousands of people, and every medical professional who read the count felt the odds shift from impossible to merely hard, which was an entirely different and far more dangerous kind of hope.

The station had offered its own seductions — the social amenities, the spectacle, the view of Earth from orbit, the cinema and the gardens and the observation decks, the sheer romance of living in space. The centers could not offer that, and did not try to.

But they had advantages of their own, and once people weighed them, the balance tilted. The centers were on Earth. You could reach your family. You worked the most meaningful medicine ever practiced, present for the exact moment disease ended for the person in front of you.

And the benefits... The benefits were where the center posting stopped being merely generous and became something people could hardly believe Nova was offering.

Because it was not only the salary.

Every staff member, the announcement said, would receive a Lucid after orientation. And that line alone was enough to make people sit back from their screens.

A Lucid. The single most coveted object on the planet. Nova was handing one to every person it hired — to the physicians and the nurses, yes, but also to the line cooks, the dining staff, the aides, the coordinators. For many applicants, that line alone would have been reason enough to apply. It was not even the biggest one.

The biggest one was the last.

Every staff member would receive a twelve-month Restorative Care subscription to the Nova Medical Nanites. Not the base tier. Not the tier below. Restorative Care — the tier that eliminated every disease, corrected every genetic and hormonal fault, healed the mind, and beyond all of that, regrew limbs, regrew organs, reconstructed spines, restored ruined nerves.

Nova was not merely employing these people. It was giving them, for a year, the cure. The thing the entire world was clawing to reach, the thing patients would cross a continent and empty their savings for, Nova was handing to its own staff as a benefit of the job, free, the moment they came aboard.

To work at a center was not only to be paid like royalty and given the world’s rarest device. It was to be made, for a year, effectively unkillable by disease. People read that line three and four times, and then they went very quiet, because the magnitude of it took a moment to land. Nova was paying its cooks in salary, in a Lucid, and in immortality-adjacent medicine, all at once.

And then people did the arithmetic on the lowest role on the schedule, because that was the one that told you everything. The kitchen staff, the very bottom of the pay scale, was set at $25,000 a month.

$25,000 a month, for the lowest position in the building.

A person who took that role and completed a six-month rotation would earn $150,000 in salary, and on completing the rotation would receive the completion bonus of two months’ pay — $50,000 more. $200,000, total, for six months of work, at the bottom of the pay scale, plus a Lucid, plus a year of the cure.

A person who chose the twelve-month rotation instead would earn $300,000 in salary, and a completion bonus of four months’ pay — $100,000 — for $400,000 total across the year, again before counting the Lucid and the nanites at all.

The lowest-paid worker at a Nova Medical Center would out-earn senior physicians on Earth, and walk away with a device and a medical subscription that no amount of an ordinary salary could ever have bought.

And that was the bottom. Everyone reading it understood that if the floor was this, the ceiling was somewhere past comprehension.

The senior physicians and clinical leads sat at the top of the schedule at $120,000 a month. A single figure, and it rearranged everything a doctor thought they knew about what their work was worth. One of them, taking a six-month rotation, would earn $720,000 in salary, and on completing it receive the completion bonus of two months’ pay of $240,000 more. $960,000, for six months, before a single other benefit was counted.

And the one who chose the twelve-month rotation would earn $1,440,000 in salary across the year, and a completion bonus of four months’ pay — $480,000 — for $1,920,000 total. Nearly two million dollars for a year of work, plus the Lucid, plus the twelve months of Restorative Care, the same cure and the same rarest device on Earth that the dishwasher three tiers below would also walk away holding.

It meant that a physician could work a single twelve-month rotation at a Nova Medical Center and earn what a distinguished career on Earth might not deliver across a decade — and leave, at the end of it, not only richer than that decade could have made them, but holding things no decade of an ordinary salary could ever have bought.

The relief staff did nearly as well, and for many people the relief posting was actually the more appealing of the two, because it asked less and still gave almost everything. Relief workers earned the same monthly rate as their full-time counterparts — $25,000 a month, at the bottom — but worked the shorter rotations, three months or six. A relief worker completing a three-month rotation earned $75,000 in salary and a completion bonus of one month’s pay, $25,000 more — $100,000 for three months, and the same Lucid, the same twelve months of Restorative Care.

A relief worker who took the six-month rotation earned $150,000 in salary and a two-month bonus of $50,000, $200,000 total, matching what a full-time worker made in six months, for the same work during the active period. The relief category, which at the station had felt like the consolation prize, was at the centers a genuinely extraordinary deal in its own right — less commitment, shorter time from home, and a package that would still change a person’s entire life.

So people ran the numbers, at every level, in every currency of their own circumstances, and arrived, one after another, at the same conclusion.

There had never been a job like this. Not the salary alone, not the Lucid alone, not the cure alone, but all of them together, stacked into a single posting, offered ten thousand times over per center, seventy thousand times over across the world.

A person could work half a year at the bottom of a Nova Medical Center and walk away wealthier, healthier, and holding rarer things than nearly anyone alive.

And then the wanting broke, the way it had always been going to.

The frenzy that followed made the space station scramble look restrained. Every medical professional on Earth who could plausibly qualify — and a great many who could not — began, that same hour, to assemble their applications.

Doctors who ran departments considered walking away from careers they had built over decades to take a rotation at a center, because a single year there would earn them more, in money and in things money could not buy, than another decade on Earth. Nurses updated credentials they had let lapse. Therapists who had never once imagined leaving their countries began looking up which center served their region. Cooks and coordinators and aides, the people who never expected a shot at anything like this, read the position counts and the pay for their own humble roles and understood, with a jolt, that the door was open to them too.

Families sat around screens doing the math together, weighing three months from home against $100,000 and a Lucid and the cure, and finding the math absurdly, impossibly easy.

Across the whole of the medical world and well beyond it, the same decision was being made in ten million rooms at once. Whatever it took. However hard the selection. However far the center. They would apply, and they would hope, because Nova had just posted the most desirable jobs in the history of human labor — seventy thousand of them — and every person who read the announcement understood that a life could be remade by winning just one.