My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible

Chapter 731: Extraordinary Nova Technologies

The individual salary amount that would be paid to the staff wasn’t the the thing that got people talking.

It was the totals — the payroll by center, and the payroll combined across all seven — because the totals were where the individual figures stopped being a lucky person’s windfall and became a number the size of a nation’s budget.

Economists and analysts looked at the figures, ran their calculations, and took a cold, deep breath when they saw the staggering total Nova Technologies intended to pay its staff.

For just one center, Nova would be spending approximately $4.12B on salary alone. Across the seven combined, a whopping total of approximately $29B.

Looking at the numbers again, the analysts could not help but take another deep breath as they tried to process the scale of it. $29B in payroll, for seventy thousand people, worked out to an average of roughly $411,000 per person — a figure that sat above the $333,000 average at Goldman Sachs, the highest-paying major institution in the market.

Nova was set to pay its nurses, therapists, coordinators, and cooks a higher average wage than Wall Street paid its bankers. And this was one arm of the company, not the whole of it.

Then the analysts asked the only question that mattered to them, which was whether this arm could ever make money, and if so, when.

The first pass was brutal. The centers took in almost nothing. The only real revenue was the nanite subscription, and in the first year there were barely any subscribers, because the subscriber base had to be built one cured patient at a time.

Against a first-year cost running into the tens of billions, the division would post a loss so vast that, taken in isolation, it looked less like a business than a fire that money was being fed into.

No company on Earth spent thirty-odd billion a year to earn back a fraction of it. By every ordinary measure, the Medical Center arm was the worst enterprise ever conceived.

But the sharper minds kept modeling, and the picture turned, because they saw the one thing that changed everything: the subscriptions accumulated. Every patient cured became, so long as they kept their coverage active, a subscriber for life — and since letting it lapse meant the nanites went dormant and the protection vanished, almost no one ever would.

So the subscriber base did not merely grow. It compounded, year upon year, while the cost of running the centers stayed roughly flat. The models showed the loss shrinking with each passing year as the base swelled beneath it, until somewhere around the sixth or seventh year the accumulated subscription revenue finally crossed the cost line and the division turned.

After that it did not merely break even. It climbed, and kept climbing, because the base kept compounding while the centers kept costing the same, and what had begun as the largest loss-maker in the company became, on a long enough horizon, one of its largest and most durable profit engines — a planetary subscription business with the stickiest product ever devised, because the alternative to paying was one’s own death.

So the answer was yes, it would be profitable, but not soon, and not by the logic of any ordinary business. Nova was choosing to lose tens of billions for the better part of a decade in order to own, at the end of it, the recurring revenue of a healed world.

It was the patience of an entity that did not need the money now and could see further than any company had ever seen. The loss was not a miscalculation. It was an investment measured in years no public company could have survived, funded by an empire that earned the entire annual loss back in a matter of weeks.

And then someone pointed out that the payroll was not even the whole of it, and the analysts had to begin again, because two enormous costs had not yet been counted at all.

Every one of those seventy thousand workers would receive a Lucid.

They tried to put a value on that and found they could not do it cleanly, because a Lucid had no market price. It could not be bought at any figure, only won, ten thousand at a time, by a planet of billions.

But they could approximate the scale of what was being given away, and the approximation stopped them. Seventy thousand Lucids. The single most exclusive object on Earth, a device the overwhelming majority of humanity would live and die without ever touching, handed out as a condition of employment — to the physicians, yes, but equally to the aides and the kitchen staff.

Whatever a Lucid was worth was not the $700 cost of the device, because its worth had no ceiling, and seventy thousand of them represented a transfer of rare and coveted wealth that dwarfed the very salaries the analysts had just finished reeling from.

There was no line on any income statement that captured it, because the thing being given was, by design, priceless.

And beneath even that lay the subscriptions.

Every worker would receive twelve months of Restorative Care. At the listed price, that came to roughly twelve thousand dollars of product per worker, and something on the order of $840M in revenue that Nova was simply choosing not to collect across the seventy thousand.

But the analysts who wrote that number down knew it undersold the thing entirely, because the true value of Restorative Care was not a monthly fee. Its true value was a human life, made whole and held safe for a year against the diseases that emptied families.

That could not be priced against a subscription. And Nova was giving its workers, free, the exact thing the rest of the world was crossing continents and emptying its savings to reach.

And that was what the analysts kept circling back to, in the end — not the cost of these things, but what they said. A company does not give away its rarest device and its most valuable product to the people cooking its food unless it has decided that those people matter as much as anyone else it employs.

Nova drew no line between the physician and the other staff when it came to the things that could not be bought. Everyone who worked at a center would walk out holding the same Lucid and carrying the same cure, whatever their rank.

It was a statement, deliberate and staggeringly expensive, about how Nova regarded the human beings who worked for it, that it would spend past all reason to make sure the humblest of them left richer, safer, and more whole than any employer in history had ever left anyone.

The analysts, trained to admire companies that shaved every cost to the bone, had no model for it, because it was not a cost decision. It was a values decision, priced in the billions, and Nova had paid it without appearing to feel the weight.

Then, still not finished, they noticed the thing that had not been added to the tally at all: the food.

Because Nova was employing kitchen staff. Chefs, cooks, bakers in numbers, at every center. And that single fact told the analysts something the salary figures had not.

Nova could have fabricated the food. It had the means to produce meals to exact specification, endlessly, without a single human hand, and it would have cost a fraction of a full culinary workforce.

But it chose not to. It chose, instead, to hire thousands of people to cook real food, by hand, for the patients and for the staff alike, which meant that everyone inside a Nova Medical Center, the recovering and the working both, would be fed by people, not by machines.

To the analysts this was of a piece with the Lucid and the cure. Nova was, at every turn, spending money it did not have to spend in order to make the centers places of human care rather than efficient processing. A fabricated meal fed a body. A cooked one fed a person, and Nova had decided the difference was worth thousands of salaries.

So they turned to what the food would actually cost, and here they had to theorize, because Nova had said nothing about how it would be sourced.

The consensus formed quickly around the model of the space station, which grew its own food in its agricultural district — and the centers, which would be remote by design, terraformed into being on land Nova shaped to its liking, were even better suited to it.

The analysts reasoned that Nova would grow the bulk of what it needed onsite, and procure from Earth only what it could not easily grow: certain premium goods, particular produce, the specialty items a diverse regional population would want to taste of home. They settled on a working split — roughly seventy percent grown onsite, thirty percent procured — and ran the numbers.

Feeding a resident and working population of some twenty-two thousand per center, at the quality Nova plainly intended, came to roughly $328M a year in food per center if every scrap were purchased.

But at a seventy-thirty split, the procured portion fell to around $99M per center — near $690M across all seven. Not a vast number against Nova’s scale, but a real one, and a number that had not appeared anywhere in the payroll tally. Added to the salary, the first-year expenditure on staff and food together came to something on the order of $29.7B — call it $30B — before a single other operating cost was counted.

The supplies, the analysts assumed, would cost Nova almost nothing to procure, because Nova would not procure them. Medical materials, consumables, equipment, the endless inventory an ordinary hospital bought from a hundred vendors — Nova would probably fabricate all of it, onsite, as it fabricated everything. So the great recurring supply bill that would have crippled any normal hospital system simply did not exist on Nova’s books. It made its own.

Which left the analysts with the shape of the thing, and the shape was what unsettled them most. In the first year, Nova would spend roughly $30B on the salaries and the food alone, give away seventy thousand priceless devices and seventy thousand years of the most valuable medicine on Earth, fabricate everything else it needed, and take in almost nothing.

And it would do the same the year after, and the year after that — salary and agricultural procurement running near $30B annually, year upon year, holding steady while the losses slowly closed and the subscriber base compounded beneath them.

For the better part of a decade, this arm of Nova would be a river of money flowing one direction, out, into the healing of strangers, funded by the rest of the empire without complaint. And only years down the line, when the cured of the world had become the subscribers of the world, would the river finally reverse.

The analysts closed their models and sat back. They had come looking for a business and found something they did not have a name for — an enterprise built to lose more money than most companies would ever earn, for longer than most companies would ever survive, in order to become, eventually, unkillable.

It was not how anyone did business. It was how Nova did everything, which was to say, on a timescale and a scale of resource that made the ordinary rules of the thing simply cease to apply.

Nova was not playing the game badly. It had stopped playing the game at all. And there was no competing with a thing that did not need to win.