My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible

Chapter 732: The Illusionary Greener Grass On The Other Side

With two announcements and a monthly report, Nova Technologies had kicked off three frenzies, and it was now seeing the results of its actions.

This was especially so for the staff recruitment application. The staff application portal was open immediately after the announcement dropped, and everyone who qualified for a position had started gathering their documents to submit their application.

And those who had been expecting the staff recruitment or had been hoping for it, especially the concluded clinical trial staff, already had their documents available, and had submitted their applications immediately.

But while the frenzy to submit applications was going on, another conversation was brewing under it. And it was about how extraordinarily, absurdly brutal the odds of getting accepted were.

So far, Nova Technologies had posted two recruitments — excluding the clinical trial, where the staff had only been paid for the duration of the trial and were never permanent staff.

The medical center was Nova’s second posting, and while the odds of getting a position were far better than they had been for the space station, they were still, by any ordinary standard, punishing.

People began to run the numbers and the numbers were sobering. Seventy thousand positions across all seven centers sounded enormous until you set it against the pool of everyone on Earth who could plausibly fill one.

There were tens of millions of doctors, nurses, therapists, and specialists in the world. Tens of millions more cooks, and coordinators, and the countless people qualified for the support roles.

When the analysts and the applicants themselves tallied it, the estimate that emerged was staggering: somewhere around thirty-five million applications, worldwide, for seventy thousand jobs.

Roughly one position for every five hundred people who wanted it. A qualified, capable, deserving person had, on average, a one-in-five-hundred chance, and the great majority of those thirty-five million would end up with nothing but the application they had filed.

And then people looked closer, and saw that the one-in-five-hundred was only an average, and that the reality was far more uneven than that, because of the residency advisory.

Because had there been no advisory — had Nova simply thrown all seventy thousand positions open to the entire planet at once, one global pool, everyone against everyone.

The whole thing would have been a single, undifferentiated scramble of thirty-five million people fighting over the same seventy thousand slots, and every applicant everywhere would have faced the same flat, brutal one-in-five-hundred odds, with no structure to it at all.

The populous regions and the empty ones, the credentialed and the desperate, all mashed together into one planetary lottery. It would have been chaos of a purer and more hopeless kind, and worse than the odds themselves.

It would have stripped away every practical thing that made regional staffing work — the proximity, the shared language, the shorter road home, the cultural familiarity between a recovering patient and the people caring for them.

So Nova had added the advisory, and the advisory had brought order to the chaos. It asked applicants to apply, preferably, under their region of residency — to the center that served the part of the world they actually lived in.

It turned one impossible global scramble into seven regional ones, each with its own pool, its own pipeline, its own competition contained within itself. It was, plainly, Nova’s attempt to be fair — to give each region its own door rather than forcing the whole world through one.

But the advisory, for all that it was the more considerate arrangement, had also made the unfairness visible in a way the global pool would have hidden, because the regions were not the same size. Not even remotely.

When people mapped the thirty-five million applicants across the seven regions, the picture that came back was jagged and hard to look at.

The Asian region, funneling toward its single center, drew something on the order of fifteen million applications for its ten thousand positions — worse than one in fourteen hundred, the steepest odds on Earth.

Africa’s pool ran to five or six million. Europe’s to four and a half. And at the far end, Oceania, with its sparse population and its small workforce, drew barely a million applicants for the very same ten thousand positions — odds of roughly one in a hundred, better than an Asian applicant’s by a factor of fourteen.

Fourteen times. The same job. The same salary, the same Lucid, the same year of the cure. The same qualifications demanded. And a nurse in one region had fourteen times the chance of a nurse in another, decided by nothing but the accident of where each of them happened to have been born and to live.

It was unfair. Nobody pretended otherwise. But the unfairness, when people traced it back, did not lead to Nova. It led to the map.

The reason Asia’s applicant faced one-in-fourteen-hundred and Oceania’s faced one-in-a-hundred was simply that Asia held vastly more people than Oceania did, and always had, and there was nothing Nova could do about the distribution of human beings across the surface of the Earth.

The company had not made Asia crowded or Oceania empty. It had built one center for each region and asked people to apply where they lived, and the moment it did, the world’s own population map had drawn the odds, jagged and uneven, entirely on its own.

Nova had done the fairest thing available to it. The unfairness that remained was reality’s, not Nova’s, and no arrangement the company could have chosen would have erased it without making things worse for everyone.

And then there were the ones who thought they had found a way around it.

They were the sharp ones, or thought they were. They were the applicants in the crowded regions who ran the numbers, saw the chasm between one-in-fourteen-hundred and one-in-a-hundred, and thought the obvious thought.

Why apply where I live, into the worst odds on the planet, when I could apply to Oceania, or the Middle East, and face a fraction of the competition?

For a day or two the idea spread, whispered from applicant to applicant, a clever little exploit hiding in plain sight — until the calculations caught up with it online, and the exploit fell apart in front of everyone.

Because the moment anyone laid out the math, the flaw was obvious. The favorable odds in the small regions existed for exactly one reason: that only the small region’s people were applying to them.

The instant a wave of applicants from the crowded regions began pouring into Oceania to chase its one-in-a-hundred, Oceania’s one-in-a-hundred would vanish — flooded back toward the same brutal average as everywhere else, or worse.

The advantage could not survive being noticed. It could not survive being used. Every person who chased the easy region helped destroy the very thing they were chasing, and if enough people chased it, it would be gone before any of them arrived. The easy odds were a mirage that dissolved the instant a crowd walked toward it.

And beyond the math, there was the advisory itself, which had said preferably your region of residency — which meant that an applicant from one side of the world submitting into another region’s pool was already working against the grain of what Nova wanted, already marking themselves as the wrong fit for a posting built around regional staffing, already, in all likelihood, lowering their own real chances rather than raising them.

So the clever ones found themselves stuck, which was the cruelest part. They had seen the unfairness clearly, more clearly than most. They had understood, correctly, that their region had dealt them a terrible hand.

And when they reached for the one apparent escape, only to watch it dissolve under the arithmetic — to realize that chasing the easy region would either not help them, or would erase the easy region, or would quietly disqualify them, and possibly all three at once. There was no move.

The math had closed every door but the one in front of them, the crowded one, and left them standing there with the choice they had started with and no better version of it anywhere to be found. The greener grass on the other side turned to nothing the moment you stepped toward it.