My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible

Chapter 733: We Are Sold Out

Time passed like a rushing river and half the month has already passed.

Conversations surrounding Nova Medical Nanites public rollout, the coming Nova Medical Centers that Nova Technologies intends to build for the product’s rollout, and the staffing were still ongoing. And the conversations were getting even more heated as the days went by.

Less than a week after the staff recruitment announcement dropped, everyone that qualified for a position had already submitted their applications, and they all took Nova Technologies’ residency region advice.

And now, the Nova Medical Nanites designated AGI extension was processing the 35M applicants’ information, sorting them out gradually, and filing those that passed into their regional categories.

The frenzy of qualified nations to host the Medical Centers for their particular region had come to an end, as they all had submitted their requests and made sure they met Nova Technologies’ criteria. Now, all they had to do was wait.

But the waiting felt like a chore, because they were all tensed to hear Nova’s response. It was in times like that that governments wished they had an inside man who could give them inside information on Nova’s inner workings — or better still, a way to directly influence the company’s decision-making.

But both were impossible, and the only person on Earth who had any real link to Nova could not help them even if he wanted to, which he did not.

Whitlock, at JP Morgan, held the closest thing to a relationship anyone outside Nova possessed, and it was worth precisely nothing here. He could not tell a government which parcel of land Nova favored, because he did not know. He could not nudge a decision, because there was no lever to nudge.

So the only thing the nations could do was wait, and agonize over how long Nova was taking to reach a decision — even though the company had said plainly, in the announcement itself, that it would respond thirty days after posting.

The date was written down. It was not a mystery. And still the governments burned through the days as though the silence were a judgment being deliberately withheld, because that was what waiting did to people who had staked everything on an answer they could not influence.

They read meaning into the quiet that was not there. They wondered if the delay meant their submission had displeased, if a rival’s parcel had impressed more, if some clause they had agreed to had been agreed to wrongly.

There was nothing to read. Nova was simply running out its own clock, indifferent to the ministries pacing behind theirs. But no government could sit still in front of a thing this large, and so they did not sit still. They waited badly, and they waited loudly, and they got nowhere for the effort.

Because these countries could not imagine passing up the opportunity of a century. To host a Medical Center was the door to becoming geographically relevant, to lifting a nation’s standing in a single stroke — the mandatory gateway through which an entire region’s sick, and an entire region’s money, would flow.

The prize was too large to refuse and too scarce to share, and so they waited, seven regions’ worth of governments, each of them staring at the same 30-day clock and each of them unable to do a single thing to move it.

In the midst of all that, the biggest and most sensitive frenzy was still ongoing — the rage between nations, institutions, and corporations to get their hands on a research zone.

In just fifteen days, all five large research zones, at their staggering $10B a year and their 5-year minimum paid upfront, had been snatched up. $50B each, committed in a single stroke, $250B total — and they were gone before the second week was out.

There would never be more than five Large Zones. This was something Nova had said so from the beginning, and the finality of that number was what had turned the scramble for them into something close to war.

Because the five zones had not gone to the worthiest. They had gone to the fastest, and the fastest were the richest, and everyone who had lost understood the distinction and hated it.

It was not the laboratories with the best science that took the Large zones. It was the entities that could put $50B on the table in a matter of days — and there were vanishingly few of those on Earth.

And they were, sovereign wealth funds that moved trillions without straining. Nations whose treasuries could absorb the sum as a line item. A bare handful of corporations sitting on cash mountains so vast that a $50B commitment was a board decision rather than a fundraising campaign.

Those were the players who took the five and they took them not always because their research demanded it but because the zones were the scarcest thing Nova had ever offered to institutions, and scarcity of that order was worth owning for its own sake.

The institutions that had the science but not the liquid billions — the great universities, the brilliant mid-tier firms, the research bodies whose work would actually have justified a Large zone — watched the five zones vanish in a fortnight and could do nothing but rage, because they had never really been in the running at all.

They could not conjure $50B quickly. No amount of merit closed that gap. By the time a university had assembled a consortium and a government backer and begun to structure the financing, the zones were already leased, already gone, already the permanent property of whoever had held the cash on the day the portal opened.

And below the Large zones, the same brutal logic worked its way down through the tiers. The twenty Medium zones, at $9B apiece upfront, went nearly as fast — 18 of them claimed inside the fortnight, again by the nations and the giants, again by liquidity rather than merit, leaving 2 stragglers for a second wave that was already forming and already desperate.

The Small and Mini zones, cheaper but still measured in the hundreds of millions and the low billions, filled more slowly, because their buyers were the ones who had to raise the money first — the universities scrambling for backers, the mid-tier firms arranging debt, the smaller nations pooling what they had, the well-funded startups praying a corporate patron would cover what their venture rounds could not.

Those tiers were a slower, quieter scramble, but no less anxious, because the same truth governed all of it: there were only so many zones, they were filling by the day, and every institution assembling its financing could feel the door closing while it counted its money.

By the fifteenth day, when the accounting was tallied, the scale of what had already moved was almost difficult to hold. The five Large zones, gone. Most of the Medium, gone. A steady share of the Small and Mini, gone, with the rest going daily.

Roughly $470B had been committed to Nova, upfront, in barely two weeks — nearly half a trillion dollars, paid into the accounts of a company that had built the station those zones sat inside for a fraction of the sum.

It was more money than most nations saw in years, moving to a single private entity in a fortnight, for the right to rent rooms in orbit. And the waitlists behind the filled tiers were already lengthening, thick with the names of the deserving and the slow, every one of them a university or a firm or a smaller nation that had wanted in, had the will to be in, and had simply been too poor or too late to beat the rich to the door.

Underneath all that, the tourist portal was open too — and it fared no better. The cap on visitors aboard at any one time was 5,000 bookings, and every one of them was claimed within the hour, the station booked solid from the moment the portal went live.

The station was, effectively, sold out — not for a night or a week, but for as far ahead as anyone could see, and the waitlist behind it swelled by the hour with people who might wait years for a single slot.

Because it was not only nations and institutions fighting to get onto the space station. It was people, too, throwing themselves at the 5,000 doors the way the powerful were throwing themselves at the zones, and finding them just as firmly, just as immediately, closed.