Read Novel Full Chapter 740: Making a Loud Statement
Chapter 740: Making a Loud Statement
After Liam’s livestream months ago — the one where he revealed himself as the owner and founder of Nova Technologies, displayed his flight capabilities, and showed the molecular assembler transmute a rough rock into a bar of solid twenty-four-karat gold and a broken tree branch into a flawless green diamond — he had become extraordinarily, almost impossibly popular.
The number of people following him had skyrocketed overnight, cresting a staggering one billion followers on LucidNet in a matter of days. And it wasn’t only his own account that had surged. The accounts of everyone he followed swelled alongside his — his friends, Lucy, Daniel, Whitlock, and even the institutional account of the Bellmere Family Office.
Every one of them had become, overnight, among the most obsessively watched accounts on the platform.
The trouble, for the billions who followed them, was that they rarely gave anything to watch. Liam almost never posted. The boys were nearly as silent. Only the girls broke the drought now and then — and of them, it was Elise who posted the most, who understood the rhythm of an audience, who knew how to feed one.
Which was precisely why the group had settled on her to host the livestream that would change everything. And precisely why, the instant she went live, the viewer count leapt into the tens of thousands within seconds, and kept climbing.
"Hi, everyone. Welcome to my livestream," she said into the internal camera of her exosuit, with warmth in her voice.
The stream ran in a double-display format. A small window in the top-right corner showed Elise’s own face. The larger display beneath it showed the view in front of her, which allowed the audience to see whatever she was looking at.
Elise crouched slightly, then pushed off, launching herself high into the air in Callisto’s feeble gravity, rising far higher and slower than any leap on Earth could ever have carried her.
At the top of the arc she looked down at the ground drifting beneath her, the camera capturing the ancient, crater-pocked grey of it.
"We are currently on the surface of Callisto," she said. "One of the moons of Jupiter."
The words seemed to knock the breath clean out of her audience. The comment section, which had been scrolling past like a rushing river, simply stopped, frozen mid-flow as tens of thousands of viewers took a collective second to process what they had just been told.
Then it erupted. Faster than before, more frantic, as a wall of disbelief and excitement came crashing upward through the feed.
WAIT. CALLISTO?? A MOON OF JUPITER??
How are they even THERE, that’s like 600 million km away
Nova shuttles fr fr, they actually went to JUPITER
ELISE POSTING FROM ANOTHER PLANET is the most unserious thing I’ve ever seen and I love it
And then the reaction stopped being a stream and became a flood, with the count of live viewers climbing so fast the number seemed to stutter as it rose, tens of thousands pouring in every few seconds as the notification rippled outward across LucidNet and every person who saw it clicked, and every person who clicked immediately told someone else.
The disbelief came first, in wave after wave.
no. NO. there is no way. she did not just casually say she’s on a moon of jupiter like she’s telling us she’s at a coffee shop
people are going on VACATION to Jupiter now?? while I’m here choosing between work and home??
600 million kilometers. do you understand how far that is. light takes over half an hour to get there. and she’s just. up there. chatting.
I need everyone to understand that until literally today the furthest any human, besides Liam, had EVER gone was the moon. OUR moon. and she’s at JUPITER’S moon like it’s nothing
Then came the ones doing the math, the ones who couldn’t help themselves, the engineers and the students and the space nerds who had spent their whole lives dreaming about exactly this and never believed they’d live to see it.
as someone who actually studies this; the fact that they got a crewed vessel to the Jovian system AT ALL is beyond anything any space agency on earth could dream of doing this century. we are talking about a capability gap of like 100+ years, casually, on a girl’s vlog
the radiation alone near jupiter would fry a normal ship and everyone in it. whatever’s shielding them is science we do not have. this is insane. this is actually insane
NASA has been trying to figure out how to land HUMANS on MARS for decades and Liam’s friends just went to Jupiter. for fun. as a background for a livestream.
I got into aerospace engineering because of a documentary about the Voyager probes. it took Voyager years to reach Jupiter. she got there and is complaining about the temperature. I need to sit down.
Then the ones who simply couldn’t hold the scale of it, who kept circling back to how ordinary Elise was being about the most extraordinary thing they had ever seen.
the way she just LEAPT and floated back down like it’s a trampoline park I’m going to lose my mind
imagine your friend’s story on socials is just "hey guys 💕 quick update, I’m on a moon of jupiter today"
we went from "wow the space station is cool" to "casual jupiter vlog" in like a month. this company is going to give me whiplash before it gives me a heart attack
my grandfather watched the first moon landing on a black and white tv. I’m watching a girl vlog from Jupiter’s moon on my phone. what a thing to be alive for.
I don’t think people realize we are watching history. not history like a headline. history like a before-and-after line drawn through the whole human species. there’s before this stream and there’s after it.
The viewers count crossed a hundred thousand and it didn’t look like it would be slowing down anytime soon. It crossed a hundred and fifty thousand as the clip was already being ripped and reposted to a dozen other platforms, as news desks that had been idling on a slow afternoon suddenly scrambled, as the words Liam’s friends, Jupiter, livestream began to climb every trending list on Earth in the space of a single minute.
In less than five minutes since the livestream started, the viewers count hit three hundred thousand viewers. And the number was still climbing.
Elise didn’t so much as glance at the comments. She had understood, from the way Liam framed everything, that this was not simple showing-off. He was making a statement and it was a deliberate, and.enormous one.
Though he hadn’t said as much, she’d felt. And so she made a decision of her own that if Liam wanted to make a statement, then she was going to help him make the loudest one in the history of the platform.