Read Novel Full Chapter 741: Making A Loud Statement (2)
Chapter 741: Making A Loud Statement (2)
"According to my exosuit’s telemetry," Elise said, as the livestream went on, her tone shifting into something more informative, drawing the audience in with detail, "Callisto’s surface temperature right now is about minus one hundred and forty degrees Celsius. And the air —" she gave a small laugh — "well, there is no air. None at all. It’s a vacuum. In conditions like these, a human being needs protection just to exist for more than a few seconds. Which is why my friends and I are all wearing vac suits, and over those, our exosuits."
She let that settle in before continuing, her voice dipping into mock-seriousness.
"And that’s not even counting the radiation. We’re in deep space, so radiation is everywhere out here. Without shielding, it would be another thing trying very hard to kill us. That’s the price of standing on a moon of Jupiter."
Then she turned, panning the camera slowly across the group — Matt, Kristopher, Alex, Harper, Kristy, Stacy, Lana. Every one of them looked slightly bulky in their suits and exosuits, waving at the camera, with their grins hidden by their helmet, as they were all unmistakably armored against the killing cold and the vacuum and the radiation.
Elise was careful, very careful, to keep one figure just out of frame.
"As you can see," she said lightly, "we’re all bundled up. Fully protected. Every one of us."
And then she turned the camera.She panned it, slow and deliberate, onto Liam who was standing there in nothing but ordinary casual clothes, the same clothes a man might wear to walk down a street on Earth, with Yanxia clinging to his side like a koala, equally unprotected, equally unbothered, the pair of them looking for all the world as though they were posing for a holiday photo rather than standing on the surface of a moon six hundred million kilometers from home.
"But then," Elise said, her voice deceptively casual, "there’s this guy. And his... sister. Who are just... built different."
She let the camera rest on them.
"They’re out here on the very edge of the reachable solar system. On the surface of Callisto. In casual clothes. Without a vac suit, exosuit or protection of any kind whatsoever." A beat. "If this is a flex, then it’s a whole new level of flex."
This time the comment section did not merely pause. It went utterly, completely silent. It was a full, uncanny minute of nothing, as an audience that had now swelled past three hundred thousand people sat staring at their screens, trying and failing to process what they were looking at.
The vac suits didn’t matter. The exosuits didn’t matter, mind-shattering as that hardware was on its own. None of it mattered, because the thing that had seized the entire audience by the throat was far simpler and far more impossible than any piece of technology.
Liam Scott was standing on the surface of a moon of Jupiter — in the vacuum of deep space, at minus one hundred and forty degrees, bathed in radiation that should have been killing him — in a shirt and trousers, breathing air that did not exist, entirely, completely fine.
And the young girl hugging him like a koala was doing exactly the same.
Then the silence broke, and the feed did not so much scroll as detonate.
*WHAT*
*WHAT AM I LOOKING AT*
*he’s not wearing a suit. HE’S NOT WEARING A SUIT. am I insane??*
*It’s editing. It has to be editing. There’s no way—*
*the little girl too?? she’s just VIBING in space???*
*this isn’t technology anymore. a machine isn’t doing this. HE’S doing this*
*Nova makes gadgets. gadgets don’t let you BREATHE VACUUM. what is he*
*is he even human*
The comments came faster than any human eye could follow. Thousands of comments per second, making it look like a solid roaring wall of text tearing upward through the feed so fast it blurred, and the viewer number that had been climbing in the hundreds of thousands began to leap by whole hundreds of thousands at a time as the clip escaped the stream entirely and detonated across every corner of the internet at once.
The deniers came first, clinging to the last shred of a world that made sense.
*green screen. compositing. it HAS to be. a person cannot be in a vacuum without a suit, that’s not an opinion, that’s physics*
*it’s definitely a hidden suit that lets him breathe in vacuum and survive -140°C and radiation is just... a suit. that’s still the most insane technology ever made. there is no version of this that is normal.*
*there is no material, no suit, no technology, nothing that lets a human stand exposed in that environment. the vacuum alone. the cold alone. the radiation alone. any ONE of them kills you in seconds. all three at once and he’s just STANDING there. I have no explanation. I have nothing.*
*the human body in vacuum: your blood boils, your lungs rupture, you lose consciousness in under 15 seconds and die in about 90. that’s the science. he is breaking the science. live. on camera. right now.*
*we keep saying "how" but I don’t think you understand there is no how. there is no known how. this is a person doing something a person cannot do and there is no asterisk*
Then the ones circling the little girl, because somehow that was worse.
*THE CHILD. everyone’s staring at him but LOOK AT THE KID. she’s hanging off him half asleep in the vacuum of space like she’s bored. a CHILD. doing this. casually.*
*the fact that she’s not even paying attention. she’s on a moon of jupiter with no protection and she looks like she’d rather be taking a nap. what is this family*
*if a random little girl in that family can survive open space then this isn’t a Liam thing. this is a BLOODLINE thing. they’re all like this. every single one of them.*
Then the ones who had stopped trying to explain it at all, and had simply arrived at the only conclusion left.
*I keep reaching for a word and the only one that fits is one I don’t want to say out loud*
*we were calling him the richest man alive. the smartest man alive. that’s not it. that was never it. we were describing the wrong thing entirely.*
*Nova was never the scary part. the company, the tech, the station — we could wrap our heads around that, it was just really really advanced. THIS we cannot wrap our heads around. this is the man himself. the tech was never the ceiling. HE was.*
*a god. I’m sorry. I’m just going to say it. what else do you call a being that stands in the void of space and breathes. that’s not a man with good gadgets. that’s a god with a company.*
*is he even human* — the comment repeated, again and again, hundreds of times over, from hundreds of different people arriving at the exact same three words in the exact same moment, because it was the only thing left to say.
Across the entire planet, the story was collapsing in real time — the comfortable story the world had been telling itself for months. Nova was ahead. Nova had the best toys. Liam Scott was a brilliant, absurdly wealthy man with technology a century past everyone else’s, and that was frightening, but it was a frightening thing the mind could still hold, because it was *technology*, and technology could — someday, somehow — be caught, copied, understood, matched.
That story died on Elise’s livestream.
Because no machine was doing this. There was no suit beneath the ordinary clothes, no ship hovering overhead, no device between Liam and the killing void. This was not Nova’s power. This was *his*. The man himself, personally, in his own body, standing at the edge of the reachable solar system as calmly as another person might stand on a street corner, doing the single most impossible thing any human being had ever done, live, in front of the entire world.
And as the viewer count screamed past a million and kept climbing, past two million, past three, as news anchors interrupted broadcasts and governments’ analysts froze, and a billion private conversations halted all at once, the same realization detonated in millions of minds together.
It was the quiet, ground-shifting understanding that they had spent all this time afraid of the wrong thing. They had been watching the company, when they should have been watching the man.
What is he?
Not who but what.
The question spread across the world like a crack across glass, and it had no answer because the thing they were looking at had no place in anything humanity thought it knew.