My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible

Chapter 743: He Really Is Built Differently

But scientists were scientists, and even when handed the impossible, the reflex did not die. Having been forced to conclude that the answer lived in his body rather than in any device, a great many of them turned, almost helplessly, to the next question.

What would a body even need to be, for this to be possible? Even in the slightest?

They began, cautiously, to itemize it. And this wasn’t because they believed it could exist, but because laying out the requirements would make the true scale of the impossibility clear in a way nothing else could.

For a body to achieve something like that, it would need, first, to be sealed against pressure without being sealed at all. A body that could stand in a vacuum without its fluids boiling, without its dissolved gases tearing it apart from within, would need every surface — skin, eyes, the wet lining of the lungs — to somehow hold internal pressure against an external nothing.

No membrane in known biology did this. Cells were not built for it. To manage it, a body would need a structural integrity at the cellular level that simply had no precedent in any living thing that had ever been catalogued.

It would need, second, to breathe without air. And this was the one they kept circling back to, because it was the one that broke them most cleanly.

Every living thing on Earth ran on the same fundamental bargain: fuel plus oxygen, burned to make energy, waste breathed out. Take away the oxygen and the fire goes out; the brain, the most energy-hungry organ in the body, begins to die within minutes.

For a body to survive without air, it could not merely hold its breath. It would have to run on something else entirely — some other source of energy, some other process, a metabolism that did not depend on the atmosphere at all.

And this wasn’t something that can be achieved by a modified human biology. But a different kind of biology, one that had thrown out the oxygen bargain the rest of life had been built on for four billion years.

And Liam Scott was not merely surviving without air. He was talking. Speech required moving air across the vocal cords, and there was no air to move — and yet his friends heard him, the microphones caught everything he has been saying, he laughed and joked and spoke as easily as ever. Whatever helped him to achieve that did not even need the thing that every other human voice was made of.

It would need, third, to be immune to radiation that shredded DNA, which meant either a genetic structure that could not be damaged the way normal DNA could, or one that repaired itself faster than the damage could accumulate, at a rate so far beyond human cellular repair that the comparison was meaningless.

And fourth, it would need to hold its own temperature in an environment that respected none, generating and shedding heat by some regulation the human body did not possess.

Each requirement alone described something that was not human. Together they described something that was not biological, at least not in any sense the word had ever carried.

A body that ignored pressure, ran without oxygen, shrugged off radiation, and set its own temperature was not an improved human being. It was not even a creature the tree of life had a branch for.

It was a thing that obeyed a different set of rules than living matter obeyed, and the scientists, itemizing it, understood that they had not been describing a possible biology at all.

They had been describing, point by point, everything a body would have to stop being in order to do what they were watching Liam Scott do.

There was no gene for it. There was no mutation, no enhancement, no augmentation, no engineered organism that got you there, because "there" was not a place on the map of biology. It was off the map entirely.

Whatever Liam was, the honest ones admitted to themselves, the requirements did not point toward a more advanced human. They pointed away from humanity altogether, toward a category the life sciences did not have and had never needed, because until this moment, nothing had ever existed to put in it.

And that was where the theorizing stopped, not because they ran out of things to say, but because the last thing left to say was the one none of them wanted to be the first to write down.

That the reason they could find no biological explanation was that they had been asking a biological question about something that was not, in the end, answerable by biology.

That the man breathing in the vacuum of a moon of Jupiter, with a child asleep against his side, was not a puzzle their science had failed to solve.

He was a thing their science was not equipped to hold and that the failure was not in their effort. It was in the assumption, held quietly by every one of them until this exact moment, that the rules that governed every living thing they had ever studied also governed him.

The same scene repeated itself in capital after capital.

And down in the public feed, the ordinary people of the world were coming apart in, the comments tearing upward past the point of legibility, thousands a second, a single roaring smear that no one could read and everyone kept adding to.

*there’s no suit under there right? tell me there’s a suit*

*the government has a FILE on this man. imagine being the person who has to update the file now. update it to WHAT*

*we spent a year arguing about where his money came from lmaooo his MONEY. look at him. look where he’s STANDING*

*this isn’t a man with a company. this is something wearing a man’s face and running a company as a hobby*

*what do you even do with this information. what does a country DO*

*is he even human is he even human is he even human*

The last three words repeated down the feed hundreds of times over, from hundreds of different people arriving at the same place at the same instant, because it was the only question left and it had no answer.

And that was the thing that truly unnerved the watching governments — not the impossibility itself, staggering as it was, but what the impossibility meant.

For a year they had comforted themselves with a story they could survive. Liam Scott was a young man of unexplained but enormous wealth, backed by a company whose technology was simply decades — a century, even — ahead of everyone else’s.

That was frightening, but it was a frightening thing that fit inside the world. Wealth could be traced, eventually. Technology could be studied, copied, matched, someday. A company could be regulated, pressured, negotiated with. There were levers. There were always levers.

But this broke every one of them because a man standing alive and unbothered in the vacuum of deep space was not a problem of wealth, and it was not a problem of technology. It could not be audited, could not be traced, could not be grounded and inspected, could not be summoned before a committee to explain itself.

There was no lever to pull, because the thing on the screen did not exist within the system that levers operated on. Every tool the great powers of the Earth possessed for understanding and controlling the powerful was a tool for handling people, and the men and women watching the feed were slowly, sickeningly coming to understand that they might not be looking at a person at all, or at least not only a person, and that whatever Liam Scott truly was, it had never once been within their reach, and never would be.

It’s been barely an hour since the livestream started and the world had already lost its mind.