My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible

Chapter 745: An Aftereffect Of A Casual Conversation

The livestream continued, but after everything that had been revealed so far, the world genuinely no longer knew how to keep watching it.

People stayed glued to their screens all the same, as they simply had no framework left for what they were seeing, no way to process one impossibility before the next arrived, so they watched in a kind of stunned, helpless trance, absorbing revelation after revelation that reordered their understanding of reality and being given no time to recover between them.

And in the middle of all that, almost as an afterthought, Liam had mentioned that he would be attending the F1 final in Abu Dhabi in two months.

It was, to him, a throwaway line. To the world, it was a detonation.

Because for the first time since he had made himself known, since the vacuum and the moon and the starships and everything else, the world had something it had never had before: a fixed point, known place and a known time.

The being no government could reach, no camera could find unless he wished to be found, no investigation could touch, had just told eight billion people exactly where he would be, and when.

The event’s remaining tickets, which had been quietly on sale for months, sold out in the time in the span of minutes. Every last seat that had gone unclaimed was gone, snatched up in a frenzy the ticketing systems had never been built to withstand.

Servers buckled and queues that had never seen more than a trickle of finale buyers suddenly held millions, and the millions were fighting over a supply that had already run dry before most of them even loaded the page.

But it wasn’t nearly enough, and everyone knew it wasn’t. Yas Marina held sixty thousand people. Sixty thousand seats, against a world in which, quite suddenly, millions upon millions of people wanted, more than they had ever wanted anything, to simply be in the same physical space as Liam Scott. Not to meet him, or even to speak to him.

But to just to be there. To breathe the same air, to see him with their own eyes, to be able to say, for the rest of their lives, that they had been present when the man who breathed the void came down to sit among ordinary people and watch a race.

Sixty thousand seats against tens of millions of desperate people. The math was obscene, and it broke something in the way people thought about the event.

It stopped being a Grand Prix and it became the single most coveted gathering in human history, and the only question that mattered was how, by any means, to get inside it.

The people who had bought their tickets weeks or months ago, ordinary fans, most of them, who had simply wanted to see the season’s final race, woke to discover they were holding the most valuable pieces of paper on Earth.

The resale market erupted into something feral. Tickets that had cost a few hundred dollars, a few thousand at most, were suddenly listed for sums that climbed by the hour, then by the minute, bid up past all reason by people to whom money had ceased to be an object.

Some holders sold, and the sums they walked away with were life-changing, generational. Others refused to sell at any price at all, because no amount of money could replace being there, and they knew it, and the buyers knew it, and so the prices only climbed higher, chasing the shrinking number of holders who could still be tempted.

And if the scramble for the general seats was violent, the war for the VIP areas was something else entirely. It was colder, quieter, and infinitely more vicious.

Because the VIP tier, the Paddock Club and the luxury hospitality suites and the yacht-access enclosures, offered the one thing the grandstands could not: proximity. Not just to the event, but to the people. To the paddock. To the inner ring where the powerful and the privileged moved. And, everyone understood without needing to say it, to the vicinity of Liam himself.

That changed the nature of the competition completely. In the grandstands, money still meant something. Expensive, yes, but a ticket could be bought.

In the VIP tier, money stopped being the deciding factor, because everyone chasing those spots had money, oceans of it, and when every bidder is rich, wealth ceases to separate anyone from anyone else. What separated them, then, was influence and access. Who you knew, what strings you could pull, what you could offer or threaten or trade.

And so the VIP allocation for a car race became, almost overnight, a matter of international consequence.

Governments wanted in for their representatives, their people placed as close to Liam as physically possible, because for a year every nation on Earth had been unable to reach the man, and here at last was a place they might stand within arm’s length of him.

Corporate titans wanted in, sensing that mere proximity to Liam was worth more than any deal they could otherwise chase. Royalty, oligarchs, the old-money dynasties and the new-money kings, the people accustomed to getting whatever they desired simply by desiring it — all of them turned toward Abu Dhabi at once and found, to their fury and disbelief, that the thing they wanted could not be bought outright, because everyone else wanted it just as badly and could pay just as much.

Favors were called in that had been saved for decades. Old debts were suddenly collected. Diplomatic channels that had nothing to do with sport lit up with quiet, urgent requests, and were met with quiet, urgent refusals.

Offense was taken — deep, lasting offense — by powerful people who discovered that their power, so absolute in every other arena of their lives, meant nothing against a demand this universal. A prince found himself competing with a president. A tech billionaire found himself outmaneuvered by a sovereign fund.

And through all of it, the organizers in Abu Dhabi and the FIA found themselves in the strangest and most dangerous position imaginable, as they held, in their hands, control over the single most coveted access on the face of the Earth, and having to decide who received it and who was turned away, knowing that every name on the list and every name struck from it carried consequences that reached far beyond a weekend of racing.

Because to grant a VIP spot near Liam was to grant something no amount of money could otherwise obtain. And to deny one was to make an enemy of someone accustomed to never being denied.

They had wanted to host a Grand Prix. What they were hosting instead was a contest, silent and merciless, among the most powerful people alive, for the privilege of standing a little closer to a man who could stand in the vacuum of space — and the contest had only just begun.

And what made it almost unbearable was that it was all the aftereffect of a casual conversation between a group of friends — friends who had already moved on to teasing each other, and given it no further thought.