Read Novel Full Chapter 752: A Supposedly Happy Situation
Chapter 752: A Supposedly Happy Situation
Jonathan had just finished his homework for the week, after feeling like he’d wasted a good chunk of it watching Elise’s livestream instead of studying. Or maybe it wasn’t wasted. He genuinely couldn’t decide.
Either way, now that the homework was done, he figured he’d earned the right to waste a little more time before he had to crack open his notes again for the tests coming up.
He picked up his phone, and that was when he saw a notification from his browser, and an email sitting on top of it.
He opened the email first and it was from LucidNet. Lucy sent you a message.
His heart skipped a beat, and he tapped it before he’d even finished processing the words. It dropped him straight into LucidNet, and there it was — the verified green mark, the blue NT tag sitting beside her name, and beneath it, 1 unread message.
His breath just stopped, as he tapped the message, and he read it.
Congratulations. You have been selected as the recipient of a stable sample of metallic hydrogen, sourced from the interior of Jupiter. Please reply with a delivery address so that it may be sent to you.
"What the fuck," he said, quietly, almost like a question.
Then, louder, standing up off his bed without noticing he’d done it, "What the fuck."
Then he screamed. "WHAT THE FUCK."
He didn’t know what else there was to say. There didn’t seem to be anything else that covered it. He read the message again, and again, his hands starting to shake around the phone, and before he’d even fully thought it through, he took a screenshot and posted it, because some part of him needed other people to see it too, needed it to be real in more places than just his own head.
The likes came first, a trickle. Then comments. Then a lot of comments, faster than he could read them.
*prove it*
*this is photoshopped lol*
*obviously AI generated, the font’s off*
*bro really faked a message from LUCY💀*
He didn’t bother arguing with any of it. He didn’t have it in him, as his hands were still shaking, his heart still going too fast, so he just went back to the actual message and typed his address into the reply, sent it, and sat there staring at the screen like it might do something else.
A second later, it did.
*The package will arrive shortly.*
He smiled so wide his face hurt. He took another screenshot, blurred his address out carefully this time, checked it twice, and posted that one too.
The people who’d already seen the first post found the second one fast, and the comments shifted, becoming sharper and more insistent.
*ok if this is real post a video when it gets there*
*show us the actual item or this means nothing*
*these fake posts are ruining it for whoever actually wins this, some of you should be ashamed*
Jonathan didn’t answer any of it. He just sat on the edge of his bed with his phone in his lap, staring at the door of his apartment, waiting.
It took forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes for something to travel from the middle of space to his front door, which was a thought so large he couldn’t actually hold onto it, so he mostly just sat there refreshing his phone and bouncing his knee until the knock came.
He opened the door to a drone hovering at exactly eye level, and a small package held in its lower housing. It had him write his signature first, then asked him to write his Lucidnet ID, and only then did the package release into his hands.
He looked at the drone and the drone seemed to look back at him. He gave it an awkward little wave, because it felt rude not to, and it lifted straight up and was gone into the sky before he’d even finished the motion.
He carried the package inside like it might go off.
He set it on his kitchen table, took a picture of it sitting there, unopened, then started recording. He didn’t say anything through the whole video. He didn’t trust his voice yet. He just filmed his own hands opening the box, slow and careful, peeling back the packaging Nova had wrapped it in. And there it was.
A small, dense, gleaming mass, sitting in a clear internal case, catching the kitchen light in a way nothing he’d ever seen before. Not quite metal, not quite anything. It looked wrong.
He lifted it out with both hands and held it there for a full two minutes on camera, saying nothing, just turning it slowly, watching it catch the light differently from every angle. Then he took a few more photos, carefully, and posted the whole thing — the video, the pictures, all of it — without really thinking about what came next.
What came next was that everything split open at once.
***
The post didn’t trend. It detonated.
Within the first ten minutes his name was climbing every list on the platform. Within thirty, it had left LucidNet entirely and was tearing through every other feed on Earth, the unboxing video clipped and reposted a hundred thousand times, the two-minute shot of the metallic hydrogen sitting in his palm playing on screens in living rooms and offices and laboratories all over the planet.
The comments changed character almost immediately. The skepticism died the second real footage existed — nobody could keep calling it fake once it was moving, catching light, sitting in an ordinary hand on an ordinary kitchen table. What replaced the skepticism was something much less comfortable.
*does this guy have ANY idea what he’s holding*
*someone needs to reach him before he does something stupid with it*
*this is worth more than most countries GDP and he’s filming it on a phone in his kitchen*
*I need everyone to be calm. we need to be CALM. do not scare this child.*
Jonathan didn’t see most of that, not right away, because his phone had stopped behaving like a phone.
It was buzzing constantly, a vibration that didn’t stop long enough to become individual notifications anymore, just one long continuous hum against the table.
His email filled first. The subject lines came in fast, and they were strange — formal, urgent, dressed up in language he didn’t fully understand. *Regarding your recent acquisition.* *Inquiry: Materials sample, private acquisition opportunity.* *Formal offer — please respond at your earliest convenience.*
He opened one, from a university he vaguely recognized the name of, and the number in the second paragraph made him stop breathing for a second.
$150,000,000.
He read it three times to make sure he wasn’t misreading a decimal point somewhere. He wasn’t.
He closed it. He opened another and it was a different number, bigger than the last. He also got an offer of $400,000,000 from a semiconductor company. He opened three more before his hands started shaking again, differently this time.
The offers weren’t stopping. They weren’t even slowing down. Every time he refreshed his inbox there were more, and the numbers kept climbing — not by increments that made any sense, but in enormous violent jumps, one email outbidding the last by amounts that didn’t seem like they should exist outside of national budgets.
A research consortium offered $600,000,000, framed in careful, respectful language about "the advancement of human knowledge."
An energy conglomerate he’d never heard of offered $1,200,000,000, and didn’t bother with the careful language at all.
Then ab an offer arrived from an account with no company letterhead, no logo, formatted plain and clipped in a way that somehow felt more official than all the others combined, offering $3,000,000,000 and asking, politely, for a same-day response.
He stared at that one the longest. Three billion dollars. He tried to picture it and couldn’t. He’d never had to picture a number like that before; there had never been a reason to. It didn’t look like money anymore, sitting there in his inbox. It looked like a mistake, or a threat, or both at once.
His phone rang. A number he didn’t know. He didn’t answer it. It rang again immediately after. Then a text came through from the same number, polite and clipped and utterly unfamiliar, addressing him by his full name — a name he was fairly sure he hadn’t put anywhere public.
Mr. Drusk, we understand you may be receiving a number of offers. We’d like the opportunity to discuss a figure that exceeds any of them. Please call at your convenience.
No number attached. Just the promise that whatever he’d already seen, they’d beat it.
That was the part that actually scared him. Not the money, not really, as it didn’t feel real yet. It was the fact that strangers already had his name, his number, the confidence to say exceeds any of them without even needing to know what the others had offered.
He set the phone face-down on the table, next to the small gleaming thing that had started all of it, and sat very still.
The apartment felt too quiet all of a sudden, and too exposed at the same time — like the walls had gone thin, like every window was a way in. He thought about the drone that had delivered it, hovering right outside his actual front door, reading his actual signature. He thought about how easily it had found him. He thought about how much easier it would be for anyone else.
His phone lit up again, face-down, glowing faintly through the table. He didn’t turn it over.