My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible Chapter 536 It's Happening

The shuttle soared beyond seven thousand feet and vanished from sight.

Spectators had braced for a deafening sonic boom given how the space shuttle rocketed upward, yet utter silence reigned.

It merely attained its height, pivoted, surged forward, and vanished before tracking displays could even complete their updates.

Crowds lining the nearby roads kept their phones hoisted skyward for a few lingering seconds post-disappearance, aimed at a heavens now barren save for faint gray clouds and routine commercial jets adhering to their approach paths at a cautious remove from the bizarre occurrence.

One by one, the phones dropped, and people turned to eye one another.

***

LucidNet managed the launch just as it had every prior moment, at velocities rendering the spectacle instantaneous for five billion souls irrespective of their time zones.

Footage of the climb was already ubiquitous. The fusion drive's azure blaze, the sheer vertical rise, the pivot, the explosive speedup. The instant it winked out from every camera's view at once, like it had chosen to evade sight entirely.

One user shared the final frame—the last glimpse of the shuttle pulled from broadcast video—sans any caption.

It racked up three million likes in less than sixty minutes. Comments below were largely empty platitudes, void of substance since none existed, yet folks posted them anyhow to dodge solitary rumination on the awe.

***

The science outreach circles had buzzed nonstop since the boarding platform touched down, and the liftoff supplied the closing fragment of their live-built mosaic.

A user delivering frame-by-frame breakdowns from the shuttle's debut at eight hundred feet on landing cams unleashed a concluding thread amid the takeoff clips' spread.

"Summary of what we observed this morning, for anyone who wants the technical picture in one place."

"Descent: Vertical. No horizontal approach. Appeared at approximately seven thousand feet above the landing zone with no prior radar contact on any publicly available feed. Descent rate and noise signature are consistently below conversational level at the perimeter, which is approximately five hundred meters from the landing zone."

"Landing: Clean contact. No visible landing gear compression. No bounce. The surface response visible at roughly fifty feet suggests focused downward pressure from the propulsion system rather than mechanical landing infrastructure. The shuttle did not use wheels."

"Boarding: Five individuals with no publicly available identification. Movement consistent with human baseline, so we can rule out them being aliens. No protective equipment. No visible technology beyond standard professional clothing. Facial recognition across publicly accessible databases — zero matches, confirmed by multiple independent attempts by users in this thread within minutes of the first clear images."

"Departure: Vertical ascent to approximately seven thousand feet. At that altitude, the vehicle oriented and accelerated. Time from tarmac to departure from visual range: under four minutes. The acceleration profile during departure was not captured adequately by any available camera due to the speed involved."

The thread concluded there.

Someone commented: What does the acceleration profile tell you?

The thread starter paused briefly. "It tells me the vehicle was not moving at aircraft speeds when it left visual range. The frame rate on the best available footage shows it covering approximately four kilometers in under one second after it oriented. That's not a speed I have a good framework for."

The subthread hushed momentarily.

Then another chimed in: The announcement said one hour to the lunar surface. The moon is three hundred and eighty four thousand kilometers away.

The originator skipped replying to that. The calculations lay open for all willing to crunch them.

***

Disease-focused forums absorbed the departure far differently than mere spectacle gazers.

A mod in an ALS group had chronicled the dawn's drama live from predawn hours. Her posts—from shuttle arrival to touchdown to embarkation—carried the tender precision of one updating kin for whom every detail struck deep and personal.

As the shuttle blinked from view, she dropped one lone update.

They're on their way.

The comments in that discussion thread ignored the video footage, the advanced technology, the Synths, or the facial recognition zero. Instead, they fixated on the individuals aboard — the personnel traveling to welcome volunteers, signaling that the facility was getting ready, indicating the trial loomed just thirty days ahead, confirming that the possibility they'd been warned about was now openly and undeniably unfolding.

A poster on a spinal cord injury forum shared: Less than thirty days. I keep saying it to myself. I don't know if it helps or makes it worse.

A response came: It helps. It's a real number. Real numbers are better than waiting.

Parents in the pediatric genetic condition groups, who had been up since before dawn, were exchanging the footage among themselves.

One parent posted: My daughter asked me this morning why I was up so early. I told her I was watching something important. She asked if it was good important or bad important. I told her I thought it was good important and she went back to sleep. I've been thinking about that conversation all morning.

The responses below stretched long and remained subdued.

***

Within forums that had debated Nova Technologies' ethical duties on affordability and access for weeks, the shuttle's departure sparked an unforeseen shift.

The disputes halted.

Not due to settled core differences — those persisted — but because the occurrence had transcended the scope of those disputes completely.

Talks of subscription levels, lotteries, and engineered scarcity revolved around policy matters, yet that morning's happenings weren't policy at all.

A key figure from the moral obligation side, after weeks of clashes, launched a thread that stunned their opponents.

"I still think what I think about the commercial model. That hasn't changed. But this morning I watched four people walk onto a spacecraft at JFK and I found myself hoping, genuinely hoping, that whatever happens up there goes well. Not because I've changed my position. Because the people on that shuttle are real and they're going somewhere no human being has gone under these circumstances and that's the part I couldn't stop watching."

Most responses came from those on the opposing debate side.

They wrote: Same.

***

The mystery surrounding the five Synths lingered beneath all other topics without resolution.

Within the first hour post-boarding, the facial recognition zero had permeated broader discussions. The science outreach circles had meticulously recorded it.

Captures from various independent checks across multiple database portals, all yielding identical outcomes. The five figures who arrived via shuttle and guided the staff to the platform appeared in no publicly reachable records whatsoever.

Speculation discussions erupted swiftly and failed to unify.

Certain users pushed the cautious theory — elite private security operating under covert protocols, with documents classified beyond public reach.

Others highlighted the motion breakdowns. The pair stationed as guards by the platform throughout the boarding. The uncanny steadiness in their posture. How they monitored the surrounding crowd with expert focus, yet possessing a sharpness no human gaze held so steadily.

***

By noon, airports in additional cities geared up for the identical sequence.

The shuttle, or perhaps others, as many as Nova Technologies planned, would touch down at twenty-three further sites before finishing staff transport.

Many of those airports sat in time zones where dawn hadn't broken. Residents there set alarms, scoured LucidNet for JFK clips, scrutinized the descent shots, landing visuals, boarding scenes, and takeoff, bracing for their local dawn version.

A Lagos user shared: "Watching the JFK footage. Our morning is in a few hours. I've watched the descent three times. I'm going to watch it again."

A Seoul responder said: "Ours is in two hours. I haven't slept. I'm not going to sleep."

From Singapore, where it had already occurred: "It was exactly like the footage. And also nothing like the footage. The footage doesn't give you the silence. You have to be there for the silence."

The Lagos individual absorbed that and stayed silent.

They replayed the descent video once more instead.