My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible Chapter 679 The Nightmare Scenario They All Are Avoiding

It had been hours since the Nova Technologies Space Station recruitment announcement dropped across LucidNet, and the initial wave of euphoric disbelief was already crystallizing into something far more dangerous for the old world: absolute, unyielding economic reality.

While the global public spent the afternoon in a collective daydream, downloading application forms and envisioning a life suspended among the stars, terrestrial institutions spent the evening doing the math.

And the math terrified them.

The panic started in the exact places that employed the people Nova wanted. In the American Midwest, a massive regional hospital network convened an unscheduled, emergency encrypted video call at nine o'clock at night.

Twelve senior executives sat frozen on their screens because, over the past three hours, no fewer than forty-two of their senior nurses and department heads had forwarded the Nova employment portal link to human resources with a single line attached: Is this real?

The Chief of Staff had run the comparative arithmetic before dialing in. A senior nurse at his hospital, carrying fifteen years of specialized ward experience, earned a little over eight thousand dollars a month gross. After federal taxes, state taxes, health insurance premiums, housing, and basic living expenses, her net savings were a fraction of that.

Nova had listed the exact same role at thirty-five thousand dollars a month. With no rent. No grocery bills. No utility costs. No transit fees. A comprehensive medical safety net backed by Advanced Tier Medical Nanites that rendered terrestrial health insurance obsolete. And a Lucid device—the most coveted technological artifact in human history—handed over for free.

The Chief of Staff stared at the grid of panicked executives. He did not have a counteroffer. There was no counteroffer on Earth to make. A three percent annual raise and a preferred parking space did not answer a number like thirty-five thousand dollars of pure, untouched net savings, and everyone on the call knew it before a single word was spoken.

The exact same call was happening in other rooms, in other countries, across a dozen different trades.

In Dubai, an international luxury hotel group pulled its executive committee into a boardroom to calculate how many of its Michelin-trained back-of-house staff met Nova's strict operational bar. When the food and beverage director saw the final tally of eligible chefs, sommeliers, and hospitality managers, he simply closed his laptop and sat in the dark.

A flagship commercial airline's in-flight service division watched its best premium cabin crew—poised, multilingual, highly trained in emergency protocols, and accustomed to long-haul isolation, exactly the profile Nova's recruitment algorithm was targeting—doing the arithmetic in real-time on internal chat groups the airline's management was not supposed to see.

A Michelin-starred kitchen in Lyon lost its lead sommelier to a daydream halfway through the dinner service. He had not submitted his application yet, but as he poured a vintage Bordeaux, his mind was already 384,000 kilometers away. He had, for all intents and purposes, already left.

Faced with an economic force they could not match, some employers and industry groups reached for the only weapon they had left: trying to make the offer sound smaller and more sinister than it actually was.

"It is barely twelve hundred jobs," a prominent restaurant and hospitality industry spokesman declared during a prime-time interview on a major financial news network. "This is a novelty posting. These are conditions no sane professional will tolerate for long. Six months without your family, trapped in a tin can in a vacuum, under a draconian contract that fires you without compensation at the first sign of dissent. This is not a labor market. It is a corporate stunt."

He was not entirely wrong about the strictness of the terms, but he was completely oblivious to the working-class appetite.

The video clip of his interview was immediately posted to LucidNet, and the thread beneath it was swiftly filled with line cooks, nurses, and warehouse workers dismantling his argument. They told the millionaire spokesman exactly what six months of untouched, six-figure savings would do for their families—numbers he had never had to live on, let alone bleed for.

The legacy labor unions found themselves in a much stranger, far more agonizing position. Nova Technologies had built a paradigm that split their entire historical argument in half.

A powerful labor federation in Western Europe drafted a furious statement, tore it up, and drafted it again. Every institutional reflex the federation had was to condemn the portal. The Nova contract answered to no terrestrial court. It offered no collective bargaining rights, no traditional terrestrial insurance, no state disability provision, and explicitly ended employment at the company's unilateral word.

But every one of those valid systemic complaints ran straight into a brick wall: a baseline wage so astronomically above anything the federation had ever won for its members that condemning it out loud risked making the union look completely absurd.

"We cannot, in good conscience, endorse employment stripped of every worker protection built over the last century of labor struggles," the federation's final, watered-down statement read.

It did not mention the pay once and everyone noticed the omission.

A verified union member posted a reply underneath the official release: You are trying to protect me from earning a hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars a year in pure savings. Step aside. The comment climbed to the top of the feed and stayed there.

Then, the sovereign governments woke up to the portal's reality, and their alarm was quieter, colder, and ran much deeper.

The pay was a crisis for employers. The terms were an existential crisis for states.

A finance ministry in South Asia convened an emergency working group before dawn over a single, terrifying question that no legal scholar in the room could answer: How do you tax a citizen who earns four million dollars in a jurisdiction your laws do not reach?

The Station Director's salary sat on the portal in plain, unyielding figures. The income would be earned entirely off-world. It would be paid by a company that answered to no terrestrial jurisdiction.

Was it classified as foreign income? Was it legally taxable at all if the wealth never touched a terrestrial central bank? Nova collected no payroll taxes on any government's behalf and had offered no API to let them do so.

Somewhere in the back of the working group, a junior official finally voiced the nightmare scenario the senior ministers were desperately avoiding: a private lunar entity had just set the price of human labor completely beyond the reach of every treasury on Earth, and no legal mechanism existed to claw a single cent of it back.