My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible Chapter 700 Staff Arrival And An Already Long Waitlist

The arrival of Nova Technologies' shuttle fleet across six continents caused an uproar immediately they were seen by those in and close to the airports. They took pictures and made videos, and posted on Lucidnet as quickly as they could.

They were curious to see the volunteers that had returned this time. But unfortunately, the space shuttle wasn't carrying any volunteers but was here to pick up the staff.

Airport authorities worldwide had been notified twenty-four hours in advance through secure, automated communications. There were no negotiations, no requests for landing slots, and no administrative forms filled out.

The airport authority was simply handed coordinates, arrival timestamps, and precise vector clearances. When the sleek hulls of the shuttles cut through the clouds and descended vertically onto commercial runways—stopping on a dime without a single roar of jet fuel or thruster plume—the air traffic control towers could only watch in quiet, paralyzed awe.

Hours earlier, the 1,240 civilian employees had begun trickling into the designated international terminals. Each candidate had to present their selection confirmation email before airport security would even grant them access.

At their own discretion, airport executives—acutely aware that these men and women were stepping into six-figure net fortunes and off-world immunity—ushered them directly into private VIP lounges, treating them like visiting heads of state.

But behind the polite smiles of the lounge attendants, state surveillance was working in hyper-drive. Obedient to urgent executive orders from national intelligence directors, airport managers quietly logged every name, passport number, and face scan, forwarding the complete manifests straight to sovereign finance and interior ministries.

The governments of Earth desperately wanted a record of who was leaving, even though they were completely powerless to stop them.

The moment the shuttles touched down, the terminal glass doors parted, and the orbital pioneers walked out onto the tarmac.

Waiting on either side of each shuttle's wide boarding lift stood two synthetic humanoids. Dressed in crisp, dark-grey suits, the synths stood with perfectly fluid grace, their warm, lifelike expressions welcoming the candidates.

In one airport, Grace, the junior nurse from Manila, stepped onto the lift. Meanwhile, in another, Rafael, the Brazilian commis chef, felt his heart hammer against his ribs as he stepped onto the platform in São Paulo.

The boarding platforms rose smoothly into the underbelly, the airlocks sealed with a heavy, pressurized hiss, and within sixty seconds, the shuttles lifted straight off the asphalt.

Across the globe, couple of sleek white arcs punched through the atmosphere simultaneously, shooting toward the sky in silent, hypersonic acceleration.

Fifty-five minutes later, the blue curvature of Earth fell away, and the viewports were completely swallowed by a sight that rendered all 1,240 passengers utterly speechless.

It was one thing to watch the fifty-five-kilometer megastructure on a flat phone screen or a holographic feed in The Hub or even in an immersive experience. But it was another thing entirely to see it fill the universe outside your window.

The space station loomed before them—a colossal, dark obsidian titan anchored against the velvet blackness of the void. Sweeping past its massive hull, the shuttles joined a continuous, perfectly choreographed dance of off-world traffic. Fleets of Nova vessels—ranging from nimble courier craft to heavy freight transports—glided along the two brilliant azure-blue light lanes stretching down the station's central spine.

The shuttle glided smoothly through the sweeping opening of the arrival bay. It moved deep into the station's interior until it passed through a heavy, iris-style airlock door, settling onto a designated landing pad inside a sealed docking chamber.

The outer doors clicked shut, the chamber rapidly pressurized, and an atmospheric display on the bulkhead flashed a steady green. There was no weightlessness, no floating, and no disorientation. The station's internal gravity field held them at a comfortable, perfect 1.0G—indistinguishable from standing on Earth. They didn't need bulky vacuum suits or oxygen helmets; they simply stood up in their casual clothes and walked off the boarding platform.

Stepping off the platform, the group walked down a brightly lit, sterile corridor toward a massive, polished composite portal ahead. As they approached, the doors slid open automatically with a soft chime, granting them entrance into a vast, sunlit arrival lobby.

Standing at the center of the immaculate lobby, waiting to greet them, was a female synthetic humanoid. She was dressed in an impeccably tailored, dark navy executive business suit. Her posture was poised, her smile genuine and warm, radiating an aura of calm, absolute authority.

She was not merely a mechanical receptionist; she was the physical avatar of the dedicated AGI extension tasked with overseeing every operational, logistical, and administrative facet of the megastructure.

As the 1,240 newly arrived pioneers gathered in the lobby, staring in wide-eyed wonder at the indoor city before them, the synth stepped forward, her voice echoing through the acoustics with flawless, welcoming clarity:

"Welcome to the Nova Technologies Research Space Station. Your new life begins today."

***

Barely six hours had passed since the announcement dropped and application requests had started coming in slowly.

It first started with the institutions that had been waiting before there was anything to wait for.

There were, on Earth, a small number of organizations that had understood what Nova was for a long time before this announcement — not the details, but the shape of it.

They had watched the Lunar Base Sanctuary go up. They had watched a station the size of a city assemble itself against the dark on a live feed, and they had drawn the obvious conclusion months ahead of everyone else: that when the doors opened, they would open once, and the people who moved first would hold what the people who hesitated would spend years wishing they had.

So when the LucidNet institutional dashboard went live, these were the ones already sitting at it. A private research foundation in Switzerland submitted its verified application for a Medium zone at the fourth minute.

A pharmaceutical group that had quietly started to restructure its entire research budget for an off world presence two weeks into the construction of the space station, filed for two Small zones at the seventh.

They had their program summaries written. They had their institutional verification completed weeks earlier, against a future that had not officially existed yet. They were not reacting to the announcement. They had been ready for it.

The trickle in those first hours was not slowness. It was the sound of the prepared moving before the unprepared understood the race had started.

Because the ones who were prepared knew the thing the general public had not yet internalized: the waitlist was ordered by date, and date alone.

The five Large zones would go to the first five verified applications that could pay, and if a national science ministry finished its internal approvals a day after a private consortium finished theirs, the ministry would spend the next five years on a waitlist behind an institution a fraction of its size.

That single design choice — first come, nothing else — was quietly the most destabilizing thing in the entire announcement, and the people who grasped it first were already filing while the people who had not were still arguing about whether the terms were legal.

By the eighth hour the character of the requests began to change, and the volume with it.

The word had reached the decision-makers who could not act alone. A university system that needed board approval convened an emergency session in the middle of the night, because a rival on another continent had reportedly already applied, and the provost said the sentence that would be said in a hundred rooms over the next week: we do not have time to be careful.

National laboratories that answered to funding cycles and legislative oversight discovered that their processes, built for a world where opportunities waited, were catastrophically too slow for a world where they did not.

A ministry in East Asia that would ordinarily spend three months on a commitment of this size compressed it into a single overnight decision, not because anyone was comfortable, but because comfort was a luxury the waitlist did not permit. The zones were not going to wait for due diligence. Due diligence was now a competitive disadvantage.

And the money, once it started moving, stopped feeling like money at all.

The first confirmed Large zone lease — ten billion dollars, paid upfront, five-year commitment — cleared through the institutional dashboard sometime in the ninth hour, filed by an entity operating under a name that told the public nothing.

The financial press caught it not because Nova announced it, but because a ten-billion-dollar transfer of that specific size, off-world, to an entity outside every jurisdiction, left a shape in the data that analysts had learned to recognize. One down. Four ever.

The remaining four Large zones were now the most contested pieces of leasable space in the history of the species, and everyone who wanted one knew that the count could only go down, that there was no manufacturing more, that the door that had been open a moment ago was now four doors, then, within another two hours, three.

The scarcity did to institutions exactly what it had done to individuals when the Lucid devices sold out in under a second. It removed deliberation. It replaced strategy with speed.

Serious organizations that prided themselves on measured decision-making found themselves authorizing billion-dollar commitments over encrypted calls at four in the morning because a competitor might be doing the same thing at the same moment, and there was no way to know, and the not-knowing was unbearable.

A research director in North America later described the night without embarrassment: he had recommended the largest single expenditure in his institution's history on the basis of a countdown he could not see, against opponents he could not name, for a resource that would be gone by dawn. It was, he said, the least rational and most correct decision he had ever made.

Beneath the Large-zone frenzy, the wider field filled in.

The Medium and Small zones, more numerous, drew a broader crowd — corporations that wanted off-world fabrication, biotech firms chasing the microgravity synthesis, governments that had missed the Large tier and were determined not to miss the next one down.

The Mini zones, sixty of them at three hundred million a year, became the entry point for institutions that could not justify more but could not bear to be entirely absent from the most important scientific venue ever built.

Waitlists formed under every tier within the first day, and the waitlist positions themselves became objects of value — a verified early position on the Medium-zone list was, to an institution that had arrived a week too late, worth having, because tenants departed, leases lapsed, and the list was the only path to a zone that was already gone.

But not everyone rushed.

There were institutions — a handful of the oldest and most cautious — that read the terms and refused on principle. The clause that placed Nova beyond all jurisdiction, the monitoring that was continuous and non-negotiable, the prohibited-research list that was explicitly not exhaustive and could be expanded at Nova's sole judgment at any time, the termination that returned no money and answered to no court — these were, to a certain kind of general counsel, disqualifying regardless of the science.

A prominent national academy issued a measured statement declining to apply, citing the impossibility of committing public research funds to an arrangement with no legal recourse. It was a principled position, carefully argued, and within seventy-two hours it had been quietly overtaken, because two of that academy's peer institutions in other countries applied anyway, and the academy's own researchers began asking, publicly, why they were being kept out of the one place their rivals were about to be working. Principle, it turned out, was difficult to hold when it meant watching everyone else board the shuttle.

The governments faced the sharpest version of the bind, and it was not really about the zones at all.

To apply for a research zone was to accept, in writing, that a state's own institution would operate under Nova's terms, monitored by Nova, answerable to Nova, in a place Nova had declared beyond the state's law.

For a national laboratory to sign that was for a government to concede, formally and on the record, that there was now a jurisdiction it did not control and had agreed to enter anyway. Some governments could not stomach it and said so.

Others signed and simply did not discuss what they had conceded. And a few of the smaller states, the ones who had smelled opportunity in the recruitment announcement weeks earlier, moved fastest of all, because a small country that secured a zone stood on the same station, under the same terms, as a superpower that secured one — and there were few arenas left on Earth where that was true.

By the end of the first full day the slow trickle of the first hours had become something with its own gravity. The Large zones were nearly gone and he waitlists were deep.