My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible Chapter 705 Nova Technologies, A Special Kind Of Retailer

Every company that received the email were surprised. It didn't matter who they were or how big they were, they all shared the same emotions.

Luxury timepiece companies like Patek Philippe, Rolex, Omega, and the rest also received emails, as did the big five publishers, science publishers, and fine wine houses, premium spirits, and premium beverage brands. But the periodicals, with Nova Technologies asking for a partnership for their daily issues to be delivered to the space station.

This was huge for most companies because Nova Technologies was asking these things for free or asking them to hand over their products and receive proceeds of sales on the space station at a certain period.

No, Nova Technologies was making a wholesale purchase and paying in full, effectively making a retailer of their products. Albeit, a special kind of retailer.

While some of them accepted the partnership after much deliberation, like in the case of Samsung, Valve, and others, others had to pause for a moment for one particular clause in the attached email: that Nova Technologies has the right to fix and service their products if they break in space.

For some companies—especially one—that single clause stopped everything.

The rest of the email had been simple enough to swallow. The company did not love being handed terms it could not negotiate, and it liked the equal-footing clause even less—the idea that it stood on precisely the same ground as every other manufacturer, with no advantage bought or earned, ran against how it had always done business.

But those were matters of pride, and pride could be set aside when the alternative was watching a competitor become the first phone sold beyond Earth. Being one of many was survivable. The other thing was harder.

Nova Technologies reserved the right to service and repair any device that failed aboard the station.

To most companies, that read like a convenience. To this one, it read like a violation of the principle its business had been built on. Repair had always stayed in its own hands, by design and at great cost, and that control was not incidental to the company—it was part of what the company was.

A great deal of its revenue and much of its reputation rested on being the only one that ever opened its own products. So a clause asking it to hand that to a company it did not control, in a place it could not reach, did not read as a small thing. It read as the surrender of something it had never once surrendered.

The engineers in the room understood the fear before the executives finished voicing it. The danger of outside repair had always been that the outsider was worse—a back-alley job with a hot-air gun and counterfeit parts, cracking a device open, butchering it, and handing the damage back to the brand. Every argument the company had ever made assumed the repairer was less capable than it was.

Nova was not less capable. That was the problem no one in the room had a script for.

Nova fabricated at a precision the company's own supply chain could not match. A Nova repair would not be a botch job with a knockoff screen. It would, in all likelihood, be a better repair than the company could perform itself, using components produced more perfectly than the originals. The question was not whether Nova would damage the product.

The question was what Nova would see while it worked—and what it would do with what it saw. An entity that could open the device, understand it completely, and had already built hardware that made the company's flagship look like a relic, handing that entity the internals of its most guarded product, even to fix it, even once, was a thing its every instinct screamed against.

Then someone on the legal side read the clause again, slowly, and the shape of it changed.

Nova was not asking for the right to repair the company's products. Nova was buying them, purchasing the inventory outright, at wholesale, in full, paid immediately—and reselling it aboard the station. Which meant that by the time a device failed up there, it was not the company's product anymore. It belonged to Nova, or to the guest who had bought it from Nova. And a company that owned a thing had always had the right to fix the thing it owned. It could hardly insist that Nova had no right to repair a device Nova had bought and paid for in full.

There was more. Nova would not send a broken phone back to Earth. There was no service center in orbit. A guest who cracked a screen three hundred and eighty-four thousand kilometers from the nearest store either got it fixed on the station or did not get it fixed at all. The repair right was not a power grab. It was a necessity of the place. Someone had to be able to fix the things up there, and there was only one someone within reach.

And attached to the clause, when they looked for it, was the offered reassurance. Nova stated that any repair it performed would be carried out without retaining, analyzing, or reverse-engineering the product. Its systems would read the device only as far as required to restore it and would keep nothing.

It was the same promise Nova had extended, in different words, to every partner whose secrets its processes could theoretically see. Nova did not have to offer it; ownership already gave Nova the right to repair. The promise was Nova saying, in effect, that it could learn everything and chose not to.

Whether the company believed that was another matter, and the room split on it. The skeptics pointed out that a promise from an entity beyond every jurisdiction was a promise with no court behind it. If Nova broke it, they could do nothing.

The pragmatists pointed out that Nova had, so far, done exactly what it said it would do, every time, at a scale that made petty theft of a phone schematic beneath it. What would Nova, which could build a city in orbit in a month, want with the layout of a chip it had already surpassed? The fear was real. It was also, when said aloud in that room, a little absurd.

The decision took longer here than at almost any other company, and that delay was itself noticed, because the emails had gone out to everyone at once and the whole industry was watching to see who moved.

A direct rival had deliberated and accepted. Its products would be aboard. Every hour spent hesitating was an hour in which the first phone in space was, by default, not going to be this company's.

That was the pressure the equal-footing clause had built without ever threatening anything. Nova had not needed to lean on anyone; it had simply written the same letter to every rival in a category and let them apply the pressure to each other.