My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible - Chapter 499 Off-world Facility Speculations

Chapter 499  Off-world Facility Speculations

It had been more than twelve hours since the volunteer selection criteria announcement was posted, yet the entire world was still talking about it.

LucidNet had grown steadily over the past three weeks since the last Nova Night, with its user base surpassing 4.7 billion. The announcement was experiencing engagement levels that would have strained any other platform — driven by a rare moment of global, simultaneous attention focused on a single subject.

In less than twelve hours, more than three million people had applied for the clinical trial. And that number was climbing by the second.

The word on everyone’s lips was the volunteer selection criteria, both online and offline. Everything else felt secondary.

Product launches were being quietly delayed by companies that understood there was no competing for attention right now.

Wall Street’s healthcare and insurance sectors were bleeding again, volatility spreading across the broader market as repeated announcements reinforced what investors were already beginning to accept as the likely shape of the future.

Most people were still processing the criteria announcement. Others were gathering their medical documents to apply. Those who had applied could only wait, fully aware that confirmation was at least three weeks out.

But gradually, as the criteria document settled into the public consciousness, the global conversation began to shift. Not away from the trial, but toward something attached to it that had gone largely unexamined until now.

The off-world facility where the clinical trial would be held. Or Lunar Base Sanctuary, as Nova Technologies called it in one the related announcements.

People had registered the name and moved past it, too focused on eligibility and timelines to stop and consider what it actually was. But now, as everything began to feel increasingly real, the location itself demanded attention.

A facility on the moon, operational and apable of housing volunteers, observers, from dozens of nations simultaneously. Built by a company that had existed in any visible public capacity for less than a year.

The speculation threads opened fast.

***

A user posted a thread that accumulated engagement within minutes: “Can we talk about Lunar Base Sanctuary for a second? Because I feel like and know that everyone is so focused on the nanites that they’ve skipped past the part where Nova Technologies has a functioning base on the moon. This isn’t something  that’s a concept or a planned project, but an operational facility. With private accommodation for every observer. Full meal provisions. Unrestricted communication access. They’re basically running a luxury hotel on the moon and it’s somehow the least discussed part of any of this.”

Someone replied: “The communication access line is what got me. Unrestricted communication with their home institution throughout their stay. That’s not a satellite uplink with a two-second delay. That’s real-time communication from the lunar surface. We saw it in the livestream when they had zero delay talking to Earth from Saturn and even out of the solar system. If they have that capability from outside the solar system, they absolutely have it from the moon. The infrastructure required for that alone is something no government space agency has come close to.”

Another user added: “People keep talking about the nanites like they’re the most impressive thing Nova Technologies has. The nanites are biological engineering. Insane, yes. But a functioning lunar base with real-time Earth communication, life support for an international delegation, medical-grade treatment facilities, and shuttle transport infrastructure — that’s a civilization-level construction project. This is something worth talking about.”

The thread continued branching in multiple directions simultaneously, each branch pulling at a different thread of the same question: what exactly had Nova Technologies built up there, and how long had they been building it?

***

The livestreams footage became the primary reference point for nearly every speculation thread that followed.

People had watched it. They had processed it in the context of entertainment and spectacle, where the CEO of a technology company flew through the solar system in real time, broadcasting from inside spacecrafts moving faster than anything humanity had built or from solar bodies that no human has ever been to.

It had been extraordinary. But it had also been distant, abstract, difficult to fully internalize.

Now it wasn’t abstract, because in about a month, a hundred people would get on a shuttle and go to the facility those same spacecrafts from the livestreams had probably launched from.

A user posted a detailed breakdown: “Let me list what we actually saw in the livestreams and what it implies about Lunar Base Sanctuary specifically. One: real-time communication from Saturn with zero delay. Light takes between eight and eighty-three minutes to travel from Saturn to Earth depending on orbital position. Zero delay means they’re not using light-based transmission. They have a communication technology that does not exist in any public scientific literature. That technology is presumably what observers will use to contact their home institutions from the lunar surface.”

The thread continued: “Two: the kilometres long and operational spacecraft. Crewed or automated, doesn’t matter — something that size doesn’t get built in orbit without an existing infrastructure base capable of supporting that construction. Lunar Base Sanctuary is probably the most visible piece of that infrastructure, but it’s almost certainly not the only one. You don’t build a kilometre-long spacecraft without somewhere to build it.”

Another user picked up the thread: “Three: the Jupiter entry. The CEO flew in a shuttle, into the Great Red Spot. A storm that has been running continuously for centuries with wind speeds exceeding five hundred kilometres per hour and pressure gradients that would crush any conventional spacecraft instantly. The shuttle survived and came back. The CEO was calm about it. That’s not a one-off vehicle. That’s a design standard. Which means the shuttles that will transport volunteers and observers to the lunar surface are built to specifications that make them functionally indestructible by any environmental threat Earth or its orbit can produce.”

Someone responded: “The Jupiter thing has been in the back of my head since it happened. Because that wasn’t a demonstration of the shuttle’s capability specifically — it was almost casual. Like it was something done on the way past because it was interesting. The bar for what registers as worth demonstrating to this company is somewhere we can’t see from here.”

***

A user approached the question from an architectural angle: “I keep thinking about the logistics of what Lunar Base Sanctuary has to actually contain to host this trial. You need medical treatment bays capable of deploying and monitoring nanites in real time. You need recovery facilities for a hundred volunteers across a range of conditions — some of whom arrive in critical states. You need separate observer areas. Private accommodation for all of them. A kitchen operation, as they all have to eat. Life support. Power generation. Waste management. Communication infrastructure. Shuttle landing and launch capability. Medical staff quarters—they are definitely needed. Security. And all of it has to work on the lunar surface, which means radiation shielding, pressure integrity, and thermal management for an environment that swings between negative one-seventy and positive one-twenty Celsius depending on solar exposure.”

The thread continued: “On Earth, a hospital facility capable of handling a hundred complex simultaneous cases is a significant construction project. We’re talking about doing that on the moon. Except it’s already done. It’s probably already staffed. It’s already waiting.”

A user replied: “And it was apparently built without anyone noticing. There was no construction contracts. No material shipments through any known port. No workforce documentation. No satellite imagery of construction phases. It just exists. Either it was built with technology that doesn’t require conventional construction methods, or it was built so fast that the window for detection was effectively zero. Both of those options are the same level of unsettling.”

Another added: “Or it was built a long time ago and we just didn’t know to look.”

That reply accumulated more engagement than the original post.

***

A thread in a space engineering community took a more technical approach and still ended in the same place.

“Running the numbers on life support alone for Lunar Base Sanctuary. Assuming a conservative population of two hundred people — volunteers, observers, medical staff, facility personnel — you need approximately five hundred kilograms of oxygen per day. Water recycling systems capable of processing that population’s daily consumption. Food either shipped continuously or grown on-site. CO2 scrubbing. Atmospheric pressure maintenance across what is presumably a substantial pressurized volume given the accommodation and facility requirements described. The energy required for all of this, on the lunar surface, from what power source, at what generation capacity?”

Someone with an apparent engineering background responded: “Solar on the lunar surface is actually more efficient than Earth due to no atmospheric filtering, but lunar night lasts approximately fourteen Earth days. You need either a storage solution capable of bridging that gap or a non-solar primary power source. Fission is the obvious answer. But a fission reactor of sufficient capacity to support a facility of that scale is not a small installation. We’re not talking about a portable unit. We’re talking about something significant.”

The original poster replied: “Which goes back to the same point everyone keeps arriving at from different directions. This is not a small installation. This is not a proof of concept. Whatever Lunar Base Sanctuary is, it is a mature, operational, large-scale human settlement on the lunar surface. Built by a company that announced its existence less than a year ago.”

***

Not everyone engaged with the speculation from a technical angle.

A user wrote: “I’m not an engineer. I don’t know anything about life support systems or fission reactors. What I know is that my brother applied for the trial this morning. Stage three glioblastoma. He was diagnosed seven months ago. He submitted his records and his ID and his emergency contact and then he closed his laptop and said — I don’t know if I’ll get selected but I did what I could do. And now we wait.”

The post continued: “I’ve been reading all these threads about what the lunar base might look like, how it was built, what the communication systems are. And I keep thinking — somewhere up there, there’s a room that might have my brother’s name on it. I don’t know what it looks like. I don’t know how big it is. I don’t know what the ceiling looks like or whether there’s a window. But somewhere up there, there might be a room. And that’s enough for me to think about right now.”

The comments beneath it were quiet.

Someone wrote: I hope he gets selected.

Another: We’ll be thinking about him.

A third, with no additional words: 🌕

***

Very little was truly known about Nova Technologies beyond the evidence left by the livestreams, the announcements, and the products themselves. The company had no public headquarters in any conventional sense. No visible executive structure beyond the mysterious CEO. No supply chain anyone had successfully traced. No construction history for any of the infrastructure they clearly possessed.

Yet three million people had applied for the trial within twelve hours of the criteria announcement. They had submitted their medical records, their identification, their emergency contacts — to a company operating a facility on the moon that no government had built and no public institution had verified.

Whether that represented trust, desperation, or simply the absence of any remaining alternative, even the people applying couldn’t say with certainty.

Probably some combination of all three.

The shuttle transport logistics document was due within forty-eight hours and the world was waiting for it.

Almost twenty four hours after the volunteer selection criteria announcement was dropped, Nova Technologies dropped another announcement but it wasn’t the one everyone was expecting.