My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible - Chapter 538 Quiet Moments

Chapter 538  Quiet Moments

While the world was still reacting to the ongoing staff departures, the two space shuttles sent by Nova Technologies had just finished picking up the last of the staff and were now flying out of Earth, approaching the highest layers of the atmosphere at blinding speed.

The sequential stops both space shuttle made across twelve airports each, moving from continent to continent with speed so fast that it made everyone confused on the number of space shuttles was sent.

Now both shuttles were outbound, climbing through the thermosphere at velocities that commercial aviation didn’t have numbers for, their hulls dark and clean against the thinning atmosphere above them.

Inside, the last groups of staff were still processing the fact that they were no longer on the ground.

The ascent had been smooth, with no vibration, no pressure change, no sense of climbing at all beyond what the windows showed. One moment the city had been visible below them, the morning light catching the grid of streets and rooftops. Then cloud. Then the cloud thinning. Then the curve of the Earth appearing at the edge of the viewport, and the sky outside shifting from pale grey to a blue so deep it had no name in ordinary language, and then to black.

It all happened in a blur.

When the Synth at the front of the cabin stood and turned to face them, its voice was calm and unhurried.

“We have cleared Earth’s atmosphere. Transit time to Lunar Base Sanctuary is approximately one hour. You are all free to move through the cabin and access the areas open to you.”

It sat back down and returned its attention to the holographic displays arrayed in front of it — telemetry data in clean columns, orbital geometry, navigation vectors rendered in three dimensions.

The screens were beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with understanding what they showed. Light and geometry and precision, updating continuously.

One of the staff members raised his phone carefully and began recording.

Nobody stood up immediately even after being told that they could freely walk around.

They looked around the cabin first, then at each other. The faces around them were mirrors — wide eyes, tight jaws, the particular expression of people who had signed up for something and were now confronting the reality of having gotten it.

Seeing it reflected back from the person across the aisle, and the person beside them, and the person two rows forward did something, it made the feeling they were feeling easier to bear.

Someone exhaled audibly, while another else let out a short, involuntary sound.

Then, without anyone giving instruction, they all unbuckled.

The first thing most of them did was go to the windows.

The viewports ran along both sides of the cabin, larger than any aircraft window, and what they showed stopped them mid-step.

Earth.

And not the way it appeared in photographs or footage from previous space missions — processed, color-corrected and framed for presentation.

Raw and immediate through clean hull material. The curvature was visible from this altitude with a completeness that photographs had never fully captured. The terminator line between day and night cut across the surface with a sharpness that didn’t seem real. Cloud systems moved in slow spirals over oceans that were too blue. The landmasses were brown and green and textured, recognizable but wrong in scale — too small, too close together, too fragile-looking against the black surrounding them.

One of the nurse pressed her palm flat against the viewport and looked at it for a long time without speaking.

A translator stood with her arms at her sides and said something quietly in a language that wasn’t English. She said it once and didn’t repeat it.

One of the physicians turned slowly away from the window and looked at the cabin, then back at the window, then back at the cabin again, as though he needed to confirm that both things were simultaneously real.

A line cook from the kitchen contingent had both hands on the viewport frame, braced, leaning in as close as the surface allowed.

The forward observation area was through a door at the front of the cabin, and the first person to find it stopped in the doorway long enough that two others nearly walked into him.

The room was circular, recessed slightly below the main cabin level, with a curved viewport that wrapped nearly three hundred and sixty degrees around the nose of the shuttle. The effect was close to standing in open space. The hull material that formed the viewport was so optically clear that the frame was the only indicator that anything separated them from vacuum.

The black was absolute. Stars were visible at a density and stillness that no atmosphere allowed, with no twinkle, no haze, or interference. Just points of light, fixed and countless, against a darkness that had no bottom.

Earth was visible to the left side of the arc, already smaller than it had appeared from the cabin windows. The moon was ahead, a crescent from this angle, its surface detail visible with a clarity that made it look close enough to touch.

Three staff members had crowded in before anyone thought to manage the space. They stood at different points along the curved viewport, none of them talking, looking in different directions at a universe that had no interest in being comprehensible.

One of them, a medical coordinator, eventually sat down on the floor of the observation room without explanation. The others looked at him.

He gestured at the view. “I needed to sit down,” he said. “That’s all.”

Nobody argued with that.

***

The rest area was at the rear of the cabin, separated by a sliding panel. The beds — six of them, recessed into the walls in two rows

A psychologist sat on the edge of one of the lower beds and looked at the ceiling. The ceiling was a neutral white. After the observation room, neutral white felt like relief.

She had spent three weeks preparing therapeutic frameworks for unprecedented environments. She had read everything available on isolation psychology, off-world adjustment, the cognitive impact of sensory environments without terrestrial reference points. She had prepared, thoroughly, for what this might feel like.

She had not been prepared for what this actually felt like.

She sat on the bed for ten minutes. Then she took out a notebook and began writing, because writing was how she processed things and because some things needed to be caught while they were still immediate.

The common space occupied the center of the cabin, with seating arranged in a loose configuration around a low table. A screen on the forward wall displayed the shuttle’s current position — a simple graphic, Earth shrinking on one side, the moon growing on the other, a dotted line between them showing the trajectory.

Several staff gathered there without planning to. It happened naturally.

The head chef sat with his arms on the table, looking at the position display. One of the kitchen assistants sat across from him, phone out but not recording, just holding it.

“How long has it been?” the assistant asked.

The head chef checked the display. “Twenty minutes, maybe.”

The assistant looked at the screen. Earth was visibly smaller than when the graphic had first appeared. “Doesn’t feel like twenty minutes.”

“No,” the head chef agreed.

A physical therapist dropped into a seat beside them, her bag still over one shoulder. She looked at the screen, then at the two of them.

“Have you been to the front room?” she asked.

“Not yet.”

“Go,” she said. “Before we land. Go.”

The Synth at the front of the cabin remained at its station throughout, monitoring the telemetry without intervention. Occasionally a staff member would drift near it, drawn by the holographic displays, and watch the data updating without understanding it.

One of the occupational therapists stood nearby for several minutes, watching the orbital geometry display rotate slowly.

“What am I looking at?” she asked finally.

The Synth turned to look at where she was pointing. “Current trajectory relative to the lunar surface. The intersect point is updated continuously as we approach.”

She looked at the display for a moment. “Is everything normal?”

“Yes,” the Synth said.

She nodded and stood there for another minute, watching the numbers update.

Then she went to find the observation room.

***

Forty minutes into the transit, most of the staff had been through every accessible area of the shuttle at least once. Some had returned to areas they’d already visited. The observation room had maintained a quiet rotation of people, two or three at a time, nobody staying so long that others couldn’t access it.

The common space had become the place people returned to. The position display had become something like a shared reference point — something to look at together when the alternative was processing everything alone.

The moon was larger on the display now. The dotted trajectory line was more than halfway drawn.

A nurse sat looking at the display and said to nobody in particular: “less than an hour ago I was at JFK.”

Nobody responded immediately.

Then one of the translators said: “Less than an hour ago I was at Charles de Gaulle.”

Someone else: “Heathrow.”

“Lagos.”

“Singapore.”

They sat with that for a moment. Different airports, different mornings, different time zones — all of them arriving at the same position display, the same trajectory line, the same moon growing larger in the upper right corner of the screen.

The head chef looked at the display. Then he looked at the table.

“I applied to cook on the moon,” he said quietly, “and they said yes.”

Nobody laughed. But several people smiled, and the smile spread around the table the way the upturned faces had spread outside the airports, one person then the next.

***

At fifty-three minutes, the Synth spoke from the front of the cabin.

“Approach to Lunar Base Sanctuary in seven minutes. Please return to your seats and secure your belongings.”

The staff moved, gathering bags and phones, returning from the observation room and the rest area and the quiet corners they’d found across the past hour.

When they were seated and the cabin had settled, the viewport on the right side of the shuttle showed something new, something that shocked them even more than seeing Earth shrinking before their eyes, as they got farther away from it.