Chapter 709: The Space Station Had Finally Become A Home
It had been more than half a day since information regarding the wave of Nova Technologies’ partnerships with Earth’s companies leaked to the global public, and it had been almost two days now since the 1,240 civilian staff departed for the Space Station.
Down on Earth, the news cycle was moving at a blistering pace. The whole world was intrigued by the fact that Nova Technologies was actively partnering with legacy companies on Earth.
The revelation that terrestrial mainstays—from massive video game storefronts like Steam to hardware giants like Samsung and cosmetics empires like L’Oréal—were given a seat at the table had dominated global financial discussions.
People were endlessly debating the implications of off-world commerce, and they were all looking forward to seeing exactly what that unprecedented partnership would create when they eventually got the chance to visit the space station. This conversation even reached the financial market, as the stock price of the contacted companies rose significantly.
But curiosity towards what the retail section would look like was way less compared to the burning, overwhelming curiosity about what the space station interior looks like.
For thirty days, humanity had watched the live construction feed, captivated and terrified by the fifty-five-kilometer obsidian leviathan assembling itself in the void. Yet, that feed had only ever shown the dark, light-absorbing exterior hull. The inside of the megastructure—the environment where over a thousand ordinary human beings were now breathing, walking, and living—was a complete mystery.
And finally, after a day of excruciating wait, the staffs started posting images and footages of the space station’s interior.
And for the public, it was way better than expected.
Ideally, the billions of people watching from Earth would have appreciated a high-definition livestream. But because none of the staff have a Lucid device and hasn’t been given one yet because they haven’t completed their two-month orientation, that kind of seamless, 64K autonomous broadcasting wasn’t possible. So they could only take pictures with their personal, standard terrestrial phones and post them on LucidNet.
But even with their phones, the images and footages were breathtaking to say the least.
The first clips to hit the feeds were of the transit infrastructure. Just the footage of the main transportation hub, with its countless high-speed mag trains and small carriers, was enough to make everyone pause.
People had imagined sterile, narrow metallic corridors, like the cramped service tunnels of a naval submarine or the claustrophobic modules of the old International Space Station.
Instead, the footage revealed a monumental, multi-tiered atrium bathed in pristine, artificial sunlight. Sleek, pearlescent-white maglev pods glided along frictionless magnetic rails with absolute silence, moving at speeds exceeding two hundred miles per hour through vast, glass-shielded corridors.
Below the transit lines, sprawling indoor parks with real, towering oak trees and winding turquoise rivers stretched out as far as the camera lenses could capture. It did not look like a space station. It looked like a utopian metropolis carved out of titanium and light, floating effortlessly in the dark ocean of space.
But the footage that broke them was the residential district, and the staff quarters most of all.
When the staff stepped off the mag-train and walked into their assigned living spaces, they pulled out their phones and began recording. Some posted what their own quarters looked like, and people on Earth found themselves comparing them not to crew accommodation, but to the finest hotel suites on Earth.
Each quarter looked less like a berth on a station than a premium apartment in a Times Square high-rise. The videos panning across the rooms showed expansive, open-concept living spaces with polished hardwood-style flooring, warm ambient lighting, and massive, sweeping smart-glass windows that offered unobstructed views of either the lush internal parks or the star-dusted void of deep space.
They were spacious, impeccably finished, and more than large enough for a staff member and their visiting family. They were appointed well beyond anything the word "quarters" had ever implied.
Every piece of furniture looked custom-engineered for maximum ergonomic comfort, blending sleek minimalist design with warm, inviting textures.
More importantly, they carried their own essentials, a full kitchen among them. These weren’t just sleeping pods attached to a communal mess hall; they were fully functional, independent homes, designed so that a person could cook for themselves without ever going down to the dining floor if they did not wish to.
It was the definition of luxury, and it said something plain and undeniable about the company.
Nova Technologies was already paying its staff more than any employer on Earth—offering massive, six-figure net savings, complete off-world immunity, and unparalleled healthcare. And still, it had built them homes like these.
It was proof of how far the company was willing to go to make the people who worked for it comfortable, even at the very edge of the world. It shattered the terrestrial corporate logic that dictated working-class housing had to be small, cheap, and strictly utilitarian.
Nova had the post-scarcity capital to build anything, and it chose to build palaces for its blue-collar workforce.
For the millions of retail workers, warehouse operators, and junior nurses watching the footage from their cramped, overpriced terrestrial apartments, it was a profound emotional shock. It proved that artificial scarcity was a choice, and Nova was choosing differently.
But footages of the residential district wasn’t the only thing that broke their mind, because they all felt like they had shown glimpsed of the future when footages of the medical district and the wellness section dropped.
The medical facilities did not look like the overcrowded, fluorescent-lit hospitals of Earth. They looked like sanctuaries of pure, frictionless healing. And for those who could one day afford a ticket to tour the station, the Recovery Pods of the medical district were the thing they fixed on.
The staff recorded the vast, pristine pod halls, showing rows of sleek, biometric Recovery Pods resting quietly in the ambient light. Seeing how they looked, how they worked—even just resting in standby mode, waiting to interface with human biology—was enough to turn idle interest into genuine want.
It was the kind of want that would send people to the booking portal the moment it opened, ready to drain their life savings just to lay inside one for a single afternoon.
But the station was not open to the public yet, and would not be for some time.
The two-month orientation for the staff had to be completed first. Yet, the delay did nothing to cool the desire. If anything, it sharpened it, because to the people watching, the station now looked like the most advanced medicine that had ever existed, and they wanted to stand inside it.
The world was already calling it what it would plainly become: the new hub of medical tourism, a place people would cross the solar system to be treated in.
Wealthy executives, aging politicians, and terrestrial billionaires were already maneuvering behind closed doors, desperate to secure early access to the station’s clinical authority. They were all pestering Whitlock, who was just as helpless as them.
And for those who could not afford a ticket, and never would—the sick, the waiting, the ones for whom the finest medicine on Earth had already run out of answers—the footage landed differently.
They looked at the most advanced medical facility ever built, out of reach by every ordinary measure, and remembered the one door that was not closed to them. There was the monthly lottery where ten people will win an all-expense paid trip to the space station, and they will be able to access the pods.
It was a statistical longshot, a drop of water in an ocean of global suffering, but it was real. Every user, Lucid users or Lucidnet, was automatically entered. There were no insurance boards to beg, no corrupt medical administrators to bribe.
A terminal patient in a forgotten rural clinic had the exact same mathematical chance of walking into that glowing pod hall as a Wall Street hedge fund manager. All they need is a Lucidnet account.
Naturally, there was still the Medical Nanites, but it still seemed too far away, though everyone were waiting for it. The clinical trial volunteers—like Diego and Maya, whose miraculous recoveries were already legends—had proven the nanites could reconstruct a human body from the brink of death.
But the mass production and global distribution of those nanites were still heavily guarded secrets, leaving the Recovery Pods on the station as the most visible, tangible symbol of Nova’s medical supremacy.
As for the other districts and parts of the space station, some of them the staff couldn’t share images of because they were restricted, like the research district. The 135 heavily contested R&D zones, locked down by the most powerful institutions and governments on Earth, were closed to casual recording.
And others were empty at the moment, with nothing to be shown. Like the retail section. The vast, sweeping commercial promenades were quiet, waiting for the massive logistical shipments from companies on earth to arrive and populate the shelves with their verified, molecularly pure station editions.
The reaction started flowing in immediately after the images and footages hit the servers.
Comment sections on LucidNet blurred into an endless waterfall of awe, disbelief, and overwhelming joy. People weren’t just discussing the engineering anymore; they were discussing the lifestyle.
They were sharing screenshots of staff’s kitchen or panoramic living room window, imagining what it would feel like to wake up in a place where gravity was a choice, where sickness was obsolete, and where the daily paper was delivered fresh to your door 384,000 kilometers from Earth.
The megastructure had officially stopped being a distant, intimidating monument of titanium. Through the shaky, excited phone footage of the space station ordinary workers, the Lagrange 5 space station had finally become a home.