If there had been any doubts about Nova Technologies' capabilities, the second livestream obliterated them completely.

The asteroid belt broadcast had been shocking—a demonstration of space access and resource abundance that challenged fundamental economic assumptions. But the Jupiter descent? That was something else entirely. That was humanity watching one of their own survive conditions that should have been instantly fatal, broadcast live with telemetry data that couldn't be faked.

The world had been struggling with problems that now seemed almost quaint. Making launch costs economical. Reducing space debris. Extending mission durations beyond a few months. These were the challenges that occupied the brightest minds at NASA, ESA, and every national space program.

Then Nova Technologies appeared and solved problems that weren't even on the roadmap yet.

When people examined what the company had actually demonstrated across both livestreams, the list was staggering:

Propulsion Technology: Travel from Earth to the asteroid belt in under fifteen hours. Return journey in similar timeframe. Acceleration profiles that suggested either revolutionary engine design or the complete abandonment of conventional rocket physics. The ability to hover and maneuver in Jupiter's crushing gravity well without apparent strain.

Structural Engineering: A spacecraft—no, a starship—over a kilometer long, capable of housing tens of thousands. Hull materials that withstood 38 bars of pressure and temperatures exceeding 150°C without catastrophic failure. A design so far beyond current aerospace engineering that every structural engineer who saw it immediately questioned their entire education.

Life Support Systems: Self-contained atmospheric recycling, radiation shielding, artificial gravity generation. The CEO had walked around that docking bay without magnetic boots or tethers. He'd operated in Jupiter's upper atmosphere without visible life support equipment beyond his suit.

Communications: Real-time video streaming from the asteroid belt and Jupiter with zero detectable latency. No signal delay. No compression artifacts during high-bandwidth transmission. This alone suggested either faster-than-light data transmission or communication technology so advanced it might as well be magic.

Materials Science: An exosuit that protected its wearer from hard vacuum, extreme temperatures, crushing pressure, and radiation exposure while maintaining full mobility. The suit moved like water showed no visible damage after exposure to conditions that would vaporize conventional spacesuits.

Artificial Intelligence: Locally ran AIs on individual Lucid devices that has shown decision-making capability, real-time and problem-solving that suggested genuine artificial general intelligence. Not narrow AI designed for specific tasks, but true machine consciousness.

Manufacturing Capability: The infrastructure to build all of this—the starship, the shuttle, the exosuit, the sampling probes—without anyone noticing. No factory floors photographed by satellites. No supply chain disruptions. No workforce rumors or leaked documents. They'd built something unprecedented in complete secrecy.

Energy Generation: Power systems capable of driving that massive starship, maintaining its artificial gravity, running its life support, and broadcasting high-definition video across hundreds of millions of kilometers. The energy requirements alone should have required a small nuclear reactor, but no radiation signatures had been detected.

Looking at this list, it wasn't hard to understand why so many people clung desperately to the theory that it was all CGI.

"It has to be virtual reality," became the mantra of the desperate. "They built a simulation so realistic that even experts can't tell the difference. That's the real breakthrough—not space travel, but perfect VR."

The theory spread rapidly through forums and comment sections, growing more elaborate with each retelling. Nova Technologies had created a simulation within Lucid, the theory went. The "CEO" was just an actor. The telemetry data was procedurally generated. The whole thing was an elaborate marketing campaign for their VR platform.

It was a comforting theory. It meant the world still made sense. It meant that humanity's understanding of physics and engineering remained valid. It meant that one company hadn't somehow leapfrogged centuries of development to achieve things that should have been impossible.

But the theory had problems.

The sampling probes, for instance. Liam had deployed multiple devices during the Jupiter descent, collecting atmospheric data at various depths. If this was all virtual reality, why bother with that detail? Why include scientific data collection in what was supposedly just a spectacular show?

And the telemetry itself presented issues for the CGI theory. Multiple aerospace engineers had analyzed the readouts frame by frame. The numbers were too consistent, too interconnected. Pressure, temperature, altitude, hull stress—everything correlated exactly as it should. Creating fake data that sophisticated would have required simulating Jupiter's actual atmospheric physics, which was nearly as impressive as actually going there.

But people wanted to believe. They needed to believe. Because the alternative was too overwhelming.

***

On social media, the discourse reached a fever pitch that made the post-asteroid-belt chaos look restrained.

#JupiterDescent trended for five straight days, generating over 2 billion tweets. #NovaGate—the subreddit dedicated to Nova Technologies—saw its membership explode to 15 million. Every post analyzing the livestream received hundreds of thousands of upvotes and tens of thousands of comments.

"I watched the hull integrity drop to 94% and I felt actual fear. For a digital avatar. In a livestream. This company has broken something fundamental in my brain."

"My physics professor stopped class halfway through to watch the stream. Afterward, he just stood there staring at the board for five minutes. Then he erased everything and said 'I need to rethink some things.'"

"The CGI theory falls apart when you consider that Nova would have to simulate not just visuals but accurate physics across multiple interconnected systems in real-time. That's harder than actually going to Jupiter."

"Everyone's focused on the technology, but can we talk about how one person just casually risked his life for a livestream? The hull was failing. He could have died. For content."

"OR the suit has capabilities we haven't seen yet and he was never in real danger. Which is somehow MORE terrifying."

"Remember when the wildest thing about Nova Tech was that they made good VR headsets? Remember when that was only TWO MONTHS AGO?"

The comments revealed a world struggling to integrate impossible information into existing frameworks. Some people defaulted to denial. Others embraced the chaos with almost religious fervor. Many simply sat in stunned contemplation, unable to process the implications.

***

Financial markets, still reeling from the first livestream, entered what analysts were now calling "The Great Recalibration."

Aerospace stocks had recovered slightly after the asteroid belt stream, investors reasoning that even if Nova Technologies was ahead, there was still room for competitors in the space industry.

The Jupiter descent destroyed that optimism.

Within 48 hours of the broadcast ending, every legacy aerospace firms had dropped an estimated 65% from its pre-Nova peak. Every company working on Mars colonization, lunar bases, or space tourism watched their investor confidence evaporate.

"Why would anyone invest in our 2030 Mars landing," one aerospace executive said in a leaked memo, "when Nova Technologies is apparently already there?"

But the damage extended far beyond aerospace. The insurance industry faced an existential crisis—how do you price risk when someone has demonstrated the ability to survive conditions you'd previously considered unsurvivable?

What does "maximum coverage" mean when the ceiling of human capability has just been raised beyond calculation?

Manufacturing faced similar disruption. If Nova Technologies could build spacecraft in secret, what else were they manufacturing? Traditional supply chains suddenly looked vulnerable to obsolescence.

The energy sector watched nervously. Those power generation capabilities implied energy technology that could make oil, coal, and even current renewable infrastructure look primitive. If Nova Technologies decided to enter the energy market...

Financial analysts stopped making predictions. The models didn't work anymore. Too many variables had changed too quickly.

***

Government responses varied by nation, but shared a common thread: barely controlled panic.

In Washington, the emergency sessions had become permanent. The National Security Council convened daily briefings on Nova Technologies, though the briefings consisted mostly of admitting they knew nothing new.

"We've attempted satellite tracking of the island," one NSA director reported. "Every system reports null readings. It's like the island doesn't exist, except we know it does because commercial flights see it. The stealth technology alone represents a strategic threat."

"Are they a threat?" someone asked—the same question from the previous emergency meeting.

"They've demonstrated weapons-grade capabilities," the Secretary of Defense replied. "That starship could obliterate our satellite network within hours. The technology in that exosuit suggests personal armor that could make an individual soldier near-invincible. And we have zero leverage to compel cooperation or even communication."

"But have they shown hostile intent?"

"No. Which somehow makes it worse. We don't know what they want."

Similar conversations played out in Beijing, Moscow, Brussels, and every other major capital. The consensus was universal: Nova Technologies represented either humanity's greatest hope or its greatest threat, and no one could determine which.

***

But amid the chaos and fear, another reaction emerged: inspiration.

Engineering programs worldwide reported even more unprecedented application numbers.

Aerospace engineering departments that had been declining for years suddenly had waiting lists. Physics programs saw enrollment jump 300%. Computer science departments couldn't process applications fast enough.

An entire generation watched someone descend into Jupiter's Great Red Spot and thought: "I want to do that. I want to be part of whatever comes next."

School children who'd previously dreamed of being YouTube stars or professional athletes now talked about becoming astronauts, engineers, and scientists. Not the sanitized, bureaucratic space program careers of previous generations, but something wilder and more immediate.

Nova Technologies had shown them what was possible. Not in some distant future, not as a dream deferred, but right now, today, achievable with the right knowledge and tools.

Universities scrambled to update their curricula. Engineering textbooks written just five years ago were now demonstrably obsolete. Professors threw out lesson plans and started from first principles, trying to figure out how to teach students for a world that was changing faster than anyone could track.

***

The thousand Lucid device owners—the Digital Aristocrats—found themselves in an impossible position.

They'd experienced something that hundreds of millions of others had only watched. They'd felt the shuttle shudder as it entered Jupiter's atmosphere. They'd seen their avatar hands grip the support rails as the hull integrity warnings flashed red. They'd experienced survival in conditions that should have killed them.

And they couldn't fully explain it to anyone who hadn't been there.

"You don't understand," one user—a popular livestreamer who got a Lucid unit during the review period—tried to explain in an interview.

"Watching the stream and being in the stream are completely different things. I know—intellectually, I know—that I was safe in my living room the entire time. But my brain didn't believe that. For twenty minutes, I was convinced I was about to die."

The interviewer pressed: "But you knew it wasn't real."

"That's just it. I don't know if 'real' means what I thought it meant anymore. The experience was real. The fear was real. The relief when we escaped was real. Does it matter that my body wasn't physically there?"

The question hung in the air, unanswered, because no one had a good answer yet.

***

As the second week after the Jupiter stream dawned, one thing became clear: the world would never return to its pre-Nova state. The company hadn't just disrupted industries or challenged assumptions. It had fundamentally altered humanity's understanding of what was possible, what was achievable, and what the future might hold.

The age of watching from a distance had ended. The age of participation was beginning, whether humanity felt ready for it or not.

And somewhere in the outer solar system, beyond Jupiter, a lone starship continued its journey toward Saturn.

The third livestream was coming. Everyone knew it. And despite the fear, despite the uncertainty, despite everything—1.08 billion people would be watching when it did.

Because whatever Nova Technologies showed them next, it would be extraordinary.

It always was.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.