Chapter 359: The Asteroid Belt

The view being displayed on everyone’s screen shocked them to the core. They couldn’t believe what they were seeing. The darkness of space, the stars, the asteroids. Everything was beautiful and overwhelming.Comments immediately started flooding in, moving so fast they became a blur of text racing up the screen.

"IS THAT REAL??? THAT CAN’T BE REAL"

"The suit alone looks 50 years ahead of current tech"

"How did they build a STARSHIP without anyone noticing???"

"That’s not CGI. Look at the way the light hits those asteroids. That’s REAL."

"WAIT HE’S IN AN ACTUAL SPACECRAFT??"

"The bay is the size of an airport hangar. HOW BIG IS THAT SHIP?"

"This changes everything. Everything we thought we knew is wrong."

"SpaseX is finished. NASA is finished. This company just won the space race."

"I can see individual craters on those asteroids. The detail is insane."

"His suit moves like water. What material is that???"

"DON’T TELL ME THAT THEY BUILT THIS IN ONE MONTH??? PLEASE DON’T!"

News anchors across every network struggled to maintain composure. On CNN, the host had abandoned her script entirely, just staring at the screen with her mouth slightly open.

"I don’t... I don’t even know what questions to ask anymore," she finally managed. "This is beyond anything we anticipated."

Standing in front of the opened bay doors, Liam turned to the gathered Lucid users behind him. Through his helmet’s speakers, his modulated voice carried clearly to everyone.

"Follow me," he said simply.

Then he stepped out of the spacecraft, floating into outer space.

The Lucid users standing there froze. Their avatars stood perfectly still, digital representations of their real bodies back on Earth, but their minds were screaming.

They knew this was a livestream. They knew they were safe at home, their physical bodies sitting or standing in living rooms and offices across the planet. But the immersion was so complete, so perfect, that their hindbrain couldn’t tell the difference.

They stood in a massive hangar bay. Vacuum stretched endlessly beyond the open doors. And someone was asking them to jump into it.

"I can’t," someone whispered. The audio system picked it up, broadcasting it to everyone.

"It’s not real. We’re not actually here," another voice said, but it shook with uncertainty.

"Then why does it feel so real?"

One figure finally moved forward. His steps were hesitant, shuffling, his avatar’s movements perfectly mimicking his real body’s reluctance. He reached the edge of the bay doors and gripped the frame, his knuckles white with tension despite being digital.

He looked out at the vast emptiness ahead. The darkness was absolute, broken only by the cold light of distant stars. The asteroids drifted past, some small enough to fit in his hand, others larger than skyscrapers. And there, floating among them, was the figure in the black exosuit, waiting patiently.

The man looked back at the crowd behind him. Dozens of avatars with blurred faces, but their body language screamed encouragement mixed with terror.

"Go!" someone shouted. "You can do it!"

"Jump! It’s amazing!"

"Don’t think about it, just go!"

He took three deep breaths, his chest rising and falling visibly. Then he pushed off.

For a moment, nothing happened. He hung in the void, suspended, weightless. Then he began to drift forward, away from the spacecraft, into the emptiness.

"Oh my God," he breathed. "Oh my God, oh my God—"

But it wasn’t fear in his voice anymore. It was awe.

He twisted his body slightly, and the movement sent him rotating in a slow spiral. The Voyager came into view, and for the first time, he saw its true scale.

The ship was enormous, easily a kilometer long, its hull covered in panels that caught the distant sunlight. Docking ports lined its sides. Weapon systems jutted from strategic positions. This wasn’t a prototype or an experimental craft. This was a warship.

"This is real," he whispered. "It’s actually real."

He turned toward where the sun should be, and there it was—the brightest star in the solar system, reduced to just another point of light by distance. He laughed, the sound slightly hysterical, overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he was experiencing.

He waved back at the others, his arm moving in the exaggerated slow motion of zero gravity, then angled himself toward Liam’s floating figure.

Watching from the bay doors, another figure stepped forward. This one moved with more confidence, recognizing the exaggerated movements as Matt.

Matt reached the edge, paused for only a heartbeat, then jumped.

"WOOOOO!" he shouted, his voice carrying clearly across the communication channel. "THIS IS INSANE!"

He somersaulted through space, laughing like a child on a carnival ride. The fear that had gripped the first jumper was entirely absent from Matt’s movements. He was having the time of his life.

Seeing Matt’s uninhibited joy broke the spell. The rest of Liam’s friends moved forward together. They jumped in quick succession, some screaming in delight, others silent with wonder.

Their momentum spread through the crowd. One by one, then in groups, the Lucid users pushed off from the Voyager, floating out into space. Soon, hundreds of digital avatars drifted among the asteroids, a swarm of humanity experiencing something no simulation had ever captured before.

Meanwhile, Liam continued addressing both audiences simultaneously. His voice carried to the standard viewers through their screens and to the Lucid users floating through space around him.

"Every image humanity has ever seen of space was taken from the outside looking in," he said, his tone conversational despite the cosmic backdrop. "Telescopes, satellites, probes—all of them observers, separate from what they were documenting. This is what it looks like when you step into it. When you become part of it instead of just studying it from afar."

He rotated slowly, the movement graceful in zero gravity, gesturing toward the asteroid field around them.

"I was on Mars about an Earth day ago. I walked its surface, searched locations where traces of life had the highest probability of being discovered. The ancient riverbeds, the subsurface ice deposits, the mineral formations that suggested past water activity."

He paused, and even through the modulated voice, disappointment came through clearly.

"I found nothing. No microbes, no fossils, no organic molecules. Mars is sterile as far as I could determine. I collected rock samples, soil specimens, ice cores—all currently being analyzed aboard the Voyager. But preliminary results suggest the planet has been dead for billions of years, if it was ever alive at all."

The comments section exploded again.

"MARS SAMPLES??? HE JUST CASUALLY WALKED ON MARS???"

"Will you release the analysis results?"

"What did the rocks look like? What did it feel like to stand there?"

"One person has now explored more of Mars than all of NASA’s rovers combined"

"This man is living in the future while we’re stuck in 2025"

Liam saw the questions blur past his field of vision. His enhanced vision and perception let him read each one despite their speed, but he didn’t respond. Instead, he turned toward the sun.

"Look at it," he said softly. "From Earth, the sun dominates the sky. Here, it’s just the brightest star among billions. Still powerful, still the source of everything we need to survive, but reduced to its proper scale. We’re so far out that our perspective has fundamentally changed."

He drifted closer to a nearby asteroid, a rocky mass about the size of a commercial aircraft. His gloved hand reached out and gripped its surface, the impact so gentle it barely disturbed his trajectory.

He turned back toward the Voyager and smiled behind his helmet. The Lucid users were floating toward him now, a scattered constellation of digital avatars experiencing weightlessness for the first time. Some moved gracefully, others flailed awkwardly, but all of them were transfixed.

Daniel floated among them, his avatar’s body language radiating pure wonder despite the blurred face. He’d spent two months processing impossible revelations, but this? This transcended everything else.

Whitlock drifted nearby, his usual composed demeanor shattered by the experience. The man who controlled trillions in assets, who had seen every luxury and privilege wealth could provide, was discovering something money couldn’t buy—at least not until now.

"The asteroid belt isn’t what most people imagine," Liam continued, his voice carrying to millions of viewers. "Science fiction shows it as a dense field requiring fancy flying to navigate. The reality is lonelier. These rocks are separated by hundreds of thousands of kilometers. But there are thousands of them, and what they represent is extraordinary."

He ran his gloved hand along the surface of the asteroid he’d gripped, feeling the texture through his exosuit’s sensors.

"This rock I’m touching right now? According to preliminary scans, it contains platinum, palladium, and rare earth elements. On Earth, these materials are worth billions. Out here, they’re just floating through space, waiting."

He pushed off gently, rotating to face the camera while drifting slowly.

"The asteroid belt contains more resources than humanity has extracted from Earth in all of recorded history. Iron, nickel, cobalt, gold—elements that are rare on our planet exist in abundance here. Some of these asteroids are almost pure metal."

Comments flooded in:

"He’s casually talking about TRILLIONS in resources"

"The mining industry just became obsolete"

"This is why he built the ship. He’s going to mine asteroids."

"Every government on Earth is watching this and panicking right now"

Liam pushed off from the asteroid, floating freely among the Lucid users who had gathered around him. Some reached out to touch nearby rocks, their avatars mimicking the wonder of discovery.

"There’s one asteroid in particular I want to show you," Liam said. "16 Psyche. It’s one of the most valuable objects in the solar system."

"Lucy, what’s our distance to 16 Psyche?" He asked, but it wasn’t broadcasted.

"Approximately 340,000 kilometers, Master. Current trajectory would take us there in roughly two hours at optimal velocity."

"Set course. Let’s go see it."

The Voyager’s massive engines ignited in the distance, visible as brilliant blue-white flares. The starship began moving, and the Lucid users gasped as their avatars were seamlessly automatically pulled along with it, maintaining their relative positions in the digital space.

Liam turned toward 16 Psyche’s direction, his body language eager despite the modulated voice.

"16 Psyche is believed to be the exposed core of a protoplanet," he explained as they traveled. "When the solar system was forming, this object collided with something else, stripping away its rocky outer layers and leaving just the metal core. It’s almost entirely iron and nickel, with traces of gold, platinum, and other precious metals throughout."

He paused, letting the information sink in.

"Current estimates put its value at ten thousand quadrillion dollars. That’s ten with eighteen zeros. More wealth than exists in Earth’s entire economy, concentrated in a single object 226 kilometers across."

The standard viewers’ comments became incomprehensible, just a blur of shock and speculation. Even news anchors had stopped trying to provide commentary, simply letting the livestream speak for itself.

As they approached, 16 Psyche grew from a distant speck to a visible mass, then to a world unto itself. Its surface gleamed with metallic luster, reflecting the sun’s light in ways that stone never could. Craters pocked its surface, each impact having excavated deeper into the pure metal beneath.

Liam drifted closer, the Lucid users following like a school of fish, their movements becoming more confident as they grew accustomed to zero gravity navigation.

"This," Liam said softly, reaching out to touch the metallic surface, "is humanity’s future. Not just the resources, but what they represent. The ability to build in space, to create without stripping Earth bare, to expand beyond the limitations that have defined our species since the beginning."

He gripped the surface, his gloved fingers finding purchase on the alien metal.

"The age of scarcity is ending. The question now is what we do with abundance."