Once We Lived in Nanjing

Today is December 10th.

Being precise about the date and time is a good habit left by the teacher, which Ban Xia has continued to maintain until now. Even Bai Yang was surprised that she still kept such a self-disciplined and meticulous habit while living alone. Bai Yang couldn't understand the significance of the last person on earth recording the date, but the teacher said, "Time belongs to the universe, but days are one's own."

The teacher made many calendars, which were engraved on walls, floors, and pillars. She made calendars up to the year 2050 AD, and every day that passed, Ban Xia would cross off one. If time was a long, continuous strip, then Ban Xia had sliced it into thin, fine pieces like a Henan knife-cut noodle master.

That motherboard still hung on the wall, connected to colorful complex cables. Indeed, upgrading the signal modulation was challenging, and now Ban Xia was no longer a complete novice. After such a long period of training and hands-on practice, she could slightly understand some basic concepts, but tuning PSK was many times harder than AFSK.

When resting, she would make faces at the camera.

The imaging quality of Hikvision's UVC camera combined with the old Philips CRT monitor was terrible. Not only was the resolution low, but it also had a delay. Ban Xia wondered, when the data transmission system was successfully set up, how should she make her appearance?

Wave her hand?

Bow?

Forget it, she might as well do a backflip.

Ban Xia was waiting.

So was Zhao Bowen.

Countless threads of thought, all converged at the command center.

It was going to be a massive plan; apart from Zhao Bowen himself, no one could see its full scope. Bai Zhen and Wang Ning were sitting on the couch sorting materials, and by raising their heads, they could see Zhao Bowen again standing in front of the map of Nanjing City, moving a compass and pencil back and forth in his hands. He drew a circle at the boundary between Qinhuai District and Xuanwu District, frowning deeply for a long time, then erased it and drew a slightly smaller one.

Bai Zhen and Wang Ning were dissatisfied with his secretive manner.

"Don't ask what you shouldn't," Zhao Bowen said.

"So what are we doing right now?" Wang Ning asked. "It's been several days without any progress. Zhao, time is consumed simultaneously on both sides; a day passes for us, and a day passes for her too. We can't afford to waste time."

"Does she have enough food?" Bai Zhen asked. "And water?"

"I know."

Zhao Bowen was somewhat irritated, put down the compass and pencil, and went out to smoke.

Four cellphones still lay on the coffee table, silent.

·

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Zhao Bowen ran downstairs, sitting at the entrance of the building, smoking sullenly.

While smoking, he cursed silently in his mind.

Curse Bai Zhen, curse Wang Ning, curse the computer team, curse the aerospace team, curse the engineering team, curse everyone. It's been hours and not a single piece of good news, every phone call is just stalling, shirking, delaying, passing the buck, and "Iron Hand Assassin is coming, silly kids, run—!".

"Run, run, the whole world is done for, where can you possibly run to."

Zhao Bowen looked into the distance, maliciously imagining what the scene would be like if the apocalypse came—would the big eyes eat the old lady walking her dog across the street? Just slightly venting some of the negative emotions from his dark side. When he's in a bad mood, he smokes; smoking alone and getting increasingly depressed as he does.

Li Bai said, draw your blade and sever water and water flows yet more, raise your glass to drown your sorrows and your sorrows multiply, but Zhao Bowen isn't that cultured; he says fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

Old Zhao fumbled for his phone in his back pocket, opened WeChat with the intention to post a long rant to curse someone, but scrolled through his contacts back and forth and couldn't find a suitable target. Unable to find someone to curse left him with a belly full of fire suppressed inside, so Zhao Bowen came up with a plan—he logged onto Weibo, Tieba, Douyin, Kuaishou, looking for some stupid posts to yell at the post authors.

Some posts are IQ valleys attracting a mass of pseudoscientists, conspiracy theorists, those who slipped through nine years of compulsory education—before entering, Zhao Bowen was full of confidence, thinking of himself as an associate professor at Nanjing University, the pinnacle of societal intellect, wouldn't this be a dimension reduction strike against them? Wasn't this a massacre?

In the end, Zhao Bowen was beaten utterly, throwing away his helmet and armor, fleeing with his tail between his legs; at first, he still held a bit of the dignity of a high-level intellectual, trying to use logic and common sense to convince the others, but quickly he realized the other party was illogical. When Zhao Bowen tried his best to patiently explain who Braun is and what means moon orbit docking, the other party could only madly type dog traitor dog traitor dog traitor you admit the United States landed on the moon and you are a dog traitor.

Couldn't reason with them, couldn't out-curse them either.

Old Zhao was extremely disheartened, disheartened by so many unreasonable people, even more disheartened that he couldn't even curse better than them—thinking that a world like this might as well be destroyed.

But then he thought about it, he just shouldn't reason with people online, he should have said your entire ancestors' eighteen generations' educational levels combined aren't as high as mine, curse them and then block them. Online arguments always end up involving the whole family and ancestors anyway, it's better to just unleash the big moves from the start.

Old Zhao finished his cigarette, threw the butt on the ground and stomped it out viciously, as though he was crushing the person he just quarreled with online under his foot, running over it back and forth, feeling relieved after that and dusting off his pants ready to get back to work.

As the command center, Zhao Bowen and others were coordinating the entire plan, they were directly responsible to the higher-ups, this was a crucial junction, connecting the previous and the next, but coordinating work is just a pain—at the lower levels, the command center was seen as the evil client, amateurs commanding professionals, a collection of bureaucratic practices, but from the command center's own perspective—damn it, getting grief from both sides, pressure from up and down, the responsibility is theirs, but the credit goes to others.

If they screwed it up, they had to take full responsibility; if it succeeded, it was the leaders being wise. If it weren't for this being a matter of great importance, thousands of lives hanging by a thread, Old Zhao really wanted to throw in the towel and quit; it's rare for a physicist to still have a full head of thick black hair, he shouldn't waste it like this, whoever loves the job can have it.

Zhao Bowen sighed, damn it, why do I have such a strong sense of responsibility?

This damn deeply rooted sense of responsibility.

Blame it all on Confucius, the old man said about cultivating oneself, putting one's family in order, managing the state, and making the world peaceful, unchanged for two thousand years, making Zhao Bowen unable to find even an excuse to escape.

Go upstairs, make more calls, urge the engineering team, urge the aerospace team, urge the astronomy team—he needs that remote sensing satellite, by any means necessary, the aerospace team must get the remote sensing satellite to twenty years from now; Zhao Bowen knows this is difficult, but if it weren't a difficult problem, there would be no need to convene those elites. The remote sensing satellite is too important, without it, they are blind, but having just eyes isn't enough, thinking this, Zhao Bowen's heart sank once more.

He's been waiting for news.

Zhao Bowen took out his phone again and glanced at it, an unconscious action, he didn't even know what he wanted to see, maybe the time, maybe WeChat.

The phone vibrated lightly.

A message arrived, Zhao Bowen hoped it was some good news, any message these days made him nervous, the last time he felt this way was after the college entrance exams, checking his results, he closed his eyes, then slowly opened them like a lottery draw.

But these days, only the operators send spam messages non-stop, Zhao Bowen guessed it was from China Telecommunications, like scratching a scratch card and getting a 'Thank you for your patronage'.

He didn't see the familiar China Telecommunications, but a strange number.

But Zhao Bowen knew where this message was sent from:

"The engagement gift has been given, engaged, Miss Qiu is soon to be married."