Once We Lived in Nanjing

On this afternoon, the girl was still fiddling with the motherboard. A motherboard that had been stored in a humid climate for twenty years was virtually a Petri dish for mold, covered in brightly colored fuzzy growths that at a glance could be mistaken for a painter's palette. Ban Xia cleaned them off, then put them outside under the Sun to bake. Wang Ning said it's best to find unused, unopened motherboards, preferably industrial or military ones because they use tantalum capacitors, which are less prone to failure.

"Find an industrial 3150 motherboard, a fanless Celeron 3150 industrial motherboard might do the trick," Wang Ning said. "You can easily find those on Zhujiang Road."

"Have you used that before?" Bai Zhen asked. "What system?"

"XP or Win7," Wang Ning answered.

"Great," Bai Zhen nodded. "Then you can play Red Alert."

Ban Xia turned the square motherboard in her hands over and blew upon it. This was probably the most delicate man-made object the girl had ever seen, with its green base and silver circuits, the densely packed resistors and capacitors, and the variously-sized interfaces making for a dizzyingly complex structure. Ban Xia carefully dusted it off. This motherboard didn't have a fan; rather, there was a large black heat sink standing in the middle of the board.

It would be the heart of the image transmission link.

It was responsible for converting the image data captured by the camera into an audio signal that a ham radio could transmit—

"Hold on hold on, what are you guys talking about?" Bai Yang interjected. "Audio signal? Sound?"

"That's right, any problem with that, Little Yang?" Wang Ning looked up as he placed the motherboard on the coffee table.

"Turning... turning images into sound?" Bai Yang couldn't believe it.

"Yes, you heard right, it's about converting image data into audio signals, turning photos that your eyes can see into 'zzzz' sounds that your ears can hear," Bai Zhen said, nodding.

"Any data can be turned into an audio signal," Wang Ning added. "It's the simplest form of transmission, just like electromagnetic waves. Sound waves are also waves, and any wave can be modulated. Don't you normally communicate with voice over the radio using the microphone and amplifier? If we modulated your voice, it too could carry image information."

"This... Verbal image transmission?" Bai Yang was stunned.

"You could say that, if your tongue and vocal cords were strong enough to produce accurately modulated sound waves directly into the radio -- it might sound a bit like Parseltongue from Harry Potter -- and on the radio's end, if someone had a recorder, they could record this sound, input it into a computer for decoding, and it could be restored into a picture," Wang Ning nodded. "That's why we need a motherboard, as they generally come with a sound card included."

"Information is essentially order; it's a pattern. Anything you can modulate in its pattern can carry information," Wang Ning continued. "For example, if I hit your dad."

"Buzz off," Old Bai said.

"If I hit your dad's jaw rapidly and rhythmically with my fist, using binary," Wang Ning said. "I could even punch out an entire XP system."

"Then my dad's jawbone would have to be made of titanium alloy," Bai Yang said.

"Sound is the same, sound waves can be modulated, and thus can carry any information," Wang Ning said. "This is also currently the simplest and most suitable method of transmission for circumventing regulations."

"This is called AFSK," Bai Zhen added.

The two old men had gathered a vast amount of motherboards and cameras, piling them up in the living room to the extent that it annoyed Mother, who said it was like walking into a second-hand electronics market when entering the house.

Under the guidance of Wang Ning and Bai Zhen, Ban Xia could assemble anything with the electronic junk from Zhujiang Road.

She sat cross-legged on the living room floor, leaning against the sofa, and said sporadically, "Mom, Dad, how on Earth are these things made? It's really incredible."

Ban Xia imagined they were made by hand with tweezers, soldering tiny components one by one. Some components on the motherboard were so small she couldn't even see them clearly. How would anyone solder those?

She suddenly grabbed a slipper.

With bated breath and a focused mind, she paused for a moment, then struck like lightning, swift and swift!

The slipper spun out and hit the cabinet with a "whack", Ban Xia had long honed her skills in locating sounds—her awareness extended in all directions, and she was even more sensitive to the sounds of mice than a cat. The moment a mouse made a noise in the room, she would throw her slipper with the speed of thunder.

However, this time, there was no "squeak" of a fleeing mouse. Instead, the slipper caused items piled on the cabinet to clatter down with a crash.

Ban Xia reluctantly got up to tidy up.

This was the miscellany she'd taken out while looking for an English-Chinese dictionary a while ago and had not managed to put away, casually stacking them on top of the TV cabinet, and now a slipper hit caused it all to collapse.

There were paper, pens, coins, empty boxes, pills whose purpose she couldn't fathom, and that thick tome of "Journey to the West," which Ban Xia stuffed back into the drawer. She was actually quite a slob in her own life, carelessly picking things up and putting them down wherever when living alone.

The girl picked up "Journey to the West" from the floor, a hefty volume that she had almost never flipped through because she couldn't understand it.

She heard a teacher say it was about a bald guy leading three monsters to the Western Paradise to obtain sutras.

Ban Xia flipped through the book casually, glanced at the page number, and looked at the header.

"Sanzang does not forget his origin... Four Saints test their Zen hearts..."

Ban Xia muttered to herself.

"Those three women walked behind the screen, leaving a pair of silk lanterns behind. The woman said: 'Esteemed elders, would any of you care to match with my dear daughter?' Wujing replied: 'We have discussed it already, it will be that one surnamed Zhu taking her as his bride.'"

She flipped through two more pages, reading aloud at random.

"The woman lifted his bridal veil and said: 'Son-in-law, it's not that my daughter isn't pleasing, but they are too modest to accept you.' Bajie replied: 'Mother, if they won't accept me, you take me then!' The woman said: 'Oh, my good son-in-law! How dare you be so presumptuous as to even take your mother-in-law!'"

She didn't understand.

Not at all.

Pigs have mothers-in-law now?

In this era, books had lost their meaning. The teacher used to have many books but ended up burning them all, along with her materials and notes. Ban Xia remembered the teacher's expressionless face as she tossed them into the brazier to be incinerated, sitting motionless the entire afternoon. There probably weren't many books left in Nanjing City; even the big library in Nantong had been emptied out, not for reading, of course, but for warmth. Ban Xia remembered one particularly cold winter, the teacher had split the wooden furniture to use as firewood for warmth.

That was the last snowfall in Nanjing City.

"That evening, after the court dispersed, the demon entered the Silver Peace Palace. Eighteen palace maids and beauties were selected to play music and dance, urging the demon to drink and be merry. The beast sat alone at the high seat, flanked by striking beauties. Look at him enjoying himself, drinking until the second night watch, drunk and unable to restrain himself."

Ban Xia recited loudly as she paced around the living room, "He leapt up, laughed out loud, revealing his true form. Sudden malice arose, he opened his fan-like hands and grabbed a girl playing the pipa, biting her head with a snap. The remaining seventeen palace maids ran for their lives..."

She paused, stunned.

She suddenly realized she had read it wrong.

"Go to hell" was not in the original text of "Journey to the West," but someone had written it on the paper with a black ink pen, messy and haphazard, slanted among the neat, printed Song typeface of the text.

"Oh my god."

Ban Xia whispered softly.

These were the teacher's handwriting.

She stood dumbfounded for a while, then snapped back to reality and frantically started flipping through the pages, in a fleeting glance she saw messy doodles, equations, numbers, English and Chinese characters.

1200 kilometers.

Big eyes.

25473000.

Observation.

Entropy.

Galaxy.

"My god."

Ban Xia murmured.

This was not "Journey to the West," but the teacher's notebook.