Once We Lived in Nanjing

Ban Xia let out a sigh, put down the "Journey to the West" in her hand, stretched languidly, and looked up through the window. The Black Moon hung low in the sky, appearing about the same size as the white moon but much darker in color, nearly fading into the ink-blue canopy above. It seemed as if a circular hole had been cut into the velvet-like night sky, revealing the deeper universe behind it. The teacher said it was so dark because its surface was rough, not smooth, absorbing and scattering most of the sunlight, preventing reflection into people's eyes.

It was hard for Ban Xia to imagine what celestial roughness looked like, because even the white moon with its uneven surface and numerous craters could reflect bright sunlight like a mirror in the night sky. The huge undulations that appeared like mountain ranges to the naked eye, once on the planetary scale, were just like a few grains of sand on a smooth table top. The Black Moon was different; it was of a planetary size and also possessed planetary-level roughness. The doodles the teacher made on "Journey to the West" suggested that the Black Moon's surface was covered with fine, complex patterns—chaotic and crisscrossed. These were likely the result of her early years observing the Black Moon through a telescope, these patterns and trenches seemingly stretching hundreds of kilometers long, unfathomably deep pits. Ban Xia inexplicably thought it resembled a huge circuit board, or a massive city spreading across the entire planet's surface.

The girl stretched her body forcefully, then stood up and paced back and forth in her room a couple of times.

Her slightly damp hair draped over her shoulders, she wore a loose white T-shirt and black shorts, and shuffled in plastic slippers. Ban Xia lifted one foot, balancing on the other, and wiggled her pale toes as she left her slipper behind on the floor.

Old Man Huang squeezed in through the crack of the door; Ban Xia bent down to pick him up and then placed him on the table.

"BG4MXH, BG4MXH, I'm back." The girl sat back down in her chair, picked up the mic, pressed the PTT button, "Let's continue—honestly, I'm not sure how effective human weapons would be against the Large Eyeballs because I've never been part of the fight against them. Only the teacher has. But if I think about it, I know we humans lost terribly. Our weapons probably weren't of much use."

"Miss, have you seen the remnants of the Large Eyeballs?" Bai Yang asked, "If there are remnants, we could analyze the effect of the weapons based on them, OVER."

"No." Ban Xia shook her head decisively.

She had never seen the remnants of the Large Eyeballs.

She only saw a living Large Eyeball from a distance when she was very young and had never encountered them again. After the extinction of humanity, they disappeared as well.

"It's strange, there are no remnants of the Large Eyeballs, nor are there human corpses." Bai Yang was puzzled, "Where did all the people go? OVER."

"There are human corpses!" Ban Xia replied, "Last time when I was fishing for the time capsule in Crescent Lake, I pulled up a skull!"

"Uh... I mean a lot of corpses. After all, the global human population went extinct—seven billion people. Shouldn't their remains be piling up like mountains?" Bai Yang thought for a moment, "Just Nanjing City had eight million people. Where did they all go? To completely eliminate the traces of so many people is almost an impossible task, OVER."

"Impossible?"

"Possible?"

"Of course it's possible, by putting all the people in sacks and sinking them into the Pacific Ocean." Ban Xia spoke with grandeur, "How much area would it take to lay seventy billion people on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean?"

"Let me calculate. An upright person sinking takes up about 0.3 square meters, so seventy billion people would be 2.1 billion square meters, which is 2100 square kilometers." Bai Yang did the math, "About a third of the size of Nanjing City... that's not really that much, Miss. If you dive into the Pacific, you might see corpses scattered densely on the seabed, standing like the Terracotta Army, OVER."

The idle chatter of the two was quite divergent. With the limited information left on "Journey to the West" by their teacher, they began to diverge from the few words on the paper, brainstorming, noting down all kinds of off-the-wall speculations, and then sending them all to Zhao Bowen.

Including but not limited to:

Hide the Earth.

Establish a super-large strategic missile defense position.

Build underground cities or undersea cities, where all of humanity moves to live beneath the surface and the sea.

For the future of all humanity, these two small heads could be said to be racking their brains and pulling out all the stops.

Yet to this day, Bai Yang was still unclear about the extent to which human weapons could threaten the Large Eyeballs. Tanks, airplanes, in Ban Xia's words, they were all just wreckage burned on the roadside. The only weapon they could confirm would be effective was the most powerful weapon in human hands.

— Nuclear bombs.

"Nuclear bombs." The girl said, "Nuclear bombs are effective against the Large Eyeballs. This is something the teacher said. Do you remember the nuclear bomb that exploded in Zhenjiang back then?"

"From my point of view, it should be a nuclear bomb that will explode in Zhenjiang in the future." Bai Yang said, "OVER."

"The teacher said that was the most successful action in humanity's resistance against the Large Eyeballs. I think since she said it was the most successful, the nuclear bomb must have had an effect." Ban Xia said, "Nuclear bombs pose a threat to the Large Eyeballs."

"Ugandan chimpanzees?" Wang Ning turned his head to glance at the laptop screen, "Xiaowen, you're not right about that. Where do you see a chimpanzee here?"

"Exactly, where do you see a chimpanzee?" Bai Zhen was greatly satisfied, after all, many years of friendship meant always standing on the same side.

"This is a baboon," Wang Ning said.

The excruciatingly slow transmission speed of AFSK didn't dampen Bai Zhen and Wang Ning's enthusiasm. With the aid of Huawei communication experts, they successfully set up an image transmission link that evening on a second-hand 725, with all the major hardware components in place - the motherboard, keyboard, monitor, camera, and amateur radio station. The image signals captured by the camera were first compressed on the Celeron 3150 industrial-grade motherboard, then encoded into audio signals, and transmitted through the 725.

In the simulation experiment responsible for signal reception was the Icom705 radio station, which Bai Zhen borrowed. The amateur radio station had also played an important role in the previous remote control system setup experiments. The 705, being a newer model radio, has a much higher degree of digitization compared to the old-fashioned 725. It was connected to a computer to receive and demodulate the image signals.

"Check the interface," Wang Ning said, "and make sure none of the connections have come loose."

They used a Hikvision UVC camera plugged into the motherboard's USB port.

The camera was responsible for signal acquisition; it input the image signals to the Celeron 3150 industrial-grade motherboard where the image data was compressed and transcoded before output.

The sound card of the motherboard was connected to the handheld mic of the 725 radio, with the sound card responsible for inputting the crackling audio signal to the radio. This step's principle and operation were similar to the previous remote control system.

"The only difference is that the PTT interface of the handheld mic needs to be connected to a separate switch, in charge of controlling transmission and reception."

Bai Zhen was holding a small switch in his hand, connected between the PTT interface of the 725 handheld mic and the ground wire. When the switch was closed, the circuit was complete, and the 725 radio was triggered to start transmitting images. Once the switch was opened, the circuit broke short, and the transmission stopped.

Half-past eleven at night.

"November 8th, 2019, 11:30 PM," Wang Ning glanced at his phone, "First image transmission simulation experiment, all stations in place!"

Bai Zhen, carrying a small table, set up the 705 radio and laptop, and sat in the stairwell outside, with the antenna erected.

"Crescent Lake Five Radio reception in place!" Bai Zhen shouted.

"Crescent Lake Twenty-Five Radio transmission in place!" Wang Ning shouted.

"Lenovo computer decoding ready!" Bai Zhen shouted again.

"Celeron industrial control encoding ready!" Wang Ning shouted again.

"Two-meter whip antenna ready!" Bai Zhen shouted again.

"Hikvision ready!" Wang Ning shouted again.

"Reception system interface all normal!"

"Transmission system interface all normal!"

"Power supply normal!"

"Power source normal!"

"Wind direction and temperature normal!"

"Air humidity and oxygen concentration normal!"

"Storm Crimson in place!"

"Chernobyl Alpha in place!"

The two shouted with the spirit of a whole team.

"02 in place!"

"01 in place!"

"Transmission countdown ten seconds! Five-second countdown! 3! 2! 1!" Wang Ning pushed the switch, "Begin transmission!"