Once We Lived in Nanjing

"We've failed."

The girl leaned back in her chair, puffing her cheeks as she looked up at the ceiling in the darkness.

"What should we do next?"

"Wait two months for the second nuclear bomb to be ready, and launch again," replied the person on the headset. "That's the only way. There's no chance of retrieving the Time Slow Delivery lost in space, OVER."

"Two months... It's definitely going to rain in two months." The girl said.

"Rain?"

"Spring will come after two months, and it'll surely pour," Ban Xia explained. "Then the cameras I put on the streets will be ruined by the water."

Bai Yang held his forehead.

I hadn't even considered that.

What can we do about it? When the time comes, we'll just have to reassemble the two cameras. If even a nuclear bomb can be reassembled, what's two small cameras?

"Besides, the direction of the wind here will also change in two months. It won't be the northeast wind by then," Ban Xia added. "Will that affect the plan?"

Bai Yang heaved a heavy sigh.

I can't cover for that. Luckily, I'm just a communications officer, not involved in planning decisions. Those making decisions at the Nanjing Command Center must be feeling overwhelmed right now.

After a failed operation, cleaning up the mess alone is amazingly complicated. Zhao Bowen curses hysterically; after he's done, he still diligently gets back to work. With no other choice, the command center had to divide the project team into two groups: one to clean up the aftermath, and the other to work overtime pushing forward the second launch.

The nuclear bomb recovery failed last night, and tonight, my dad and his team stayed out late, who knows where they went for a meeting. They didn't return even at one in the morning. Only Wang Ning sent Xiao Zhu over to collect materials around midnight. One could imagine another sleepless night in some brightly lit meeting room of the provincial committee or Nanjing University, with Lianqiao sorting out documents in the living room, burning the midnight oil and eventually falling asleep on the coffee table, unconscious, until my mom carried her to the couch and covered her with a blanket.

Everyone's just too tired.

All of them are exhausted.

It's difficult to say what exactly is still driving them to keep going. When someone is so tired they're cross-eyed and fighting to keep their eyelids open, they probably don't think about humanity's future. How important is humanity's future compared to a pillow? Besides, most people in the command center have already lost hope for the plan's success, though no one dares to say it outright. Defeatism is absolutely not allowed in the project group, but even without saying it, the sentiment can be read in their eyes. Some privately tell Zhao Bowen that upper levels are discussing whether to gradually shift the focus to military preparedness, implying dwindling confidence in the actions of the Nanjing Command Center.

Bai Yang asked Uncle Zhao if there was anything he could help with.

Uncle Zhao just smiled weakly: Make her happy.

Bai Yang nodded.

Uncle Zhao added: And make sure you're happy, too.

Compared to the dejected ones in the command center, Ban Xia seemed much more open-minded. Probably because she'd always lived in a destroyed world, how much worse could things get?

So, in the end, it was Ban Xia who ended up comforting Bai Yang:

"BG, look, living here is actually quite nice. You'll get used to it, and you might even come to like it."

"Yes, of course I'll get used to it, Miss. I'm dead in your world."

"...Oh."

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By the evening of December 29th, the third night after the recovery failure, there was still no sign of the spaceship returning. At this point, even Lianqiao had to admit that the mission was most likely a failure. Miss Qiu was lost in the vastness of space, as Zhao Bowen said, it would either arrive on time, or never at all.

Bai Yang became increasingly despondent, muttering pointless nonsense like "The world's ending in five years, should I go enjoy life?" or "What would you do if you only had five years to live?" He even posed questions to the young lady like "Are you afraid of dying?" and "How to bravely face death," to the point that even his father couldn't stand it anymore. His father didn't want his son to become a bottomless philosopher with a Socratic method, telling him that if he really had nothing to say, then go over the mission details with her again.

So Bai Yang took a tablet and repeated the mission details to the girl, work that was originally meant to be done after the successful recovery of the spacecraft, but now with the mission failed, they had nothing better to do.

They entered a video call, allowing Ban Xia to see the pictures.

"This is the Long March 5."

Bai Yang held up the photo of the Long March 5 and paused it in front of the camera for a few seconds, then held up a white sheet of paper with the six words written on it.

"The spaceship is installed here."

He circled the nose cone of the Long March 5 rocket with a pen, marking it with arrows and text.

"This is the spaceship; the nuclear bomb is housed inside the spaceship."

Bai Yang switched the photo of the rocket to the spaceship. The pristine new-generation manned spaceship stayed in the dust-free workshop, as if presenting a PPT report.

"This is the nuclear bomb."

Miss Qiu is a deep red sphere in the technical documentation provided by Zhonghe Industry. Its size is marked as 36.6 centimeters in diameter, weighing 19 kilograms, slightly larger than a basketball.

But its internal structure is much more complex than a basketball, with layers like the composite material shell, cushioned lining, safety lock mechanism, explosive lenses, detonators, reflector layer, nuclear materials, and neutron source, one encapsulating the other. Bai Yang couldn't explain these because he didn't understand them himself.

"This is the key."

The key looks like a tiny USB drive, but it is actually an electronic key. It will be placed inside the spaceship along with Miss Qiu as it ascends, serving as dowry from her birth family, to ensure the safety of this nuclear bomb. The project team designed a quite complex locking mechanism—it has dual safeguards of a password and a key. To unlock the bomb, one must have both the password and the key, inserting the key first and then entering the password, and only the girl knows what the password is.

"Only I know it?"

Five minutes passed, and the video call switched to a different person on camera. The girl appeared in the frame, holding a flashlight and a cardboard with a question written on it.

She brought the question closer for Bai Yang to see. After a few seconds, she lowered her head to write a new sentence:

"But no one ever told me the password."

She wrote several sentences in succession:

"Answer my question quickly."

"Switch person! Switch person!"

"Now it's your turn."

The signal transmission switched, and Bai Yang wrote on the tablet:

"I'm not clear either; they just said this: When you see it, you'll know what to input."

"When it turns from red to green, that means the unlock was successful."

"I can explain the specifics when we can communicate. Typing so much is tiring."

"I'm done speaking, switch!"

The signal transmission switched again, and the girl had prepared a bunch of questions:

"How do I get into the spaceship?"

"Does the spaceship have a door lock? Is there a key or a password?"

Bai Yang scratched his ear with his little finger, thinking to himself what's the use of asking these questions—the spaceship is not coming back, who knows where it ended up now.

But still, he answered graphically:

"This is the spaceship."

Bai Yang drew a large circle on the photo of the new manned spaceship, specially framing the command module, and then typed text below the image:

"The spaceship you see now is complete, including the command module and service module, but it won't return in this state. Only part of it will re-enter the Earth's atmosphere—take note, the module I circled is the re-entry module, the nuclear bomb is placed inside, it's the part that returns to Earth. When the spaceship lands, the hatch will pop open automatically; you don't need to manually open it."

"The spaceship in this photo is too clean. It will be scorched by high temperatures upon entering the atmosphere, hold on, I will find you a similar picture."

Bai Yang searched on Baidu for a photo of an Apollo spaceship's charred re-entry module to show the girl.

"What you'll see will be roughly like this."

I'm just doing useless work.

Bai Yang sighed to himself inwardly.

The mission has failed, what's the point in talking about this? It's like Bodhi Patriarch teaching Sun Monkey to fish the moon out of water or to look at flowers in a mirror; in reality, the moon cannot be fished out, and the flowers cannot be plucked.

The signal transmission switched once more, and Ban Xia's bright eyes appeared in the frame. She blinked, seemingly trying to recall something. After a moment, she held up a piece of paper from below:

"I've seen this thing before."