Once We Lived in Nanjing

Everyone sat like they were meditating until 3 o'clock in the morning, finally someone couldn't hold up any longer. They felt that sitting until the sun rose wouldn't have any solution drop from the sky, but rather increase the chance of sudden death, so Bai Yang and the others got up to send off the visitors.

They went downstairs to see the nuclear task force off the building and watched them drive away.

The neighborhood was quiet, with only a few streetlights still on.

"Long March 5 still has one backup, right?" Wang Ning stood in the cold wind, shivering, "There's also one backup spaceship. Why don't we just use it to send the key?"

"I've brought this up before." Zhao Bowen shook his head, "The aerospace task force advised us not to do this. The return to zero hasn't been completed, and the reason for the failure of the previous spaceship hasn't been analyzed yet. We don't know if the parachute opened late or didn't open at all. Trying rashly might lead to the same old path, and the re-entry capsule may again crash to the ground with a bang."

"It would create a big hole." Bai Zhen added a sentence.

"Headaches." Zhao Bowen sighed.

"If you ask me, this is just making trouble for ourselves." Old Bai complained, "The world is about to end, yet we still care so much about rules and regulations."

"Say that to the Zhongbao Committee, they set the rule."

Zhao Bowen yawned, speaking as he walked away.

"Old Zhao, where are you going?"

"Going home!" Zhao Bowen yawned again, straddling a small electric scooter by the grass, "There's a meeting at eight in the morning at the provincial committee, I need to catch up on some sleep. If I hurry, I can sleep for four hours... Damn, this is actually the longest I've slept in the past week."

Bai Zhen turned to look at Wang Ning, "And you?"

Wang Ning thought for a moment, "I'm sleeping on the couch."

·

·

·

Five hours later.

Bai Yang returned home with Lian Qiao after their morning jog, only to see Old Bai sitting listlessly on the sofa with two large dark circles under his eyes, Uncle Wang also sat there just as dispirited, both lazily browsing through the documents on the coffee table, yawning incessantly, opening their mouths to expose yellow teeth tainted by cigarettes and alcohol, and the stale breath of middle-aged men permeating the air.

Lian Qiao furrowed her brow.

"Not joking, when I got up this morning and looked at my pillow, I saw it was full of hair." Bai Zhen covered his face with his hands and took a deep breath, "But the saddest part is that even with losing so much hair, it didn't yield a good idea."

Wang Ning scratched his head.

If Old Bai lost that much hair and couldn't think of anything, he was even more powerless.

Everyone hoped to wake up with a reliable plan or for someone to have a revelation from Duke Zhou in their dreams. But unfortunately, not many saw Duke Zhou. Bai Zhen lay in bed, eyes open, tossing and turning unable to sleep, so he went to the living room to find Wang Ning, who also hadn't slept, sitting motionless in the dark; Bai Zhen suddenly turning on the light even startled him.

"What's going on?" Bai Yang came out of the bathroom, a towel in hand wiping sweat, "What's the problem?"

"What else could it be?" Wang Ning said, "How to send the key."

"Use the time capsule." Bai Yang said without hesitation, "Send a slow delivery."

"It's not safe enough, the last time we used a spaceship for slow delivery it failed, the higher-ups lost some trust in us, and our approach faced wide criticism." Wang Ning shook his head, "They demanded an as-safe-as-possible plan, we're pondering how to improve the safety factor."

"How safe can a time capsule be?" Bai Yang was puzzled, "Isn't sending this just taking a chance?"

"Yes, it's just taking a chance." Bai Zhen nodded, "That's what we all think."

At ten o'clock in the morning.

The nuclear task force showed up again, and Bai Yang curiously examined the small gadget they poured out of the document bag.

"Is this the key?"

"Yes." Someone nodded, "Sorry, do you have any sunflower seeds?"

Mother brought a large plate of sunflower seeds, and everyone began the sunflower seed meeting.

"Despite its small size, it has great powers," the nuclear task force explained to Bai Yang, "Have you ever seen a movie where the head of state is always accompanied by someone carrying a black briefcase? That black briefcase is the nuclear weapons command system, but the one in the movies is fake, this one is real... You can think of it as a nuclear briefcase, it is a system integration, normally involving a huge command and control chain compressed into this tiny key. It integrates unlocking, timing, identification, triggering, and detonation. Without it, a nuclear bomb cannot be detonated."

"Wow." Bai Yang marveled half-understandingly.

"After all, twenty years later no one will give the command," the nuclear task force added, "Miss Qiu herself must be a control loop."

"So this is the brain of the nuclear bomb?"

"It's part of the brain, the control unit of the triggering system is actually made inside this little thing."

The nuclear task force nodded.

"The trigger mechanism of that nuclear bomb is very difficult to make. If we want Miss Qiu to form a control loop herself, we have to make it slightly smarter... but this goes against the safety requirements, that nuclear bomb demands very high robustness (this is the requirement of your Director Zhao), it must not be damaged even if the spaceship crashes. To achieve such a fiendishly high reliability, we can only reduce the proportion of the use of microelectronic components inside the nuclear bomb."

"This is like using electron tubes, transistors or even gears and linkages to build a computer, its volume could fill up this entire living room." someone continued, sounding somewhat helpless, "In the end, we used a compromise approach, only retaining the highly reliable parts inside the nuclear bomb and moving out all the high-precision, fragile, and easily damaged control departments to an external device that can be replaced, which is this key that you see in front of you. Do you understand now? If the key is damaged, just replace it with another one, but if all systems were built inside the nuclear bomb, it would be impossible to repair if there's a malfunction."

"How clever," Bai Yang said, "Then may I ask what exactly is the trigger mechanism of the nuclear bomb?"

Members of the nuclear task force exchanged smiles.

"You will know."

"Can we think about how to send this thing over?" Bai Zhen pointed to the key on the coffee table, "If this thing can't be sent over, everything we say is pointless."

"Throw it into the lake with a time capsule?" suggested Bai Yang.

"No," Bai Zhen said, "They think that's too insecure."

The nuclear task force spread their hands, indicating this was also a requirement from higher-ups, and not within their control.

"Sending with the time capsule is like gambling," Wang Ning said, "We have to bet with the future of this world. If you can't afford the bet, you'll inevitably gain nothing."

Bai Zhen sighed:

"These damned three laws of Time Slow Delivery."

·

·

·

Meanwhile.

Zhao Bowen was attending his first meeting of the day at the provincial committee.

The astronomy team finally rose up, no longer had to endure the torment of the iron hand of fate, it seems after the last failure of a Time Slow Delivery mission by the Nanjing Command Center, other teams gained attention from the upper-level, their priority was raised, and began to make significant moves, whether it was teams from the Hedgehog Plan or the Human Cannon Project, their initial work premise was to gain intelligence on the enemy, reconnaissance goes first before troops advance, thus the astronomy team received tremendous reliance, enduring under the tyranny of the Nanjing Command Center for a long time, they finally saw their day to rise, and there was much rejoicing.

Zhao Bowen was lazily huddled in the last row of chairs, sneaking in a nap.

At this moment, on the stage, the astronomy team was explaining a newly succeeded breakthrough technology.

VVVLBI technology, formally known as The Very Very Very Long-Baseline Interferometry, abbreviated as 3V technology.

Its success would make a grand and majestic plan possible—

Creating the largest telescope in human history, the Earth Orbital Horizon Telescope.