Ban Xia, panting heavily, heaved the heavy amateur radio repeater onto the table. Just as BG4MXH had said, the thing was both large and heavy. She’d found it in the warehouse of the Jiangsu Amateur Radio Administration Bureau, on the twentieth-something floor. With no elevator, she could only rely on her two legs to climb up and down, floor by floor. After just two trips, her legs felt like they were filled with lead. During her search, she would rest against the circular pillars at China Merchants Bank’s entrance whenever she got tired.
As Wang Ning and Bai Zhen had said, in the apocalyptic era, repeater stations were things nobody wanted. Ordinary people didn’t recognize them, and those who did had no use for them. When Ban Xia found them by following the directions, they were scattered haphazardly across the floor and cabinet tops, covered in dust and thick cobwebs—a happy home for spiders and cockroaches.
Cockroaches particularly loved nesting in these little boxes. When Ban Xia turned the repeater upside down and shook it, American cockroaches came pouring out.
They fled in panic, and Ban Xia smashed them with her shoe sole, squishing them to a pulp.
The girl moved through the dim hallways with her flashlight. It was clear that people had evacuated in a hurry back then. When disaster struck, people working there fled in panic, abandoning their work and never to return. Time froze at that moment, leaving their desks, file cabinets, and printers exactly as they were. Ban Xia’s feet left prints in the dust covering the floor, which concealed scattered papers underneath. She casually opened cabinet drawers, stuffing anything interesting into her bag.
Scavenging wherever she went was Ban Xia’s normal way of life. All of humanity had left her an enormous inheritance, so vast she couldn’t use it up in a lifetime.
The tropical rainforest ecosystem is layered, from the ground to the canopy, with different creatures living at different heights, forming parallel circles of life. The city’s ecosystem was also layered, from the underground sewers to the tops of high-rise buildings, each with its own biological communities and population densities. As Ban Xia climbed the stairs step by step, signs of large animal activity decreased with height.
On the first and second floors, you could still see droppings from certain ruminants. Above the fifth floor, only traces of feral cats remained.
By the twenty-fifth floor, there were only rats, cockroaches, and bird droppings.
Ban Xia found three repeater stations in the warehouses and offices. Fortunately, since the Jiangsu Amateur Radio Administration Bureau building was tall, it didn’t usually flood, so the repeaters had never been submerged. If they had been underwater, they would have rotted away long ago.
For any electronic product, moisture resistance is crucial. Water is the nemesis of all precision equipment. Short-term water exposure can cause circuit board leakage and shorts, while long-term exposure can rust nanometer-scale integrated circuits into solid blocks—damn it all to hell.
When Wang Ning and Bai Zhen discussed this, they immediately pointed out the two biggest challenges:
First was moisture protection.
The second was batteries.
Old Wang and Old Bai knew very well that post-apocalyptic Nanjing wouldn’t lack electronic components. As the saying goes, “Zhongguancun in the north, Zhujiang Road in the south”—the swindlers’ dens in Beijing and Nanjing were like Qiao Feng of the north and Murong of the south in Jin Yong novels. You couldn’t say which was more crooked; there were only degrees of crookedness. Post-apocalyptic Zhujiang Road would certainly be an electronic waste street. Nothing would be hard to find, but finding usable parts wouldn’t be easy.
After the apocalyptic disaster, Nanjing had become a coastal city. Sea winds could blow directly into Qinhuai District. The climate had changed dramatically, and the humid, rainy weather posed a huge obstacle to the long-term preservation of electronic products.
Bai Zhen, with his Navy technical officer background and years of military service, knew very well that once the climate turned humid, anything could grow mushrooms. To combat the all-penetrating mushrooms, humans had used all their ingenuity, employing the essence of millions of years of painfully evolved advanced intelligence, the brilliant crown of human civilization, the pearl born of the chemical industrial system, to finally master an effective method—
Use plastic bags.
Plastic bags were miraculous tools.
If there were the greatest yet worst inventions in human history, nuclear bombs would be first and plastic bags second. These casually used and discarded plastic bags became one of the most useful tools in the apocalyptic era. No other material was lighter, more flexible, stronger, translucent, and waterproof. The clothes that Cowherd stole while Weaving Girl bathed in mythological legend couldn’t have been better—so you could say the immortals were just flying around wrapped in plastic bags. If this were placed in some ancient-setting RPG game, it would be at least a legendary material, named something like “Fragments of the Heavenly Maiden’s Robe.”
Bai Zhen instructed that most unopened electronic products would have plastic packaging bags, telling Ban Xia to keep an eye out for these, as items preserved in sealed packaging bags would have a higher survival rate.
Ban Xia placed the three repeater stations on her small cart, tied them down with rope, and headed home.
The first thing she did upon returning home was strip off her clothes. She carried the repeater stations one by one to the eighth floor, left them outside the door, then went inside to undress, throwing all her clothes on the floor, screaming “Aah aah aah” as she let down her hair and rushed into the bathroom.
So dirty.
It was just so dirty.
Those who knew would say she’d been looking for repeater stations; those who didn’t might think she’d just returned from a coal mine.
What was most abundant in buildings uninhabited for twenty years?
Dust was most abundant.
Ban Xia had gone wearing a blue short-sleeved top and beige pants; they all came back black. Twenty years of accumulated dust, as thick and rich as ink. She went in as a flower girl, came out as Cinderella, went in again as Cinderella, and came out as a black girl.
The girl showered in the bathroom, and still dripping wet, put on just an apron without other clothes, and began cleaning the retrieved repeater stations.
The repeater stations were even dirtier than she was.
Ban Xia filled a basin with clean water, soaked a raggedy cloth in it, and with a plum blossom screwdriver between her teeth, brought in one repeater station, set it on the floor, and began cleaning.
She wrung out the cloth to first clean the outer case, then used pliers to grip the screwdriver and forcefully unscrew the rust-spotted screws. Opening the case, she poured out various strange things… dead spiders, rat droppings, dried insect corpses, cockroach eggcase shells. Ban Xia shook her head. After cleaning the repeater station, she roughly examined whether the cables were intact, then plugged it in to test if it still worked normally.
Cleaning the three repeater stations took her four hours, from five in the afternoon until nine at night. During this time, Ban Xia ate something, and after completing all the work, took another shower.
Of the three repeater stations, only one showed any response when powered on. One had broken cables—though it looked fine at first glance, the rubber cable insulation was so brittle it broke at a touch. Another had some unknown problem; it had no visible damage, but the lights wouldn’t come on when powered.
The girl lifted the still-functioning repeater station onto the table.
“The model is—MOTOROLA…”
“Received, Motorola, what else? OVER.”
“Also… CAUTION, TO REDUCE RISK OF FIRE OR ELECTRIC SHOCK REPLACE WITH SAME TYPE AND RATING OF FUSE.”
Ban Xia didn’t understand what this meant; she read off the letters on the repeater station’s case one by one like a monk reciting sutras.
“Uh… young lady, that’s not the model number, that’s warning you about fire and electric shock hazards, OVER.”
“Ah?”
The girl was stunned.
“The model number has numbers in it, young lady, OVER.”
“Okay, let me look again…” Ban Xia continued examining it. “GR3188/GR3688.”
“Received.” Bai Yang nodded, took off his headphones, and turned to shout at the door: “The model is GR3188/GR3688!”