That afternoon, the girl was still tinkering with motherboards. After twenty years in the humid climate, the motherboards had become virtual Petri dishes for mold, sprouting colorful fuzzy growths that made them look like artist palettes. Ban Xia cleaned them thoroughly and set them out to bake in the sun. Wang Ning said it was best to find unopened, unused motherboards, preferably industrial control or military-grade ones since they used more durable tantalum capacitors.
“A 3150 industrial control motherboard, find a fanless Celeron 3150 industrial control board, I think that should work,” Wang Ning said. “Those are easy to find on Zhujiang Road.”
“Have you used one before?” Bai Zhen asked. “What operating system?”
“XP, or Win7,” Wang Ning replied.
“Excellent,” Bai Zhen nodded. “Then we can run Red Alert on it.”
Ban Xia flipped over the square motherboard in her hands and blew on it. This was probably the most intricate human-made object the girl had ever seen – a green substrate, silver circuits, densely packed resistors and capacitors, ports of various sizes, the structure so complex it made one dizzy. Ban Xia carefully dusted it off. This board had no fan, just a large black heatsink mounted in the center.
It would be the core of their image transmission link.
It would convert the camera’s image data into audio signals that amateur radio could transmit—
“Wait, wait, wait, what did you say?” Bai Yang asked. “Audio signals? Sound?”
“That’s right, Little Yang, is there a problem?” Wang Ning placed the motherboard on the tea table and looked up.
“Converting… converting images into sound?” Bai Yang asked incredulously.
“Yes, you heard correctly. We’re converting image data into audio signals, turning photos your eyes can see into ‘bzz bzz bzz’ sounds your ears can hear,” Bai Zhen nodded.
“Any data can be converted into audio signals,” Wang Ning explained. “It’s the simplest transmission method. Like electromagnetic waves, sound waves are waves, and anything that’s a wave can be modulated. Don’t you use your radio’s microphone and amplifier for voice communication? If you modulate your voice, it can carry image information too.”
“This… broadcasting images by voice?” Bai Yang stared blankly.
“You could say that. If your tongue and vocal cords were powerful enough, you could make precisely modulated sound waves into the radio—it would sound a bit like Parseltongue from Harry Potter. If someone on the other end had a recorder, recorded the sound, and input it into a computer for decoding, they could recover the image,” Wang Ning nodded. “That’s why we need the motherboard – they usually have built-in sound cards.”
“What is information? Information is essentially order, and patterns. Anything can carry information if you can change its patterns,” Wang Ning continued. “For example, say I punch your dad.”
“Get lost,” Old Bai said.
“I could rhythmically punch your dad’s jaw in binary,” Wang Ning said. “I could even punch out an entire XP operating system.”
“Then my dad’s jawbone would need to be titanium alloy,” Bai Yang said.
“It’s the same with sound. If sound waves can be modulated, they can carry any information,” Wang Ning said. “This is currently the simplest and most suitable transmission method for our ’25’ setup.”
“This is what’s called AFSK,” Bai Zhen said.
The two old men had acquired numerous motherboards and cameras, piling them in the living room. There were so many that Mom got angry, saying opening the door was like walking into a second-hand electronics market.
Under Wang Ning and Bai Zhen’s guidance, Ban Xia could cobble together anything from the electronic waste on Zhujiang Road.
She sat cross-legged on the living room floor, leaning against the sofa, musing idly: “Mom, Dad, how do you think these things… are made? It’s just incredible.”
In Ban Xia’s imagination, someone must have hand-soldered each tiny component one by one with tweezers, but some parts on the motherboard were too small for her to even see clearly. How could anyone solder those?
Suddenly, she picked up a slipper.
Holding her breath, she remained silent for a moment, then struck like lightning!
The slipper spun through the air and smacked against the cabinet with a “pah!” Through years of practice, Ban Xia developed an extraordinary ability to locate sounds. She was vigilant in all directions, her hearing more sensitive to rats than a cat’s. Whenever she heard rat movements in the room, she would hurl a slipper with lightning speed.
This time, however, there was no “squeak” of a fleeing rat. Instead, the pile of items on top of the cabinet came crashing down with a “crash.”
Ban Xia had to get up to clean up the mess.
These were items she had taken out while looking for an English-Chinese dictionary some time ago. She hadn’t had time to put them away and had just stacked them on the TV cabinet. When the slipper hit them, everything collapsed.
There were papers, pens, coins, empty boxes, some pills of unknown purpose, and that massive copy of “Journey to the West.” Ban Xia stuffed them all back into the drawer. She was quite messy herself; when living alone, she would leave things wherever she happened to set them down.
The girl picked up “Journey to the West” from the floor – a thick tome she had barely opened because she couldn’t understand it.
The teacher had said it was a story about a bald man taking three monsters to fetch scriptures from the Western Paradise.
Ban Xia flipped through it randomly, glancing at the page numbers and headers.
“Tripitaka Remembers His Origin… Four Saints Test the Heart of Zen…” Ban Xia read aloud.
“The three maidens stepped behind the screen, leaving a pair of gauze lamps. The woman said: ‘Honorable monks, please consider, which of you will marry my young daughter?’ Wu Jing said: ‘We’ve discussed it, and decided the one surnamed Pig should marry into your family.'”
She turned a few more pages and read out loud:
“The woman lifted his veil and said: ‘Son-in-law, it’s not that my daughter is being difficult, but they all modestly declined to marry you.’ Bajie said: ‘Mother, since they won’t marry me, why don’t you marry me instead!’ The woman said: ‘Oh my good son-in-law! How improper you are, even wanting to marry your mother-in-law!'”
She couldn’t understand it.
Couldn’t understand it at all.
Even a pig could have a mother-in-law?
In this era, books had lost their meaning. The teacher once had many books, but eventually burned them all, along with her materials and notes. Ban Xia still remembered how the teacher sat motionless all afternoon, her expression wooden as she threw them into the fire pit. There probably weren’t many books left in Nanjing City either. Even the massive Nanjing Library had been emptied. People hadn’t emptied the library to read, of course, but to stay warm. Ban Xia remembered one particularly cold winter when the teacher had chopped up wooden furniture for firewood.
That was the last time it snowed in Nanjing.
“That night after the court dismissed, the demon entered the Silver Peace Hall. He selected eighteen palace maidens and beauties to play music, sing, and dance, urging the demon to drink and make merry. The monster sat alone in the high seat, surrounded by those of delicate beauty and charm. You should have seen how he indulged himself, drinking until the second watch, when drunkenness overtook him and he could no longer restrain himself from acting wildly,” Ban Xia paced around the living room, reading aloud. “He jumped up, let out a great laugh, and revealed his true form. His violent nature suddenly erupted, and he stretched out his winnowing fan-sized hands, grabbed a pipa-playing maiden, and with a crunch bit off her head. The seventeen remaining palace maidens ran for their fucking lives…”
She froze.
She suddenly realized she had read something wrong.
“Ran for their fucking lives” wasn’t in the original text – it was written in black ink between the neat printed Song typography lines, the handwriting messy and slanted.
“Oh my god,” Ban Xia whispered.
This was the teacher’s handwriting.
She stood stunned for a moment, then frantically began flipping through the pages, catching glimpses of scattered doodles, formulas, numbers, and English and Chinese characters.
1200 kilometers.
Big eyes.
25473000.
Observation.
Entropy.
Galaxy.
“Oh my god,” Ban Xia murmured.
This wasn’t “Journey to the West” – it was the teacher’s notebook.