Today, the Operation Dongfang Hong leadership team was present in full force for the first time since the plan’s inception. All deputy team leaders had left their posts to gather at the command center to witness history. Starting from 4 PM, people had been arriving continuously. Bai Yang didn’t recognize any of them, but they all came to shake his hand unprompted.
Zhao Bowen and Wang Ning made introductions, leaving Bai Yang in a daze as he tried to remember a string of titles – they all seemed quite important. Uncle Zhao introduced various professors, bureau chiefs, and department heads, while Wang Ning pointed out deputy division-level officials, deputy department-level officials, and full department-level officials.
One department head told Bai Yang that although this was their first meeting, they had been working together for a long time. Bai Yang felt nervous and bewildered, wondering how he had suddenly become colleagues with such high-ranking officials.
Bai Zhen was watching the clock.
He was timing for now, and also timing for twenty years in the future. Tonight at 7 PM, the operation would officially begin.
Laptops covered the coffee table and dining table. Cables stretched out from the rooms, with tangled wires across the floor requiring careful navigation. Various strange peripherals flickered with red or green lights. A white screen was propped against the wall with a projector running. The command center finally had the appearance of a joint operations command center, with the only shortcoming being the lack of lighting effects. Bai Zhen said they should add some blue cold lighting – that way it would look like the CIC of an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer.
“Young miss, is everything ready?” Bai Yang held the microphone, “OVER.”
“Ready.”
Ban Xia also held her microphone. By today, she had completed all preparations. A Baofeng UV-9R handheld radio was mounted on a Yagi antenna on the roof, while a Celeron 3150 industrial control motherboard was connected to a camera, display, and keyboard mounted on the wall. These were two peripheral systems that could be switched through the Icom 725’s microphone jack – when Ban Xia connected the Icom 725 to the radio’s audio output, it connected to the satellite data transmission system, and when she connected the Icom 725 to the industrial control board, it connected to the image data transmission system.
Since the Icom 725 only had one microphone jack, the two peripheral systems couldn’t be connected simultaneously and had to be switched between.
Tonight both systems needed to be tested. First, they needed to test whether the reconnaissance satellite and relay satellite had successfully entered orbit and were functioning normally. Second, they needed to test whether the image transmission link could transmit pictures or video.
If Hong and Ha successfully entered orbit, then Bai Yang and the others would receive the first remote-sensing image of Nanjing twenty years in the future.
If the image transmission link was successfully established, then Bai Yang would be able to truly see BG4MSR, and the latter would also be able to truly see Bai Yang.
Ban Xia also held a pocket watch in her hand. The current time was 6:45 PM.
“BG, how many photos have you prepared?”
“I took over a hundred, totally exhausted me this afternoon. My legs are about to fall off – I’ll be first in the WeChat Moments step count today. From those hundred-plus photos we carefully selected twenty to send to you,” Bai Yang said. “Now that the data link is established, just tell me what you want to see and we’ll go take photos for you, OVER.”
“Do you have photos of yourselves?” the girl asked. “Of you, and Uncle Zhao, Dad, Uncle Wang, and everyone else?”
Bai Yang was stunned for a moment.
“That’s easy, we’ll take one right now…” He put down the microphone. “Uncle Zhao! She says she wants a group photo of all of us!”
Zhao Bowen was adjusting the projector and checking the router. Hearing Bai Yang’s voice, he stopped his work and raised both hands to clap: “Comrades, fellows, put down your work for a moment, let’s take a photo together!”
Lian Qiao took out her phone: “I’ll take it for you!”
So everyone squeezed together, backs against the screen and the huge map of Nanjing. Bai Yang stood in the middle, with his father on the left, and Old Wang and Old Zhao on the right, along with the other members of the Operation Dongfang Hong leadership team – eight or nine people in total. Lian Qiao was in charge of photography. She raised her phone, stepped back a few paces, and captured everyone along with the surrounding mess of files, computers, tables, and sofas in the frame-
“Ready, smile, say cheese!”
With a crisp shutter sound, time was frozen, leaving behind the only group photo in this entire story.
At 7 PM that evening.
Ban Xia took a deep breath, took off the coin from her neck, and flipped it again – it was headed.
“BG4MXH, BG4MXH, now terminating voice communication.”
“BG4MSR, this is BG4MXH, confirming the termination of voice communication, OVER.”
Ban Xia removed her headphones and unplugged the Icom 725’s microphone, freeing up the microphone jack. From now on she could no longer talk with the other side. Instead, she carefully plugged in the radio’s audio output cable to the microphone jack. This black cable connected the 725 radio to the handheld radio on the roof.
The handheld radio was mounted on the Yagi antenna to receive signals returned from the relay satellite.
The first test was planned as follows:
The reconnaissance satellite would orbit at low altitudes, activating its synthetic aperture radar for remote sensing scans of the area from Qinhuai District to Xuanwu District as it passed over Nanjing. The scanning mode was strip imaging. This SAR remote sensing satellite carried a one-meter wide by ten-meter long folding radar antenna, with a scanning range of a huge rectangle five kilometers wide and twenty kilometers long.
After completing the strip scan, it would switch to spotlight imaging mode to locally magnify a specific area within this hundred-square-kilometer strip with higher resolution. This photo would be the first image transmitted from the apocalyptic future to the present.
The relay satellite served as the data bridge. The reconnaissance satellite would send all data back to the relay satellite for storage and signal modulation.
The relay satellite would then transmit the modulated signal back to the ground, to be received by Ban Xia’s Yagi antenna on the roof.
After the Yagi antenna received it, it would be passed to the 725 amateur radio, which would transmit the data back to the present.
The signal transmitted back to 2019 would be backed up in multiple locations while being decoded – if the decoding was successful and produced an identifiable photo, then the test would be considered successful.
And what would they photograph for the test?
Everyone tacitly and unanimously chose 66 Mushu Yuan Street in Qinhuai District.
Meihua Mountain Villa.
The first image transmitted back from twenty years in the future – the image used to test the entire system – would be an ultra-high altitude view of Meihua Mountain Villa during the apocalypse.
Bai Zhen’s palms were sweating.
Zhao Bowen was also sweating.
Everyone present was tense as if waiting for news of a Mars lander touchdown. The lander would be out of contact before landing, having to survive the “seven minutes of terror” with no supervision. The mission control room then was exactly like the command center now – no one knew if it would succeed, and could even say the chances of success were slim. If any one of the many steps went wrong, it would all be for nothing.
All that effort was wasted, not to mention consuming their most precious resource – time.
The command center was dead silent.
“Is there a satellite signal?” Wang Ning asked quietly.
Zhao Bowen sat on the sofa wearing headphones, staring at the computer screen. Detecting a satellite signal was simple – just listen for noise. The relay satellite would modulate the image data into audio for transmission, which would sound like static to human ears.
“Is there a satellite signal?” Wang Ning asked again.
“Yes!” Bai Zhen suddenly said, pressing his headphones tightly, “There’s sound!”
Everyone present was startled.
“So it worked?” Wang Ning asked excitedly.
“Don’t celebrate too early. There is a signal… but it’s very weak. The antenna direction might not be aligned properly. Look at this signal, it’s barely there,” Zhao Bowen frowned, pointing at the jumping lines on the oscilloscope. “Yang Yang! When is our next scheduled voice contact?”
“Ten minutes!”
“During the next voice contact, have her slightly adjust the antenna direction! Just a small adjustment!”
During the second voice contact, Bai Yang guided Ban Xia to make minor adjustments to the Yagi antenna’s direction, but no one knew which direction was correct, so Ban Xia could only adjust left and right based on intuition.
After adjusting, the signal disappeared completely. Bai Yang knew she had turned in the wrong direction.
The command center could only wait ten minutes for the third voice contact to have her try a different direction.
This behavior was no different from hitting a TV – when the TV breaks you hit it hard, if hitting the left side doesn’t work you hit the right side, eventually one side will work. Ban Xia’s adjustment this time was effective.
“Got it!”
“There’s… there’s an image!”
“We have an image!”
The image was slowly loading on the computer screen. This was the test image, also the first photo taken by the reconnaissance satellite after entering orbit. If it could load completely, it would prove that Hong and Ha could operate normally, and phase one of Operation Dongfang Hong could be declared successful. Zhao Bowen’s breathing became noticeably rapid as he bent over with both hands pressed on the coffee table, his fists tightly clenched.
The effect was very similar to loading a webpage during the dial-up internet era, with the image downloading bit by bit.
What appeared before everyone was a black-and-white photo, full of snow-like noise. The image quality was quite poor, but people could still make out what the satellite had captured – small squares were rooftops, distributed evenly among the lush vegetation. The layout of the residential buildings was familiar to them – this was Meihua Mountain Villa, half of the complex. Bai Yang sat in the room, staring at the image on the screen for a long time, speechless.
Everyone knew she lived twenty years in the future, but this was their first time truly seeing that destroyed world with their own eyes.
“My God.”
Someone whispered in astonishment.
“Look,” Wang Ning suddenly jerked. “Look there!”
Zhao Bowen’s gaze followed Wang Ning’s direction and froze for a moment. His eyes widened behind his tortoiseshell-framed glasses. Old Zhao’s brows had been furrowed for a long time, but now they suddenly relaxed.
He didn’t know what expression to make, but a smile was irrepressible.
Everyone in the command center was stunned. Wang Ning was also smiling, but as he smiled his eyes grew red.
“She’s talking to us,” Bai Zhen murmured.
At this moment, in various institutions, departments, and command centers, everyone looking at this photo noticed that detail-
It was a small greeting.
A small “Hi.”
In an inconspicuous corner of the photo, on a lawn in Meihua Mountain Villa, this word had been assembled using stones, bricks, and concrete. In the photo taken with the synthetic aperture radar’s spotlight imaging mode at the one-meter resolution, the word was less than a centimeter long, though its actual ground area must have been dozens of square meters. Everyone knew who had left it, but that girl had never mentioned it to anyone.
At some point, she had quietly arranged bricks and stones on the ground to spell out a huge word.
Never had there been such a moment that made Zhao Bowen, Bai Zhen, Wang Ning, and everyone else feel so strongly that the girl was still alive. She was real and vibrant – she could jump and bounce and run around. She lived in the radio signals and under the satellite’s lens. You could almost hear her voice.
In the satellite’s remote sensing image, she was silently shouting with all her might to the world twenty years in the past:
Hi—!
The first satellite data transmission test was declared successful.
Hong and Ha had overcome numerous difficulties to successfully enter orbit with invincible dumb luck. This was practically the third milestone in human space history after Yuri Gagarin’s first space flight and Neil Armstrong’s first moon landing – the first successful orbital insertion after humanity’s destruction. The comrades of the Operation Dongfang Hong leadership team excitedly went downstairs arm in arm to celebrate with drinks. Though drinking during work hours was usually prohibited, they made an exception this time.
The first test lasted half an hour, with the relay satellite transmitting about 60MB of data to the ground station. The original image data from the reconnaissance satellite’s synthetic aperture radar scan was extremely large – transmitting it all was neither feasible nor practical. So at the relay satellite stage, it had to undergo selection, compression, and modulation. But compression would cause massive information loss – data quality and transmission efficiency were mutually exclusive. There was no help for it – the satellite’s signal transmission speed was limited. They had to grudgingly accept lossy compression, with the final image decoding and restoration relying on the computer team’s algorithms.
The computer team claimed they could restore high-definition images from blurry ones – they had trained their algorithms by turning all the cavalry films on the market into infantry films.
Ban Xia set up the camera, and adjusted the lens direction, aiming it at the desk and window.
With the satellite communication test successful, they removed the satellite communication equipment and proceeded urgently with the second test. After all their hard work and effort, the PSK signal modulation data transmission link they had painstakingly cobbled together would finally be put to use.
She would finally see the people on the other side.
Both parties had been communicating via amateur radio for three to four months, and tonight they would conduct their first video transmission.
“BG, BG, should you go first or should I?”
“You first!”
“Alright, I’ll go first then!”
Of course, the Icom 725 was a cursed half-duplex radio – real-time chat like WeChat video calls was impossible. Data could only be transmitted one way – either Ban Xia watching Bai Yang perform, or Bai Yang watching Ban Xia perform.
So they agreed that each video transmission would be five minutes – five minutes for Ban Xia, five minutes for Bai Yang, another five for Ban Xia, another five for Bai Yang. The image data transmission link couldn’t transmit sound, only images, so they would communicate by writing on paper boards.
Ban Xia turned on her flashlight and fumbled in the dark to unplug the UV-9R handheld radio’s audio transmission line from the Yagi antenna, replacing it with the Celeron 3150 industrial control board’s audio transmission line – seamlessly switching between the two peripheral systems.
She decided to transmit video to the other side first, planning to perform a backflip on camera-
But it was late at night and she didn’t dare turn on the lights. The room was pitch black, so they wouldn’t be able to see her backflip anyway. After some thought, Ban Xia abandoned this idea.
On the other end, Bai Yang was a bit nervous.
“It’s like meeting an online girlfriend,” Lian Qiao teased. “What if she’s not pretty?”
“Get out of here, Counselor. We’re facing a great enemy – we must focus on the bigger picture,” Bai Yang said righteously. “Don’t talk about such things.”
Though he said this, when it came time to meet, he was the most nervous person in the command center.
“What are you nervous about?” His father was busy debugging software. “Aren’t you already very familiar with her?”
“Old Bai, you don’t understand. Before it was just phone calls, now we’re finally going to meet – how could that be the same?” Wang Ning was tightening the fixing nut on the tripod. “You’re half buried in the dirt – how could you understand the psychology of young people in puberty…”
“Fuck you, you’re the one half buried in the dirt.”
At 8:15 that evening.
The software debugging was complete and the signal connected.
Bai Yang sat formally on the sofa in front of the coffee table. He knew the other side couldn’t see him yet, but he still couldn’t help secretly combing his hair, buttoning up his collar, and managing his expression.
It wasn’t like meeting an online friend, but more like preparing for a business negotiation.
Behind him was a large group of people – Old Dad, Old Wang, Old Zhao, Lian Qiao were all there, peering over Bai Yang’s shoulders.
They were all curious too.
Wanting to know what this girl living alone in the apocalyptic world looked like.
But the video playback window on the computer screen was completely black.
“Why is it still black?” Wang Ning asked. “Is something wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong, the signal is connected, all the lines are good…” Old Dad checked the laptop’s ports and firmly pushed in the plug. “At least our side is fine, maybe she… Hey hey hey! It moved! There’s light! There’s light!”
The pitch-black video playback window suddenly lit up, as if a flashlight had shone on the camera. The people sitting in front of the computer suddenly became excited.
“It’s alive! It’s alive!” Wang Ning exclaimed with joy.
“What nonsense are you talking about, Old Wang? Of course, it’s alive,” Bai Zhen said.
Now they all understood – the video was black only because the lights were off in her room, not because there was a problem with the connection. The video transmission had succeeded.
The girl was still adjusting the camera lens. The people in the command center could only see a flashlight beam swaying back and forth, with a hand occasionally appearing in the beam of light. That hand was turning and adjusting the camera, its wrist glowing brilliantly white against the dark background.
Bai Yang watched that hand, wondering what kind of person she would be. At seventeen or eighteen, youths are at that stage where showing them just a hand lets them imagine the whole person. It wasn’t that Bai Yang had never imagined the girl’s appearance, but imagination was just imagination. Now that he was about to truly see her, he couldn’t help feeling inexplicably nervous.
“Why hasn’t she shown her face yet?” Wang Ning said.
This guy was even more anxious than Bai Yang.
“What’s the rush? She’s still adjusting the camera.”
Zhao Bowen leaned back on the sofa and adjusted his glasses. The image in the video window was still moving – she was indeed adjusting the camera. In the extremely dim light, they could vaguely make out some things – like the desk that flashed briefly in the flashlight beam, and the curtains above the desk. This was in a room.
“Once she’s done adjusting, naturally we’ll…”
Zhao Bowen’s phone suddenly rang in his pocket.
Before he could answer, within four or five seconds, the phones in Bai Zhen and Wang Ning’s pockets also rang. Suddenly all the communication devices in the command center were ringing urgently.
“Hello, it’s me, what… what did you say?”
Zhao Bowen’s expression changed dramatically.
He went around the sofa and bent over the coffee table to open the computer. The second photo decoded and restored by the computer team had arrived. It was still of Meihua Mountain Villa but showed the other half of the complex not included in the first photo. Bai Zhen, Wang Ning, and others also gathered around. They only needed one glance before their expressions changed violently.
“Holy shit.”
“This… this fucking…”
A huge, black, blurry spider was crouching on the roof of the residential building. Its limbs were extraordinarily long – while crouching on this building’s roof, its long legs could reach the exterior walls of the neighboring building.
Bai Yang nudged his father.
Bai Zhen turned his head and saw his son’s face had turned pale.
Bai Yang pointed at the computer screen.
In the video playback window, there was a red glow. The previously pitch-black room where you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face was dimly lit. Through the curtains, the people at the computer could see a huge, glowing, blinking red eyeball sliding into view outside the window, stopping, then slowly drawing closer – so close that the entire window couldn’t capture the full eyeball. The bedroom was like it was being shot with a giant red laser pointer from outside.
The satellite had only captured a static photo, but the computer was showing a live stream. Bai Yang stared fixedly at the screen, his body too rigid to move. He was face-to-face with the giant eye.
Even separated by twenty long years, the people in the command center felt too oppressed to breathe.
Ban Xia held her breath, tightly hugging Huang Daye while curled up under the desk.
She hadn’t been adjusting the camera earlier, but trying to chase away Huang Daye. The cat had snuck into the room at some point and was frantically circling her feet. When Ban Xia bent down to grab it, she noticed the red light reflecting off the camera’s glass lens facing the window. Without time to think, she grabbed Huang Daye and immediately rolled under the desk, pressing against the wall, not daring to move or make a sound.
The red light from outside grew stronger and stronger, so strong it could illuminate the bedroom even through the curtains. Soon Ban Xia heard a “clack-clack” sound – this was the giant eye crawling on the building’s exterior wall.
On the other end of the video, Bai Yang could only see the image, not hear the sound. If he could hear the sound, he would have an even deeper understanding of the giant eye’s terror – Ban Xia trembled in the darkness, eyes closed, burying her head in Huang Daye’s warm soft fur. She heard again that high-pitched, giggling, woman-like voice, just outside the window, separated from her by just a wall:
“Come out~ Where are you~ Where are you~”
“Give me the fruit—”