The programming struggle continued until Friday of that week. When Banxia couldn’t handle it anymore, Wang Ning asked a friend to bring in a communications expert from Huawei.

The expert’s face crumpled up as soon as he saw Bai Zhen’s code.

“In my memory, when I was very, very young, I saw that thing once. It was almost dark then, and it was too far away, so I could only see a blurry shadow,” the girl’s voice came through the headphones. “It was crawling on the building, with very long legs, like a giant black spider. The teacher said they came from the moon.”

“The Black Moon? OVER.”

“Yes, the Black Moon,” the girl said. “They only appeared after the Black Moon’s arrival.”

“What caused the Black Moon to appear?” Bai Yang sat in his chair, holding a pen between his fingers and furrowing his brow. “It couldn’t have just shown up out of nowhere, right?”

Although finding the cause of the apocalyptic disaster was crucial, no one could be sure if humans could influence or change that cause.

What if the Black Moon had discovered the Pioneer or Voyager probes?

Could humanity somehow retrieve the Voyager now?

Going further, what if the Black Moon had discovered humanity’s very existence?

Could humanity hide an entire planet as vast as Earth?

Questions were questions, but answers weren’t guaranteed. If natural disasters reached a point beyond human intervention, then even with a warning, all people could do was minimize losses. Whether earthquakes or tsunamis, although mere human power couldn’t resist or prevent them, at least people could be notified to evacuate—but with a moon falling, where could people run to?

To outer space?

Three years definitely wouldn’t be enough—three hundred years might be about right.

“Let’s think of a way to hide Earth,” Bai Yang said. “Young miss, do you have any good ideas? OVER.”

“Eh?” There was a pause on the other end. “What do you mean?”

“Like hiding the entire Earth, so the Black Moon can’t find us,” Bai Yang said casually. “If it can’t find us, we’ll be safe, right? OVER.”

“Then… should we cover Earth with black cloth?”

“Where would we find that much black cloth?” Bai Yang laughed. “Earth’s surface area is 500 million square kilometers—you’d need 500 million square kilometers of black cloth. That’s even more ridiculous than putting a lid on the Pacific Ocean, OVER.”

Though he said this, the concept of “hiding Earth” gave Bai Yang an idea—what if, just what if, people could determine the true reason for the Black Moon’s arrival and learn how it found Earth? Maybe this really could be a solution. If they could figure out how it collected information about Earth, then people could work to eliminate that information, cut off the transmission paths, and hide Earth’s location—

It sounded incredible.

Like how the British used lights to create fake cities at night during World War II to mislead German bombers. Using the same logic, humanity could conduct strategic camouflage and misdirection on an unprecedented scale!

Hide the entire Earth.

If the Black Moon observed Earth through visible light, then people would hide themselves in the visible light spectrum.

If the Black Moon observed Earth through infrared light, then humanity would hide in the infrared spectrum.

Treat the symptoms accordingly, and aim precisely.

That’s what Bai Yang thought.

Although he could hardly imagine what kind of god-tier project it would be to hide a massive sphere with a radius of 6,370 kilometers, making it disappear from the Black Moon’s sight, playing a cosmic game of hide-and-seek with life-or-death stakes—but this could be a possible solution. The future had proven that humanity would inevitably lose in a confrontation with the Black Moon, so if they couldn’t win a fight, couldn’t they at least hide?

Bai Yang decided to send this idea to Zhao Bowen for consideration.

Meanwhile.

On the other side of the wall.

Wang Ning and Bai Zhen were still struggling with the code. That afternoon, the Huawei communications expert had managed to squeeze some time out of his busy schedule to visit. He was a former classmate of Wang Ning’s former classmate, coincidentally on a business trip to Nanjing, and came to help as soon as he heard about their needs.

After looking at Bai Zhen’s code, he diplomatically commented that no amount of watery shit could build a mountain of solid shit.

So the professional took charge, centered his energy, channeled his power, and effortlessly laid the first foundation of rock-hard, hemorrhoid-inducing feces for the shit mountain.

The expert finished and left, refusing payment, cool as a cucumber. He waved both hands, saying they were all friends, it was just a small favor, no trouble at all, no need for money, he had other business to attend to, must go now, see you next time.

Watching his retreating figure, Bai Zhen sighed with admiration—if only he’d gotten into university back then, he’d be working at Huawei today, being just as cool.

Wang Ning said with your grades, repeating every year, dream about university.

The two then rolled up their sleeves and worked through the night, continuing to build a complete image transmission link on the secondhand 725. The expert handled the basics, set up the integrated development environment, and sorted out the compiler. Bai Zhen praised the industry expert’s code, saying it was like Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

Wang Ning asked if he meant the code was as good as “One Hundred Years of Solitude”?

Bai Zhen said he meant it was as incomprehensible as “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

The next huge challenge facing them was transmission speed.

“How fast can this thing go?” Wang Ning patted the radio’s black case.

“Using AFSK, the speed won’t be very impressive,” Bai Zhen said. “I estimate about 800 to 1000 bps.”

“How did you calculate that?”

“It’s based on sound frequency. Whether it’s images or code, we’re converting all data into sound for transmission, but the sound frequency has its limits. The human ear normally can hear sounds up to 20,000 hertz, so that’s the sound card’s working range,” Bai Zhen answered. “Digital signal transmission rate theoretically can’t exceed its intermediate frequency, which is 10,000 hertz, or 10kbps.”

“10kbps, ten thousand bits per second…” Wang Ning calculated mentally. “Converting to kB, divide by 8?”

“Divide by 10,” Bai Zhen said. “10kbps converts to what we usually call network speed as 1kB/s, one kilobyte per second, but that’s the theoretical value, the maximum speed.”

“Even 1kB per second is just the theoretical maximum?”

“Yes, 1kB per second is already an unattainable theoretical value. In actual engineering practice, getting 1000bps speed would be pretty good,” Bai Zhen nodded.

“1000bps speed…” Wang Ning calculated. “0.1kB/s? 100 bytes per second? 100B?”

“Yes, 100B per second,” Bai Zhen said. “That’s the data transmission speed.”

Wang Ning knew video transmission was impossible. At this speed, forget about viewing images—even reading novels would be a struggle. It was like going back to the dial-up internet era.

“That’s AFSK for you,” Bai Zhen said. “Later, if conditions allow, we can switch to PSK modulation, which is much faster than this, but for now we’ll have to make do.”

Faced with super-low network speeds of less than 1kB per second, they only had one choice if they wanted to transmit images quickly: compression.

Extreme compression.

Compressing a 10MB image to 1MB, then to 10KB, in the process losing 99.9999% of the information.

And a 10KB image would take 100 seconds to transmit using this 725 radio.

Wang Ning and Bai Zhen experimented to see what effect image compression and transmission would have.

Wang Ning took a photo of Old Bai, a front-view half-body shot, 1.5MB in size.

Next, they imported it to PS, first proportionally compressing it, reducing the large image’s pixels to one-fourth of the original, immediately halving the size. Then they performed chroma subsampling, turning a color photo into black and white, which halved the size again. Finally, they performed quality compression. The whole operation was fierce as a tiger, compressing at a ratio of 5:1.

Finally, Wang Ning displayed the photo—

Mom passed by the living room and glanced over casually from afar.

“What Ugandan chimpanzee is that?”