Banxia let out a breath, put down “Journey to the West,” stretched, and looked out the window. The Black Moon hung low on the horizon, appearing the same size as the White Moon but much darker in color, almost hidden beneath the ink-blue sky dome. It looked like a round hole cut in the velvet night sky, revealing the deeper universe behind it. The teacher said it was so dark because its surface was very rough, not smooth—most sunlight was absorbed and scattered rather than reflected to people’s eyes.
Banxia found it hard to imagine what roughness meant on a celestial scale because even the White Moon with its uneven surface covered in crater rings could reflect bright sunlight like a mirror in the night sky. What appears to ordinary eyes as mountain-sized undulations, when placed on a planetary-scale surface, amounts to mere grains of sand on a smooth table. But the Black Moon was different—it was planetary-sized and had planetary-scale roughness. The teacher’s casual doodles on “Journey to the West” showed that the Black Moon’s surface had dense, chaotic, crisscrossing complex patterns, perhaps the result of her early telescope observations of the Black Moon. These grooved patterns were hundreds or thousands of kilometers long, with depressions of unfathomable depth. Banxia inexplicably felt it looked like a giant circuit board, or rather a vast city covering an entire planet’s surface.
The girl stretched vigorously, then got up and paced around the room twice.
Her slightly damp hair fell over her shoulders as she wore a loose white t-shirt and black shorts, walking in plastic slippers. Banxia lifted one foot, maintaining balance on the other, leaving the slipper on the floor as her pale toes wiggled about.
Old Huang squeezed through the door crack, and Banxia bent down to pick him up, placing him on the table.
“BG4MXH, BG4MXH, I’m back,” the girl sat back in her chair, picked up the handheld microphone, and pressed PTT. “Let’s continue—I’m not too sure how effective human weapons are against the Big Eyeballs, because I never participated in the resistance against them. Only the Teacher did, but you can imagine we humans lost terribly. Our weapons probably weren’t much use.”
“Young miss, have you ever seen the remains of a Big Eyeball?” Bai Yang asked. “If there are remains, we could analyze weapon effectiveness from them, OVER.”
“No,” Banxia shook her head decisively.
She had never seen the remains of a Big Eyeball.
She had only seen a live Big Eyeball once from far away when she was very young and never encountered them again. After humanity’s extinction, they disappeared too.
“It’s strange—there are neither Big Eyeball remains nor human corpses,” Bai Yang was puzzled. “Where did everyone go? OVER.”
“There are human corpses!” Banxia responded. “Last time when I was salvaging the time capsule from Crescent Lake, I pulled up a skull!”
“Uh… I mean large numbers of corpses. After all, humanity went extinct globally—seven billion people, shouldn’t there be mountains of remains?” Bai Yang thought for a moment. “Nanjing alone had eight million people. Where did they all go? Disposing of so many bodies without a trace would be an almost impossible task, OVER.”
“Impossible?”
“Is it possible?”
“Of course, it is—put everyone in bags and sink them in the Pacific Ocean,” Banxia declared grandly. “How much area would you need to lay out seven billion people on the Pacific floor?”
“Let me calculate—if each person standing takes up 0.3 square meters, seven billion people would need 2.1 billion square meters, which is 2,100 square kilometers,” Bai Yang calculated. “About one-third the area of Nanjing… that’s not that big, young miss. If you dove down into the Pacific, you might see corpses standing like terracotta warriors on the seafloor, OVER.”
Their casual chat thoughts were quite divergent. The information the Teacher left in “Journey to the West” was limited, so they started brainstorming from those fragments, recording every wild idea and sending them all to Zhao Bowen.
Including but not limited to:
Hiding Earth.
Building ultra-large strategic missile defense positions.
Constructing underground or undersea cities, moving all humanity below ground or underwater to survive.
For humanity’s future, these two little heads were wracking their brains and exhausting every scheme they could think of.
But Bai Yang still wasn’t clear on how much threat human weapons posed to the Big Eyeballs. Tanks and planes were all just burned wreckage by the roadside in Banxia’s account. The only weapon they could confirm would be effective was also humanity’s most powerful weapon.
—Nuclear bombs.
“Nuclear bombs,” the girl said. “Nuclear bombs are effective against Big Eyeballs, Teacher said. Remember that nuclear bomb that exploded in Zhenjiang back then?”
“From my perspective, it should be the nuclear bomb that will explode in Zhenjiang in the future,” Bai Yang said. “OVER.”
“The teacher said that was humanity’s most successful operation in resisting the Big Eyeballs. Since she called it the most successful, nuclear bombs must be effective,” Banxia said. “Nuclear bombs can threaten the Big Eyeballs.”
“Ugandan chimpanzee?” Wang Ning turned to glance at the laptop screen. “Little Wen, that’s not right—how is this a chimpanzee?”
“Right, how is this a chimpanzee?” Bai Zhen was greatly comforted—after all, his old friend of many years would always take his side.
“This is a baboon,” Wang Ning said.
AFSK’s outrageously slow transmission speed didn’t dampen Bai Zhen and Wang Ning’s enthusiasm at all. With the Huawei communications expert’s help, they completed building the image transmission link on the secondhand 725 radio tonight. Motherboard, keyboard, monitor, camera, amateur radio—all the major hardware was in place. The image signal captured by the camera would first be compressed in the Celeron 3150 industrial control board, then encoded as an audio signal and transmitted through the 725.
In the simulation experiment, signal reception was handled by the Icom 705 that Bai Zhen had borrowed. This amateur radio station also played an important role in their previous remote control system setup experiments. The 705 was a new radio, much more digitalized than old antiques like the 725. Connected to a computer, it was used to receive and demodulate image signals.
“Check the interfaces,” Wang Ning said. “Watch for any disconnected ports.”
They were using a Hikvision UVC camera connected to the motherboard’s USB port.
The camera was responsible for the signal collection, inputting image signals into the Celeron 3150 industrial control board, where the image data would be compressed and transcoded before output.
The motherboard’s sound card was connected to the 725 radio’s handheld microphone, with the sound card responsible for inputting the crackling audio signals into the radio. The principles and operations of this step were similar to their previous remote control system.
“The only difference is the microphone’s PTT interface needs a separate switch connected, which controls transmission and reception.”
Bai Zhen held a small telegraph key that was connected to the 725 radio’s microphone PTT interface and ground wire. Close the key, complete the circuit, and the 725 radio will trigger and start transmitting images. Open the key, break the circuit, and the transmission stops.
11:30 PM.
“November 8, 2019, 11:30 PM,” Wang Ning checked his phone. “First image transmission simulation experiment, all departments in position!”
Bai Zhen set up a small table with the 705 radio and laptop, antenna mounted, sitting in the stairwell outside the door.
“BG5 station receiving ready!” Bai Zhen shouted.
“BG2-5 station transmitting ready!” Wang Ning shouted.
“Lenovo computer decoding ready!” Bai Zhen called again.
“Celeron control encoding ready!” Wang Ning called back.
“Two-meter whip ready!” Bai Zhen shouted once more.
“Hikvision ready!” Wang Ning shouted again.
“Receiving system all ports normal!”
“Transmitting system all ports normal!”
“Power supply normal!”
“Power source normal!”
“Wind direction and temperature normal!”
“Air humidity and oxygen concentration normal!”
“Storm Red in position!”
“Chernobyl Alpha in position!”
The two of them shouted with the spirit of an entire battalion.
“02 in position!”
“01 in position!”
“Transmission countdown ten seconds! Countdown five seconds! 3! 2! 1!” Wang Ning pressed the telegraph key. “Begin transmission!”