At L’s request, this is the revised version of “Holy Red Cross.”
Tong County, Sandaoguai Residential Compound. Seen from Google Earth, it is a district of red-roofed apartment blocks. Unfortunately, the satellite photos have not been updated in years. If there were images from any time in the last decade, you would see collapsed buildings and a vast stretch of brownish-yellow roofs. Less than two kilometers east of the compound runs a winding coastline. Ten kilometers to the west lies an orange-yellow desert.
At five in the evening, the wind rose. The sky rapidly turned dim yellow, and beyond ten meters houses and trees were no more than vague shadows. Lean glanced at the electronic watch on his left wrist. Today’s sandstorm had arrived another minute and a half earlier than yesterday’s. Just wait, he thought. One day the evening wind and the noon wind would join into one unbroken span. He rose from the sofa, picked up the empty can on the tea table, shook it, and tossed it into the trash.
He had just pulled down all the sandproof shutters in every room when the storm hit. Between the buildings the wind let out a bleak wailing cry. Grit struck the shutters in loud bursts of clattering sound, as if giant sheets of sandpaper were being rubbed furiously against the buildings and the ground. Lean checked the water filter and the breaker box, then called Su. On the other end, Su was in a meeting in an office on basement level one, a hundred kilometers away on Central Atoll, commuting back and forth on the Desert Fox. Everything was fine.
Lean returned to his study, drew the curtain, and sat down at the workbench. The whole wall before him lit up and displayed the boot screen of the TRIR OS system: a lean boy in black-rimmed glasses, looking remarkably like Lean in his youth, rode a Sanqiang bicycle through a pitch-dark tunnel. The point of light in the distance grew nearer and larger, until the whole screen became white radiance. The boy’s figure was swallowed by the light and transformed into a row of icons that settled along the lower edge of the wall. The system had booted.
Only Lean’s family still lived in this building. He occupied the fifth floor. The four floors below were filled entirely with server racks for the Vagabondish supercomputer. Vagabondish had a theoretical peak performance of 50.04 trillion floating-point operations per second and a total of 393,633 nodes. It monopolized every Wi-Fi base station and every 30-to-300-millimeter microwave communication channel along the western shore of the New Pacific. Needless to say, all of it was illegal.
The disc-shaped icon at the lower left of the screen began to flash. Lean moved the mouse over it, and a new message popped up: no signature, no text, only a tiny icon, a red cross medal.
Lean smiled. This was one of the old games Tihu liked to play with him, a Tihu Cipher. What clue was it this time? From the backend he opened Photo MosaicX, an image-mosaic program he had written in his spare time. Image mosaic means replacing every pixel in a parent picture with an independent sub-image, so that countless sub-images form a new original. People had played tricks like this long ago. The difference was that Lean’s sub-images came from the hundreds of millions of cameras under his control.
The software automatically broke down the roots of “red,” “cross,” “icon,” and the like, refining them into 53,176 related keywords, then searched every networked camera. The camera nearest Lean, just below his own building, immediately began to turn and capture. The farthest camera also went to work 1.2 seconds later. Across the great screen before him, innumerable bright and motley images streamed past like clouds and smoke, too fast for the eye to make out, not one repeated.
Half an hour later there was still no result. Lean checked the time. Su was nearly off work. He selected several more keywords for special searching: Lujiazui, Malianwa, Baoding, Taichung. Still nothing. Then something seemed to strike him. He sat bolt upright, logged into a meteorological satellite, and slowly lowered the great telescope, moving it deep inland.
Lilacs. Willow trees. Bustling crowds. White helmets of military police. Off-road jeeps. His gaze drifted through the streets of that city, following what remained of memories from many years ago. Shuijing Alley. Beidou Temple. South Gate Stadium. Red Cross Hospital.
Red Cross. Lean hurriedly stopped the lens and looked closer. In the hospital courtyard fixed in the satellite view there was only a tiny mottled patch. He enlarged it, enlarged it again, enlarged it yet again. This FY-7-29 polar-orbiting weather satellite was somewhat old, and the image lagged, with a hiss of white noise.
At last he saw clearly. The basketball court that had been demolished many years ago had been rebuilt, fresh and new. Spread all across it were 729 black-and-white footballs, and Lean actually counted them one by one. Together they formed four crooked Chinese characters, written like a child’s hand:
Happy Birthday!
At the dot of the exclamation point, several men sat cross-legged on the ground, drinking beer and eating mutton. One fellow with golden hair seemed to sense that someone was peering at him. He suddenly raised his head, shook the beer bottle in his hand toward the sky, and grinned.