Under the starlight, Jinghua City is like a sandbox model with the power turned off. It seems magical and yet so real. Even when the whole country was silent twelve years ago, Jinghua City was not completely extinguished. In very few important facilities and buildings,
The backup power supply still held up a few lights. But now, the whole city seemed dead.
In the underground garage of the National Academy of Sciences, which smelled of burning electronic equipment and gray sand, the hand-cranked flashlight in Wei Xu's hand was flickering as he shook it. There were also dots of light like this in other places in the garage.
.
"Hey, I'm talking about Lao Wei. Why can your hand-cranked flashlight still work, but ours can't?" Wu Fan asked, fiddling with the hand-cranked flashlight in his hand.
"This is an old antique of mine more than ten years ago. I bought it when the crisis decree was just issued. The battery is no longer working. If you don't shake it, it won't light up. Those of you who don't light up are all new guys." The guard said slowly.
The ground swings its rocker arm, maintaining the undulating brightness.
"It's possible that the wires between our light-emitting unit circuit boards were too close and were penetrated by electromagnetic pulses. His old antiques are all enameled wires and lamp beads, but it's fine." Lin Tianyu said, pondering the flashlight in his hand.
At this time, several people outside the garage were shaking light beams and shouting as they walked in.
"Is Dr. Xia Lan here? Who has seen Dr. Xia Lan!"
"I'm here!" Xia Lan raised her hand and replied loudly.
As I got closer, I saw clearly that the people coming were several soldiers. Their military uniforms were all still tied with motion capture sensors, and they must have just taken off their power armors.
"I have been ordered to inform you and your team to immediately go to the rooftop to set up astronomical observation equipment and maintain monitoring of the star ring and the enemy situation in low-Earth orbit. Dr. Xia Lan, follow me!"
With the faint light in Wei Xu's hand, everyone immediately set off back to the office to get a small refractor astronomical telescope, and then went to the rooftop of the building. Xia Lan followed a few soldiers to a small room next to the wall of the National Academy of Sciences. Before today, all year round
Xia Lan, who visited the National Academy of Sciences, had never noticed the existence of this small house against the wall.
There were several old-fashioned hand-crank telephones on the table in the hut. A soldier pressed the receiver and shook the handle quickly and said:
"This is an important department emergency communication set up in the last century. The combat command center will contact you if there is anything."
On the rooftop, Wei Xu, Lin Tianyu and Wu Fan were setting up astronomical telescopes in the dark. Liu Mengzhu took out the laptop from her bag, smelled it on her nose and put it back. She put several bags aside,
He took out a stack of paper and a pen and said:
"It all smells like burning, and it's unusable."
Wei Xu adjusted the horizontal nut of the telescope tripod and said:
"Then it all depends on basic skills. This purely manual work was done in college."
The two refracting telescopes had just been set up when footsteps came from the corridor. Looking back, it was Xia Lan. The expression on her face could not be seen clearly under the weak starlight.
"Sister, where did those soldiers take you?" Wei Xu asked jokingly while adjusting the telescope.
Xia Lan's voice was very low:
"Teacher Shen just contacted me through the emergency network at the backup command center. The situation there is also very bad. According to the preliminary understanding of the command center, all power supply, substation, and power generation equipment have been burned down, and the communication network has also been completely destroyed.
collapsed.
All equipment with chips that were running were burned down. More than 90% of the chips that were not turned on and running had large-area circuit breakdowns, making them unable to be repaired and used. Even the ignition coils and trip computers of most cars were burned out. No
What was burned down were all outdated antique equipment.
People who had taken shelter in the subway and underground fortifications had returned to the ground one after another because the ventilation equipment was burned down. Although there was no large-scale riot, the scene was very chaotic.
Now the command center speculates that it was attacked by a large-scale and high-intensity electromagnetic pulse. Although the latest news has not been reported yet, they believe that the air early warning phased array radar must not have been spared. So, let us set up a telescope to observe through optical
Continue to monitor the situation in low Earth orbit."
"Did Teacher Shen say it affected the scope?" Liu Mengzhu asked in horror.
"Due to the complete interruption of communication, they also confirmed the loss manually, and the coverage area is very small. It will take time to calculate the further situation." Xia Lan replied.
Wei Xu stood up, and the usually joking person also became serious:
"According to data from the ground-to-air early warning phased array radar, before strong winds occur, ice and spores fall into the atmosphere in all cities and strongholds around the world, as well as in some other places. If we speculate based on this situation, this electromagnetic pulse storm
It should be global.”
"Doesn't that take us all back to the farming era overnight?" Liu Mengzhu exclaimed.
Xia Lan sighed softly:
"It's modern humans who have returned to the farming era. According to the current situation, the damage to electronic equipment is quite serious. The spare parts we have stored can only restore a very small part of it. It may take several years or even years to fully restore it to what it was before the storm.
It will take longer. This requires industrial production capacity to be fully activated."
Wei Xu suddenly thought of something:
"Have you noticed that when the strong wind started, the originally high thunderclouds rushed to low altitude like being pushed by a big pot lid? After the clouds dissipated, the wind stopped."
Xia Lan said:
"Teacher Shen and the others also noticed the situation you mentioned. Before the electronic equipment burned down, all detection equipment found no abnormalities in or on the clouds, but Teacher Shen also believed that this was definitely not a natural phenomenon.
Teacher Shen also explained that although the current situation is very difficult, while monitoring the star ring, we still need to continue to explore the specific situation of alien organic creatures. Until now, we still don’t know what they look like. This battle is
It just kicked off.”
Wu Fan lit a cigarette and pointed at the dim star ring above his head:
"I think they may not be as scary as I thought. You see, such a big fight will burn our chips in the end, and we will live well. Not to mention large-scale casualties, we may be injured.
There are only a few people there. It seems like they are nothing more than that."
Wu Fan's words seemed to make sense, but the absolute darkness that had never appeared in Jinghua City seemed to remind them that things were not that simple.
Xia Lan said:
"I had the same idea as Wu Fan at the beginning, but if we think about it from another angle, we will get the completely opposite answer."
"Sister Lan, what do you mean?" Liu Mengzhu asked.
"Our scientific system and cognition are completely unable to effectively predict the offensive intentions of alien civilizations. This will lead to our optimistic estimates of the results, because we cannot imagine what we cannot do.
Only after the next move of alien civilization begins, we will know what it means for human civilization. Just like the turkeys on the farm, the farmer who comes to feed them every day will make the turkeys think that the farmer means food and survival.
But what the turkeys don't know is that the farmer will arrive on Thanksgiving with a butcher knife.
What's more, less than 10% of the ring material has entered the atmosphere now."
Everyone was silent for a long time, and suddenly Wei Xu shouted while holding the telescope:
"Look there! There's something!"
In the night sky with sparse moon stars, a dim light band peeled off from the star ring like a slender velvet pulled out of a cotton ball. It tilted across the Milky Way and flew toward the northeast until the front end of the light band disappeared.