Chapter 30: Telecommunications

The construction of residences for the transmigrators also began. Compared to the previous infrastructure projects, this one was much simpler. The prefabricated houses were assembled like building blocks from standard parts.

The foundation of the residential area was raised by two meters, both for flood control and to provide a defensive advantage in case of an attack. The entire slope of the foundation was paved with stone, and the ground was hardened. The houses were arranged in a row-style layout, common in new villages, in seven groups around a central square, numbered clockwise. Groups one to five were male dormitories, group six was for women, and group seven was for families. Each single dormitory housed four people, and each family had one room. The interiors were configured for comfort, with electric lights and power sockets. There was no furniture—the wood was needed for infrastructure—but the simple luxury of a real house, a place to charge their laptops, and an escape from the boredom of the long nights was enough to make many people happy.

Rows of clotheslines were set up in the square, and on the north side, a row of buildings housed the toilets and washrooms. Brand new flush toilets were unloaded from the ship—squat toilets, not pedestal ones, as the Executive Committee deemed them more hygienic. The water for the toilets was drawn directly from the river and stored in a simple water tower. From the very beginning, Bairen City was designed with a dual water supply system.

The washrooms and toilets shared a drainage system, which carried the sewage to the agricultural area downwind of the residential area. There, Wu Nanhai had built a large biogas digester to treat the city’s wastewater.

The entire residential area was enclosed by a low wall of earth and stone, with a single entrance guarded by a sturdy wooden gate and a two-story blockhouse, manned 24/7 by the security team.

The Executive Committee’s offices also received an upgrade: a two-story steel-frame prefabricated building. The interior was much grander, furnished with pieces from the Fengcheng ship. The old-style furniture, which had looked dated in their previous lives, now seemed luxurious and magnificent. There was even a local area network, and rumors spread that some of the committee members were playing online games in their offices at night.

This put pressure on the communications team, which had just moved into its own office in the Executive Committee building. People clamored for network interfaces in every room, and some, worried about a shortage of routers, suggested a wireless network.

The request was ruthlessly rejected. Ma Qianzhu instructed the team to set up a communication center in Bairen City as soon as possible.

The communications team’s pre-transmigration plan had relied on the now-obsolete PHS system. It was not an ideal system, but it was simple and consumed little power. And in the radio-silent air of the 17th century, with no tall buildings or high-voltage lines to interfere, the signal was surprisingly good.

Li Yunxing had brought a set of abandoned PHS base stations and controllers, as well as laptops, servers, cables, and a full suite of communication management software. It was enough to build a wireless network in this new world.

A single base station could support thousands of PHS mobile phones within a radius of several tens of kilometers. With a few remote modules, the range could be extended even further, which would be sufficient for their internal communication needs for the foreseeable future.

They also had over a thousand PHS mobile phones, all of the same model and batch number, to facilitate future repairs and parts replacement.

The base station’s transmission power was about 50w, covering a cellular area of 15km. To meet the Executive Committee’s requirements, they needed to boost the power to 200w, which would extend the range to 35-40km and increase the system’s fading margin. A tower top amplifier would also be needed to boost the uplink signal. The entire base station would require 7-10kw of power, which the new portable steam engine could easily provide.

The communications team enlisted the help of the engineering team to build a tower in the city and install an array antenna, which would reduce the echo from surrounding buildings—though, at present, there were no tall buildings to speak of.

Wen Zong proposed that all wireless resources be integrated, so that radios, mobile phones, and walkie-talkies could communicate with each other. After much deliberation, the team devised a crude solution: using an industrial single-chip microcomputer to build a server that would simulate the walkie-talkie signal as a mobile phone signal and connect it to the switch. This required not only the microcomputer but also an additional antenna due to the different frequencies.

The activation of the PHS system brought a sense of normalcy to the transmigrators. On the day of number allocation and phone distribution, the communications team office was mobbed. Everyone wanted a lucky number.

“I want 888888!”

“I want 168168! A prosperous journey!”

“Bullshit, that’s mine.”

“Little Shao, remember me? I bought you a meal once. Save me a number with an 8!”

“You people are so vulgar, all you want is 8s.”

“It means ‘fa,’ getting rich! Don’t you understand? Illiterate!”

“You’re the illiterate one! Your whole family is illiterate! You’re not even Cantonese, why are you talking like one?” The two men nearly came to blows.

“I want a 6! Give me a 6!”

Someone else had a different idea: “I want 444444!”

“You might as well have 514514!” someone joked.

Shao Zong, behind the table, shouted, “Everyone, calm down! We’re drawing numbers in order. No choosing! You get what you draw. Hey, you! Don’t look at it and throw it back! No quality!”

“Hey, Little Shao, can you give me a prettier one? This phone is so ugly,” a girl said.

“I want a flip phone. Why are all of yours candy bars? So old-fashioned!” The women chattered, more interested in the phones than the numbers.

“Yeah, there’s no choice of color… If I’d known, I would have brought the one I threw away at home.” The phones were all the same model, with only minor color variations. It was no wonder the girls were disappointed.

The communications team struggled to maintain order. Seeing the chaos, Comrade Guo Yi, who had been working nearby, stepped in.

“Everyone, calm down,” he said. He had never worked security, but he had been in the business. He knew how to handle a crowd. When a hot-tempered man tried to push past him, Guo Yi put him in a joint lock, and the man cried out in pain. The noisy crowd immediately fell silent.

The number selection was over quickly. A few lucky people got their 8s and 6s, but most received ordinary numbers. Those who were particularly superstitious and had not been so lucky cursed their misfortune and went to find the lucky ones, offering to trade materials and equipment for their numbers.

“Business opportunities are everywhere,” Shao Zong said with a satisfied smile, moving the table back into the office. Just as they would have in their own time, the communications team—the future Transmigration Telecom Company—had withheld the most auspicious numbers. Li Yunxing and Shao Zong were already planning to release them to the market once the company was restructured. They would be rich.

Seeing that the man who had restored order had left without a number, Shao Zong chased after him.

“Brother, what’s your name? Why didn’t you get a phone?” He decided to offer him a number with an 8 as a token of his gratitude.

“Well,” Guo Yi said, scratching his head, “I have a temporary ID card. I can’t get a phone yet.”

“Oh!” Shao Zong slapped his hand to his forehead. “You’re that Guo Yi, right?”

“You know me?” Little Guo was surprised.

“Well, others don’t, but I’ve read the internal report our team leader brought back.”

“Oh? What did it say?” Guo Yi was very concerned about his future. The report would reveal the senior management’s views on him.

“Well…” Shao Zong hesitated. “It’s classified…”

Damn it, Guo Yi thought, they’ve already mastered the art of bureaucracy. But he kept his face a mask of sincerity. “It’s okay, I was just asking.”

“I’ll just tell you this,” Shao Zong said, relenting. “The Executive Committee’s opinion is that there should be a distinction between the three of you. Just remember that.”

A distinction? What did that mean? Guo Yi fell into a deep thought.