Station 4

The Academy again assures me they are searching for fresh engineers, a younger generation who will be taught the assembly languages and can communicate with our aging uncles and aunties. Otherwise, when we engineers die or, in the cases of Huang and Xu, our minds soften with time, monotony, and desolation, then our uncles and aunties will be adrift, muted, perhaps attempting to signal but with no one left to receive.

I am People’s Liberation Army Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Jianyung Yan, but, here at the station, we’re all members of the Chinese Academy of Space Technology and my fellow engineers call me Jian, and the enlisted men who guard our perimeter salute crisply but seldom mention my name or look in my eyes. It has been several weeks since I’ve bothered to leave the station complex and walk to the perimeter, as the outside temperature is −20 C and my ability to retain heat in my old age has declined. I stay inside, where the old mainframes emit enough warmth that I can work in just a canvas jacket and slippers. Back in the 1960s, our team, led by Feng and myself, reverse engineered the civilian versions of machines ibm had sold to nasa, and in our haste we built big iron mainframes that consumed three times the energy per computation as the originals. We could have built more efficient machines, but then half the engineering faculty at Baitech was sent for reeducation and the rest publicly beaten and humiliated so it was hard to concentrate on reducing computational power suck. The ceramic transistors melted if we didn’t have ice blocks with fans blowing over them. The solution: move them to a cold climate. Even now, when we need to cool down the old tubed monsters we throw open the doors and let the mountain winds do the job. The elevation is also advantageous for our antennae, increasing transmission radius and decreasing power requirements.

Still, the mistakes of our past, we never stop paying for them.

We were two dozen who first made the trek from Kashgar, our meager baggage strapped to mountain yaks that, no matter the temperature or altitude, never seemed to emit any steam or sweat. We had set out in early spring, but would soon discover that at this altitude season was an arbitrary distinction, as it was always cold and always snowing. Still, for the twenty-four of us who had been saved from the rampages of the cities, from the Red Guard committees and denunciations, from the defenestrations and ritual finger smashing, the snowy passes and the long climb were a manumission. In the evening, as we sat around the fire, we’d calculate how long it would take for the human body to consume all its caloric energy if it were left naked in minus-30-degree temperatures, and the difference one bowl of rice would make, or one shirt, or body hair or one kilogram of body fat. No matter, the fattest, healthiest specimen would be dead in eighteen minutes. Still, to have been chosen by the Academy, to have escaped the worst of the purges, it was cold luxury.

A company of PLA soldiers had already been on site for three months supervising three punishment battalions of prisoners who had labored in subzero temperatures to build the half-dozen connected Quonset huts that would house our mainframe and signal telemetry, the generators that would power the 35-meter antenna with the transponder that we had purchased from the East Germans who themselves had purchased it from Iran. When we opened the boxes, I wasn’t surprised to see made in japan stamped on some of the components. The prisoners wore cloth coats, were fed soup in the morning and millet in the evening, and they slept in the snow around ribbony flickers of fire until they built their sleeping quarters. I recall them as ghostly figures, starved, terrified, fatigued, and occasionally frozen solid on the ground when they failed to wake up. Who were they? All I knew is they were unlucky, and we were...