Radio Waves Across 327 Days

On the 327th day since the signal had vanished completely, Chen Yan scraped a shallow mark into the rust on the satellite receiver with his fingernail. The sandstorm had yet to pass. Lead-gray winds hurled gravel against the makeshift sheet-metal shack with a hollow bang, like the heartbeat of a dying person he had heard in an abandoned hospital the previous winter.

Half a bag of moldy ration biscuits sat in a corner of the shack. The wind and sand had worn away the production date on the packaging, leaving only the four blurry black characters meaning “emergency supplies.” Beside it lay his old laptop. Three cracks spread across the screen like a spiderweb, and the battery had long since died, so it would not even turn on. Still, Chen Yan wiped it down with a cloth every day. It was not out of nostalgia: his daughter’s photo was tucked beneath the keyboard. In it, Niannian had just started elementary school. Her hair was tied into two little buns, and she held up a perfect-score test paper, grinning to show two tiny canine teeth. It was the last photo he had received before the signal went out.

He could still remember the chaos of the day the internet went down.

It was July 15, which should have been one of the hottest days of summer in the city, but a cold wind carrying the smell of rust suddenly began to blow. Chen Yan was watching the morning news from the TV station’s control room when the female anchor on screen abruptly froze. Her professional smile remained in place, but her voice turned into crackling electrical interference. Then the lights in the entire building began flashing wildly. One by one, the surveillance monitors went dark, the control console’s alarms shrieked, and red warning lights turned everyone’s faces deathly pale.

“What’s going on? A power system failure?” The deputy station director slapped the table