The sun shone brightly beneath a cloudless sky. Spring's warmth had arrived late this year, only now beginning to dispel the stubborn chill left behind by winter. It was the kind of pleasant weather that made people want to lie on a carpet and roll around, while the world continued turning in an orderly fashion.
People went to work, shopped, chatted, drank tea, beat their children at the doorway, and slurped noodles at Lanzhou Ramen stalls that charged five yuan a bowl. Even people from Lanzhou themselves couldn't taste the slightest connection between those noodles and Lanzhou. The world was peaceful. Its greatest commotion was no more than a young couple arguing by the stairwell over what to eat for dinner. This was the life of ordinary people, and their ordinary peace: without a position at least at the department-chief level, ordinary people had no way of knowing what was truly happening in this world.
The aftereffects of the full-band interference a few days ago—or, according to the official explanation, the solar flare—had almost completely subsided. The communications outage that had initially caused widespread panic among civilians had miraculously recovered by seventy or eighty percent. Cell phone signals were still far from clear, but at least midrange and high-end phones could now make normal calls through the significantly weakened signal. Several TV channels still suffered severe interference. A spokesperson from the Relevant Departments explained that several key satellite circuit boards had burned out, leaving no spare channels to relay those broadcasts for the time being. People had begun getting used to calls cutting off halfway through. At least it was much better than that first day, when even landlines were unusable. What had happened a few days ago had become a popular topic of conversation. Groups of two or three