Chapter 3 · First Forbidden Fruit
It took Lu Yuan three days to get his hands on the SDR.
He didn’t buy it—a software-defined radio platform covering Starlink’s full frequency band cost sixty thousand credits on the secondhand market, money he didn’t have. He “borrowed” it from a warehouse in Huaqiangbei that specialized in refurbished communications equipment. “Borrowed” was a polite word. He’d waited until the owner’s lunch break, used a screwdriver to pry open the back window’s security grille, squeezed through, climbed three meters up a shelf of inventory, and found the unit marked “pending disposal”—a USRP X440.
The machine was caked in dust. Rust spots on the heatsink. But the core board was intact. In the dim warehouse, Lu Yuan spent forty minutes testing it by disassembly: power module normal, baseband FPGA logic intact, RF front-end aged but calibratable. He stuffed the machine into an empty microwave box, climbed back out the rear window, and hit his knee on the concrete floor on landing. The pain made him clench his teeth.
He didn’t dare turn on a light. Walking back to his rental, he held the box against his chest like a terrorist who’d just stolen nuclear material. The afternoon sun of Shenzhen burned his back, but he felt that heat was nothing compared to the radiation coming off the machine in his arms—it wasn’t even powered on, but he could already feel the danger.
He spent two days setting up the environment and calibrating the equipment. The SDR was hidden on top of the wardrobe, covered with old clothes. The feed line ran along the baseboard gap to the window, the antenna disguised as a discarded TV reception rod, secured to the security grille with zip ties. The drivers came from a Russian tech forum—a forum lurking in some corner of the dark web, reachable only after three layers of redirection. Lu Yuan didn’t know how to navigate the dark web, but his old roommate from UESTC did. A phone call he hadn’t made in thirty years, a few vague excuses, and an encrypted link arrived.
“Old Lu, what are you up to?” his roommate asked on the other end.
“Fixing something,” he said.
After hanging up, he snapped the SIM card in half and flushed it down the toilet.
Now the equipment was in place. But he still lacked one thing—the target signal.
You couldn’t just casually capture a Platinum-tier user’s signal. Starlink terminals entered low-power mode when idle, transmit power dropping to a minimum, signal characteristics faint, drowned in ambient noise. To capture a fingerprint sample clear and complete enough, he needed to catch the target terminal in an active communication session—preferably a high-data-rate service like HD video streaming, because high data rates meant high transmit power and prominent signal features.
Lu Yuan needed a neighbor. A Platinum-tier neighbor.
He spent half a day filtering. Starlink terminal signals could be roughly classified at the antenna end—by analyzing signal bandwidth, modulation order, and power spectral density, you could make a reasonable guess at the user’s tier. He set up a temporary reconnaissance antenna on the roof, recorded four hours of spectrum data on his laptop, then went home to analyze.
The result: his building had no Platinum users. The nearest Platinum signal source came from a high-end apartment complex two hundred meters away—Shimao Riviera Garden, one of Shenzhen’s wealthiest enclaves. The building’s exterior used Starlink-supplied embedded phased-array antenna panels. The Platinum users’ signals shot out from those panels, clean, assertive, carrying a sort of unquestionable priority.
Lu Yuan stood at his fifth-floor window, looking in that direction for a while. Between him and those towers lay a stretch of old urban-village rooftops, a forest of mismatched antennas. Two hundred meters. Two hundred ten meters in a straight line. At that distance, even with a high-gain directional antenna, captured signal quality would be heavily degraded.
But he had no choice.
At two in the morning, Lu Yuan mounted the directional antenna on the water tower’s maintenance platform. The antenna was disguised as a discarded PVC drainpipe, fastened to the railing with wire. The feed line ran down along the rainwater pipe, entering through a gap in the kitchen window. He crouched on the roof for forty minutes, mosquitoes feasting on his arms. He didn’t move. He was waiting for the Platinum user to become active.
At 2:47 AM, the signal appeared.
The target terminal initiated a video call—the remote terminal was in Europe. Low-latency requirements made Starlink allocate a dedicated low-orbit link. Transmit power surged. The signal strength on his spectrum analyzer jumped sharply.
He started recording.
The SDR’s sampling rate was set to maximum—128 megasamples per second. Data flooded into the hard drive, 16-bit I/Q samples accumulating at nearly a gigabyte per second. Lu Yuan’s eyes were fixed on the real-time spectrum display, his finger hovering over the stop button, waiting for a perfect, continuous signal segment.
Three seconds. Five. Seven.
In this single frame, the target terminal transmitted a complete handshake protocol packet—containing terminal ID, authentication token, timestamp, and signal fingerprint verification sequence. This was the most critical segment of signal in the entire authentication chain. Everything they needed was here.
Lu Yuan pressed stop.
7.3 GB of new data on the hard drive. He leaned back in his chair and realized his back was soaked with sweat. Outside, the Platinum user in that luxury apartment might be having a casual video call with family, completely unaware that part of their signal had been intercepted, stored, and was about to be dismantled and cloned.
Lu Yuan thought he should feel guilty. He didn’t. He was only mechanically calculating the next steps in his head—extract signal fingerprint features, build a clone template, design a real-time relay algorithm.
He opened his laptop and started writing code.
After three sleepless nights, the clone link passed its first closed-loop test.
The test environment was laughably crude. He used a secondhand phone as a mock terminal, connected it to the SDR’s transmit port, had the SDR replay the recorded Platinum signal—then used another device to connect to Starlink. The result was better than expected. On the first try, the cloned signal passed physical-layer fingerprint verification but got stuck at the second layer’s session key negotiation. On the second try, he fixed the timing skew—three milliseconds of delay between the original and cloned signals, which Starlink’s timing detection module caught and severed. On the third try, he added an adaptive delay compensation module to the relay algorithm, keeping the cloned signal’s frame timing synchronized with the real terminal’s clock drift.
Third try. Connection successful.
A notification icon appeared in the top-left corner of the screen—one he barely recognized. Platinum-colored, Starlink’s highest tier badge, next to it:
“Connected · Platinum Tier · Bandwidth Guarantee 1 Gbps · Latency Guarantee <5ms”
Lu Yuan stared at that icon for ten full seconds, then slowly exhaled. He reached for his water glass. When his fingertips touched the cup, he realized his hand was shaking violently—so badly that the water rippled and spilled onto the table.
He didn’t care. He picked up the cup and drank. The water was cold, but his entire chest felt like it was burning.
He walked into his daughter’s room.
The little girl was fast asleep, breathing steady, lips slightly curled—probably having a nice dream. On the nightstand sat her study tablet—a secondhand, old-model device with a crack running across the screen, its casing chipped and missing paint in several places. Lu Yuan picked it up, connected it to the cloned Platinum network, and opened an online education platform.
Page load time: zero.
Not zero—too fast for the eye to perceive. The HD course video that used to take three minutes to buffer now played instantly, the image so clear he could see the texture of the teacher’s hair strands. He opened another page, then another. Every one loaded instantly. A thousand-fold difference wasn’t just a number—it was a sensory shock. It was like spending your whole life looking at the world through frosted glass, and then someone took the glass away.
He turned off the tablet, put it back in its place, and sat down by his daughter’s bedside.
Moonlight leaked through the curtain gap, a strand of silver falling across his daughter’s cheek. The five-year-old turned in her sleep, her little hand reaching out from under the blanket, unconsciously grasping Lu Yuan’s finger. That hand was so small—five fingers couldn’t wrap around his index finger—but she held tight.
Lu Yuan didn’t pull his hand back. He sat there, listening to his daughter breathe in the dark, a feeling in his heart he couldn’t name. Not pure joy. Mixed with fear, unease, and a kind of desperate, reckless exhilaration. He had done something illegal. He knew that. He’d cloned another person’s network identity, stolen services worth tens of thousands of credits per month. If he was caught, he didn’t dare think about the consequences.
But his daughter was holding his finger.
He looked down at that small hand, and suddenly felt that even if there was a bottomless abyss ahead, he would jump.
The next morning, Lu Yuan connected his daughter to the cloned network.
The girl sat on the edge of the bed holding her tablet, eyes bright as she looked at the screen. She opened a natural science course—the first lesson had taken three days to download. The dozen-plus lessons after it had been grayed out, impossible to open. Now the entire course was unlocked, HD video playing smoothly. For the first time, the girl saw a high-definition butterfly emerging from its cocoon, every scale on the wings glittering in the sunlight.
“Daddy, it’s so beautiful,” she said, her voice soft, as if afraid to disturb the butterfly on the screen.
“Mm,” Lu Yuan said, watching her.
After the video, she opened a remote consultation app—a free children’s health portal on Starlink’s medical platform. Before, the network was always too slow for the video to ever load. Now the doctor’s face appeared clearly on the screen. A young female doctor in glasses smiled and greeted her: “Hello little one, how are you feeling today?”
His daughter froze for a moment, then shyly hid behind Lu Yuan, but couldn’t resist peeking out to see the doctor’s face. Lu Yuan answered the doctor’s questions for her, describing the seizure frequency and medication response. The doctor listened carefully, pulled up some reference data in the system, and gave some adjustment suggestions. The whole process took less than twenty minutes—saving at least half a day compared to a hospital visit.
After the call ended, his daughter tugged at Lu Yuan’s sleeve.
“Daddy, the internet got faster.”
She said it calmly, like a little grown-up stating a fact. Lu Yuan smiled, tried to say something, but his throat felt blocked. He could only nod.
“Will it always be this fast?”
The question made his fingertips go cold. He didn’t know how to answer. He didn’t know how long this stolen signal would last. A week, maybe a month. Or maybe it would be intercepted and blocked by Starlink’s security systems the next second. He didn’t know if that Platinum user would discover their signal had been cloned, or if Starlink’s engineers were monitoring this kind of anomaly, or how long this makeshift cloned link could hold.
“Daddy will try his best,” he said.
His daughter didn’t press further. She lowered her head and continued watching the butterfly on the screen, her little finger swiping across the touchpad, flipping through high-definition images that had never loaded before. Lu Yuan walked to the kitchen, turned his back to her, placed both hands on the edge of the sink, lowered his head, his shoulders trembling slightly.
He didn’t make a sound. A thirty-three-year-old man can’t cry out loud anymore. But his shoulders were shaking.
After a long while, he turned on the tap and washed his face. The person in the mirror had reddened eyes, fine crow’s feet, white stubble starting to show in his hair. He stared at himself for a few seconds, then dried his face and went to make breakfast.
At the same moment, eight thousand kilometers away, Belgrade.
In the top-floor office of Starlink’s European Protocol R&D Center, Milan Vojnović was looking at two geographic coordinates displayed side by side on his screen. The left one was marked in Antwerp, Belgium—the legitimate registered location of that Platinum terminal. The right one was marked in Shenzhen, China—the location where the cloned signal had just come online.
The distance between the two coordinates: 9,247 kilometers. Signal fingerprint match: 99.94%.
Milan was holding a cup of coffee that had long gone cold. He leaned back in his ergonomic chair and looked at those two coordinates over and over. His expression was calm—even, one might say, appreciative. Like a gardener finally seeing a seed he’d buried years ago break through the soil.
He did not report it. Did not alert anyone. Did not block the cloned signal. He didn’t even notify Starlink’s security team.
He opened an encrypted journal application and began typing. The sound of keyboard clicks was clear in the silent office, unhurried, one after another.
“Number 7. Maybe number 8—if you count the Brazilian who failed three years ago.”
He paused, thought, and continued typing.
“The implementation path this time is different. The previous ones all used software to crack the authentication token. This one uses physical-layer cloning—real-time remapping of the RF fingerprint. An interesting approach. He’s done his work on the CDMA physical layer. Probably an old Huawei person.”
Milan added an underline after this line. Not an emphasis mark, but a wavy underline of anticipation, like the kind a teacher draws under a student’s work to say “that’s somewhat interesting.”
He closed the journal and looked back at the screen. The dot in Shenzhen was still blinking—the cloned signal was stable, continuous, even better connection quality than some real terminals.
Milan smiled slightly at the dot on the screen.
There was no hostility in that smile. No anger. Not even calculation. It was more like—
A hunter, deep in the dark forest, finally hearing the footsteps he’d been waiting for, for seven years.
He picked up the microphone on his desk and said into the intercom: “Don’t touch it. Observe. Make sure you don’t spook the game.”
The security team operator on the other end hesitated. “Sir, this is a clear—”
“I know what it is.” Milan cut him off, his voice mild but brooking no argument. “I said, observe.”
He ended the call and looked at the screen again. Night was falling outside the window in Belgrade, while Shenzhen’s sun blazed. The same network, two completely different skies.
Milan drained the cold coffee in one gulp. The sound of the glass touching the wooden desk was faint, but carried a note of finality.
He wrote the last line in his journal:
“Come. Closer.”
