Chapter 7 · Snow of Belgrade
Milan Vojnović woke at 3:17 AM Beijing time. He had kept this rhythm for twenty-two years—sleeping only four hours a day, spending the rest reading, calculating, and waiting.
He did not open his eyes immediately. In the darkness, the projector on his bedroom ceiling played a low-resolution miniature version of the real-time Starlink topology map, the green intersatellite links pulsing slowly above his field of vision like fluorescent blood vessels. He had set this before sleeping—the way others listened to white noise before bed, the health of the Starlink network was his lullaby.
He rose, bare feet on the floor. June in Belgrade, the temperature at only fifteen degrees in the early morning, but he did not feel cold. He walked into his study without turning on the lights; three floating screens detected his iris recognition and lit up automatically.
The first screen displayed Lu Yuan’s location. The coordinates were over the South China Sea—not his real position, but the relay path traces of his signal proxy. After leaving the Data Party’s Shenzhen base, Lu Yuan’s signal path had jumped three times, but Milan did not need those disguises. He had tracked directly to the underlying firmware signature of the cloned signal—a signature he had designed himself, like a covert watermark embedded in every banknote, recognizable no matter how many hands it passed through.
The second screen displayed a topology map of the Data Party’s communication patterns. Milan had mapped their organizational structure—not all of it, but enough. Farhan was the technical core. Amina was the logistics backbone. There were four main nodes: Berlin, Lagos, Singapore, Buenos Aires. He had already identified the precise locations of three of them.
He did nothing.
When the third screen lit up, Milan’s hand hovered above the keyboard for one second.
It was a photograph. Taken from the window of an apartment building across the street, a telephoto shot. A young woman was pushing open a gray apartment door. Twenty-six years old. Brown hair tied in a low ponytail. A dark green trench coat. Her profile sharply defined in the afternoon sun. There was a trace of a smile on her lips—not directed at the camera, but at someone coming out of the door to meet her.
Mia. His daughter.
Milan looked at the photograph for a long time.
He remembered this apartment building. Berlin, Kreuzberg. An old walk-up with no elevator, a Turkish kebab shop downstairs. He had never been there, but he had seen it on maps hundreds of times. More than once, in the deep of night, he had opened a flight booking page for Berlin, filled in all the information, and closed the window before clicking confirm.
He had never been able to click that button.
Milan turned off the third screen, got up to make coffee. Outside the kitchen window was the Belgrade nightscape—the Sava River flowing silently in the distance, the old town’s sparse and warm lights like a faded oil painting. He had lived in this city for forty-seven years. He had witnessed its dissolution, its bombing, its reconstruction, its silence. The city had taught him one thing: a civilization without unified order was nothing but a group of children holding knives, groping for each other’s throats in the dark.
He stood in the darkness with his coffee cup for a long time.
Then he walked back to his desk and opened a locked drawer. The drawer contained no classified documents, no weapons—only a leather-bound notebook. Paper. Handwritten. Connected to no network.
He flipped to the latest page, picked up his fountain pen, and began to write. His Serbian script was neat and restrained, the spacing between each letter nearly uniform.
June 14, 2057.
They found the side channel. Approximately eleven months earlier than I anticipated. Farhan Malik—I have read his papers. He published a theoretical article in 2049 on the encoding potential of photon time-of-arrival differences in quantum key distribution systems. No one paid attention at the time. Now someone is using it.
What is interesting is the Chinese man. Lu Yuan. He took a completely different path—signal fingerprint cloning, physical layer proxying. Old school, but effective. His motivation is not in cyberspace—it is in his daughter. This makes him different from the others in the Data Party. Farhan is driven by intellectual challenge. Amina is driven by memory. Most of the Data Party is driven by ideology. But Lu Yuan is driven by another specific human being.
Specific human beings are the most unpredictable variables.
Milan’s pen paused on the paper.
I left so many entrances. I waited so many years. Now someone has finally walked in. But the person who walked in is not the kind of person I thought would walk in.
He closed the notebook. He did not write the last line. But he knew what the unwritten sentence was—He reminds me of myself.
When Milan was seven years old, the snow in Belgrade fell thick and heavy.
The winters of his memory were always gray—gray skies, gray snow, gray faces. It was 1989. Yugoslavia was unraveling. The air smelled of gunpowder and rust, like an invisible blight eating at the skeleton of the city.
His father, Aleksandar Vojnović, was a telecommunications engineer who had worked at the Belgrade telephone exchange for nineteen years. Six foot three, broad palms, knuckles enlarged from years of turning screwdrivers and stripping pliers. A man of few words, but steady hands—what Milan remembered most was his father’s hands: impossibly precise when repairing equipment, yet carrying a clumsy gentleness in daily life, peeling an apple for his son in one continuous strip.
The winter of 1990. The days of queuing for bread.
The temperature dropped to minus twelve degrees. Milan followed his mother, standing in a line that snaked through three city blocks. Everyone wore the same dark heavy coats—not a uniform, but because everyone was wearing the hand-me-downs of the generation before. No one spoke. Children leaned against their parents’ legs, shrunken with cold.
In front of Milan stood an old woman, her back so bent she looked like an umbrella that had been folded too many times and could no longer fully open. She clutched a ration coupon, her fingers already purple with cold. When she finally reached the bread distribution window, the attendant glanced at her coupon, shook his head, said something. The old woman did not argue. She turned around and slowly walked to the back of the line to wait again.
Milan’s mother broke her own bread in half, walked over, and pressed it into the old woman’s hand. The old woman did not refuse. She did not even say “thank you.” She hid the bread inside her coat and walked away.
“Why didn’t she wait in line?” Milan asked.
“She did wait,” his mother said, her voice very low. “But there wasn’t enough bread.”
“Why wasn’t there enough?”
His mother did not answer.
That night, when his father came home, his coat stained with oil and snow. He stood at the door for a long time, scraping the mud off his boots before entering. Half a loaf of bread and a bowl of bean soup sat on the table. His father sat down and ate slowly.
“Another line went down today,” he said. Not a complaint, a statement. “The exchange in Sarajevo got bombed. The manual backup lines were cut too. People there can’t make calls now.”
“So are they going to fix it?” Milan asked.
His father looked at him. “I can’t go. That line passes through the conflict zone.”
Milan did not fully understand what “conflict zone” meant at the time. But he remembered his father’s expression when he said it—not fear, but something deeper, like metal fatigue. When he said “I can’t go,” the muscles around his mouth tightened, like someone biting down on something hard.
That winter in Belgrade lasted a long time. The snow was still falling after the New Year. No one cleared the streets; the snow piled nearly half a meter deep. The footprints people left formed narrow channels that twisted like a maze. Two blocks away, a shell had hit an apartment building, leaving a three-meter hole in the wall. No one came to fix it. Passersby glanced at it and kept walking.
In the spring of 1991, the first armed civilians appeared on the streets of Belgrade.
Milan remembered it clearly. He was walking home from school when he saw several men in mismatched military clothing standing on a street corner, rifles in hand, muzzles pointed down. They were not regular soldiers—their uniforms did not match. Some wore camouflage pants, some wore leather jackets and sneakers. But their eyes were the same.
One of the men noticed Milan and smiled at him. It was not a malicious smile. It was almost friendly. But Milan felt cold all over. He did not know why, but he intuitively felt that the temperature of the rifle in that man’s hands was much more real than the warmth of his smile.
He ran home.
Two months later, war officially broke out. Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia—one by one, the republics declared independence. The Yugoslav People’s Army began to intervene. The front lines spread like cracks in a dry lakebed. Belgrade was not directly on the battlefield, but it was like a person sitting in the middle of a burning house—all four walls were smoking, the ceiling was creaking, it was only a matter of time before it collapsed.
Milan’s father was conscripted—not as a soldier, but as telecommunications technical support. His mission was to repair bombed communication lines in the lulls between shelling, keeping the phone lines open between the military and civil authorities.
“Keep the lines open,” his father said as he left, his tone as flat as if he were saying “remember to close the window.”
That was the last time Milan heard his voice.
Three days later, two men in uniform knocked on their door. Milan’s mother stood at the entrance for a long time. She did not cry. She wore an expression Milan had never seen before as she looked at the men outside. Her lips moved several times, but no sound came out.
His father had been shot while repairing a telephone line near Sarajevo that had been cut by a sniper. Not a shell, not a stray bullet—a precise shot from a window across the street. The sniper had been waiting for someone to come repair the line.
They learned later that the shot was deliberate. The sniper’s target was not a military installation, not a government building—his target was to cut communications. If a line was repaired, he would shoot the repairman. That way, the next repair team would hesitate. The longer the delay, the harder it was for the two sides to communicate, the more likely the conflict would escalate through misjudgment in an information vacuum.
This was tactics. Human lives treated as signal attenuation costs.
Milan’s mother did not cry at the funeral. She wore black mourning clothes, standing in the cemetery, her arms stiff at her sides. Milan stood beside her, his frozen fingers gripping a wilted flower.
When they returned home, his mother sat at the kitchen table for a long time. Milan did not know what she was thinking. Then she stood up, opened the cupboard, took out the only intact ceramic plate they owned—their most valuable piece of tableware—stared at it for a few seconds. Then she let it fall to the floor. It shattered.
Milan stood in the doorway, looking at the shards on the ground. He did not ask “Mom, what’s wrong?” He just crouched down and helped his mother pick up the pieces, one by one.
He was seven years old that year.
It took him a long time to understand the full meaning of his father’s last words. “Keep the lines open”—not an instruction, but a creed. His father believed that the flow of information was the only way to stop violence. When people could hear each other’s voices, they would not shoot. And when the lines were cut, misunderstanding, fear, and hatred found the space to grow.
Milan made a decision that winter. He could not say exactly what day or what moment it was, but the decision was like a stone sinking to the bottom of the water, never to resurface.
He would become the one who repaired the lines.
Not the telephone lines from Belgrade to Sarajevo. The entire world’s infrastructure—the conduits that allowed information to flow between people. He would make the lines dense enough, redundant enough, powerful enough that no one could ever cut them again.
Thirty years later, he had become the chief architect of the largest communication infrastructure in human history.
One hundred and twenty thousand satellites.
Every intersatellite link was a protocol he had designed with his own hands.
No one could cut it—because no one knew the full routing topology.
Milan looked up from his notebook. The sky outside was beginning to lighten. His coffee had gone completely cold, but he picked it up and drank anyway.
His gaze returned to the screen. He had been monitoring Farhan’s encrypted communication traffic—the Data Party was preparing a global protocol injection operation. What they did not know was that the QKD side channel they were using to hide was a directional entry point Milan had kept open in the firmware for three years—like a backdoor he could close at any moment.
But Milan would not close it.
Not because he could not.
Because on the other side of that door, he saw the shadow of his own daughter.
Three years ago.
The sunset over the Gulf of Naples was a deep gold-red, like a ball of molten iron slowly sinking into the sea. Mia sat on the stone steps of the dock, holding an old film camera—she loved film because it required no tokens, no network, no uploading to any server. Film belonged only to her.
Milan sat down beside her. This father and daughter had not seen each other for over a year—the last time had been a brief weekend in Belgrade, Mia restless like a bird caged too long, gone within forty-eight hours. He had been the one to suggest this meeting; Mia had hesitated for a week before agreeing.
The conversation between them began with a technical question. It was the only area where they could still communicate smoothly—technology and engineering, because in this their languages were perfectly aligned.
“Do you know what Starlink is doing?” Mia asked. Her tone was not a real question, but a question wrapped in quotation marks.
“Connecting the world,” Milan answered. He knew what kind of answer she expected.
“Connecting the world to your price list.” Mia set the film camera on her knee and turned to face him. Her eyes were exactly like her mother’s—gray-green, cold when they needed to be cold, warm when they needed to be warm. “Dad, the QKD channel you designed—I found the side channel.”
Milan’s eyebrow moved almost imperceptibly.
“The noise distribution of the photon arrival time difference isn’t random. You kept the modulation interface for the laser drive current. There’s a path in the Starlink firmware that was never documented—it can access the laser bias current control register directly from the application layer.”
She paused, waiting for his reaction. Milan did not deny it, did not explain. He just looked at her, as if waiting for her to finish.
“This side channel can be used to transmit data,” Mia said. “Less than one bit per second. But for encryption keys and instructions, it’s enough.”
Milan was silent for a long time. The last patch of gold-red on the sea was being swallowed by deep blue. The motor of a fishing boat sounded in the distance, intermittent.
“The system isn’t perfect,” Mia said finally, her voice no longer challenging, softening. “I know you didn’t know the side channel existed. But your system isn’t perfect, Dad. You didn’t design a wall—you designed a cage. And cages always have gaps.”
What she did not notice was that the muscles in Milan’s jaw tightened slightly—the same micro-expression his father had worn when he said “conflict zone.”
He did not tell her: that side channel was deliberately left. Not through negligence, not through design flaw—it was one of dozens of test entries he had buried in the Starlink firmware, meant to observe who would find it, what they would use it for, how far they would go. But the other thing he did not tell her was: among all those who had discovered this entry, Mia was the only one he had not anticipated.
“Maybe it’s not perfect,” Milan said finally. His voice was calm, gentle, like a father discussing a math problem with his daughter. “But it’s the best system humanity has right now.”
“The best system?” Mia stood up. She was the same height as her mother, under five foot five, but when she stood, there was an indescribable pressure about her. “You monitor every single breath of every person on Earth—every search request, every location update, every payment, every heartbeat—and you convert it all into a line item on a bill. You call it connection. But this isn’t connection. This is colonization.”
“Colonization requires a center.” Milan also stood. He was not defending himself, he was stating a fact. “Starlink has no center. The network has no center. It’s decentralized—”
“Decentralized infrastructure, centralized control.” Mia said. “You know better than anyone: whoever controls the protocol layer controls everything.”
She bent down to pick up her film camera from the ground, brushed the dust off the stone steps, and stood with her back to her father for a few seconds.
“Mom asked me to ask if you’re coming home for dinner.”
Milan did not answer.
“She said she’s not cooking what you like anymore. She’s forgotten what you like.”
Mia said these words and walked away along the stone steps of the dock without looking back. Her pace was neither fast nor slow, like someone walking a path she had already decided upon. The last ray of sunset stretched her shadow long across the rough stone pavement, undulating, gradually shrinking, disappearing around the corner at the end of the dock.
Milan stood on the steps until the fishing boats’ lights had fully replaced the daylight. He did not follow.
Later, he returned to his Belgrade apartment and sat in the dark living room for a long time. He did not turn on lights. He did not eat. He did not check any screens. He just sat on the sofa, looking at the lights on the opposite bank of the Sava River outside the window, his fingers unconsciously tapping a rhythm on the sofa’s surface—the beat of an old song his father used to hum while repairing telephone lines.
Two months later, he received an email from Mia—not through Starlink’s mail system, but through an anonymous mail forwarding service so ancient it had nearly been forgotten, bypassing the Starlink network.
The email was only one sentence:
“I told the Data Party about the side channel. I’m sorry. But I don’t regret it.”
Milan read the email, deleted it, and did not reply.
He spent three days confirming what Mia had said in Naples—about the side channel. Not to patch it, but to confirm it was still functional. He checked the access logs for that register in the firmware. The Data Party’s technical team had first accessed it two weeks ago. A second time four days ago. A third time the day before yesterday.
He sat before the screen, looking at those access records, his expression unreadable to any observer.
He had never told anyone—including Mia—that the idea for that side channel had come to him twenty-six years ago, while he was in the archives of the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal, reviewing the case files of his father’s death. He was reading the details of NATO operations to bomb communication infrastructure, but his mind was on something entirely different: If I were the target of those bombers, how would I hide an escape route in the building I built, one that would never be found?
That thought had grown in his mind for twenty-six years, eventually becoming a code path hidden in the Starlink firmware, recorded in no document, appearing on no diagram. He had hidden it so deep that sometimes he himself doubted whether it was really there.
But it was real. Mia had found it.
He had been waiting for someone to walk in. But when he heard that the person walking in was his daughter, he did not know what he felt. Not anger. Not fear. It was something like feeling a hand gently grip your wrist in the dark—not an attack, but a touch. He had designed the most精密 connection system in the world, but the deepest communication between him and his daughter had occurred through a vulnerability he had deliberately left behind.
Milan pulled himself from memory. He realized he had been sitting in his study for an hour. The third screen had turned itself on again. Mia’s photo appeared once more—not the candid street shot this time, but an earlier photograph, taken on the balcony of the old Belgrade apartment. Mia was about sixteen, wearing a school uniform, her hair blown across half her face by the wind, smiling at the camera.
The photo had been taken with a digital camera. The photographer was him.
Milan reached out and turned off the screen.
He picked up the internal phone and dialed a number.
It rang twice. The other end picked up.
“Cyrus,” he said. “That cloned signal in Shenzhen—don’t touch it. Let him run.”
Silence on the other end for a few seconds. Cyrus’s voice carried a restrained displeasure: “You’re protecting him. Why?”
“Because what he’s doing—isn’t finished yet.” Milan paused. “And he has a variable I didn’t calculate.”
“What variable?”
Milan did not answer. He hung up and leaned back into his chair.
Outside the window, the first pale light of dawn appeared on the Belgrade horizon. This city had witnessed too many dawns, each one feeling like another侥幸 survival. Milan watched the light spread along the Sava River, like a line being gradually reconnected.
He remembered what Mia had said.
Cages always have gaps.
Milan closed his eyes. Behind his dark eyelids, he did not see satellite topology maps or the green light of intersatellite links. He saw Belgrade in the winter of 1989. A long line of people winding through the snow. His mother standing beside him, holding his hand. He could still remember the warmth of that hand.
She held on so tightly. As if letting go would let some invisible force sweep him away.
Milan opened his eyes.
He opened the notebook, then closed it again. There was nothing more to write tonight.
He had been walking this road for too long. There was no one waiting for him at the end—he knew this—but he could no longer turn back.
Just like his father walking toward a broken telephone line through a conflict zone.
He had no other choice.
