Chapter 16 · Father and Daughter

The rain in Lagos started at midnight. Not the gentle, rhythmic city rain of the night — it was the torrential downpour of the African rainy season, raindrops the size of fingernails hammering corrugated iron roofs like a thousand drums beaten at once. In minutes the air shifted from humid heat to a cold, waterlogged heaviness, and a damp current carrying the smell of mud and diesel seeped through the gaps in the warehouse door.

Lu Yuan and Mia were trapped in Amina’s warehouse. Not the basement where the servers were kept in the port district — this was an old transit warehouse by the docks, not far from the container yards of Apapa Port. Lu Yuan had come to pick up a batch of SkyWalker firmware samples — new hardware Amina had sent from a concealed node north of Lagos, transported by camel across the desert roads on the edge of the Sahara, then bounced around on the back of a motorcycle for two days, finally stored on a solid-state drive wrapped in ballistic fiber. He had been debugging those samples all afternoon and half the night, and was heading back to the rest room on the second floor of the freight company when the rain came down.

Mia had been trapped by the rain fifteen minutes before him. She leaned against the half-open iron door of the warehouse, a stainless steel cup in her hand — instant coffee that Amina had left there, already cold, but she hadn’t bothered to reheat it. She watched the harbor through the curtain of rain. The container cranes had become a row of blurry giant silhouettes in the downpour, searchlight beams shredded into fragments by the dense lines of falling water.

Lu Yuan walked out from deeper inside the warehouse and stood two or three meters away from her, also watching the rain. He had no coffee — only a bottle of water he’d pulled from his backpack.

News of the failed Sahel Operation had reached every Data Party node. Those twenty-three code names in dark red — Golden Eagle, Raven, Albatross, Nightingale — were being mourned in their own somber way on the Data Party’s internal bulletin board. No one wrote long eulogies. No one spoke. Someone had simply added twenty-three horizontal lines beneath the list of names, like twenty-three shallow knife cuts.

Neither Lu Yuan nor Mia had left a message below that board. They had looked, closed the interface, and gone back to their work. But the weight hung in the warehouse air like a fine dust, and every breath tasted of it.

“You asked me that day — who the letter was for.” Mia spoke. She didn’t turn to look at him. Her gaze stayed on the rain.

Lu Yuan didn’t answer. He waited for her to continue.

“I’ve been thinking about it. For a month after I got back from Lagos to Berlin, I kept thinking. I sat at my workbench at the Pigeonnet node, with the paper in front of me, the pen already dipped in ink — but I couldn’t write. Because I didn’t know who I was writing to.”

She took a sip of the coffee, now completely cold. She didn’t wince.

“I wasn’t writing to my mother. My mother doesn’t need those letters to know I’m still alive — I call her every two weeks, relayed through Pigeonnet, and even though we only get about three minutes each time, hearing my voice is enough. Those letters weren’t for her.”

The rain on the iron roof converged into a continuous roar, like a massive waterfall cascading somewhere close.

“They were for him to read,” Mia said. “For my father. But I never sent a single one.”

She took something out of an inside pocket of her backpack — not the letter Lu Yuan had seen in Lagos, another one. The envelope’s edges were frayed with fine cracks from repeated folding and unfolding, the paper noticeably thicker than ordinary printer paper, as if it had been handled and refolded many times. She handed it to him.

Lu Yuan took it. The envelope wasn’t sealed; the corner of the paper inside was visible. He glanced at Mia — her gaze was still fixed on the rain, but her jaw had tightened slightly, the way someone looks when they’re doing something they know they have to do but aren’t sure they can.

He pulled out the paper and unfolded it.

The letter was handwritten in blue-black ink, the characters arranged with a discipline bordering on rigidity — every line almost exactly the same length, the spacing between characters as uniform as if measured with a ruler. Lu Yuan had never seen Milan’s handwriting, but he had seen screenshots of Milan’s design logs, thatlayout style revealing a苛求 for perfection beneath extreme restraint. This letter matched completely.

He didn’t read the opening. He flipped to the bottom first — no signature. Not a single name on the paper, like someone unwilling to leave their mark on their work.

Then he started from the beginning.

The letter had no date, no salutation. It began directly with its first sentence, like a conversation excerpt from the middle:

“When I was young, I thought you knew everything. Not thought — I was certain. You fixed that broken radio. You solved that integral no one else could solve. In the Belgrade winter, with a copper wire and a pair of pliers, you gave the whole building back a week of televisionsignal. The neighbors stood in the doorway watching you work, like watching a kind of magic. I thought you were the closest thing to God I would ever meet.”

“Then I found the first crack — not in your system, but in you. I was fourteen that year. You fell asleep in your study, your notebook open on the desk. I stood there for so long my knees ached. What I saw wasn’t God’s equation — I saw a man changing the same parameter over and over again.”

“You were afraid. I didn’t recognize the expression back then, because I had never seen it on your face. It took me until I was fourteen to learn what fear looked like on a person. By those years you were already too tired — too tired to hide it in front of your own daughter.”

“Your network could transmit anything — data, images, money, power. It connected that old server in the warehouse to every screen on earth that could glow. It let a child in Belgrade and a child in Tokyo see the same picture at the same moment. It increased humanity’s total communication bandwidth by four orders of magnitude over thirty years. You were proud of that. So was I. But you forgot to annotate one thing in the architecture diagram: it cannot transmit forgiveness.”

Lu Yuan’s eyes stopped on that line. The roar of rain on the iron roof seemed to recede in those seconds, retreating to another layer of the background.

“Because forgiveness requires something that can only be said offline — a face-to-face, a time you never left for me. You wrote exception-handling branches in your protocol for every possible connection error. But you never wrote a single line of reconnection logic for the断连 between you and me. Maybe it wasn’t negligence. Maybe you just didn’t know where to start writing that line of code.”

“But I’m still waiting. I’m not sure what I’m waiting for — maybe for you to admit that your cage has a door you deliberately left unlocked. Maybe for you to tell me that the side channel you left for me wasn’t just a test入口, but a —”

The letter stopped there. Not torn — the pen had simply stopped mid-sentence, leaving about three lines of blank space, and then the paper had been folded and placed in the envelope. The rest was never written.

Lu Yuan refolded the paper along its original creases, put it back in the envelope, and returned it to Mia. He didn’t look at her face as he did it — he didn’t want her to feel examined. He just handed it over, waited until she had taken it, and then turned his own gaze back to the rain.

“You never sent a single one?” he asked.

“Every one was finished, folded, put in an envelope. Then I kept them in a drawer for a few days, took them out, read them, and tore them up. Only this one I kept.”

“Why this one?”

Mia didn’t answer. She put the letter back in the inner pocket of her backpack and zipped it shut.

The rain showed no sign of stopping. The sound on the iron roof had shifted fromdense drumbeat to a continuous, low-frequency roar — not louder, but the ear could no longer distinguish individual impacts. They had叠加 into a wall of something like white noise.

From behind that wall, Mia spoke.

“He’s not a bad person.”

Lu Yuan turned his head to look at her.

“I mean — my father. He’s not the kind of person you imagine. He’s not like Silas, the type who enjoys the feeling of controlling others. He doesn’t take pleasure in power. What he enjoys is — order.”

She searched for the precise word.

“What kind of creature do you think human beings are?” she asked.

Lu Yuan thought about it. “I don’t know. Most of the people I meet are people trying to survive. Some make it, some don’t, but they’re all trying.”

“My father thinks human beings are children holding matches, and the world is a gunpowder factory.”

When Mia said it, her tone was very calm, like stating a fact she had understood for many years. Not a defense. Not a complaint. Just a statement.

“He thinks humanity has already proven, over several thousand years, that it cannot manage the forces it has created. Nuclear energy, gene editing, artificial intelligence, low-orbit industrialization — every technology that appeared brought a crisis that nearly destroyed civilization. He lived through the wars in Yugoslavia. He knows what people do to each other once the unifying framework is gone. That memory never left him.”

She paused.

“So he wanted to confiscate everyone’s matches. To manage the right to ignite them himself.”

Lu Yuan leaned against the cement pillar by the warehouse door. Rain splashed in through the gap, soaking one shoulder. He didn’t move.

“He might be right,” he said.

Mia turned to look at him. Her eyes, in the light leaking through the warehouse door gap, were a color between gray and green, her pupils slightly dilated — like someone who had expected a rebuttal and heard an unexpected answer instead.

“Human beings really are sitting in a gunpowder factory with matches,” Lu Yuan said. “Climate tipping points, global inequality, nuclear proliferation, uncontrolled AI risk — any one of them could blow us into a footnote in history books within fifty years. Your father says a unified control layer is needed to prevent all of this — from a pure engineering standpoint, his conclusion is consistent with his premise.”

He paused.

“But that doesn’t mean he should have that power.”

Mia didn’t respond immediately. She set the cold coffee cup on the windowsill and crossed her arms over her chest. The posture looked defensive, but Lu Yuan noticed that her fingers weren’t gripping — they rested lightly on her arms. She was listening.

“He designed the system, and he believes in it the most,” Lu Yuan said. “One person as designer, judge, and executor — there’s no historical record of any power structure with that configuration that didn’t corrupt. Not because he’s bad — because no one can be right forever. And the system he designed doesn’t allow anyone to question his correctness. That’s not order. That’s a single point of failure.”

He stepped forward half a pace, standing at the edge of the rain curtain. The raindrops landed at his feet, splashing fine mist on the cement.

“My daughter is five. She learned two-digit addition this month. The question she asks me is ‘why do the stars cost money.’ I don’t want to destroy Starlink, Mia — I want to destroy the world that makes a five-year-old child think connection is something that requires permission.”

Mia watched his profile for a long time. She suddenly remembered the first time she had met this man — in that stuffy port district workshop, crouched in front of a hand-soldered device, measuring power supply ripple with a multimeter, too focused to notice her walk in. She had thought he was a typical engineering-minded person: pragmatic, quiet, with an obsessive precision about technical problems. She hadn’t expected him to say what he just said.

And she hadn’t expected that, on this stormy night, she would say the following to a man she had known for less than two months:

“Three years ago, when I left Belgrade, I left a note on the kitchen table. Just one sentence: ‘I took the door you left open.’”

She looked at the rain.

“I mean — the side channel. The QKD photon arrival time difference. I read the draft of that path in his notebooks when I was fourteen, but it took me ten years to understand what that door was for. It wasn’t a vulnerability. It was a door he left for me to find.”

She paused.

“He never told me it was there. But he left all the clues where I could find them — unlocked notebooks on the shelf, an admin session he never logged out of on the office terminal, firmware source code printouts scattered across the desk. He was never a careless person. If he hadn’t wanted me to find those things, he had a hundred ways to hide them.”

Her voice grew lighter in the rain, but not weaker.

“He knew I would leave through that door. He didn’t lock it.”

Lu Yuan didn’t respond. He could feel that Mia wasn’t confiding in him — she was reconfirming to herself a conclusion she had reached long ago but never spoken aloud.

“But after I left, he didn’t contact me not because he couldn’t find me. He can locate any terminal on earth through Starlink — if he wanted, he could know in three seconds which apartment in Berlin I was in, what terminal I used, what time I went online every day. He didn’t contact me because he respected what that door meant. I chose to walk out the exit, and he wouldn’t follow.”

She finally turned her face from the rain toward him.

“But I’ve been thinking about one question for three years: what if I walk back?”

The rain filled the silence after those words. Lu Yuan stood in front of her and felt the shape of the cylindrical key in the inner pocket of his chest pressing against his skin through the fabric — the skeleton of the old internet preserved on that FreeBSD server. His fingers unconsciously pressed against the key through the cloth.

“Your father left a back door. Not the Entry-7 honeypot — another one, farther down beneath the honeypot. Farhan has confirmed its existence, but hasn’t found the exact activation path yet.”

Mia’s gaze didn’t move.

“If he can find that entry — the door that even Milan himself hasn’t fully decided whether to use — your father left a keyhole he wasn’t sure he wanted anyone to find. He’s not omniscient. He might even be helping us.”

Lu Yuan didn’t know how much of what he said was analysis and how much was hope. He only knew that, in this moment when the ashes of Sahel hadn’t yet cooled, he needed to believe that Milan was not an unbroken wall — that there were cracks in Milan’s wall, and not all of them were camouflage for catching prey. Some were the shadows of his own internal contradictions.

“If you can contact him — no matter how —” Lu Yuan started, and found himself unsure how to phrase the rest, because he was asking a daughter to do something she might not be ready for herself, “tell him: he doesn’t need to confiscate everyone’s matches. He just needs to trust that people won’t set themselves on fire.”

Mia was silent for a long time.

The rain began to ease. Not abruptly — ittransitioned gradually from that bombardment-level intensity to something that could be called “heavy rain,” then to “moderate rain,” the roar on the iron roof dropping several notes, becoming distinguishable raindrops again.

Mia straightened up in the doorframe. She made several movements — lowered her crossed arms, took a slender key from her pocket, walked to a corner of the warehouse covered by an oilcloth, and pulled it aside.

Beneath it was a device. Not a SkyWalker test terminal like the ones Lu Yuan had seen — it was an old satellite phone, military green, with a thick antennainterface and a casing that had clearly been reinforced. It wasn’t a Starlink product — its antenna structure was simpler, incompatible with any Starlink frequency band, pointing instead to an earlier, more primitive satellite communication network.

A dedicated Pigeonnet relay satellite phone. No connection to Starlink. No connection logs traceable through Starlink gateways. A device living in the previous communication era.

Mia picked it up and checked the battery. The indicator lit up — three bars remaining. She unlocked the antenna latch, extended it, and carried the device to the warehouse door — where there was a relatively open concrete platform washed clean by rain, uncovered by the iron roof.

She didn’t dial immediately. She stood there, holding the phone, watching the rain curtain thin and brighten. At the edge of the rain clouds in the eastern sky, a very pale, struggling gray-white was appearing. She stood close enough that Lu Yuan could hear her breathing, but her face was turned away — he couldn’t see her expression.

She thought for a while. A decision process of a length Lu Yuan couldn’t judge, requiring no external input — like a machine running internal self-checks, making one final confirmation before starting the final boot sequence.

Then she pressed the dial key.

The number wasn’t called from a contact list — she entered it manually, each keypress evenly spaced and stable, like a piece of music she had practiced too many times, her fingers having memorized all the distances between the keys.

Belgrade’s area code. Then a string of digits she would never forget — Milan Vojnović’s private line. Not in the Starlink official directory, not in any public contact database — the same number her father had used on the phone he carried when he picked her up from school as a child. He had never changed it. She didn’t know why he had never changed it — maybe after rebuilding the entire human communication infrastructure in low-earth orbit, changing a phone number had become a trivial thing he didn’t care about. Maybe because he was waiting for someone who would never call again.

The call connected.

One ring. Mia’s breathing stopped.

Two rings. Her fingers slid unconsciously along the edge of the phone casing.

Three rings.

Connected.

There was no sound on the other end — not a dead line, but the silence of someone present.

Mia raised the phone to her ear. Lu Yuan saw her hand holding the phone trembling steadily, almost imperceptibly. Her lips moved, as if relearning a motion she thought she had forgotten, before sound came out.

“Dad.”

When that syllable came out of her mouth, Lu Yuan felt something block his throat — not because of the word itself, but the way she said it. A word not spoken in three years, but the pronunciation held no trace of unfamiliarity or hesitation, as if she had silently repeated it every day — yesterday, the day before — and had only now allowed it to pass through her vocal cords.

The silence on the other end of the line stretched. Standing a few paces away, Lu Yuan couldn’t hear Milan’s voice — only the rain, the distant harbor foghorn, and the detail of Mia’s knuckles whitening from the pressure of her grip on the phone.

Then Mia spoke.

What she said was not what she had spent three years preparing. Not an interrogation. Not an accusation. Not a single carefully crafted sentence from the letters never sent.

She said:

“Someone wants to talk to you.”

She lowered the phone from her ear, turned it toward Lu Yuan, and held it out.

From the receiver came Milan Vojnović’s voice — across thousands of kilometers and a storm gradually subsiding off the west coast of Africa, through a satellite phone that did not belong to Starlink, from a previous communication era — lighter than Lu Yuan had imagined, carrying the particular, almost imperceptible hoarseness of long-distance circuit compression and restoration:

”…Lu Yuan.”

Lu Yuan took the phone. He didn’t speak immediately. He felt the warmth of the old phone’s casing, still carrying the heat of Mia’s palm where she had held it. He raised it to his ear.

“Milan.”

Two men were speaking on a line that bypassed the Starlink network entirely. A hundred and twenty thousand satellites were passing overhead at seven kilometers per second, but not one knew this call existed.

The rain continued to ease. The outline of Lagos harbor grew clearer in the brightening light, the tips of container cranes emerging from the mist, seagulls beginning to circle in the low air. An old connection was being reactivated — through a military-green, scuffed old phone, and a number a father had never changed.

Somewhere far away, somewhere Lu Yuan couldn’t see — before a study window in Belgrade, Milan Vojnović held the phone that had not rung in three years, standing in the darkest part of the hour before dawn.

It was also raining outside his window.

He listened to the sounds of breathing on the other end of the line — two breaths, one from his daughter and one from a former Huawei engineer he had never met but had been tracking for months. He held the phone. He didn’t hang up.

He was already on the line.

The line was open.