ICE RIVER
Part One
1
The weather was getting colder and colder—and this was only late October. Dale Kingston exhaled a cloud of white vapor, pulled his leather jacket tighter, and headed toward work.
Today was an important day—at least for Dale Kingston, it was extremely important. Because according to multiple intelligence reports, "Sanxingdui" was about to make contact.
"Sanxingdui" was a mysterious organization they had recently uncovered. This organization had apparently existed for a long time, but what it actually did and what its purpose was—nobody knew. After a series of meticulous investigations, they managed to capture a Sanxingdui liaison known as "Old Harlan." Old Harlan was a stubborn middle-aged man in his forties or fifties, tight-lipped as a vault—no matter how they interrogated him, he wouldn't utter a single word. The higher-ups issued orders, specifically assigning Dale Kingston, a criminal investigation specialist, to conduct a surprise interrogation of Old Harlan.
After handing over materials with his colleagues, Dale Kingston walked into the interrogation room alone. Old Harlan sat across from him in handcuffs, looking haggard—it seemed he hadn't slept well the night before.
Dale Kingston figured the night shift must have given him the soft treatment—wearing him down. No choice—against a hard case, you had to play rough.
"Cigarette?" Dale Kingston offered one.
"Give me one." Old Harlan nodded.
Dale Kingston lit it for him, sat down, and before he could even begin questioning, Old Harlan spoke first: "Is it cold outside?"
"Pretty cold. You worried about the weather?"
"Nothing special—just asking." Old Harlan slowly exhaled a column of smoke. "Going forward, it's only going to get colder."
"Of course—it's winter." Dale Kingston flipped through the materials and said, "I prefer to get straight to the point. Let's begin. Old Harlan, real name Harlan Grey, forty-nine years old. Graduated from the Southern Institute of Information Engineering in 1985, meteorology specialist, formerly employed at a municipal meteorological bureau with associate senior professional title. Left the system in 2001 and entered a private laboratory. According to intelligence, that same year you joined the organization known as 'Sanxingdui.' These records—are they correct?"
"Correct." Old Harlan nodded, looking quite composed.
"Good. Then tell me—who is the leader of Sanxingdui, and what exactly is your purpose?"
Old Harlan flicked his ash. "I know you have virtually no information on Sanxingdui, but don't expect me to give up a single word."
Dale Kingston gave a faint smile. "Old Harlan, I advise you to face the reality before you. Although we don't understand this organization, there is solid evidence that you have been engaged in illegal destructive activities. Even if you refuse to confess anything, I can charge you with endangering public safety."
"The safety of all humanity is at stake—my personal honor and disgrace mean nothing."
"Heh heh heh." Dale Kingston's laugh carried a trace of sarcasm. "In all my years on the job, this is the first time I've seen a criminal suspect so full of righteous conviction. Do all you people dress up your actions in such lofty language? Like those extremists who strap on suicide bombs?"
"Don't lump us together with them!" Old Harlan suddenly grew fierce. "Our philosophy is completely different from theirs!"
"Everyone says that." Dale Kingston shrugged. "In this world, who would voluntarily admit their own mistakes?"
"I have nothing more to say to you, Officer." Old Harlan crushed his cigarette, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes. "I'd like to rest now."
2
Back in his office, Dale Kingston rubbed his messy hair in frustration.
Ryan from the technical department came over and asked: "Captain Dai, how'd it go? Any progress?"
"Couldn't get anything out of him. This guy is impenetrable." Dale Kingston shook his head, then added, "What about your end—any progress?"
"That's actually what I wanted to tell you about." Ryan brought over a laptop. "We just intercepted some of his outbound communications—several emails sent overseas."
"Overseas? This is getting bigger." Dale Kingston scrolled through the emails. They were in both English and Chinese, mostly discussing academic meteorology questions, and didn't seem to contain anything of value.
"Did you find anything?" Dale Kingston frowned.
"Not yet," Ryan said, somewhat dejected. "Our tech team stayed up all night analyzing every single email, but we didn't find anything unusual."
"This Old Harlan is a slippery old fox indeed." Dale Kingston rubbed his temples. In all his years in criminal investigation, he'd seen every type of suspect, but very few like Old Harlan. He was like a block of solid ice—there was no crack to get a grip on.
Just as Dale Kingston was about to give up, one email caught his attention. What drew his eye wasn't the content of the email itself but the writing format. It was written in English and discussed academic topics, but something about the writing felt off—subtly peculiar in a way he couldn't quite name. This nagging sensation caught the attention of the battle-hardened investigator. His finger moved unconsciously toward the screen, tapping along character by character.
"Captain, this is..." Ryan looked puzzled.
"Look—the first letter of each sentence has an abnormally high rate of repetition: CQCQCQAD EK EK..."
Ryan, with his professional training, instantly caught on. "My god—Morse code?!"
"Quick—get someone to decode this!" Dale Kingston's face lit up with excitement. "We've caught the fox's tail!"
The Morse code was decoded quickly, only to plunge them into an even deeper mystery—leaving everyone in deep contemplation.
The decoded message contained only one sentence: "Calling 1988, the Milky Way is about to bloom."
3
The technical team was stumped by this baffling message.
"Could we have made a mistake?" Ryan began to doubt. "Maybe this isn't Morse code at all—just a coincidence?"
"No—in this world, there are no such things as coincidences. My years of experience tell me that 99% of coincidences are deliberate." Dale Kingston was emphatic. "This is definitely Sanxingdui's internal communication code."
"But... what does it mean?"
Dale Kingston thought for a moment, then asked: "Can we trace the email's recipient?"
"No." Ryan shook his head. "The IP address is encrypted and untraceable. We only know the email was sent to Norway."
Dale Kingston frowned. Norway was a small country, but it still had a population of over five million. Even with international police cooperation, finding the recipient would be like searching for a needle in a haystack.
"Should we use this intelligence to interrogate Old Harlan again?" Ryan suggested tentatively.
"No, we can't spook them." Dale Kingston made the call. "Sanxingdui is a deeply secretive organization—they definitely have backup plans. If they find out we've decoded their communication code, they'll stop all communications immediately. The enemy is in the dark; we're in the light. We cannot act rashly."
After a long day, Dale Kingston went home, took a quick shower, and went to bed. The weather was getting colder—it wasn't even time for the heating to come on yet, but frost had already formed on the windows. His cat was curled up in a blanket, not moving a muscle. Dale Kingston burrowed under his quilt, and it wasn't until the middle of the night that the bed finally warmed up. He'd been hoping for a lie-in, but before dawn, the square dance music from downstairs jolted him awake.
"No sense of civic decency at all..." he mumbled, rolling over, trying to go back to sleep. But the faint square dance music kept seeping through the window like an annoying moth in his ear.
Dale Kingston could take it no more. He leaped up and threw open the window. The freezing blast of air from outside gave him a shiver. Wrapping his quilt around him, he shouted down at the square: "Look at what time it is! Can't you let a person sleep?!"
But the elderly men and women down in the square paid him no attention. Bundled in thick winter coats, their faces flushed red from the cold, they continued to dance in neat rows to the rhythm of the music, like a flock of zombies. Dale Kingston gave up—he finally understood that old internet saying: it's not that rude people get worse as they age; it's that bad people get older.
He grumpily closed the window—but then, as if suddenly thinking of something, he went still for a moment, then yanked the window back open. The square dance music blasted in again, and this time he heard it clearly—the accompanying music was the familiar song "Meet in '98."
"98..."
Like a bolt of lightning splitting through his mind, Dale Kingston jolted awake. He threw on some clothes, dashed downstairs, and knocked on the door of the nearest music shop. The bleary-eyed shop owner rolled up the security shutter, yawned, and said: "Officer Dai, this early?"
"Do you have any CDs?" Dale Kingston asked out of nowhere.
"CDs? I've got plenty. What kind are you looking for? Pop, jazz, or country?"
Dale Kingston hesitated. "Do you have any CDs released in 1988?"
"Haha," the owner laughed. "Officer Dai, you must be joking. There weren't any CDs on the mainland back then. The earliest CDs in this shop are from after 2000."