Conference—The Technical Working Groups

From the very outset, Xiao Zishan had set eyes on those small cities along the southern coast of the mainland. After half a month of running from place to place, he finally managed to rent a county militia training base.

The base rented by the Crossing Company was a training camp originally established in the era of compulsory military service. It had been left empty for many years before Xiao Zishan came across it. It was located in a hilly, wooded area, and had a small access port straight into the sea. It was surrounded by mountains on all sides, and the only road in and out was very poorly maintained, making transport very inconvenient.

Although getting there was inconvenient, the base was in a fairly rural area with very few people in the local area, and so it was easy to avoid detection. Although the various facilities were a little run-down, they were all there: barracks, warehouses, and a field. Also, since the location of this base was really out of the way and no one had expressed interest in it for a long while, the county garrison asked for a very low rent. Their only requirement was that they must continue to employ two retirees to watch the gate. Xiao Zishan had agreed on the spot. The two ‘guards’ each took turns to live in the guardhouse every week, and didn’t do anything else except watch the gate and sweep the outside grounds.

The first thing that Xiao Zishan did was to find a cleaning company to tidy up the inside and outside of the base. Next, he found a renovation company to repair the broken windows, get the plumbing working, etc. Because this place was a designated reserve barracks of the defence department, all the day to day necessities were already in the base. After cleaning up and fixing a few things they could move in directly.

The Crossing Company moved in soon enough. Wen Desi still kept the offices back in Guangzhou, as after all the company was registered at that address. After this, the first wave of personnel came to report one after another. These people were all hand-selected by Wen Desi after many individual interviews. In short, they were all experts in various subjects that would be crucial on the other side.

Many people were filled with doubt when they arrived, thinking it was a scam. However, when they saw the piles of RMB, Ming Dynasty porcelain and even a flashing wormhole, they immediately realised that was real. Some ran away, thinking that this was too crazy. Some stayed for a few days, thinking about it, but still left in the end. Some burst out with exclamations of excitement. Some were calm and simply went about joining the ongoing preparation work.

The team needed by the Committee to make their dreams possible was built up like this.

In order to facilitate management and assignment of labour, the Committee decided to call a general meeting to restructure the group of time travellers. As for the future political structure, this was not discussed for the time being; after all, not everyone had arrived yet. It would not be a good idea to establish any sort of formal executive structure before a full meeting could be convened with all members present. Thus, the purpose of this particular meeting was just to establish a limited administrative department.

The meeting was held in one of the large conference rooms in the base. It was big enough to comfortably accommodate nearly 50 people. Although the furnishings were a little shabby, they were usable. Xiao Zishan even found many porcelain tea cups in the cabinet which they could use. The only missing item was a whiteboard.

Xiao Zishan took out an audio recorder and placed it in the middle of the table, planning to give it a go.

“I suggest manual recording.” A young woman stood up. “It’s unbearable trying to organise the meeting minutes from audio. I can type quickly in Wubi, I can record the transcript.”^[1]

“You are...”

In the meeting room were dozens of unfamiliar faces that Xiao Zishan didn’t recognise. This woman was thin and small and could not be called beautiful.^[2] But she was fit and loved sports.

“I’m Li Yilao’s girlfriend, my name is Li Yuanyuan. I used to be a secretary, so I’m quite good at taking down meeting minutes.”

Xiao Zishan knew Li Yilao. Yilao had also studied machining, loved guns, and was a friend of Zhan Wuya. He was a reticent person, the type to go half a day without a single word. Xiao Zishan guessed that the reason Yilao wanted to travel through time was just to make guns without any government oversight…

This sprightly woman would even dare to follow him. “I love you so much I’ll follow you even to the ends of the earth” suddenly did not seem like such a groundless saying. Thinking of this, Xiao Zishan couldn’t help but feel a little sour.

“Okay, but leave the recorder running.”

Li Yuanyuan took out a laptop, opened a blank document, typed in the time and date, and then turned to Xiao Zishan.

“I’m ready, let’s start.”

Xiao Zishan cleared his throat, and raised his voice a little to speak to the whole room. “Although we all roughly know each other, this is the first time a lot of us are gathering like this. Let me first establish the rules of this meeting.”

“This meeting will discuss each topic one by one as listed out in the agenda. We will try to stay on topic as much as possible.”

“This meeting may go on for a long time. If you’re not interested in discussing certain topics or they’re not your specialty, feel free to leave. However, please only leave between each discussion topic or during breaks announced by the host.”

“At the conclusion of each section, the host will sound this bell once,” ding, “before commencing the next topic. Those who wish to re-enter the room must do so during this pause.”

“Raise your hand if you wish to speak, but you may only do so after the host consents.”

“Everything you say must be about the subject matter at hand and you must not make comments about the other speakers personally.”

“That’s all.” Xiao Zishan looked around the table, before nodding. “Now let me invite Wen Desi to re-cap the current status of our preparations for time travel.”

Chief Wen stood up and cleared his throat, and the crowd silently looked at him.

“Thank you all for coming. Let me first summarise the current situation.”

Wen Desi briefly summarised the status of the wormhole, the trades they had made so far with the Ming Dynasty people as well as their current finances. As soon as he finished, someone motioned to speak.

“My name is Jin Keshou. I suggest Chief Wen stop reselling porcelain. I know a little about the antiques circle: they are all very familiar with each other. It’s fine if a few pieces were found every now and then, but if too much emerges at once the whole province or even the whole country will know. This would be disastrous for our secrecy. It may even bring the attention of the Cultural Preservation Office.”^[3]

Wen Desi leaned forward. “Then what’s your suggestion?”

“Traditional medicine.” Jin Keshou replied. “Many precious herbs in traditional Chinese medicine are now very scarce and exorbitantly expensive. For example, rhino horns, natural bezoars, musk-mallows, and so on.”

“Not rhino horns, that’d get the Bureau of Commerce onto our tail.” Someone objected. “But spices and herbs we can consider.”

“This suggestion is good. We’ll try it the next time we cross over.”

“The next topic is industry. Let’s start with energy…” Xiao Zishan was talking as he suddenly saw Ma Qianzhu raise his hand. “What’s up?”

“Should we set up the administrative structure first and divide ourselves into several professional sub-committees? This will make speaking much easier.”

“En, I agree.” Wang Luobin said. “Otherwise it’ll be too messy.”

“Then let’s start with the agricultural group.” A muscular man stood up. “I’m Wu Nanhai, a graduate of the agricultural department of XX university. Food is the baseline need of the population. It should be our top priority.”^[4]

“Alright, the agricultural group.” Xiao Zishan wrote it down on the whiteboard.

Several other suggestions followed. “Industrial!” “Transportation!” “Geology!” “Railways!” “Temporal Affairs!” “Aviation!” “Security!” “Army!” “Navy!” “Urban Planning!” “KGB!” “NDRC!”^[5]

“Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures!”

Hearing the increasingly fantastical suggestions, Xiao Zishan had to step in.

“Okay, okay that’s enough. These groups will mostly be just for the preparatory period. The question of our formal organisation will be discussed later, no need to overcomplicate stuff now. We still haven’t crossed over, let’s not divvy up the pie before it’s baked.”

Everyone laughed, and soon, the following groups were divided out.

Eight technical working groups: industry, agriculture, construction, energy, communications, sports, IT, and intelligence.

Two support teams: general affairs and procurement. The General Affairs Team was responsible for contacting, registering and coordinating personnel as well as the daily life and operations of all travellers. The Procurement Team was responsible for purchasing equipment and materials as requested by the working groups.

Every working group would elect a single leader, and the Executive Committee would be expanded to include all these group leaders. The Executive Committee would hold a coordination meeting once a week to make sure all groups would be up to date, and potentially more as deemed necessary.

Unsurprisingly, Wen Desi became the chairman of the new Executive Committee, directly inheriting his old position. Originally, Zhan Wuya, wanted to nominate Wang Luobin as the head of the Industrial Group, but Wang Luobin declined, citing his inexperience. In the end, Zhan Wuya became the leader of the industrial group.

However, no one wanted to lead the General Affairs Team. It was boring to look after food, drinks and personnel rosters. If this were a normal business enterprise, it would be far more attractive. But in this case, no matter what, they would be leaving in a year. Everything they did belonged to the organisation as a whole in the end.

Xiao Zishan subtly nudged Wen Desi, who took the hint and nominated Xiao Zishan, and soon Xiao Zishan became the head of the general affairs group.

Xiao Zishan’s thinking was very simple: he had no technical background, and this preparatory period would be where these professionals display their strengths. It would be best to keep himself in management. When the institutional restructuring came he would have a lot of political capital to play around with.

In order to improve the clarity and openness, Xiao Zishan proposed to set up an accounting sub-group within the new Executive Committee who would be solely responsible for income, funding allocation, and financial auditing.

After all the groups were established, everyone started to shuffle themselves around in the conference room according to their assigned duties, and a few leaders were selected among themselves. The General Affairs Team, unlike all the other ones, was mostly women. This first batch of people on the base were mostly technical people, and so the members of the current General Affairs group were the partners brought by these backbone personnel. There was even a middle-aged lady who was the mother of a female professional… life was truly really hard for all the parents in the world.

Xiao Zishan felt a headache coming on, thinking about how to deal with these women. Especially since they all ‘belonged to other people’. He swore in his heart to be careful and avoid any suspicions.

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1. Wubi is a type of keyboard based writing system for simplified Chinese. See wiki. ↩︎

2. Bruh, my poor girl got done dirty. ↩︎

3. Handles the preservation of sites deemed culturally significant by the Chinese government. See wiki. ↩︎

4. Deleted in original ↩︎

5. NDRC is the National Development and Reform Commission, established 2003. I don’t need to explain what the KGB is right? ↩︎