A Change of Regime (The Children's War Book 2) by J.N. Stroyar

Author:J.N. Stroyar [Stroyar, J.N.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2018-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

2.12

“So what’s the problem?” Peter casually picked up a piece of paper and scanned it.

Jurek petulantly snapped it out of his hands. “It’s not that!”

“Didn’t mean to pry.” Peter knew Jurek would miss the irony in that, and indeed he did.

“It’s this,” Jurek stated gloomily, as he turned toward the computer. “I can’t get anything to work right!”

Peter watched as Jurek tapped a few keys and drew up a screen of obscure text messages. “As you can see, anytime I try to run this program – I get this message. Errors! I don’t understand. I thought this was all automated!”

“Automated, yes.” Peter perused the messages. “Unfortunately, there’s always a bug hiding somewhere.” He pulled up a chair for himself, sat down at the computer, and typed in a few commands. He read through the diagnostics, tried a few things, pointed out a few key phrases to Jurek and then entered the appropriate changes. “Ah-hah! There! I’ve changed the formatting to cope with the different standard used by the Americans. It should work alright now.”

“Why didn’t you do that before?” Jurek asked, sourly.

“They never used to send things in that format. They’ve changed their conventions.”

“But how was I supposed to know what to do?”

“You weren’t!” Peter laughed. “I mean, I guess they should have told you, but getting information out of these people… Anyway, sooner or later you’ll stumble across every sort of problem, and sooner or later you’ll have a clue how to solve anything that comes up. It’s all trial and error and at first you’ll spend hours solving problems that later will take only seconds to sort out. That’s why experience is so important. That and communication.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, nobody can keep track of everything – that’s why it’s good to talk to the others, in Warszawa, even in the NAU.”

“I don’t speak English.”

“Ah. Well, I’ll warn you now – everyone changes conventions with some regularity. There are updated machines, more secure protocols, better ways of handling things. Even stylistic changes. Most aren’t important, but they can foul up any routine machine translation. Whenever stuff doesn’t run smoothly, you need a human to look at things and recognize what’s going on. A trained human.”

Jurek grunted.

“For instance – there was a complete change in what the security services do here, about five years ago. Anything from before that time, you have to handle differently – otherwise you’ll get gibberish out of the machines.”

Jurek screwed up his face with something like interest.

“And there are even varying styles among the different regions. Dialects you might call them.”

“Such as?”

“Well, a long time ago I worked with coded documents, mostly inter-office memos from within England but every now and then something came to us from France, and it was quite different. Same security service, different styles. And now the stuff out of England is almost unrecognizable. I would guess that when Schindler took over he replaced all the top people in London with his own cronies and they had their own conventions, so the old ones were supplanted.

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