46 - 2 - Program

" . . . the Council suggests . . . bzzsmmm . . ."

I swung my stalk eyes toward the small laptop in one corner of my scoop. A new model Apple computer I had acquired at Computer City. With the help of several months of Rachel's credit card allowance.

She informed me that I owed her "big time" for her assistance.

"What the heck was that?"

I raised a hand to silence Marco. Nothing further came from the computer.

<I believe that was a snippet of a Yeerk dialogue,> I explained finally. <I have applied a computer program of my own making to the Zero-space transponder I created - with help from your father, Marco.>

I have always believed in giving credit where credit is due. Even if it was to a human.

<And?> Tobias stared at me with his intense hawk gaze.

<And,> I continued, <this program attempts to decode locally originated Z-space transmissions. Unfortunately, and through no possible fault of my own,> I admitted, <the success rate of the program is less than thirty percent. Human computer technology is simply too slow to overcome advanced Yeerk encoding in a reliable and consistent way.>

"But the success part, Ax," Marco pressed. "The fifteen or twenty percent of the time something does get through, that's something. Or could be."