I hadn't expected her to be so certain that it was a bargaining chip after merely looking over the materials and the information I had shown her.
"So these garbled characters are all the telecommunications company's problem?" I asked.
"Of course. Their programmers must have made some mistake at work and accidentally brought out these codes. So that's all it was? Wasn't this just a waste of time? I'm very busy. Do you know how important my research is to Great Xia's national defense?" Liu Xin was clearly quite angry. They had summoned her from so far away, only for it to turn out to be a string of garbled characters produced by a telecommunications company. How could someone who valued her time so highly not be angry?
She immediately wanted us to turn the car around and take her back to Yanjing.
But one sentence from me instantly rekindled her interest.
"Are you sure this is garbled text? Have you ever seen garbled text made up of nothing but numbers and symbols? There isn't a single letter in it. Doesn't programming require English letters?"
"Ah!" She looked over the material I had given her again and narrowed her eyes. "This..."
Although I wasn't a programmer, I had watched some skilled programmers at work. Besides numbers and symbols, letters were indispensable in all programming.
I added, "Were you serious when you said those numbers and symbols matched the information?"
She looked at me and nodded. "Yes, the content of the information can indeed be expressed through these numbers and symbols alone. But that level of programming is beyond what the programmers at the three major carriers could achieve. And with current mature information transmission technology, it would be impossible to produce such garbled text, because real-time Chinese transmission doesn't require