“Got it,” she said.
“But it makes sense. And it flows nicely into what I’ve been thinking,” Pham said.
“So, what are you working on?” Parkowski asked, intrigued.
Pham waved for her to come around to the monitor, which she did. “Let me explain.”
She nodded.
“So here are the logs,” he said, pulling up a window showing a spreadsheet pulled from the VR environment’s internal logging tool. “I went over them Friday night before I went out to dinner with Gus, and again this morning.”
“Did you see anything out of the ordinary?” Parkowski asked, squatting down slightly to get a better look.
“Nope,” Pham said. “I compared it to Marx’s run that morning, and Mohammed’s run after yours. At face value all three were nominal, save for your temporary loss of contact with the ACHILLES units.”
Parkowski felt a pang of guilt. “That didn’t screw anything up, right?”
“No, they were fine,” the Ph.D. replied. “They’re designed to be able to withstand a comm hit pretty frequently, given the distances involved. No lasting damage, and Mohammed was able to complete all of his objectives before we put the two units in station-keeping mode for the weekend.”
“Phew,” Parkowski said, breathing a sigh of relief. “I was scared for a bit that I had done some damage, but I kind of forgot all about it when I heard that the connection was restored.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Pham said. “If there was any danger to the robots, we would have been a lot more worried.” He cleared his throat. “So, again, the logs. While it’s a video game developer…”
“Panspermia Studios,” Parkowski cut in.
“Panspermia Studios,” Pham confirmed, “that made the environment, it’s actually more similar to an aircraft or ship simulator than a simple game.”
“Why is that?”
He laughed. “Standards, mostly. When we contract something like that out, federal mandates force us to include documents like military standards or international best practices as part of the contract for the contractor to adhere to.
“As part of these standards, the environment is made up of ‘layers’ and ‘enumerations.’ The layers are static — things like the terrain and skybox. The enumerations are dynamic, pulled from a library of objects contained deep within the code base.”
Pham took a breath and went on. “The robots are enumerations, complex ones made up of subenumerations for the head, body, and each limb. They are modeled across multiple spectrums: visible, infrared, ultraviolet, and have their own complex RF signature. Others aren’t as complex, simple boulders and rocks are just a wire mesh with a texture thrown over it that are more similar to an object in a video game.”
He paused. Parkowski leaned back from the computer monitor. “So where are you going with this, boss?”
“Let me show you,” Pham replied, going back to the keyboard. Without using the mouse, he deftly sped through several windows before coming to a debugging interface. “I’ve narrowed down the logs from Friday to the last 300 seconds — five minutes — of your mission. This is the list of enumerations currently active.” He pulled up another spreadsheet-like screen and scrolled down. “As you can see, there’s a lot.”
“And everything is normal?”
“Once again, at first glance, yes,” Pham said. “But…”
“But,” Parkowski said. “There’s something.”
Pham nodded. “There’s an enumeration for something that doesn’t exist on our system. C-458, here,” he pointed at the screen. “It’s a dynamic model, that’s all I can tell, but a lot of the fields are either blocked or don’t show up in the debugging tool.
“It showed up in the environment through some kind of trigger event, which I also can’t see in the tool, and remained until we lost the connection. When we recovered it, the enumeration was gone.”
Parkowski pulled up a chair and looked at the screen next to Pham. “So, what is it?”
“I don’t know,” Pham replied. “What I am doing is gathering all of the information that I can, and I will send it over to our focal point at Panspermia. Hopefully, we’ll get some clarity, and make sure that if it was a bug, that you didn’t really see a dragon, it won’t happen again.”
“Thank you so much,” Parkowski said, breathing a sigh of relief. “And thank you for not thinking I’m crazy.”
“No problem,” Pham said. “I’ve worked with you for a year now, and you’re nothing but a rational engineer, just like me. And, there was no damage to the robots or any of the gear here. No harm, no foul. You’re fine, Grace.”
He locked his machine and stood up. “I’m going to go check on my computer and then fire off that email. The schedule for this week has been updated, you’re on the sticks on Wednesday afternoon. We’ll have a planning session tomorrow morning.”
“Got it, thanks.” Parkowski stepped aside to let him through.
After Pham was gone, she sat down at the cube and logged into the computer. Parkowski’s email inbox was full; she hadn’t touched them since Thursday morning. She sighed and started working her way through them.
It was almost lunchtime when Pham stopped back by the cube, holding a piece of paper face-down. “Sorry, they fixed the PC in my office, so I just transferred my session over,” he explained.
“No worries,” she replied.
“I just got off the phone with Panspermia Studios,” Pham said with a smile. “And you’re going to like what they told me.”
“What did they say?”
“They make a video game called Faerieia,” Pham explained. “In addition to their work with NASA and for the military. Not sure if you’ve ever heard of it.”
Parkowski laughed. “I haven’t,” she said. “Not much of a gamer, and my boyfriend plays mostly sports and shooter games.”
“I hadn’t either, but apparently it is a fantasy role-playing game,” Pham said. “That heavily features…” his voice trailed off.
Parkowski cocked her head slightly; she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to fill in the blank or not.
“Dragons.” Pham filled it in for her.
“No shit.”
“No shit,” he repeated.
“So how did it get in the Venus environment?” Parkowski asked.
“I asked them that,” her boss replied. “Faerieia has a portion of the game set on a hellscape similar to Venus, so when they were starting to build up the environment for us they copied it over as part of the prototyping process. I guess some of the call-outs to the dragon model were kept by accident.”
Parkowski finally let out her breath. “Holy crap.”
He laughed. “They copied the event for the dragon to appear and used it for a meteorite event in our environment, but didn’t delete the dragon itself — reusing some code. So when a sensor detected a meteorite, it wanted to show you it in the environment. However, for reasons that they’re still investigating, it managed to ‘call home’ to Panspermia and get the dragon model and display it in your environment, complete with a canned animation where it flew at you. Your ‘twinning’ research was correct. It only did it in your model because you were the only one who could ‘see’ the meteorite. The feed to the TV screen and the monitors couldn’t see it, so it never triggered there.”
“So, I’m not crazy.”
“No, not at all. Your description matches the dragon, seen here.” He showed her the piece of paper. It was the same creature that had attacked her on Friday.
“Thank you so much for running this down,” Parkowski said, rocking slowly back and forth in her chair. “I know what I saw and to have that confirmation really gives me a confidence boost.”