“Well, you’re going to need it,” Pham said, grinning as he took the piece of paper back. “I’m heading out early today, but I’ll see you tomorrow. It’ll be time to plan your second mission.”
CHAPTER NINE
The rest of Parkowski’s day was as normal as it could be.
She ate lunch at the Rayleigh cafeteria with a couple of her work friends, finished up her emails by one o’clock, and spent the rest of her day checking out the schedule, reading the logs from prior missions, and reading the unfortunately sparse mission details for her upcoming jaunt with the ACHILLES robots.
It wasn’t perfect, though. The techs avoided her for the most part, and there was an uneasy silence surrounding her in the high bay as she passed through.
She had plans to go out for a quick dinner with her boyfriend, but DePresti had sent an email to her work address telling her that he was going to be late at work preparing for a major review on one of his programs. Parkowski decided to stay late, too, so that they could eat dinner together.
At around four o’clock, she was done with her other work and decided to dig into the logs from her mission. Parkowski opened up the logging software that Pham had used earlier.
She wanted to get into the logs for two reasons.
First, to confirm what she had been shown this morning. Parkowski trusted Pham more than almost anyone else in her life, but for something as bizarre as seeing a dragon in a simulated Venus environment, she had to be sure that it was just a bug.
Second, she wanted to learn how to work the debugging and logging systems in case she had to do something similar in the future.
Parkowski was surprised at how easy the software was to use compared to the mission planning software — obviously different developers. Everything created by Panspermia was modern, sleek, and designed with the user in mind. The mission planning software, the communications stuff she had seen connecting the Aering building with MICS, and some of the other UIs she had seen in her current job, had all been created by traditional defense contractors such as Aering and were more cumbersome to use.
The logs were all stored in a spreadsheet, a two-dimensional database that linked to other files and documents that contained more information. She clicked on the “C-458” enumeration and traced it to the communications log. Sure enough, when the sensor, an IR camera on the relay satellite orbiting Venus, had seen the meteorite enter the atmosphere, it had sent a message to the communications hardware. Then, in the same region where the ACHILLES robots were operating, a signal had been sent to the environment back on Earth to display a meteorite exactly where the real one had been sensed.
She laughed to herself. Parkowski wondered how much it cost for Panspermia to implement that feature. It didn’t add much to her ability to do the mission, but had to have been part of the contract between Aering and the video game studio nonetheless.
Parkowski shook her head and started to follow the communications pathway that the signal traveled once the relay satellite sensed the meteorite.
The packet had left the sensor and traveled via the satellite’s internal Linux real-time operating system to the communications payload. One antenna was always pointing down at the planet, the other in the direction of the satellite at the far-off Earth-Moon Lagrange point that directed the signal to the MICS satellite. The comm box had seen that its final destination was the Venus environment and sent the packet through the narrowband connection that way.
She opened up the packet in the debugging tool. In it, she could see fields in a table format like the initial log window.
Parkowski quickly scanned the packet’s metadata. Most of what she saw made sense, but a number of other fields were blank.
She scrunched up her nose. That was weird.
The engineer pulled up another packet, a state-of-health telemetry report that was sent every second back to the NASA ground station operators for the satellite at White Sands. That one, when opened, had every field in the metadata filled out, with even more data available once she double-clicked on each of them.
Parkowski pulled up another packet, searching for one from the IR sensor this time. This one was old, a reading of a hot pocket of gas in a crater near the ACHILLES landing site. This packet, when opened, also had all of its fields filled out and accessible.
Another mystery, she thought.
She pulled up the initial packet, taking another close look at it.
Parkowski wasn’t a communications engineer — her expertise was in robotics and control systems — but she knew enough to be dangerous. From what she saw, everything looked nominal, a normal network packet. What was different about this one, she wondered.
She double-clicked on one of the fields that was blank. A dialog box popped up. It was an error message, stating: ERROR: DATA MASKED. THIS SYSTEM CANNOT DISPLAY BRONZE KNOT DATA.
“What the…” Parkowski said, rubbing her eyes. It had been a long day, most of which had been spent hunched down over a computer screen. Maybe she was seeing things. She read it again.
ERROR: DATA MASKED. THIS SYSTEM CANNOT DISPLAY BRONZE KNOT DATA.
“That doesn’t even make any sense,” she said softly.
Parkowski closed the error window and tried double-clicking again.
ERROR: DATA MASKED. THIS SYSTEM CANNOT DISPLAY BRONZE KNOT DATA.
She read it a third time, this time more slowly.
“ERROR: DATA MASKED.” So the software was throwing up an error because there was data “masked” or hidden from the user. That made sense at first glance, the previous screen had blanked-out fields that should have been filled out.
But, on further thought, it didn’t. Why would any data be hidden from her? This wasn’t anything like what DePresti did; while Aering did do work on-site for the Space Force and some classified customers, the ILIAD project was most certainly unclassified. There was proprietary information, sure, and parts of the technology were ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) controlled, but in theory, as the prime contractor for NASA, Aering, and by proxy Parkowski should have access to all of the data.
“THIS SYSTEM CANNOT DISPLAY BRONZE KNOT DATA.” That made sense based on the previous sentence until she got to the word “bronze.” What the fuck is a "Bronze Knot," she thought.
That made no sense at all.
This packet was created in the communications hardware of the relay satellite and was sent to MICS to be “bent piped” back down to Earth. It was the same as every other packet, all of which should have been unclassified, and from her spot-check of the other two, this was the only odd one.
Parkowski backed out again and tried some of the other blanked-out fields. She got the same error message for each one. However, one of them did provide more information. It wanted to open up a “BRONZE KNOT MESSAGES” spreadsheet located in a directory on a shared drive that Parkowski had never seen before. When she tried to open it she got another error message — file cannot be found.
Frustrated, but also intrigued, she went back to the logs and tried to find some other packets that also would trigger the same error message. Parkowski tried for over twenty minutes to find one with blanked-out fields to no avail.
She sat back in her chair and thought for a minute. This was weird, there was no reason why any of the logs should be hidden from her, yet there they were—“masked” from her sight.
Parkowski sighed. She had already caused a lot of trouble with what happened on Friday, despite Pham’s assurance to the contrary. There had been a repair ticket for the equipment she had damaged that had been CC’d to her email. The mission report for the time block after hers noted that it took nearly an hour to get back to a nominal state.