It seemed like she had two options.
Parkowski could bring this discovery of hers up to Pham, who being the good guy that he was, would take it up to his boss or look into it himself. She would be at the center of attention again and who knows how that would work out.
The other option was to keep this to herself. No one else would know, nothing would happen to her. She would get another chance to prove herself on Wednesday during her second mission. She’d still be on the path to that promotion she was working towards.
To her, it seemed like an easy decision. No one else needed to know what she found.
Parkowski pulled up the error message one last time. It was the same, no change from before. She took a screenshot and saved it to her personal folder on the shared internal Aering drive.
She left the office and went home.
The next day was more of the same. Emails and a couple of brief meetings in the morning; her afternoon was filled with mission planning.
Parkowski had been through it before during her first time in the Venus environment. It was a painstaking, almost excruciating process where every single minute of her time controlling the ACHILLES robots was planned out using the old, slow mission planning tool. Last time, it took over three hours; hopefully, now that she was more experienced, it would be a little shorter.
She, Pham, and two technicians who would be responsible for making sure all of the ground systems needed for her mission to be successful all sat in the small conference room.
Surprisingly, Dr. Rosen stepped into the room about an hour into the planning session. That meant only one thing: senior leadership was now interested in her mission. Whether it was due to the encounter with the anomalous “dragon” last week or for another reason she didn’t know, but it was odd for him to be there.
It made her nervous.
Rosen didn’t say anything; he just observed the planning for fifteen or so minutes before departing the room without saying a word.
Parkowski brushed it off. If she was in his position, she’d probably do the same thing. She had heard through the company grapevine that they were bidding on a similar mission to Io. Any failures during the proposal process would probably result in a loss to another contractor.
Plus, he’d probably be the determining factor if she were to rise to a higher-level position within Aering. Given how her last mission went, Rosen probably wanted to know as much as possible as to how Parkowski was performing in her current role.
The mission itself seemed fairly simple.
Parkowski was only to control one of the ACHILLES units this time; the other would stay at a recharging station for its duration. Her destination was the base of one of Venus’ many volcanoes. They were all thought to be extinct, but a previous NASA mission had detected some odd readings that may indicate that some of them were dormant rather than dead. Parkowski’s job was to carry a small, unmanned drone to a waypoint at its base and then launch it. She would initially control the drone and get it on an upward trajectory but then transfer control to a more seasoned operator, a former RQ-4 Global Hawk pilot, located at another part of the sprawling Aering facility.
That operator, along with a pair of co-located sensor operators, would take over control and use more refined methods — flight stick and throttle, versus Parkowski trying to manipulate actuators physically located on Venus with her robot’s hand-analog — to fly the drone on a suicide mission into the volcano. This would hopefully provide the NASA volcanologists with a better understanding of the state of volcanic activity on Venus.
She went home to her apartment that night and watched a few episodes of a show with her roommate before going to bed early. Tomorrow was a big day; a chance to correct the mistakes she made the previous week and get her coveted promotion back on track.
CHAPTER TEN
On Wednesday afternoon, Parkowski sat with her head in her hands on the bench in the locker room.
She was getting herself in the right mental state to put her VR undergarment on and go into the high bay for her second mission with the ACHILLES robots.
It shouldn’t be this hard. The mission was straightforward, she had the appropriate training, and the support team around her was top-notch. It was just another day in the office.
But it was hard. And her experience last time loomed large over her.
Parkowski was a perfectionist. It was part of being an engineer. You wanted to get the correct answer every time, to get the best design you could on the first try.
Her last mission in the VR environment was less than perfect.
She breathed slowly, remembering how she got ready for high school soccer games. Clear your mind, visualize yourself doing the task, and cast all of your worries aside. But, her old tricks weren’t working. Dread gripped Parkowski, just like the last time in the VR gear.
Parkowski put on her Catwoman suit and headed, headset in hand, into the high bay.
Pham and a female tech helped her with the VR gear, bottom to top just like the last time she went into the Venus environment.
One of her close friends at Aering, Rachel Kim, had run the morning shift. Her job was to get the robots in position to support Parkowski’s mission.
That gave her a small but much-needed boost of confidence. The seniors at Aering trusted her to do the more difficult mission of releasing the drone near the volcano despite her missteps last week. They could have switched her with Kim but chose not to. Someone, probably Dr. Pham, still believed in her. That little gesture filled Parkowski with pride.
“Are you ready?” Dr. Pham asked. She was completely geared up, save for her customized headset which lay at her feet.
Parkowski nodded.
He clapped her softly on the back. “We’ll switch over in five minutes. Did you remember to eat more this time?”
She laughed. “Yes, but hopefully not too much.”
Pham gave a small smile and nodded. “Go get ‘em.”
Parkowski walked over to the side of the raised platform and did some basic stretches, still trying to get in the right mindset for the mission. She paced back and forth like a cat.
Finally it was time to switch. Kim stopped walking and a small swarm of technicians ran up to her to help her remove her gear. She was calm and smiling after her successful mission.
Parkowski was all nerves as she waited.
After a few minutes, Kim was disconnected from the VR setup and carefully stepped down off of the platform. “All yours.”
“Thanks, Rachel. I’ll take good care of it.”
Parkowski climbed up onto the raised platform and took a deep breath.
A technician attached all of the relevant cables and got her ready.
Parkowski did one final stretch of her arms and placed the helmet on her head.
She was now on Venus, seen through the eyes of ACHILLES I. The screen was semi-frozen: she could move her head around and see the environment, but her actuators weren’t controlling the robot’s limbs yet.
Pham’s voice popped into her ear. “Are you ready to transfer control?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
There was a slight hint of haptic feedback as the VR controllers were synced to the actual hardware on Venus.
Parkowski blinked and took note of her surroundings. The ACHILLES robot was currently in a deep depression, a long, cracked ridge that traveled east-west along the planet’s surface. According to her pre-mission briefing, it was the result of ancient lava flows from the seemingly extinct volcano Sacajawea.