An energy drink would definitely help.
It took forever to log in to her machine. Parkowski leaned back in her chair and tried to process the last twenty-four hours. In some ways, it was an even more compelling mystery than the dragon appearing in the VR environment.
It was time to get to the bottom of it.
She was sure of what she had seen. The error messages were burned into her memory with indelible ink. Her boyfriend might question her, sure, but just like with the dragon Parkowski knew she wasn’t crazy.
Parkowski needed to bring this to someone at Aering, preferably Dr. Pham. But, first, she wanted to do a little research.
Once her computer finally logged her in and she was able to use it, she did just that.
Everything DePresti had told her seemed to be accurate. Special access programs were the crown jewels for the military and intelligence communities, protecting anything from the acquisition of new stealth fighters to special forces operations and even covert associations between government agencies. The requirements for processing SAP data were intense, and definitely not met by the open area that Parkowski worked in.
She then opened the web browser to the internal Aering Space Systems home page. It was a Microsoft SharePoint-based site with collaboration tools for the entire company.
Parkowski was somewhat familiar with the site, but most of her work was done through other tools. Mostly, she used it for stuff like logging her hours worked in the payroll system and doing her required yearly training.
But, today, she was most interested in the site’s search feature. By performing one keyword search, Parkowski could crawl through every single web page, document, and archive at the unclassified level for all of Aering’s projects going back to the late nineties and, in some cases, even older than that. She had used it in the past to find an obscure Air Force standard for one of her projects and found it to be fairly helpful.
She started with a search for the words Bronze Knot.
The computer took a minute but finally spit out a list of results. There were over two hundred thousand of them.
Parkowski leaned back and took a sip of her energy drink. While she didn’t have a whole lot to do today — just go through her emails, write up her after-action report from yesterday, and sit in on a planning meeting for next week — that was a lot of results to go through.
She decided to narrow her search down further. Using a trick she learned from her undergrad program, Parkowski put quotes around the search term, so it was now “Bronze Knot,” and hit the enter key.
This time there were no results.
Parkowski blinked and looked again. The web page read “0 results found” in bold letters above an empty list.
That made sense, now that she thought about it. If Bronze Knot was a SAP, likely some kind of military program being built in-house that leaked over to the ILIAD network, it would be blocked from being viewed on the SharePoint site.
She went back to the first search and quickly went through the first page of results. They were all documents using the words “bronze” and “knot” in unrelated contexts — not what she was looking for.
Parkowski wanted to try one more thing before going to Pham.
She used a VPN to log into a NASA network that was located at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory out in Pasadena. Most of the scientists reviewing the data that the ACHILLES robots were collecting were located there, and she had access in case she had to share data with them.
Parkowski tried the same search terms. No dice.
She wanted to have all of her ducks in a row before she talked to her boss. If something was going on and it was somehow related to the ILIAD mission, she needed to have her story straight before she started asking sensitive questions. She pulled up the logging software that she had used earlier in the week to go through her first mission.
Parkowski went to the folder where the logs were kept. It was empty.
She leaned back in her chair and took another sip of her drink. That seemed wrong. Trying again, she refreshed the folder and looked for “hidden” files in it. Still empty.
Parkowski checked the folder size. 0 kilobytes. There was nothing in it.
“What the fuck,” Parkowski said to herself. She went up a level to the larger folder containing folders for each of the different missions that had been run. All of them were empty.
The logs were all gone.
She checked her personal folder where the screenshot she had taken with the Bronze Knot reference was kept. Mercifully that was still there.
Parkowski had to make a decision.
She could bring the screenshot to Pham as evidence of the strange SAP’s presence on the VR network.
Or, she could keep that piece of information to herself.
In general, Parkowski was a person who trusted authority. She trusted her boss and the management at Aering. They had never deceived her or lied to her. But, the hairs on the back of her neck stood up with this whole Bronze Knot thing.
Regardless of whether something intentionally wrong was going on, Parkowski needed to protect herself.
She emailed the screenshot to her personal email address and deleted it from the local folder.
Then, she stood up to go talk with Pham in his office.
After some brief pleasantries, Parkowski took a step inside of the door and pointed at it. “Can I close it?”
Pham raised an eyebrow. “Sure.”
She closed the door and took an offered seat across from the senior engineer.
Parkowski closed her eyes. She didn't know where to start.
“Is something wrong?” Pham asked her.
She tilted her head slightly. “Yes, there is,” Parkowski told him. “I was trying to pull up my logs from yesterday’s mission, but they weren’t in the normal folder.”
He didn’t say anything, so she continued. “All of the logs were gone. Mine, other people’s, everything was erased.”
Pham looked confused. “They’re there,” he said to Parkowski. “I looked last night, and all of the logs were where they were supposed to be.”
“Well, they’re not now,” Parkowski said. “I just peeked to see if I could see them from the end of my mission yesterday and it was all gone.”
He put his reading glasses on. “Let me take a look,” Pham said, turning to his computer and typing away furiously. A few moments later he turned back to her, seemingly perplexed. “You’re right, they’re not there.”
Parkowski gave a slight smile. “I know.”
He leaned back in his chair, deep in thought, and then leaned forward. “A-ha,” Pham said, to himself more than to Parkowski. “I remember now. The NASA guy, Dr. Hughes, told me that they took all of the logs to look for an error in the communications system.”
“Took them?” Parkowski repeated.
“Yeah, there was some kind of issue with MICS,” the Aering Ph.D. told her. “And they wanted to use all of the logs to help troubleshoot it.”
“And they deleted our copies?” Parkowski said, a little annoyed.
Pham shrugged. “They’re the customer, Grace. They’re paying for this whole mission. If they want the logs, they get the logs, and we lose the local copy. It’s part of the contract.”
That didn’t sit well with her. “What if we needed those logs to troubleshoot our system?”
The older man sat quietly for a moment and then answered her question. “I believe they are still in the facility, in the NASA room right down the hall. The entire ILIAD system is currently operational, I even took a spin with an ACHILLES robot early this morning. If we need the logs, we’ll go through NASA to get them.”
Parkowski crossed her arms. “I don’t like it.”