Parkowski got in at eight, checked in with her boss, and went through her email. She should have finished her mission plan for her mission on Friday morning, less than 24 hours away, but put it off to the afternoon.
After a brief hesitation, Parkowski did some more digging on the SharePoint site. She was particularly interested in anything to do with deep-space sensors or Aering's involvement in any of the cislunar military missions currently on the drawing board.
She surprisingly found quite a bit of both. Aering was working with a smaller business to develop a long-range electro-optical sensor that could detect movement at up to a million kilometers, and all of it seemed to be unclassified. Aering also had recently won a contract to build a small satellite that would be a secondary payload on an upcoming launch to the Earth-Moon L2 Lagrange point. However, all of the details of that mission were classified.
Parkowski had brought her lunch and ate at her cube while organizing all of her computer’s files. DePresti had texted her that morning, asking to take her out to dinner that night, but she hadn't responded. She was still kind of upset with him, the two had barely talked since their argument Monday night, and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to see him or not. It might just make things worse.
Just as she was finishing her lunch, her cubicle’s telephone rang.
She narrowed her eyes at the phone.
It was her normal cube, sure, but they didn’t have permanent seating — all of the desks were hot-bunked — and the junior engineers swapped desks fairly often so the phones were usually used for outgoing calls, not incoming ones. Who would be calling her?
Parkowski answered it. “This is Grace.”
“Ms. Parkowski, this is James with the security team,” she heard in a thick Southern accent — a rarity in SoCal. “There’s a visitor here to see you.”
“A visitor?” she said. Parkowski wasn’t expecting anyone.
“Yes, a visitor,” the security guard replied.
“Be right there.”
Parkowski hung up the phone and got up from her cube.
She walked towards the Aering building’s entrance. Who could be visiting her? Hopefully, it wasn’t DePresti coming to try and mend their relationship. She still loved him — that word had been a big step a few months back — and wanted to be with him, but right now she needed a little space. He knew the building, had spent a lot of time there in preparation for the ILIAD launch, but hadn’t been there in months. She couldn’t think of any other potential suspects.
When she got to the entryway, there was an older man with an elaborate mustache sitting on a couch, reading a magazine. A small briefcase sat next to him. The security guard turned to her. “Ma’am, this man came to see you,” he said. “He’s got a badge.”
“Thanks, I’ll go talk with him,” Parkowski said. She walked up to the newcomer. “Hey, I’m Grace Parkowski, you came to see me?”
The man looked up from his months-old Sports Illustrated. “Oh, hello,” he said in a deep voice, putting the magazine down and standing up. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small black wallet. Flipping it over, Parkowski saw a picture of the man with some writing next to it — an ID card — and a gold badge. “Special Agent Hollis Everson, AFOSI/PJ,” he said, extending a hand. “Pleasure to meet you.”
“You as well,” she replied, unsettled. Why was a federal agent here? “Sorry, but I don’t know what this is about.”
“That’s ok,” Everson said. “I need to talk to you, but somewhere more secure. Can we go get a conference room or something?”
Parkowski nodded, still unsure. She worried about why this man came to pay her a visit. “I guess so, I had a busy afternoon planned, but I guess it can wait.”
“This shouldn’t take too long,” the man said.
She got him a visitor’s badge and took Everson back through the facility. “I only have a Secret clearance,” Parkowski told him as they walked, “and I can only get a conference room cleared to that level.”
“That’s good enough,” the older man replied.
Where she would have gone left to the ILIAD high bay, she took a right and went back to the “classified area” that she did have access to. It was sparsely populated — not much at the Aering plant was done at the Secret leve;, but they did need an area to process that kind of data — so she found a small unoccupied conference room fairly easily.
Once they got in, Everson closed the door. “I’ll try and keep my time here short,” he said. “But we have a security concern that we need to take care of.”
“What is it?” Parkowski asked, her heart racing. Did they know that she had gotten into the secure room out in the senior engineers’ hallway?
The older man didn’t respond at first, reaching down into his briefcase for something. “Nothing you did,” he said gently, noticing her concern as he removed a couple of printouts, “but more what happened to you.”
Parkowski was still confused until he flipped over one of the pieces of paper. It was a screenshot of the error message from her second mission in the VR environment. ERROR: SPECIAL ACCESS PROGRAM — BRONZE KNOT — SPECIAL ACCESS REQUIRED — the same words now burned into her memory. “Unfortunately, you saw this when you were doing whatever it is you do virtually on Venus,” Everson told her. “And you weren’t supposed to see this.”
“What exactly is it?” Parkowski asked. “It’s been bugging me, I have no idea what it is, but I’ve seen it twice now in the Venus environment.”
“Twice?”
“Well, once in the VR setup, which is what you have here,” she explained, “and again when I went through the logs for my first mission.”
Everson laughed. “Well, this should cover both times then.”
Parkowski tilted her head. “What do you mean?”
He pulled out another piece of paper. “This is a nondisclosure agreement,” Everson said, reaching into the briefcase again, “and this is an unauthorized disclosure form.”
“What does that even mean?” she asked.
“Let’s start with the second one,” the AFOSI agent said. “That means you and the government, which in this case means me, agree that you saw something you weren’t supposed to.”
“What exactly did I see?”
Everson looked at the door and then back at her. “In this case, you saw the name of a special access program,” he told her. “In this case, an unacknowledged one where even the name is classified.”
“Why?”
He laughed. “I was told a long time ago to not speculate about stuff you don’t know or aren’t cleared to. I suggest that’s what you do here.”
“Ok,” she said, unconvinced. “What about the other one?”
“This one you need to sign,” Everson told her as he pointed at the piece of paper. “It says you won’t talk about this program with anyone else unless you want a monetary punishment or imprisonment.”
She took a second to let that sink in, then responded. “No.”
“No?”
“No, I’m not signing that,” Parkowski said, pushing the piece of paper away without reading it. “There’s no reason for me to sign it.”
She saw it as limiting her options. Parkowski was now more than ever convinced that everything was not on the up-and-up on the ILIAD mission and she felt like she had to protect herself somehow in case it went sideways. Having all of her options open would help her do that.
“Young lady,” Everson said, “you are going to sign it if you want to continue working here.”
“What are you going to do if I don’t?”
“I’ll get your clearance pulled faster than you can say A-F-O-S-I,” the agent said. “And I’ll have you put on an ITAR-restricted list that will prevent you from coming into the building. This is a matter of national security, and I’ll be damned if I let you threaten that.”