Parkowski finished the mission with ten minutes to spare. As the technicians removed her gear, she saw that all of the eyes in the high bay were on her.
She smiled, and as soon as she was able, left the high bay. She checked her phone — DePresti wanted to do dinner.
While she was still annoyed with him, they needed to talk. She texted him back and suggested a Korean BBQ place they both enjoyed. Parkowski then left and went home. Her after-action report could wait until tomorrow.
They ate outside on the patio. The conversation started with small talk, both of them being polite, before they got into a more complex discussion about Bronze Knot.
Parkowski was defensive; she hadn’t learned anything new about the special access program and its relation to ILIAD, and DePresti couldn’t understand why she couldn’t just let it go. “Grace, it sounds like you had a good mission today,” he told her. “You were able to troubleshoot on the fly and fix a problem all by yourself. Nothing weird happened. No dragons, no aliens, no weird error codes, no strange special programs, nothing. You should be celebrating, not beating yourself up for not figuring out this mystery.”
“You just don’t understand,” she said. “The entire leadership team was there, watching me, waiting to see if I mess up or screw up the whole program. And, yeah, I did fine this time, but who knows what’ll happen the next time? I need to know what’s going on so I can prepare in case I see anything else strange. I hate not knowing everything going on.”
“Maybe you don’t need to know everything.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, raising her tone slightly.
DePresti paused. “So, when I worked the launch,” he said slowly, referring back to the ILIAD mission’s successful launch out of Kennedy Space Center. “I was in charge of the seating arrangements for the firing room. I had to make sure that all of the important people, as well as the people actually running the mission, had a seat.”
He took a breath. “I thought I had it all figured out until a day before the launch Colonel Hawke told me that two of the seats I had reserved for the Aerospace team had been requisitioned for someone else. I wasn’t told who, wasn’t told why, just that it happened and we needed to adjust.”
“What does this have to do with anything?” Parkowski asked as she crossed her arms. Where was he going with this? Was he going to tell her to stop looking into it? She needed DePresti to be on her side, they needed to be a team, but it felt like he was working against her.
“I’ll get there,” DePresti said. “So I had to move two members of my team out to a remote site and it wasn’t particularly easy to do so, but I made it happen. Day of launch, two nondescript white dudes in suits and sunglasses showed up and watched the launch from those two seats. To this day, I have no idea who they were, but we still managed to pull the mission off.
“Grace, you don’t need to know everything. In the aerospace business there’s always some kind of weird stuff going on, either because of national security concerns or corporate bullshit. I was able to do my job with the launch despite not knowing why those two seats had to be given up. I think you can do yours without knowing everything about the ILIAD mission.”
“So you just want me to drop it,” Parkowski said. Her food was getting cold, but she didn’t care. “Despite me telling you how concerned I am about all of this, how it’s been eating me up for the last month or so, you want me to just let it go.”
DePresti sighed. “Grace, you haven’t been yourself,” he said. Another mistake. “You’re always thinking about this and it seems like it’s the only thing you want to talk about. Even when we’re trying to do something fun, like going scuba diving, you just want to ask me about it. I want to go back to before you had your first mission.”
Parkowski teared up. “I can’t,” she said softly as she pulled out her wallet. This was the last straw. She couldn’t take being ignored and blown off anymore, especially by the people closest to her.
DePresti was going to say something but she tearfully held up a hand. “I’m done,” she said as she dropped a few bills and wept her way out of the restaurant.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Parkowski was a slug all weekend — ignoring a slew of text messages from DePresti — and then called in sick on Monday.
She wasn’t sick. In fact, she felt as healthy as ever. But she just wasn’t in the right state of mind to work right now. She was too focused on solving the Bronze Knot puzzle to really do much of anything else.
Thankfully, she didn’t have anything to do other than write her after-action report. After her successful mission, she didn’t have much to state in it.
Parkowski knew that she had probably overreacted with her boyfriend.
But, she'd had enough. Everyone was lying to her, she thought, no one would tell her the truth about what was really going on with the ILIAD mission and Bronze Knot.
She turned on a cooking show at nine and pulled out her personal laptop. Parkowski opened up a spreadsheet and tried to put down all of the different pieces of information that she could remember into the different cells. There was something she was missing, something that could be inferred from the clues she had available.
Parkowski now was more sure than ever that the ILIAD mission, and whatever the Bronze Knot program associated with it was, had much more going on behind the scenes than what was being told to her and the other operators, not to mention the periodic press releases going out from NASA singing the praises of their scientific mission.
There were so many pieces of information that didn’t make sense.
For the first mission, there was the “dragon,” and then the Bronze Knot-protected packets in the logs associated with the event.
For the second mission, there was the Bronze Knot error message that told her for the first time that there was a special access program involved.
Then there was all of the information that she had learned in the secure “NASA” room. The biggest piece of which was that the VR environment was not hosted on server racks at the Aering facility, but somewhere in Orlando.
Finally, there was all of the stuff DePresti had told her, that there was no SAP data under that program name on any of the networks he had access to, as well as the general education she had received from him on classification and special access programs. She believed him, despite her anger towards him at the moment.
Together, they pointed to a military involvement in the ILIAD mission, hidden under the program Bronze Knot, potentially run out of Orlando since the Venus environment was hosted there.
Parkowski remembered that there were some letters before the word “Orlando” in the configuration file she had pulled up on the SAP server — letters she had never looked into further.
She typed “AFAMS” into a search engine. According to the results, AFAMS stood for the Air Force Agency for Modeling and Simulation.
It was located in Orlando — confirming what the configuration file said.
Why was the Air Force involved at all in the ILIAD mission? The only military link was the launch through the Space Force, not the Air Force.
A knock on the door startled her as she absorbed this new piece of information.
Parkowski jumped, knocking her laptop to the floor. She quickly picked it up and checked it for damage — there was none.
She placed it down on the coffee table in the center of her living room and silently crept to the door. Parkowski looked out of the peephole and didn’t see anyone.
“Look down,” a muffled voice from the other side of the door said.
Parkowski did just that and smiled when she saw the person outside of her apartment.