She couldn’t figure out why it looked more like a smokestack than a rocket, but then it dawned on her — there was nothing on top! No capsule, no fairing, not even a nosecone. Nevertheless, it was an impressive feat of engineering. It had taken NASA and the might of the U.S. government years and billions of dollars to design, test, fly, land, and reuse the Space Shuttle orbiter; OuterTek had managed to do it in a fraction of the time and with a significantly smaller budget.
DePresti pulled off of the freeway onto Crenshaw Avenue, and Parkowski finally saw just how big the OuterTek facility was. On the left side of the road was a giant, ten-story parking garage, on the right side was the main OuterTek building, a former Southron Aerospace building that had been built and expanded until it was the size of a city block.
Sprawling out from the main building were a number of smaller ones, with tiny roads and paths between them. She knew from DePresti’s description that those were mostly test facilities for things that couldn’t be done in the main, office-like building, but others were administrative buildings that OuterTek had absorbed as it went from a startup to a ten-thousand-employee corporation.
There was no guard at the entrance to the parking garage. DePresti turned into it and started looking for a spot.
To both of their surprise, there were none to be found. The entire garage was full.
The reason was found on the ground floor of the concrete structure as they came back down a spiraled loop from the top floor. Over half of the lowest level was roped off as construction machines and workers scurried around.
“What’s going on?” Parkowski asked, not expecting an answer.
DePresti smirked.
“One of OuterTek’s sister companies, The Looping Company — originally part of OuterTek — does what they call ‘hyperloops,’” he explained. “They’re trying to build high-speed mass transit underneath urban areas. Think a Japanese bullet train but on a frictionless air bearing instead of on tracks. They’re in theory building one starting here all of the way north to San Francisco, but to be honest, I think it’s a boondoggle. They started back when I was at the Academy but haven’t made much progress. Every once in a while The Looping Company puts out a press release on some new technology, or promise to link LA with Las Vegas or Denver, but to the best of my knowledge no one has ever ridden on it.”
Parkowski laughed too. “So what have they done?” she asked as he checked through the garage for a spot again. Every single one looked full.
“They did a small-scale prototype almost ten years ago,” DePresti said, “that supposedly worked well. I think it went just over a kilometer. But nothing’s happened since then.” He sighed. “I don’t think there are any spots.”
“So what do we do?” Parkowski asked.
“Let me try something.”
He drove out of the parking garage and stopped at the intersection between it and the main OuterTek building. “Get your Aering badge out,” he told Parkowski.
“What?”
“Just do it.”
Parkowski rolled her eyes and gave him the badge as DePresti drove across the street. Almost instantly a security guard on a golf cart drove up to their truck. “Excuse me, I need to see your identification,” the nondescript white man in his forties asked.
DePresti handed over his OuterTek badge and Parkowski’s Aering ID. “Here you go,” he said.
The guard scrutinized them intensely.
“Does she have a green badge?” he asked the Space Force officer.
“No, I’ll have to get her a red badge at the front desk. They know she’s coming,” DePresti lied.
The guard nodded and handed the ID cards back.
He pulled the golf cart aside so DePresti could drive through to the small parking lot in front of the main building.
DePresti looked for a visitor’s parking spot but those, too, were all full.
“Well, hot damn,” he said softly. “What do we do now?”
“Can you pull into one of the other spots, the ones with numbers on them?” Parkowski suggested.
“No, those are reserved for OuterTek big-wigs or VIPs coming to visit,” he replied. “We can’t park there.” He looked at the clock. “Actually, I take that back. It's almost three. They should be pretty much done for the day. I think we should be safe.”
“You think?”
“It’s better than going back to Barstow empty-handed,” he argued.
“Fine,” Parkowski said, pointing to a spot with a “4” on it. “Park there.”
“Aye, aye,” DePresti said sarcastically as he pulled in. He stopped the vehicle and took out a pen and notepad from his bag.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m writing down all of the different wireless passwords we used while I was spending time at OuterTek,” DePresti explained as he jotted down a dozen phrases. “They cycled through about ten or twelve while I was working that program. Hopefully one of them will still work and you can get into their network. Make sure you pick the guest one — it’ll get you access to all of the stuff you’re looking for. And here,” he continued as he wrote a few more lines below it, “is my username and password. They still work as of last week.”
“And if none of this works?”
“Then hopefully I find something while I’m inside,” he said as he opened the door to the truck. “If I’m not back by six, just take it and drive back to Andrew’s. I can find my own way out of the city.”
“Good luck,” Parkowski said as she reached around with her good arm for her bag. She gave him a brief kiss.
DePresti stepped back as he attached his green OuterTek badge to his shirt. “Good luck to you as well.”
Parkowski sighed as he walked off. She hated the feeling of losing control of the situation, but her boyfriend was right. She could do more good outside in the parking lot than inside of the massive complex.
Maybe the answer could be found inside the OuterTek networks. Thankfully, Chang had told her that it was ok to connect to them. “We’ll just have to put the laptops in the do-not-use category afterward,” he had joked. “They’ll be tainted.”
She pulled out a year-old HP model from the bag. Time to get to work.
Parkowski booted it up and started looking for a wireless network to get on.
There were five to choose from. But, she remembered DePresti had said she wanted the “guest” one. She chose the one with “guest” in the name and was asked for a password.
Parkowski looked at the list that DePresti had given her and tried the first one, “The Red Planet,” an obvious reference to Mars — the colonization of which was an obsession of OuterTek’s founder.
It didn’t work.
She sighed again and tried the second one, “Highway to Mars.”
Same with the third one, “Fourth Rock from the Sun,” and every other one on the list.
None of them worked.
I should have known as much, she thought, reaching into the bag for an energy bar and water. Remembering what video game was coming out next? That was something her boyfriend would have burned into his memory. Her birthday? Sure. But recollecting a Wi-Fi password he had used for months was too much to ask.
Parkowski selected a different wireless network and went through the list of passwords again. And, again, none of them granted her access.
She tried the other three networks with the same result.
The Aering engineer rolled her eyes. What a waste of time, she thought. Hopefully, Mike would be more successful inside.
Parkowski ate her energy bar and a bag of grapes while she watched the company’s employees file out of the building in groups of twos and threes before walking to their vehicles in the parking garage across the street. She tried all of the passwords on the “guest” network for a second time, but still, none of them worked.
Something nagged at her, though. A voice in the back of her head was telling her that she hadn’t exhausted all of her options. But she had, hadn’t she? She had been through every single permutation of passwords with networks. And none of them had worked.
She got the notepad back out and looked through them. DePresti’s handwriting was strangely clear and easy to read — he might be the only engineer on the planet with good penmanship. Parkowski went down the list and checked for any typos or misread words, but there were none. None of them worked.
“Fuck,” Parkowski said to herself, slamming the keyboard with her fist in frustration. She didn’t like to feel helpless, but here she was, stuck in an old Chevy truck in the OuterTek parking lot.
Parkowski went through the list again. She had the feeling that something was wrong with the passwords — that DePresti hadn’t remembered them correctly — but nothing jumped out at her as being incorrect.
She went line-by-line, word-by-word. Same thing. All twelve phrases were logical passwords for a space- and Mars-obsessed company to use.
Parkowski slammed the laptop closed. Nothing was going right.
Suddenly, she had a revelation, based on an experience that Parkowski had had her first week in Los Angeles.
Parkowski had been talking with Rachel Kim and another female Aering engineer over lunch in the Rayleigh cafeteria about her commute into work from her apartment in Marina del Rey down to the Aering plant south of LAX. She had described her route to the point where she got onto I-405 South, “the highway,” as she had called it.
Kim and the other woman had quickly corrected her.
“Freeway,” Kim had said. “In California, they are all ‘freeways.’”
“What do you mean?” Parkowski had asked. “A highway is a highway.”
“Unless it’s in California, where it’s called a freeway,” the other engineer had said.
DePresti, like Parkowski, was from the East Coast and called an interstate a “highway.”
OuterTek was located in Hawthorne, California. Where an interstate was called a freeway.
She grabbed the notepad and looked at the list. Where had she seen “highway?”
The second entry was “Highway to Mars.”
Parkowski grabbed the pen and scribbled out “Highway.” In its place, she wrote “Freeway.”
She opened the laptop back up and selected the guest network.
“Freeway.to… Mars,” Parkowski said to herself as she inputted it on the HP’s keyboard.
It took a few minutes, but finally, at last she was connected to the wireless network.
“Yes!” she said as she pumped her fist into the air. Parkowski was in.
She opened up a browser window.
Bang!
There was a loud knock on the Silverado’s door.