Parkowski always considered the HUD to be a distraction to the work she was doing. Instead, she preferred to pull up individual menus as she needed them and put them away when she was done. Alerts were set for various metrics measured by the system, if any of the robot’s systems were trending in the wrong direction she would deal with it then. Otherwise, Parkowski wanted to be immersed in her work — a hard task with all of the additional overlays on her display.
Parkowski turned the ACHILLES 2 robot so it was pointed in the correct direction, to the northeast. “Here we go.”
She only got about a dozen meters forward when the system grew sluggish. “I’m getting some lag here,” Parkowski said over the net. “I’m going to hold up and run a diagnostic.”
“Copy,” Pham said. “We see you stopping, but everything looks green from out here.”
Parkowski flipped through her menus until she found the external communications system.
The settings and values in the menu were all normal; there was nothing out of the ordinary. Puzzled, Parkowski checked the raw signal coming into the robots from the relay in orbit. The transmission was being received by the robots, but it was well below the strength needed to maintain the minimum lag required for smooth operations. “I’ve got a signal strength problem, over.”
“Let’s check the satellite,” Pham said. “Standby. Don’t switch robots.”
“Roger,” Parkowski replied. “Standing by.”
The answer came a few minutes later. “There’s an issue with a power regulator on the comm bird in orbit around Venus,” Pham told her. “We’re switching it to the redundant string until we can figure out what’s exactly wrong with it.”
“Got it, thanks,” Parkowski said. They were switching to the backup power system on the satellite, the only option they had if the primary power subsystem was malfunctioning. She moved her hand and watched the ACHILLES robot mirror her movement smoothly. “Everything looks back to normal.”
She walked what the HUD told her was about a hundred meters, then switched back to ACHILLES 1 to bring it back to the other robot. Parkowski sweated in her tight clothes that didn’t give her skin much room to breathe. While walking in ACHILLES 1, she checked the time — it was eleven. She had already been in the virtual environment for an hour. Time flies when you’re having fun, she thought.
After bringing ACHILLES 1 next to the other robot, she switched to ACHILLES 2 and continued on her path to checkpoint Bravo. The environment showed her more clouds and the terrain was getting steeper, with plenty of pitfalls and steep ledges to avoid. She did some quick mental math to make sure the robot could get over those obstacles. Thankfully, it didn’t translate to any increase in difficulty. Parkowski was able to keep a good pace and reach the checkpoint in fifty minutes, ten minutes off of her planned time even with the communications issue.
At Waypoint Bravo, she looked around but didn’t see any caves. “Hey Doc,” she called out on the radio. “I’m not sure where I’m supposed to set up my radar gear.”
“Huh,” Pham said. “Let me check the map.”
A minute later, he returned to the net. “The waypoint’s a little off. The entrance to the cave system is located just past a small crater to the north. It’s probably hard to see with all of the clouds and steam.”
Parkowski squinted in that direction. Just behind a boulder, she saw a small dip indicating a crater. “Ok, I think I see it,” she told Pham. “Let me confirm.”
She walked past the boulder and into a shallow crater that reminded her of a sand trap at a golf course, just without the sand. Climbing the other side carefully, she came to a small pit that, from her view, looked like it went a pretty decent depth into Venus’ surface.
“Ok, I’m here,” she said. “Get the Rayleigh tech on.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Using the robot’s arms, Parkowski placed the nondescript metal gray box on the ground.
She wasn’t sure what to do next. “Is the tech on the net?” she asked again as she brought the ACHILLES robot down to one of its "knees"
“I’m right here,” an unfamiliar male voice said in her ear.
“Hi,” Parkowski said. “What exactly am I supposed to do with this box?”
She heard a quick laugh. “Well, first things first, you need to move it on its side. The radar dish itself is recessed into the box, it’s the large circle next to your left leg if the display I’m seeing here is correct.”
Parkowski rotated the box so she could see the circle. She could barely see it with the computer-generated graphics. Pulling up the HUD, she created a display from the ACHILLES robot’s cameras and pinned it to the upper right of her display. Despite the grainy footage, the radar dish was clearly there. She rotated the radar system into the correct orientation. “Got it,” she said over the net. “What next?”
“Check the control panel,” the tech said. It was now visible, a series of minimalist controls on the top of the box with a small three-inch LCD next to them. “Look for a row of square buttons. The largest one is the power button.”
After turning it on, the Rayleigh tech helped her get the radar configured. She took a quick image using the lowest setting available, then switched the control panel to the image processing function. “I’m not seeing anything,” Parkowski told the tech, “at least not anything useful. It looks like a completely black screen, not like a radar image.”
“Huh,” she heard the tech say. “Give me a sec, I have one of the engineers here with me in the room.”
Parkowski stood up and stretched her legs. She was starting to get tired and hungry. That breakfast sandwich hadn’t been enough; she had underestimated how much walking with all of the VR gear on would tire her out.
She looked at the landscape around her. The graphics inside of the virtual environment were almost photorealistic, immersing her in the alien planet. She almost forgot that her body was still on Earth. The sky was a different color, sure, and the clouds more ominous, but it wasn’t completely out of place from hiking in Arizona or New Mexico. Except for the lack of vegetation. That got Parkowski every time. Unlike early science-fiction depictions of the planet, Venus was completely barren.
The technician came back online. “The radar doesn’t have the correct settings to operate on Venus,” he told Parkowski. “The magnetosphere is different from Earth’s and we need to compensate. We’re working on getting a correct list of parameters that you can feed into the system manually. Standby.”
“Got it,” she replied. Parkowski stretched her arms out, then sat down.
Five minutes passed before he spoke again. “Hey, Ms. Parkowski, sorry for the dela. We have the correct list of configuration settings for the radar. Please let us know when you’re ready to input them.”
Parkowski knelt next to the radar box. “I’m ready now,” she told the tech as she readied the ACHILLES robot over the control panel.
The tech walked her through the settings, page by page, until the radar was properly configured. “Try taking an image now."
Parkowski tried again. This time, the control panel showed a black image with white lines seemingly drawn indiscriminately across it. “What the hell is this?” Parkowski said to herself softly. “I have something, but I’m not sure if it’s what we’re looking for,” she said over the net.
This time, Dr. Pham responded. “It looks like you’ve got it,” he told Parkowski. “That’s what a radar image looks like before any processing. I think we have the right settings now.”