“Shall we?” DePresti asked.
She nodded.
He swung the door open and stepped inside.
They stood in another dimly lit hallway, similar to that in Hangar AZ. Only a single naked bulb at the top provided any light.
DePresti was right. The building did have power. And at the end of the hallway was another metal door.
They walked to it together. “I’ll let you have the honors,” DePresti said.
Parkowski grabbed the handle and opened the door.
After her eyes adjusted to the bright light of the cavernous room beyond she stopped in a state of shock.
She didn’t believe what she was seeing.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Beyond the door was a massive high bay, easily twice both the height and square footage of the former satellite processing facility that the ILIAD mission had used at the Aering plant in El Segundo. It was just as clean and well-kept — someone had spent a great deal of time, money, and effort renovating the place.
There were no windows. It looked to Parkowski like a former clean room that had been converted for another purpose. The walls were beige and the floor was a shiny white tile that reflected the incandescent lights suspended on beams just below the ceiling, creating a glare that blinded Parkowski and DePresti.
On the far side of the room was what looked like a payload stack ready to be put on the second stage of a rocket. Parkowski couldn’t make out what it was with all of the glare. Next to it were two halves of a rocket fairing.
The stacked payload was connected with wires, both to large outlets in the high bay’s walls and to a mess of electronics on white folding tables, which was connected to a rack of servers against the wall that ran almost the length of it. Rounding out the room were eight small cubicles in two rows at the end of the server farm.
“What the…” Parkowski said. She was at a loss for words.
All of this looked new, or at least built in the last few years. The floor gleamed like it had barely been walked on. It was all such a sharp contrast to the outside of the building, which made it appear to be falling apart. Inside, it was as clean and well-kept as any modern aerospace facility.
After adjusting their eyes from the darkness outside to the overbearing light inside, Parkowski and DePresti walked across the high bay to the payload stack. It looked very familiar, but she couldn’t put a finger on where she had seen it before.
On the top of the ten-meter stack was a large, two-meter-wide jumble of metal and composites. She wasn’t sure what it was. In the middle was a large ring with different antennas and sensors sticking out of it. At the bottom was a wide, short metal cone that was painted black.
Parkowski stood about ten feet from it, studying it further, while DePresti walked up to it.
He stood there, mouth open, speechless.
“There’s no way…” he said, his voice trailing off, “there’s no fucking way.”
“What’s ‘no fucking way’?” Parkowski asked.
“I never thought I’d see it again.”
“See what?”
DePresti pointed at the stacked payload. “That’s the ILIAD stack. The lander is on the top there,” he said, “with the two ACHILLES units and all of the associated ground gear. In the middle is the relay satellite, built on an ESPA ring, and at the bottom is the payload attach fitting that goes on the top of the second stage.”
Parkowski was confused. “So, they built a second one and stored it here?”
He shook his head vigorously. “No, no, no, there’s no way they could, or even would,” the Space Force captain said. “They spent four or five billion dollars on the entire stack. There’s no reason to build a second one.” DePresti paused for dramatic effect.
“They never launched it.”
Everything clicked into place for Parkowski. She knew what Bronze Knot was protecting. “Holy fucking shit.”
It all made sense. The robots had never left Earth’s surface.
They had never gone to Venus. They had been here the whole time.
Parkowski was willing to bet that the server racks next to the payload stack were some kind of virtual environment — another level into the simulation.
The ACHILLES units were programmed to operate in that virtual world, not on the solar system’s second planet.
The operators at the El Segundo facility were plugged into it like they had thought, but all of the sensor feeds coming into it were spoofed.
Aering’s decision to have a video game developer and not a simulation design firm create and maintain the Venus environment made so much more sense. The operators weren’t piloting a high-tech robot. They had been in a simulation — playing a game.
She sank her knees down to the cold tile floor. It was too much to take in at once.
DePresti stepped even closer to the stack. “Those bastards.”
“What do you mean?”
He turned to her. “I spent years of my life working on a lie.” DePresti shook his head. “Those fuckers did a full second stage swap, to include the payload, and I had no idea. I don’t even know how they could. Something of that magnitude would be impossible without a bunch of other people finding out.”
Parkowski nodded in agreement. “It’d take an army to make it happen.”
DePresti snapped his fingers. “Wait a sec,” he said, “when we were about to transport the encapsulated fairing from Astrotech to the launch site, the day before the launch, I was absolutely exhausted. I had been watching OuterTek perform processing operations and closeouts for almost twenty-four hours straight. Col Hawke told me to go back to the hotel and get some sleep before the launch, and that he would monitor the transportation activities. That’s when they did it. They traded out the ILIAD probe for the other second stage, which had to have been prepared in advance, and put it on the flatbed to come over to LC-39a.”
He breathed slowly. “Goddammn it, how could no one have noticed?”
“No one said anything?” Parkowski asked.
“Nope. And that’s what is so confusing. We had cameras inside of the fairing the whole time, not to mention string after string of sensors all over the second stage. If something was wrong, or the payload was different, we would have known immediately.”
Cameras. Videos. Something clicked in Parkowski’s brain.
She stood back up. “They — OuterTek — tricked you with the videos,” she explained. “When I was in their system, I found all of these videos of the launch for the webcast, but the dates were all wrong. The files had all been created before the launch date.”
“I remember you saying that,” DePresti said, eliciting a smile from Parkowski, “but I didn’t appreciate it at the time.” He paused. “And, during the launch, when they went to jettison the fairing, the video remained the same — fairing still attached to the second stage — before they cut the feed. I bet someone fucked up and went to the live sensor feed before they went to the canned video.”
Parkowski had nothing to say. She just nodded. It all made too much sense.
“And after the launch, they just pretended everything was fine,” DePresti continued. “And gave NASA and Aering fake data until the probe ‘arrived’ on Venus.”
“I have a theory,” Parkowski said, “the servers here are creating a virtual Venus in terms of sensor inputs that are fed into the Panspermia environment that the Aering operators control the ACHILLES units in. It closes the feedback loop and makes you, the operator, feel like you’re really controlling the virtual robot when really you’re just talking to a virtual state machine here. Even the lag is fake.”