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.”
“That makes too much sense,” her boyfriend responded, “and is probably the cause of all of the anomalies that you saw while you were in the VR gear.”
“That’s what Bronze Knot is protecting,” she said in agreement. “The fact that the virtual environment isn’t calling Venus at all — it’s calling this building, A99, out here. We just didn’t see it because we didn’t have the full network architecture. They didn’t need to protect the details, or the ‘big secret’ if you will,
DePresti put a hand up against the PAF and sighed. “All of this, and for what?”
She didn’t have an answer for him. But, all of the things that she had found over the last few weeks, large and small, now fit in place.
There was no real-time interface between the Panspermia environment and the feed coming in from MICS because it wasn’t needed — all of the packets coming in were artificial. Since whoever had integrated all of this had control of both sides of the interface, there was no need for data conditioning.
There was lag — artificial lag — that was needed in order for the Panspermia environment to react as it had been programmed in. It was expecting a ninety to one-hundred-twenty-second delay, and if it didn’t receive that, the virtual environment software wouldn’t work as planned. When it had gotten smaller than that in some of her missions, the errors had started, leading to the cryptic messages exposing the Bronze Knot name.
The changes in part number for the second stage of the Shrike Heavy were real and poorly documented by OuterTek. Given their history of last-minute configuration changes, a few swapped part numbers wouldn’t be totally out of the ordinary.
It was a lot to take in.
Her entire job for the last year had been a lie.
She joined him next to the OuterTek PAF with the ILIAD probe on top of it.
“If this is here,” DePresti mused as he ran his hand along one of the thick wires that connected the ILIAD probe to the wall and gave it power. “Then what went up on the Shrike Heavy?”
Parkowski had no idea.
Her mind flashed with a million possibilities, each more implausible than the next, but none of them made any sense.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“I don’t either,” DePresti said in response. He laughed. “I’m not sure it matters now, does it?”
“Nope.” It was another mystery, sure, but Parkowski felt a great deal of satisfaction in solving the one that had bugged her for months. “At least we know what Bronze Knot is.”
They followed the cables to the scattering of electronic gear on the folding tables. DePresti and Parkowski both instantly knew what it was. “That’s a flat-sat,” she said, pointing at the contraption, referring to a set of satellite parts, mostly avionics, arranged on the ground for rapid testing of software upgrades. “But for what satellite?”
DePresti bent over it, studying the components. He turned to her. “It’s a MICS simulator, and a very high-fidelity one at that. Those are all space-rated parts or models of space-rated parts. I bet you’re looking at close to a million dollars of hardware there.”
Parkowski blinked. “Why would you spend that much on a simulator?”
He laughed. “Grace, the payload stack there cost over a billion dollars. A million dollars is a drop in a bucket to these people.”
It took a bit for that to sink in.
“Why would someone pay over a billion dollars to build a science probe that never launches?” she asked rhetorically.
