“Copy, we’re reading the same thing here,” Pham responded in a calm tone. “I’ve got one of the technicians calling over to NASA to see what’s going on. Preliminary analysis shows heavy traffic through MICS, much more than would be expected on a Friday. We’ll see if we can free up some bandwidth for you.” A pause. “Is it bad enough that you need to pause or cancel the operation?”
Parkowski shook her head, a pointless gesture inside all of the VR gear. “No, let me check some settings and see if I can’t make it a little better. I think I’m good for the time being.”
“Very good.” She heard some papers rustling in the background. “You still have plenty of time left.”
“How much exactly?”
“Well, it’s just after noon local, so you have about an hour and a half, but it’s going to take you most of that time to get there.” A map appeared in front of her blown-up version of the one in her HUD, overlaid over the VR headset’s display of the Venusian landscape. “There’s Charlie,” Pham said, a little blue cursor circling a point, “and there’s you,” the cursor pointing at the blue arrow. “It’s about eighty kilometers from your current position in a low-gravity setting. You’ll be fine.”
“Thanks, Doc.” She checked the VR system’s settings. Everything looked good, but she turned down some of the graphics fidelity to reduce stress on the rendering system.
Parkowski then went back to her minimalist HUD and started her journey.
She was glad that she was controlling a robot a planet away and not actually on Venus herself. The ACHILLES unit had to transverse some pretty rough terrain to get to point Charlie. There was a shallow crater that didn’t look too tough until she got into it. The depression was pockmarked with smaller impact holes, and to top it off, had cracks running through it up to a foot or so deep.
ACHILLES 2 got stuck not once, not twice, but three times. Parkowski had to work carefully in order to get the robot’s foot out of a crevasse or hole. She placed a large timer on her HUD to count down until the end of the mission and transfer of control.
“What happens if I miss my window to give up control of the robots?” she asked Pham, mostly out of curiosity, while she continued her trek across the crater.
“Depends on by how much,” the scientist replied. “If you miss it by a few minutes? That’s fine, we can adjust. If you miss it by an hour or so, we could recover, but it would cause an enormous replan of the downstream schedule. You’re not planning to do that to us, are you?”
“Of course not,” Parkowski said with a slight smile. “Just curious, that’s all.”
“You’re almost home free,” she heard Rosen say, breaking in on the channel. “Keep it up, Grace. You’re doing great.”
She smiled again and continued her push forward — her future promotion was in the bag.
Looking ahead, Parkowski saw some weird effects on the horizon, a naturally jagged ridge in front of a distant mountain range.
This was aliasing, an artifact of the lag spike she was encountering. The VR system’s renderer was downsampling images to preserve bandwidth. but displaed them in the same, higher resolution of the environment, leading to the jagged edges.
“Doc, are you sure the lag numbers are correct?” she asked again. “Lots of weird stuff going on.”
“Still one minute and fifty-eight seconds even,” Pham answered. “No alerts or alarms in our monitoring software.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Parkowski said under her breath. “Ok, thanks,” she replied over the net. “Continuing onwards.”
She managed a few more meters before her entire ACHILLES rig stopped moving, despite her continued inputs.
Parkowski groaned. “Hey doc, I’m stuck.”
“We know,” Pham said. “They’re switching to the alternate wideband comm pathway on the relay. The NASA flight crew think that’s the issue.”
“Isn’t MICS just a bent pipe?” she asked, meaning that the communications satellite just simply passed forward whatever it received. In this case, it should just be taking in the signals from the communications satellite around Venus, amplifying it, and sending it down to a ground station on Earth.
“It is, but something’s wrong with that pipe on the bird itself,” Pham told her. “Thankfully, we’re fully redundant. They’re switching to the alternate side now and will troubleshoot the primary later.”
Parkowski rolled her eyes. “Fine, how long is it going to take?”
“One sec,” Pham said. “They’re putting together the script now.”
She heard him ask a muffled question to someone on the other end, then come back to the mic. “As soon as they upload these commands, you should be good to go — it should be almost instantaneous. Wait a minute, then try moving forward again.”
“Roger roger.”
Parkowski took a deep breath and let her arms drop, trying to relax at the apex of a difficult mission, her first inside of the VR gear controlling real-life robots on another planet. Her stomach growled again. She couldn’t wait to get out and go get some food.
