“No, not at all. Your description matches the dragon, seen here.” He showed her the piece of paper. It was the same creature that had attacked her on Friday.
“Thank you so much for running this down,” Parkowski said, rocking slowly back and forth in her chair. “I know what I saw and to have that confirmation really gives me a confidence boost.”
“Well, you’re going to need it,” Pham said, grinning as he took the piece of paper back. “I’m heading out early today, but I’ll see you tomorrow. It’ll be time to plan your second mission.”
The rest of Parkowski’s day was as normal as it could be.
She ate lunch at the Rayleigh cafeteria with a couple of her work friends, finished up her emails by one o’clock, and spent the rest of her day checking out the schedule, reading the logs from prior missions, and reading the unfortunately sparse mission details for her upcoming jaunt with the ACHILLES robots.
It wasn’t perfect, though. The techs avoided her for the most part, and there was an uneasy silence surrounding her in the high bay as she passed through.
She had plans to go out for a quick dinner with her boyfriend, but DePresti had sent an email to her work address telling her that he was going to be late at work preparing for a major review on one of his programs. Parkowski decided to stay late, too, so that they could eat dinner together.
At around four o’clock, she was done with her other work and decided to dig into the logs from her mission. Parkowski opened up the logging software that Pham had used earlier.
She wanted to get into the logs for two reasons.
First, to confirm what she had been shown this morning. Parkowski trusted Pham more than almost anyone else in her life, but for something as bizarre as seeing a dragon in a simulated Venus environment, she had to be sure that it was just a bug.
Second, she wanted to learn how to work the debugging and logging systems in case she had to do something similar in the future.
Parkowski was surprised at how easy the software was to use compared to the mission planning software — obviously different developers. Everything created by Panspermia was modern, sleek, and designed with the user in mind. The mission planning software, the communications stuff she had seen connecting the Aering building with MICS, and some of the other UIs she had seen in her current job, had all been created by traditional defense contractors such as Aering and were more cumbersome to use.
The logs were all stored in a spreadsheet, a two-dimensional database that linked to other files and documents that contained more information. She clicked on the “C-458” enumeration and traced it to the communications log. Sure enough, when the sensor, an IR camera on the relay satellite orbiting Venus, had seen the meteorite enter the atmosphere, it had sent a message to the communications hardware. Then, in the same region where the ACHILLES robots were operating, a signal had been sent to the environment back on Earth to display a meteorite exactly where the real one had been sensed.
She laughed to herself. Parkowski wondered how much it cost for Panspermia to implement that feature. It didn’t add much to her ability to do the mission, but had to have been part of the contract between Aering and the video game studio nonetheless.
Parkowski shook her head and started to follow the communications pathway that the signal traveled once the relay satellite sensed the meteorite.
The packet had left the sensor and traveled via the satellite’s internal Linux real-time operating system to the communications payload. One antenna was always pointing down at the planet, the other in the direction of the satellite at the far-off Earth-Moon Lagrange point that directed the signal to the MICS satellite. The comm box had seen that its final destination was the Venus environment and sent the packet through the narrowband connection that way.
She opened up the packet in the debugging tool. In it, she could see fields in a table format like the initial log window.
Parkowski quickly scanned the packet’s metadata. Most of what she saw made sense, but a number of other fields were blank.
She scrunched up her nose. That was weird.
The engineer pulled up another packet, a state-of-health telemetry report that was sent every second back to the NASA ground station operators for the satellite at White Sands. That one, when opened, had every field in the metadata filled out, with even more data available once she double-clicked on each of them.
Parkowski pulled up another packet, searching for one from the IR sensor this time. This one was old, a reading of a hot pocket of gas in a crater near the ACHILLES landing site. This packet, when opened, also had all of its fields filled out and accessible.
Another mystery, she thought.
She pulled up the initial packet, taking another close look at it.
