Parkowski wasn’t a communications engineer — her expertise was in robotics and control systems — but she knew enough to be dangerous. From what she saw, everything looked nominal, a normal network packet. What was different about this one, she wondered.
She double-clicked on one of the fields that was blank. A dialog box popped up. It was an error message, stating: ERROR: DATA MASKED. THIS SYSTEM CANNOT DISPLAY BRONZE KNOT DATA.
“What the…” Parkowski said, rubbing her eyes. It had been a long day, most of which had been spent hunched down over a computer screen. Maybe she was seeing things. She read it again.
ERROR: DATA MASKED. THIS SYSTEM CANNOT DISPLAY BRONZE KNOT DATA.
“That doesn’t even make any sense,” she said softly.
Parkowski closed the error window and tried double-clicking again.
ERROR: DATA MASKED. THIS SYSTEM CANNOT DISPLAY BRONZE KNOT DATA.
She read it a third time, this time more slowly.
“ERROR: DATA MASKED.” So the software was throwing up an error because there was data “masked” or hidden from the user. That made sense at first glance, the previous screen had blanked-out fields that should have been filled out.
But, on further thought, it didn’t. Why would any data be hidden from her? This wasn’t anything like what DePresti did; while Aering did do work on-site for the Space Force and some classified customers, the ILIAD project was most certainly unclassified. There was proprietary information, sure, and parts of the technology were ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) controlled, but in theory, as the prime contractor for NASA, Aering, and by proxy Parkowski should have access to all of the data.
“THIS SYSTEM CANNOT DISPLAY BRONZE KNOT DATA.” That made sense based on the previous sentence until she got to the word “bronze.” What the
That made no sense at all.
This packet was created in the communications hardware of the relay satellite and was sent to MICS to be “bent piped” back down to Earth. It was the same as every other packet, all of which should have been unclassified, and from her spot-check of the other two, this was the only odd one.
Parkowski backed out again and tried some of the other blanked-out fields. She got the same error message for each one. However, one of them did provide more information. It wanted to open up a “BRONZE KNOT MESSAGES” spreadsheet located in a directory on a shared drive that Parkowski had never seen before. When she tried to open it she got another error message — file cannot be found.
Frustrated, but also intrigued, she went back to the logs and tried to find some other packets that also would trigger the same error message. Parkowski tried for over twenty minutes to find one with blanked-out fields to no avail.
She sat back in her chair and thought for a minute. This was weird, there was no reason why any of the logs should be hidden from her, yet there they were—“masked” from her sight.
Parkowski sighed. She had already caused a lot of trouble with what happened on Friday, despite Pham’s assurance to the contrary. There had been a repair ticket for the equipment she had damaged that had been CC’d to her email. The mission report for the time block after hers noted that it took nearly an hour to get back to a nominal state.
It seemed like she had two options.
Parkowski could bring this discovery of hers up to Pham, who being the good guy that he was, would take it up to his boss or look into it himself. She would be at the center of attention again and who knows how that would work out.
The other option was to keep this to herself. No one else would know, nothing would happen to her. She would get another chance to prove herself on Wednesday during her second mission. She’d still be on the path to that promotion she was working towards.
To her, it seemed like an easy decision. No one else needed to know what she found.
Parkowski pulled up the error message one last time. It was the same, no change from before. She took a screenshot and saved it to her personal folder on the shared internal Aering drive.
She left the office and went home.
The next day was more of the same. Emails and a couple of brief meetings in the morning; her afternoon was filled with mission planning.
Parkowski had been through it before during her first time in the Venus environment. It was a painstaking, almost excruciating process where every single minute of her time controlling the ACHILLES robots was planned out using the old, slow mission planning tool. Last time, it took over three hours; hopefully, now that she was more experienced, it would be a little shorter.
She, Pham, and two technicians who would be responsible for making sure all of the ground systems needed for her mission to be successful all sat in the small conference room.
