She repeated that mantra as she tried to move, to walk forward slightly using her legs, but an error message popped up, covering a large portion of the display. It read ERROR: SPECIAL ACCESS PROGRAM — BRONZE KNOT — SPECIAL ACCESS REQUIRED.
BRONZE KNOT again. But what did the other words mean?
She dismissed it with a flick of her wrist. She tried moving again but the error appeared again. This time it read ERROR: SPECIAL ACCESS PROGRAM — BRONZE KNOT — SPECIAL ACCESS REQUIRED. YOU DO NOT POSSESS TS//SAR-BRK CREDENTIALS.
What was a “SPECIAL ACCESS PROGRAM” and what was it doing on Venus?
The environment then completely disappeared, leaving her with an empty, grayscale room, which was then slowly built up layer-by-layer: skybox, ground textures, meshes for the terrain followed by a fully textured environment, smaller details such as dust and rocks.
The first message appeared again.
It was ancient Greek to Parkowski, a gibberish of words she understood separately, but not in context together. Still, she committed each and every word to memory. She keyed the mic. “Hey, Dr. Pham, I’m getting an error message.”
“Standby,” he said, a bit of concern in his disembodied voice. “We’re getting some error messages too.”
“Copy,” she replied as the message disappeared. “Standing by.”
Parkowski cursed. This was not how today was supposed to go.
She heard a hurried shuffle of feet around her on the raised platform as some of the technicians popped up to help her. “Grace, we’re going to disconnect you,” Pham said over the radio. “We’ve lost connection.”
Parkowski waited as multiple pairs of hands quickly worked to disconnect her from the wires that hooked her into the Venus VR environment. The error message reappeared briefly before going away for good.
The last thing removed was her headset, but before it was fully off, Parkowski could already feel the tension in the room. At least a dozen people, technicians and engineers alike, scurried about. The large TV screen over the terminals was completely blank.
No one seemed to notice or pay attention to her.
She placed the helmet on the ground and slipped off of the platform, leaving the techs to gather all of the VR setup’s components.
Pham was at one of those terminals underneath the TV screen, furiously tapping away at the keyboard.
“How bad is it?” she asked.
The older man shook his head. “Completely lost the signal. Trying to reacquire now, but we’re locked out.”
He turned his head and looked at her with a forced grin. “Hey, but at least it wasn’t your fault this time.”
She didn’t smile back.
Parkowski packed her bag and headed out. While she had been changing, the techs had reestablished the connection with the ACHILLES units by power-cycling one of the antennas on the relay satellite. But, it wasn’t a great link. The signal-to-noise ratio was terrible and they weren’t able to fully exercise control of the two robots. But, they were able to get health and safety readings and ensure that both ACHILLES were safe.
Thankfully, the quadcopter had kept its telemetry connection — run through a separate comm pathway than the ACHILLES data — the whole time. The sensor operators reported mission success.
She was scheduled for another upcoming mission. The exact date, time, and details were still up in the air, pending a full recovery of the entire ACHILLES system.
Everything was still a blur. She had done everything right, followed the mission plan to a T, even kept her cool when shit hit the fan, and, most importantly, didn’t panic like she had last time. However, she remembered she was just one cog in the machine, and a low-level one at that. Parkowski had expected more of a response when she got out of the VR gear, but everyone’s attention was focused on getting the integrated enterprise back up and running.
And on deeper examination, who knew if she would even still be on the schedule tomorrow.
Parkowski got into her Camry in the parking lot. This was all a lot to process, and she still wasn’t sure she fully wanted to.
She started the long drive back to her apartment. As she drove, she thought through the entire bizarre situation. It wasn’t going as well as she would have liked.
Parkowski knew that most of the other engineers were angling for the same promotion she was, thelead engineer for the NASA-led Io mission that would be launching in the next few years. She hadn’t heard about any other anomalies, just hers, so she was seemingly behind the power curve.
If something didn’t change soon, she was going to be out of the running. She felt like she was going to have to start asking questions about why it was happening to her.
Parkowski was a naturally curious person. She had driven her parents crazy with questions as a young girl, and had even once taken apart a toy with a screwdriver just to see how it worked. It had been one of many instances that had set her on the path to becoming an engineer.
