She thought for a second. “What does Bronze Knot mean?” Parkowski asked. “It was mentioned in the logs of my first mission, in particular with some of the packets traveling around the same time I saw the ‘dragon,’ but without any mention of a special access program.”
He shook his head. “That’s the program name, but it’s not one I’m familiar with. And if it’s in the logs, then in theory it would be connected to your mission somehow. But, to the best of my knowledge, NASA doesn't have any SAPs. They are a purely civilian agency.”
“Any idea as to what the name means?”
“No,” DePresti replied.
“There was another error message too,” Parkowski continued quickly, reciting from memory. “Error, Special Access Program — Bronze Knot. Special Access Required. You do not possess TS//SAR-BKT credentials.” She spelled out each of the acronyms.
DePresti frowned. “That’s worse because you don’t have a Top Secret clearance, and that’s a huge security violation if you saw anything Top Secret.”
“But what did I see that is Top Secret?”
“I have no clue. That’s why it’s hard to believe what you say you saw,” he said carefully.
“I saw what I saw,” she replied, a hint of anger in her voice.
“No, I’m not saying you didn’t see that,” he said quickly. “But, there’s no way that Top Secret and SAP data was on the VR environment’s network. It would be a huge security violation and Aering is smart enough not to do that. There has to be another explanation.”
“I saw what I saw,” Parkowski repeated. She took a breath and finally took another bite of her food. “Why would someone code an error message to display that?”
“I don’t know,” he answered. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
They ate, both of them deep in thought.
“Could there be a data spill?” Parkowski wondered aloud. “Could something from a higher-level network or computer get into the Venus environment?”
“Not likely,” DePresti replied. “Most SAP networks are air-gapped — they aren’t connected to any other network. And if they are connected, there are multiple security layers, protected by NSA-approved guards. Those prevent Top Secret data tagged as a SAP from going to a lower level, either Secret or Unclassified.”
He finished his beer and got up to get another one. “You know, I’ve never heard of Bronze Knot,” DePresti said as he opened the cap, “but there was a program called Bronze Crow that was run during the Cold War.”
“A special access program?”
“Yeah.”
“What was it about?”
The Space Force captain laughed. “Well, I’ve never been read into it, but from my understanding, it was a program to let U.S. Air Force and Navy pilots fly American jets against foreign-built equipment.”
Parkowski frowned. “While I get why that would be a special program, that has nothing to do with what I do at Aering or the ILIAD mission.”
DePresti took a long sip of his beer and then smiled at her. “I know, the whole thing doesn’t make sense. I’ve never worked with any program with ‘Bronze’ as part of the codename. But I will say that most of the codenames are randomly generated for security. They usually have nothing to do with the actual program information that they are protecting.”
“So, Bronze Knot is meaningless.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” DePresti said.
“You wouldn’t tell me even if you did know,” Parkowski said, teasing him.
He laughed, and then his face turned serious. “Grace, even if I did know, I’d at least give you something, anything that would help alleviate your concerns but also keep me out of trouble. But, I do like my clearance.”
She didn’t say anything. This whole thing ate away at the back of her mind. She had to know why this last mission had gone the way it did, despite her best efforts.
“Have you asked anyone at work about it?” DePresti asked.
“Nope,” Parkowski said. “I wanted to avoid that, but I think I have to. I’ll do it tomorrow.”
“Sounds like a good plan.”
“It does. Now, can you get me a beer?”
Parkowski cracked open her energy drink and logged into the internal Aering network.
She and DePresti had had a late night.
They had gotten up at six. DePresti looked no worse for the wear, but Parkowski was exhausted. She felt like she hadn’t slept at all. Thankfully, it was a slow day, so she could manage.
An energy drink would definitely help.
It took forever to log in to her machine. Parkowski leaned back in her chair and tried to process the last twenty-four hours. In some ways, it was an even more compelling mystery than the dragon appearing in the VR environment.
It was time to get to the bottom of it.
She was sure of what she had seen. The error messages were burned into her memory with indelible ink. Her boyfriend might question her, sure, but just like with the dragon Parkowski knew she wasn’t crazy.
Parkowski needed to bring this to someone at Aering, preferably Dr. Pham. But, first, she wanted to do a little research.
Once her computer finally logged her in and she was able to use it, she did just that.
