He didn’t say anything, so she continued. “All of the logs were gone. Mine, other people’s, everything was erased.”
Pham looked confused. “They’re there,” he said to Parkowski. “I looked last night, and all of the logs were where they were supposed to be.”
“Well, they’re not now,” Parkowski said. “I just peeked to see if I could see them from the end of my mission yesterday and it was all gone.”
He put his reading glasses on. “Let me take a look,” Pham said, turning to his computer and typing away furiously. A few moments later he turned back to her, seemingly perplexed. “You’re right, they’re not there.”
Parkowski gave a slight smile. “I know.”
He leaned back in his chair, deep in thought, and then leaned forward. “A-ha,” Pham said, to himself more than to Parkowski. “I remember now. The NASA guy, Dr. Hughes, told me that they took all of the logs to look for an error in the communications system.”
“Took them?” Parkowski repeated.
“Yeah, there was some kind of issue with MICS,” the Aering Ph.D. told her. “And they wanted to use all of the logs to help troubleshoot it.”
“And they deleted our copies?” Parkowski said, a little annoyed.
Pham shrugged. “They’re the customer, Grace. They’re paying for this whole mission. If they want the logs, they get the logs, and we lose the local copy. It’s part of the contract.”
That didn’t sit well with her. “What if we needed those logs to troubleshoot our system?”
The older man sat quietly for a moment and then answered her question. “I believe they are still in the facility, in the NASA room right down the hall. The entire ILIAD system is currently operational, I even took a spin with an ACHILLES robot early this morning. If we need the logs, we’ll go through NASA to get them.”
Parkowski crossed her arms. “I don’t like it.”
“Sorry Grace, but that’s just how it is,” Pham said. “I wish I had a better answer to give you but I can’t. Sometimes the customer, in this case NASA, does things that make absolutely no sense, or in other cases are directly harmful to their own mission. All we can do is point out the flaws in their plan and hope for the best.” He took a breath. “I’ve polled the other operators and no one else has seen a dragon or any other abnormal graphical anomalies. It’s only happened to you, unfortunately, but I’m confident that everything has been resolved.”
Parkowski nodded. She had one more question for him. “Have you ever heard of the term ‘Bronze Knot’ in the context of the ILIAD mission?”
Unlike her question about the logs, Parkowski could have sworn she saw a hint of recognition on Dr. Pham’s usually inscrutable face when she said the words “Bronze Knot,” but it was gone as fast as it had appeared.
He gave her an odd look. “No, I don’t think so,” he told Parkowski. “Where did you see that?”
She decided to give him part of the truth.
Parkowski felt a little guilty about lying, probably a result of her Polish Catholic upbringing, but some part of her decided that she needed to protect herself. “My last mission, when we lost connection after I released the quadcopter, there was an error message in the VR environment.” She didn’t tell him about the mention of Bronze Knot in the logs.
“What did it say?”
It was burned into her memory by now. “ERROR: SPECIAL ACCESS PROGRAM — BRONZE KNOT — SPECIAL ACCESS REQUIRED,” Parkowski told him, including the punctuation marks.
Pham frowned. “I’ve worked in that world before, the same one your boyfriend works in, and there’s absolutely no link to the ILIAD program. I’m sure of it. I wouldn’t have taken this job otherwise. I got very tired of the classified world.”
He was lying. Pham wouldn’t meet her eyes.
Then, he looked right at her. “Are you sure that’s what you saw?”
All of the men in my life are questioning me, Parkowski thought as a hint of a smile came to her face. Everyone thought she was crazy. “Yes.” She paused. “And I clearly remember the words 'Bronze' and 'Knot.' They seem so random, so weird and out-of-context, that I committed them to memory.”
The older engineer laughed. “Special access program names tend to be like that, but I’ve never heard of a Bronze Knot.” He took a breath. “I’ve been read into some SAPs in the past and have a pretty good idea of what’s going on in the company with regards to our special programs. It sounds like we have another weird error, much like the dragon you saw, probably bringing together some unrelated elements to unfortunately give you some weird visuals in the VR environment. I’ll bring it up — quietly — with our developer Panspermia.”
“Thank you,” Parkowski said. “You’ve made me feel a little better.”
That last part was a lie. If anything, she felt worse.
“No problem,” Pham said. “Anything else?”
She shook her head.
“See you at the three o’clock.”
The next morning, she went for a quick run to clear her head.
As Parkowski ran through the streets of Marina Del Rey, she started to think of a two-pronged approach to figuring out what Bronze Knot was.
