After checking her emails, she walked down the hallway towards the room. It had tall ceilings and was well-lit throughout. There were eight offices, four on each side, with the NASA room at the very end of the hallway before it veered off in a 90-degree turn to the left towards a different high bay.
The door itself was not like those of Pham, Rosen, and the other senior engineers’ offices. While the other doors were wooden with brass doorknobs, the NASA room’s door was metal and painted a matte black. Instead of a doorknob,it had a brushed steel handle with a cipher lock above it. There were five metal buttons with the numbers 1 through 5 next to them in descending order.
Parkowski had never seen a lock like that before, but she assumed that a multi-digit code needed to be inputted for it to open. Whether it was alarmed or not, she had no way of knowing. She knew the risks — there was no valid reason for her to be opening the door and she would at the very minimum get a security violation or write-up. She could be fired in a heartbeat.
However, it was a risk she had to take. Something was wrong here, something that was a risk to the mission, and by association, her livelihood and reputation.
Parkowski had to get to the bottom of it.
Her plan was fairly simple in theory, but complex in execution.
The first part wasn’t too bad. Over the last few months, she had seen people go in and out of the locked room. They didn’t seem too careful about trying to shield the code as they input it; why would someone want to get into the room who didn’t have access? She could easily walk by, strike up a conversation with someone while they typed the code in, and surreptitiously make a mental note of the code.
The next part was a little more complicated. Parkowski was going to have to find a good time to be able to type the code in herself without being noticed, either by another human or by some kind of active or passive security system, do what she had to do inside, and get out cleanly.
She was no spy, no secret agent, and had no clandestine skills. Her one claim to fame was being able to sneak quietly out of her parents’ house in suburban Wilmington to go out partying with her friends during high school. But Parkowski was smart, and more importantly, she was observant. Maybe she was overconfident, but she knew she was able to get into the room.
Thankfully, she had no mission to plan for, so she had plenty of free time. No one would notice the nice, young female engineer making the rounds to all her friends and colleagues and being social, and definitely not spending too much time in the senior engineers’ hallway.
But, there was more traffic in that hallway than she expected. The special projects division’s high bay was the next one over, and for whatever reason quite a few people were traveling through the ILIAD mission’s high bay to that one. Unfortunately, none of them seemed to be using the NASA room’s door.
Parkowski decided to start checking the hallway scientifically, with a pattern. She would get up from her cubicle, speak briefly with Kim or one of her other friends in the cube farm, and then meander over to the hallway and walk towards the NASA room. Just past the door, and the bend in the hallway, was a water fountain. She would walk nonchalantly past the door, take a sip of water, and then walk back as slowly as she could.
She did this every half hour on Wednesday and Thursday. There was a lot of traffic in the hallway, but very little around the NASA door. Rosen slipped in there, twice, as did Pham a few times. She saw a few people associated with the special projects division go in once as a group but didn’t catch their exit.
Friday confirmed her suspicions. Dr. Rosen entered the room at noon on the dot. That made three days in a row.
Parkowski surmised that he went in there for some kind of meeting. Why else would he go in at the same time each day?
Making a leap in logic, she assumed that he would be there on Monday. This couldn’t be easier. All she had to do was walk up to him as he typed in the code, strike up a conversation, and take note of what he inputted. Then, come back later when no one was around and input the code herself.
Parkowski bounded into work on Monday, her plan set and ready to go.
The building was a ghost town — no ILIAD missions were planned. But as she walked in, she saw Dr. Rosen and Dr. Pham up on the raised stage, having an animated conversation with each of them holding a different piece of VR control hardware.
She shrugged and went to a cube to check her emails.
At eleven fifty-five, she got up from her desk and walked out into the hallway. Parkowski got a sip of water from the fountain and turned around to see if Dr. Rosen would go to the NASA door.
He didn’t.
She waited a few minutes, but the hallway was empty.
Parkowski was a little surprised — he was off his schedule — but played it off, walking nonchalantly back to her desk.
This was not good.
She was already off her baseline plan.
