As a fast-riser within the aerospace company, she was angling for a promotion to a supervisory job within the next few years. Being late for her first mission wouldn’t necessarily kill her Aering career, but it definitely wouldn’t help it either.
She tapped her left foot on the floor, a nervous habit she had learned from her father, and waited for the idling cars in front of her to go forward.
Finally, the old Chevy SUV in front of her moved six feet. Parkowski breathed a sigh and let her foot off of the brake.
She took a moment to calm herself down and clear her head, taking in her surroundings. It was a beautiful day in Southern California. The sun shone brightly overhead and a slight breeze came in from the Pacific, seeping into her vehicle through the slightly-open windows.
Parkowski smiled. Just like the weather, everything was going to go well today. The mission was going to be a success, she was going to blow through its objectives and finish strong at its conclusion in the early part of the afternoon. Then, she would either go home and rest, or go out to dinner with her boyfriend and his military unit at the nearby Rock & Brews to celebrate a going-away.
Nothing was going to ruin her day.
After what seemed like an eternity, the traffic started moving again. As she drove she looked for the source of the delay but couldn’t find it. It was as if the collective sea of cars on the road had a mind of its own.
Parkowski got off the main road before taking a few back streets through a residential section of El Segundo to the Aering plant. She parked her car in the attached parking garage and made her way into the facility with plenty of time to spare.
“Morning, Bert,” she said to the security guard as she scanned her ID card at the reader at the entrance to her building.
“Good morning ma’am,” the elderly dark-skinned man replied from his desk. “How do you think your Birds are going to do this weekend?”
Parkowski gave a quick laugh, then shook her head. “I’m not sure. I think we’ve got a good chance against the Giants, it’s at home, but my boyfriend is worried. He thinks it’s a trap game.”
“I hope they win,” Bert responded. “My Rams are probably going to be in contention with New York for the seventh and final wild card.”
“Me too,” Parkowski said as she quickly stepped to the large, heavy door that controlled access to her part of the facility. She liked talking with the security team, especially football with Bert, but she was in a rush. “Have a good weekend.”
“You too, ma’am.”
Parkowski walked down a wide, nondescript hallway with windows at the top of the walls near the ceiling, allowing the sun’s morning rays to fully illuminate the space without the help of artificial light. The building was part of an old Hughes plant that had been bought by Aering when the former company went bankrupt twenty-five years ago. Most of the multi-building facility was devoted to spacecraft design and production, but this particular structure was home to the ILIAD project and the control of the ACHILLES robots.
She turned the corner and kept walking until she found the women’s locker room. There, she changed from her street clothes into a skintight black turtleneck and leggings. Parkowski thought that they looked like workout clothes, only tighter and made of a strange material that seemed to attract lint and dirt like a magnet.
Parkowski checked herself in the mirror. Her dark brown eyes looked tired, and the light makeup she had put on this morning didn’t do much to hide it. She didn’t feel particularly exhausted, but the bags under her eyes gave it away.
She made a mental note to go to bed earlier tonight regardless of her evening plans. It had been a long week. Hopefully, it didn’t affect her performance on today’s mission.
Shoeless, Parkowski went through an airlock at the far side of the locker room into a semi-clean room.
Originally a spacecraft high bay development area with forty-foot ceilings, it had been repurposed as a command center for the ACHILLES project. The space was sectioned off into multiple segments: a large cube farm for the scientists who were in theory guiding the mission, but in practice just reviewing data after it came in, a smaller one for the engineers working on the hardware and software of the ACHILLES robots, a lab area for the technicians, and a large section in the middle which appeared to be a small metal “stage” raised above the floor that almost looked out of place in the high-tech setting.
Just outside the high bay was a hallway with offices for the senior staff, as well as a pair of controlled rooms with cipher locks: one actively used and owned by NASA, another one, inactive, for a classified program that used to occupy the ACHILLES mission space.
