She walked towards the Aering building’s entrance. Who could be visiting her? Hopefully, it wasn’t DePresti coming to try and mend their relationship. She still loved him — that word had been a big step a few months back — and wanted to be with him, but right now she needed a little space. He knew the building, had spent a lot of time there in preparation for the ILIAD launch, but hadn’t been there in months. She couldn’t think of any other potential suspects.
When she got to the entryway, there was an older man with an elaborate mustache sitting on a couch, reading a magazine. A small briefcase sat next to him. The security guard turned to her. “Ma’am, this man came to see you,” he said. “He’s got a badge.”
“Thanks, I’ll go talk with him,” Parkowski said. She walked up to the newcomer. “Hey, I’m Grace Parkowski, you came to see me?”
The man looked up from his months-old Sports Illustrated. “Oh, hello,” he said in a deep voice, putting the magazine down and standing up. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small black wallet. Flipping it over, Parkowski saw a picture of the man with some writing next to it — an ID card — and a gold badge. “Special Agent Hollis Everson, AFOSI/PJ,” he said, extending a hand. “Pleasure to meet you.”
“You as well,” she replied, unsettled. Why was a federal agent here? “Sorry, but I don’t know what this is about.”
“That’s ok,” Everson said. “I need to talk to you, but somewhere more secure. Can we go get a conference room or something?”
Parkowski nodded, still unsure. She worried about why this man came to pay her a visit. “I guess so, I had a busy afternoon planned, but I guess it can wait.”
“This shouldn’t take too long,” the man said.
She got him a visitor’s badge and took Everson back through the facility. “I only have a Secret clearance,” Parkowski told him as they walked, “and I can only get a conference room cleared to that level.”
“That’s good enough,” the older man replied.
Where she would have gone left to the ILIAD high bay, she took a right and went back to the “classified area” that she did have access to. It was sparsely populated — not much at the Aering plant was done at the Secret leve;, but they did need an area to process that kind of data — so she found a small unoccupied conference room fairly easily.
Once they got in, Everson closed the door. “I’ll try and keep my time here short,” he said. “But we have a security concern that we need to take care of.”
“What is it?” Parkowski asked, her heart racing. Did they know that she had gotten into the secure room out in the senior engineers’ hallway?
The older man didn’t respond at first, reaching down into his briefcase for something. “Nothing you did,” he said gently, noticing her concern as he removed a couple of printouts, “but more what happened to you.”
Parkowski was still confused until he flipped over one of the pieces of paper. It was a screenshot of the error message from her second mission in the VR environment. ERROR: SPECIAL ACCESS PROGRAM — BRONZE KNOT — SPECIAL ACCESS REQUIRED — the same words now burned into her memory. “Unfortunately, you saw this when you were doing whatever it is you do virtually on Venus,” Everson told her. “And you weren’t supposed to see this.”
“What exactly is it?” Parkowski asked. “It’s been bugging me, I have no idea what it is, but I’ve seen it twice now in the Venus environment.”
“Twice?”
“Well, once in the VR setup, which is what you have here,” she explained, “and again when I went through the logs for my first mission.”
Everson laughed. “Well, this should cover both times then.”
Parkowski tilted her head. “What do you mean?”
He pulled out another piece of paper. “This is a nondisclosure agreement,” Everson said, reaching into the briefcase again, “and this is an unauthorized disclosure form.”
“What does that even mean?” she asked.
“Let’s start with the second one,” the AFOSI agent said. “That means you and the government, which in this case means me, agree that you saw something you weren’t supposed to.”
“What exactly did I see?”
Everson looked at the door and then back at her. “In this case, you saw the name of a special access program,” he told her. “In this case, an unacknowledged one where even the name is classified.”
“Why?”
He laughed. “I was told a long time ago to not speculate about stuff you don’t know or aren’t cleared to. I suggest that’s what you do here.”
“Ok,” she said, unconvinced. “What about the other one?”
“This one you need to sign,” Everson told her as he pointed at the piece of paper. “It says you won’t talk about this program with anyone else unless you want a monetary punishment or imprisonment.”
She took a second to let that sink in, then responded. “No.”
“No?”
“No, I’m not signing that,” Parkowski said, pushing the piece of paper away without reading it. “There’s no reason for me to sign it.”
