She switched to the second ACHILLES unit, making sure that the sensors on the first one were still active so that the scientists could get all of their readings.
ACHILLES 2 was inside of a network of slot canyons to the far east of its final destination. Parkowski had calculated the distance to be over a dozen kilometers from the current location of ACHILLES 1, but she knew now that number was too low. The canyons were dense, similar to the dry riverbeds of the American West, but they had been created by planetary tectonics rather than running water.
Some of the twisting routes that she had created in her planning software were already not possible. One of the passageways between two canyons that she had hoped to use was blocked with boulders.
Parkowski sighed and pulled up her map within the VR interface. The mapping of this area wasn’t as detailed as she would have liked, but it was enough. She manually changed some of the waypoints, adding an extra fifteen minutes to her mission, and started on her route.
While she walked, she called over the net to Pham. “Jake, I’ve made some slight changes to the mission route. Adding fifteen minutes and four seconds, but still within the time margin.”
“Copy, Grace, thank you, let me know if anything else changes,” Pham replied.
The path she had chosen was a roundabout one. She went away from the final waypoint before crossing back and taking a parallel, unblocked canyon in the correct direction.
When she was four kilometers away, she started to get an error message. Pulling up the logs, Parkowski saw what the problem was.
One of the robot’s leg actuators was malfunctioning. The control system that told the right leg’s joints to bend and push forward in a walking motion was throwing up all kinds of error codes, some of which Parkowski had never seen before.
It was the moment when Aering management’s decision to use engineers as the ACHILLES unit’s operators paid off. Parkowski opened up the code for the leg’s control system and scanned it while pulling up a display of the ACHILLES 2’s sensor feeds. She called out on the net that she had an issue, but everything was under control.
Comparing a time-series data plot with the expected output from the system’s block diagram, she found the culprit. One of the sensors in the robot’s leg gave an incorrect output. Parkowski tried to change the gain, but it had no effect. Instead, she told the control system to just ignore the sensor and use the other ones embedded in the leg for feedback.
It worked. She was on her way again, the entire episode having taken just four minutes, which she could easily make up.
As Parkowski came out of the canyon, she increased her speed slightly.
The system didn’t handle it well. For the first time in the entire mission, she started to experience some lag.
“What’s my total lag?” she asked over the radio.
“One minute, forty seconds,” Pham replied. “You should be fine.”
“I’m seeing a lot more than that.”
“Copy, continue and see if it smoothes out.”
It did. As she reached the edge of the crater, the sluggishness of the system and the associated graphical bugs disappeared.
Parkowski finished the mission with ten minutes to spare. As the technicians removed her gear, she saw that all of the eyes in the high bay were on her.
She smiled, and as soon as she was able, left the high bay. She checked her phone — DePresti wanted to do dinner.
While she was still annoyed with him, they needed to talk. She texted him back and suggested a Korean BBQ place they both enjoyed. Parkowski then left and went home. Her after-action report could wait until tomorrow.
They ate outside on the patio. The conversation started with small talk, both of them being polite, before they got into a more complex discussion about Bronze Knot.
Parkowski was defensive; she hadn’t learned anything new about the special access program and its relation to ILIAD, and DePresti couldn’t understand why she couldn’t just let it go. “Grace, it sounds like you had a good mission today,” he told her. “You were able to troubleshoot on the fly and fix a problem all by yourself. Nothing weird happened. No dragons, no aliens, no weird error codes, no strange special programs, nothing. You should be celebrating, not beating yourself up for not figuring out this mystery.”
“You just don’t understand,” she said. “The entire leadership team was there, watching me, waiting to see if I mess up or screw up the whole program. And, yeah, I did fine this time, but who knows what’ll happen the next time? I need to know what’s going on so I can prepare in case I see anything else strange. I hate not knowing everything going on.”
“Maybe you don’t need to know everything.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, raising her tone slightly.
