About ten people were in the room, most of whom stood around the one person hooked up to the VR gear up the stage. A large clock hung in one corner like in her high school gym. Above the stage was a 100” flat-panel monitor that displayed a rocky landscape, obviously the surface of Venus from the sensors of the robots.
It was seven fifty-five AM. She had made it.
Her supervisor and mentor stood underneath the giant television screen that towered over him. He smiled as Parkowski approached. “How are you doing this morning, Grace?” Dr. Jacob Pham asked.
“Just fine, Jake,” Parkowski responded. “How are you doing?”
The older Vietnamese-American man shrugged. “Can’t complain. Another day, another dollar.”
“You’re not excited?” she asked.
He shook his head, then thought for a second. “I’m not excited for myself, but I’m definitely excited for you,” he told Parkowski, who at five-foot-eight stood a head taller than him. “I’ve been in and out of the gear and walking on Venus for the better part of two weeks. It’s no longer as new and fascinating as it was the first time I was in.”
Pham paused and took a breath. “It’s just after eight and your shift isn’t until ten. Let’s get you set up and we’ll walk through your mission before you have to get on the sticks. Does that sound good?”
“Sounds great,” she said with a smile.
Parkowski followed Pham to a rack of equipment, the closer of two in a row. The older man pulled out a pair of slip-on shoes made of an exotic rubbery material and handed them to her. “Put these on first,” he said. “Remember, just like going into a clean room…”
“Bottom to top,” she finished with a slight smile. As she sat down and put them on, Pham walked to a nearby chest and pulled out a pair of what looked like soccer shin guards. “Do you want me to help you put them on?”
She nodded. “Of course, boss.”
He bent down and strapped the attachments to Parkowski’s legs — not the first time he had helped her suit up. When she had first described this whole process to DePresti, he had been defensive. “So, you’re wearing your Catwoman suit, and this dude’s just feeling you up and putting all of the gear on you.”
Parkowski had laughed. “He’s five-foot-nothing, old enough to be my father, and on top of that, he’s been married for twenty years… to another guy. You don’t have anything to worry about, Mike. It’s just part of the job. We all help each other get ready to get on the sticks.”
Pham finished putting on the shin guards and returned to the large locker. He came back with a pair of wristbands. “Go ahead and put these on.”
She slipped them on, then reached over and pulled out a pair of custom-fit gloves labeled with her last name. “Where are the helmets?” Parkowski asked, not seeing the last part of her gear.
“Over there, at the rack near the stage.” Pham pointed in that direction. “The techs did a double-check last night in preparation for the missions we are running today.”
Parkowski nodded, then walked to the second stand of equipment. Up on the raised platform she saw another operator, Caleb Marx, take a couple of steps.
The ACHILLES probes were controlled by a top-of-the-line virtual reality system. It had full haptic feedback in the gloves and shoes and partial feedback throughout the skintight suit that Parkowski wore.
The custom-built headset, a lightweight fourth-generation model, provided a 120° field of vision. The gloves, shoes, and bands around her wrists and ankles provided sensor readings.
Those inputs were transmitted via wired signals to a large rack of high-performance computers near the raised platform. From there, they ran through a landline to NASA’s White Sands ground station in Las Cruces, New Mexico. At that location, it was uploaded to the Monitoring and Information Communication System (MICS) satellite network until it reached a high-speed communications relay at the Earth-Moon L2 point. That relay blasted a tightbeam signal at Venus.
There, it was received in synchronous orbit by a small communications satellite placed there by the ILIAD probe and sent to the ground, where it was broadcast to the ground and the ACHILLES robots. Inside, in the main computer system, the commands inputted by the user were mirrored by the robot’s internal control systems.
Since Venus was nearing its closest approach to the Earth the total delay time was a little under two minutes. The computer system that powered the virtual reality environment was able to smooth that delay out to just a second or two through filtering and predictive processing. It calculated two to three dozen possible next frames for the user, so when the VR gear sent a command, it was able to give a response before the signal bounced to Venus and back.
Parkowski found her VR headset and put it on to check the fit. When it was strapped over her eyes and ears, she was completely immersed in the Venusian environment. Now, however, it was completely black.
