Parkowski took a breath. “Then, once they landed, the senior engineers like,” she paused, “Dr. Pham,” she paused again. Just saying his name made her feel awful, a sick feeling at the bottom of her stomach. “They did all of the initialization and checkout stuff for the two robots and ground support gear while we finished our training. Then, once the ACHILLES units were calibrated and ready to go, we — the junior engineers — started operating them.”
Chang nodded.
She then went into a rapid-fire summary of the last two months, starting with her first mission in the virtual reality environment and encountering the simulated dragon. Parkowski then told Chang about all of the references to Bronze Knot showing up in the logs and inside of the environment itself. The man nodded, this was a familiar topic to him.
“And this is where I started bringing Mike in,” she told Chang. “I asked him to start looking around on base for any references to Bronze Knot.”
“Were there any?” he asked DePresti.
“Nope,” the Space Force captain said. “At least, not right away.”
She told Chang about the secure room down the hall from the high bay and her late-night break-in. Parkowski kept going, telling the rest of her story until she asked Dr. Pham just yesterday to meet up with her and DePresti and finally fess up about his involvement in Bronze Knot.
Chang put a hand up. “I’m going to go grab a beer,” he told the other two. “Do either of you want anything?”
“No,” DePresti and Parkowski both said.
He came back a moment later with a can of PBR. “Ok, keep going.”
“Do you want me to take this part?” DePresti asked her.
She nodded.
DePresti told Chang about the pier, their escape, and then the two surprisingly brief car chases, one through El Segundo and the other through the outskirts of San Bernardino.
“Holy shit,” Chang said once DePresti had finished. “And then you came here?”
“Yes,” Parkowski said. “And we’re not sure what to do next.”
Chang sat up in his chair and took a sip of the beer. “Are you looking for advice then?”
Parkowski and DePresti both nodded affirmatively.
“Ok, so here’s what I think is going on, and what we should do next.”
Chang took another sip of beer.
“So, you two probably know this already, but you’ve stumbled onto something big. And bad.”
“No shit,” Parkowski said.
Chang nodded in agreement. “It has to be something like a faked Apollo mission, or the CIA killing JFK, or anything along those lines. The levels of security, the quick response to Grace’s incursion into the secure room, we’re dealing with either a high-functioning government agency or its private equivalent.”
“What do you mean, high-functioning government agency?” Parkowski asked.
The short man laughed and pounded the rest of his beer. “Most of the government is beyond fucked-up. The majority of the federal government is a jobs program, first and foremost. Every single member agency of the intelligence community is absolute trash. However, there are smaller, less well-known government entities out there that do this kind of thing.”
“What kind of thing?”
Chang laughed. “A lot of different things, actually, but what it really comes down to is secret keeping.”
He threw his empty beer can away. “Information is power. It’s always been the case, from the ancient Egyptian priests being able to predict the flooding of the Nile to the high-tech information warfare that took place during Operation Desert Storm. What did the U.S.-led coalition forces take out first? The tanks, planes, and guns? No, they went after Saddam’s C2 structure, removing the Iraqi military’s ability to receive reports from the field and give orders to their forces.”
“What does that have to do with the U.S. government?” Parkowski asked.
“The U.S. government hoards information. Always has, always will, it’s their best chance at staying a step ahead of everyone else, foreign and domestic. They hide that information in classification schemes, HIPAA laws, the Privacy Act, and more or less give themselves a monopoly on controlling that data.” Chang paused to take a breath, then resumed his monologue. “But, what happens when someone not in the government gets a hold of a valuable piece of information? Something so important that would put the ability of the U.S. federal government to either rule its own citizens or present our image as the ‘city on the hill,’ the ‘world policeman,’ to the rest of the world in jeopardy.”
“They have a problem,” Parkowski answered quietly.
“Bingo,” Chang replied. “They have to get information supremacy back. That piece of data cannot be released free into the wild. It’s why the intelligence community went so hard after Assange and Snowden.”
“So who does it then?”
Chang laughed. “To be honest, I don’t know for sure. But I know that organizations dedicated to removal — of both people, objects, and information — exist.”
