Parkowski looked at the list that DePresti had given her and tried the first one, “The Red Planet,” an obvious reference to Mars — the colonization of which was an obsession of OuterTek’s founder.
It didn’t work.
She sighed again and tried the second one, “Highway to Mars.”
Same with the third one, “Fourth Rock from the Sun,” and every other one on the list.
None of them worked.
I should have known as much, she thought, reaching into the bag for an energy bar and water. Remembering what video game was coming out next? That was something her boyfriend would have burned into his memory. Her birthday? Sure. But recollecting a Wi-Fi password he had used for months was too much to ask.
Parkowski selected a different wireless network and went through the list of passwords again. And, again, none of them granted her access.
She tried the other three networks with the same result.
The Aering engineer rolled her eyes. What a waste of time, she thought. Hopefully, Mike would be more successful inside.
Parkowski ate her energy bar and a bag of grapes while she watched the company’s employees file out of the building in groups of twos and threes before walking to their vehicles in the parking garage across the street. She tried all of the passwords on the “guest” network for a second time, but still, none of them worked.
Something nagged at her, though. A voice in the back of her head was telling her that she hadn’t exhausted all of her options. But she had, hadn’t she? She had been through every single permutation of passwords with networks. And none of them had worked.
She got the notepad back out and looked through them. DePresti’s handwriting was strangely clear and easy to read — he might be the only engineer on the planet with good penmanship. Parkowski went down the list and checked for any typos or misread words, but there were none. None of them worked.
“Fuck,” Parkowski said to herself, slamming the keyboard with her fist in frustration. She didn’t like to feel helpless, but here she was, stuck in an old Chevy truck in the OuterTek parking lot.
Parkowski went through the list again. She had the feeling that something was wrong with the passwords — that DePresti hadn’t remembered them correctly — but nothing jumped out at her as being incorrect.
She went line-by-line, word-by-word. Same thing. All twelve phrases were logical passwords for a space- and Mars-obsessed company to use.
Parkowski slammed the laptop closed. Nothing was going right.
Suddenly, she had a revelation, based on an experience that Parkowski had had her first week in Los Angeles.
Parkowski had been talking with Rachel Kim and another female Aering engineer over lunch in the Rayleigh cafeteria about her commute into work from her apartment in Marina del Rey down to the Aering plant south of LAX. She had described her route to the point where she got onto I-405 South, “the highway,” as she had called it.
Kim and the other woman had quickly corrected her.
“Freeway,” Kim had said. “In California, they are all ‘freeways.’”
“What do you mean?” Parkowski had asked. “A highway is a highway.”
“Unless it’s in California, where it’s called a freeway,” the other engineer had said.
DePresti, like Parkowski, was from the East Coast and called an interstate a “highway.”
OuterTek was located in Hawthorne, California. Where an interstate was called a
She grabbed the notepad and looked at the list. Where had she seen “highway?”
The second entry was “Highway to Mars.”
Parkowski grabbed the pen and scribbled out “Highway.” In its place, she wrote “Freeway.”
She opened the laptop back up and selected the guest network.
“Freeway.to… Mars,” Parkowski said to herself as she inputted it on the HP’s keyboard.
It took a few minutes, but finally, at last she was connected to the wireless network.
“Yes!” she said as she pumped her fist into the air. Parkowski was in.
She opened up a browser window.
There was a loud knock on the Silverado’s door.
Parkowski jumped. The laptop went a few inches into the air and then back down into her lap.
She put the laptop on the driver’s seat and looked to see if DePresti was back from his site visit to the facility.
It wasn’t him.
Instead, a harried-looking young Asian woman stood there, her arms crossed and an unhappy expression on her face.
Parkowski’s heart raced with panic. Had the real reason for her boyfriend’s visit to the OuterTek facility been discovered? She carefully rolled down the passenger’s side window. “Can I help you?”
“I need you to move,” the woman said, obviously annoyed. “The lead singer of the band Muse is coming to visit our founder, and this is the spot that I told his driver to park in.”
Parkowski blinked. “What?”
“You need to move your truck,” the woman said. “Now.”
She didn’t want to cause any trouble. The last thing that she needed was for the other woman to call security.
