You pull your t-shirt over your head as you slam the door to your bunkroom behind you. You’re running a bit late for your shift. You need to swing by the food dispenser on your way to the ops room. You missed breakfast yesterday and recall the resulting pounding headache you had by lunchtime.

What to have? Bircher muesli, the yoghurt pot? Nope, it’s going to have to be the bacon and egg muffin. You think about your order, holding it clearly in your mind before pushing it through to the food station, then make your way down the stairs to the shuttle stop outside. You pause, concentrate and envisage a shuttle car arriving to take you to the ops room via the food station. After a couple of minutes a car comes along. It’s empty, which is a relief. The door flips open like the unfolding of a beetle's wingcase. You climb in and confirm your route and destination verbally.

The shuttle car pulls off and you stare mindlessly out the window. The rocky landscape starts to zip by as the car picks up speed. You observe the various uniformed personnel busily swarming around the base, attending to different vehicles or preparing to go out beyond the wire. Even over the Strauss being played inside the car, you can hear the distant roar of aircraft engines being revved in anger. You watch three aircraft take off in quick succession from the aerodrome.

The shuttle car comes to a gentle halt and you hop out and jog to the food station. The screen above the dispenser on the left is displaying your name. You walk to it and a warm paper parcel is waiting for you in the mouth of the dispenser’s shute. You grab it and get back in the car. As you lean into the seat and unwrap your breakfast, the Strauss pauses and a message comes through the speakers reminding you that eating in shuttle cars can make a mess or create unpleasant odours for future passengers. You decide to ignore the advice.

By the time you’ve finished your bacon and egg muffin, the shuttle car has pulled up outside the low level sprawl of temporary buildings which accommodates the ops room. You run up the path to the door, noticing a cleanerbot zig-zagging around the perimeter of the buildings. You toss the crumpled, greasy paper in which your breakfast was wrapped in its general direction before pushing open the door. One minute to spare before you’re officially late for your shift.

The room is a hive of activity. Military and civilian personnel sit at desks staring at monitors, with others striding around purposefully between them. There is a low buzz of chatter. An officer walks past you, in his pristine uniform. The creases down the sleeves of his light blue shirt look like they’ve been pressed by a precision robot, which they probably were. He glances at you and furrows his eyebrows. You look down at your t-shirt and notice the ketchup stain on your chest. You mentally shrug. You were recruited for your cognitive abilities and willingness to have various implants, not your sartorial elegance.

You survey the room. Over in one corner, you see the door you’re looking for. You make your way over to it and step into the small room. It is darker inside, and the atmosphere is almost tangible, a fug of body odour and stale coffee. There are two couches positioned next to each other, like the type you might see in a psychiatrist’s surgery. Lying on one the couches is a figure, seemingly catatonic. Every so often their hands or feet twitch. You lie down on the couch next to the figure and pull your glasses out of your hoodie pocket. Time to get yourself jacked up to the system. You put your glasses on and feel with your mind for a connection with the network. While you are doing this, you go through your mantra to yourself. Starting to prepare yourself to receive data.

It is by will alone I set my mind in motion…

You let your body relax and then you feel it, your brain seems to jolt as you begin to see the world around you. A tapestry of environments, cyber, electronic, physical. All depicted as one large network of data, flowing from nexus to nexus. Even though it is vast and complex, you are able to comprehend it at an intuitive level. You sense it, not just visually, but you can feel it, hear it, even smell it. And you can manipulate it, roam around it - travelling without moving.

At the moment, you are viewing it in its entirety from outside, giving you a feeling of vertigo. You need to enter it, so you will yourself into the data flow. You can feel it, physically pulsing through you, all its different flavours. There is data from the myriad networks utilised by the military forces operating across the AOR. You are receiving feeds from the communications infrastructure, the full range of deployed sensors, all the network traffic across the system. You can’t perceive all of it in detail, but with support from AI, you can understand its flow, gauge its health, see any problems and respond to them or direct resources to deal with them.

You feel another conscious presence alongside you and feel its thoughts enter your mind.

Ah, you’re here at last. I thought I was going to be trapped in here forever.

I’m only a couple minutes late. Anything to report?

There’s something weird going on with the mesh network we have on the ground. A few of the nodes are acting strange, but I haven’t been able to get to the bottom of it. I’ve already dispatched a ground patrol to go and make a physical check.

Okay. I’ll look into it.

Great. I’m clocking off then. Anna will be here to relieve you at lunchtime.

Got it. Oh, can you clear up your coffee cups on the way out. They’re starting to make the room stink.

And then you are alone, just you and the data.

You start to concentrate on the ground mesh network that’s used to provide edge computing capabilities to all of the deployed platforms and systems operating across the AOR. There are quite often problems with individual nodes. They have a tendency to be squashed by large trees or inhabited by squirrels, but the network was engineered with a high degree of redundancy. Problems with nodes can easily be circumvented by redistributing the load. You start to travel through the stream of data coming from the mesh network, following it from node to node, like a shark hunting its prey.

You reach one node and sniff. The scent coming from it reminds you of something. You’ve smelt it before. It’s sweet, which normally indicates everything is fine, but there’s something artificial about it. Candyfloss, that’s what it smells like. You try and recall any previous occasions you have come across that smell. It has a strong association for you, but what with? You examine some of the diagnostic data coming from the hub, sifting through it, looking at its patterns, feeling its texture. It appears normal, in fact it has the appearance of textbook typical data. This in itself makes you suspicious.

Then you remember the smell. The last time you came across it was when you were training with synthetic data. Someone must be generating synthetic data for the network node and injecting it into the system somehow, presumably to cover up its real output. You’re not sure how this could be done. The AI intrusion detection system should have noticed this and brought it to the attention of your colleague on the previous shift.

You need to get closer to the network node in question, so you push yourself inside the node itself, feeling all of its major components, its circuits, its chips, its ports. Something about one of the ports doesn’t feel right, like a tiny stone in your shoe. You realise someone must be plugged into the network node directly. That’s how they’re doing it. Your instinct now is to defend the system. Who knows what they might have been able to insert onto it. Before you close the node down, you issue a short non-lethal burst of electricity across its surface. Anyone in physical contact with it should just have received a nasty surprise.

Having sorted the immediate problem, you emerge out of the node, rising higher and higher. You need to see the network as a whole again, restoring its functionality, tracing any malware and making sure it hasn’t been compromised elsewhere. You gaze down on the network, like so many neurons connected, fizzing with seemingly random activity. For a moment, you consider how your own brain would appear to an outside observer. Thoughts flit unbidden across your mind.

This is my morning, my day begins. I wonder what’s for lunch.