Medium shot of 3 men and a lady sitting at a table in a busy commissary cafeteria.
CHASE: You’re such a simp for Kansas, dude. (he laughs)
MANNY: I’m telling you, it’s win-win. They’ve got momentum and I’ve got them to kick the Pats’ asses with at least a 12 point spread. Plus I hedged on PlayBook so if I’m wrong, I’m still going to Disneyland!
CLAIRE: (silently eats her salmon salad)
CHASE: No way bro, they’re going down. I’ll see your Disneyland and–
A loud blaring tone over the intercom signals an announcement.
INTERCOM: Shift C.
ANDY: Chow down. Gonna be a hot one today. First Thursday of the month, ops get gnarly.
Claire gets up without a word and takes her tray to the bin.
MANNY: Bring it. And bring some imported beer Sunday too, ya deadbeat.
The three men rise, head to the bins and follow their colleagues down the corridor, through the retina scanners, onto the lift, down into level 4. They gather at the door to one of the training classrooms and take their seats with a dozen other operatives.
Charlie comes in, hair in a ponytail, clean and neat, and takes her spot behind the lectern.
CHARLIE: Good morning.
The assembled agents settle.
CHARLIE: Today’s field exercise will be multi-domain. We will be using the SPHYNX app to coordinate. Your devices have been updated with this and individualized notes for your role. You’ll be assigned to three groups.
Group Angler will be assigned to infosec. You’ll be given a handful of accounts on social media, some with existing presence and AI-gen backstories, some newly created burners.
Group Flyer, you’ll be in Northwest Phoenix, within a fixed 3-mile radius. Free to wander, but see your individual notes for suggested locales. Your roles may or may not be prescribed or improvised.
Group Dragnet, your parameters will be explained individually after this briefing. Your task is not to infiltrate general population but to spy on your associates in Angler and Flyer.
Please bring your attention in SPHYNX to the social node overlay tab, and the ideology heatmap. You’ll be given 40 minutes before deployment to explore these. The former allows you to hone in on arbitrary targets and pull up a nav graph of their primary relationships, their local associations, and any connections within the zone of interest. The latter allows you to connect any targets to a word cloud of trending topics, political and ideological affiliation, as well as areas of interest, hobbies, and so on.
Your objectives individually are in the notes app. The primary mission of today’s operation is to understand multiple domain awareness, reconnaissance, and practice staying in character while extracting information collectively to two ends: identify who is the mole, which one of you has already been assigned. And, determine who are most active in the greater Phoenix area in the anti-datacenter coalition that has been organizing protests.
Are there any questions?
The agents look around amongst each other to see who has any questions.
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