It was 10:45 on a mission day and the operator sitting in position number 260 was having an existential crisis. The Department was not paying him to have an existential crisis on their time, in fact it was barely paying him at all which, in combination with the unsatisfying and repetitive nature of his work contributed materially to his present condition. Once again he looked down at his watch and noted the time. 10:46. In accordance with procedure he was supposed to have stopped drinking at least twelve hours prior to coming into work that day, in fact he had finished the last of five neat glasses of whiskey at 22:53 the night before and so decided to delay logging into his position for another six minutes so he could continue to call himself a man of utmost integrity.

On the way to work that morning Operator 260 had driven past a highway patrol car and focused all his attention on giving the impression that he was completely sober. This is best accomplished, he had learned, by assuming an air of complete indifference. Exceed the speed limit by about 5 miles per hour - any more and you run the risk of being pulled over for speeding, but sticking assiduously to the limit when everyone else on the road takes it to be a mere suggestion is a signal that you are trying too hard to appear law-abiding. It had been 34 days now since anyone was picked up for a DUI on Department premises, an enlisted infantryman who guarded the gate at the Eastern compound and had since been replaced by a motion sensor and an underfed Doberman. Operator 260 had wanted to join the infantry once, at a point in his life where he could not obtain either a firearm or a large quantity of Valium, but the Department recruiters at the Army enlistment office had taken one look at him and concluded that at 5ft5 and 130 lbs he was born to be a desk murderer.

From the other side of the bay Operator 255 looked down at his watch pointedly. Operator 260 decided to power cycle one of his computers to make him look busy.
“These automatic updates again, you know they keep the system running on UTC so they always need to be rebooted right when shift starts…”
“That’s why if you’re not five minutes early you’re five minutes late.” Operator 255 shook his head disapprovingly. His eyes were spaced slightly too far apart meaning that at least one of them always seemed to be staring directly at Operator 260 even when he was ostensibly looking at his screen. It was never a welcoming kind of look either.
“There’s always some excuse with you isn’t there 260?”
“We’re on the same pay scale, 255.” It was 10:50.

The operator in position number 260 had a name once, but nobody cared to remember it much less care to use it. He signed it occasionally on legal documents and responded to it during infrequent phone calls to his mother. Otherwise, the use of one's personal name on the operations floor was always frowned upon by the Department. Learn someone's personal name and the next thing you know they might tell you about their spouse and kids, what football team they go for and how many fish they caught out on the lake that weekend. Build a feeling of rapport, of camaraderie. Become distracted from the stream of data flashing across your screen and ask an inane question about how the Lions are shaping up this season. Miss the one flashing red dot in the sea of flashing red dots that represented an active target and jeopardize the security of the entire Union then before you know it everything and everyone you ever knew and loved is reduced to a smouldering pile of ashes in a barren, irradiated wasteland that makes the Permian mass extinction event look like a seasonal flu outbreak.

Operator 260 entered his system credentials at 10:53 and began to set up the various programs he used to shift data around to his preferred arrangement. He spent a great deal of time making sure the margins of each window aligned perfectly with those on either side, each having precisely the same dimensions and position on the screen as in every previous operation he sat. It was comforting in some incomprehensible way to be able to arrange the screen the way he liked it, having the same pacifying effect on his natural nervous disposition within the workplace as his excessive alcohol consumption did outside of it. To his left, the operator in position 259 had already set up his workstation and was staring blankly at the screen waiting for something to happen. Operator 260 scowled. Operator 259 only ever took notice of activity to deliver the right excuse as to why Operator 260 was more qualified to handle it than he was.

Any attempt to describe the work carried out by the operators in positions 255 through 260 can be reduced to the same words as the most universal of human sexual practices: a series of repetitive motions of the hand and wrist. He copied data from one output field into another input field without modification, which was then quality-checked by another employee who had been doing the same thing for about one year longer and published in an identical format to the original data he had received with a wider distribution list. There was a common misconception among this class of operator that a machine could do the exact same job as them. The misconception was that such a machine had not yet been invented; a prototype had in fact been developed several years previously but the Department had assessed that it was more cost effective to continue to employ low-paid enlisted personnel for the indefinite future rather than pay the software licensing fees. The operators took some small comfort in the words painted on the door that led into the mission control room: What you do here matters! If they overlooked the fact that what they did there could also be accomplished by a cleverly written Python script, it must indeed “matter” to somebody or surely they would not be asked to do it.

“Good morning 260,” chirped Operator 258 through the headset, “How are you doing today?”
“I'm having an existential crisis,” he stated bluntly.
“Really?” Her eyes widened in feigned sympathy before continuing in a single breath. “My weekend was shit too, I just can't deal right now. Two of my friends are getting a divorce, you know, not like, I'm friends with the husband and the wife, just the wife, I mean like I know her and then this other guy I know who isn't married to her is also getting a divorce from his wife and I've been trying to tell him for months now that she's cheating on him but he ain't listening and still thinks they can reconcile but...”

“I went for a walk along the beach on Sunday afternoon and found a dying sea turtle,” said Operator 260 steadily, his eyes still fixed on his screen. “It was lying there on the sand, the tide was starting to come in and it couldn't even crawl a few extra inches onto the beach to stop the water filling its lungs. It was covered in these malignant tumours that had erupted over every point of exposed skin, and its shell was so encrusted in barnacles that you couldn't tell where one problem started and the other ended.”

Operator 258 said nothing. She racked her brains for a distantly related experience from her own life that she could use to lead the conversation back around to her present problems, but found nothing to draw upon there.

“I stopped for a while to look at that turtle. One of its eyes was so covered in these lumps that it had lost the ability to open or close it, so it was stuck in this half-open position where the sun had been slowly searing its retina away minute by minute as it lay out there. But the thing that really struck me is that it made no attempt to struggle against its fate. It wasn't lying there floundering pathetically, scraping its fins back and forth in some futile attempt to escape its own mortality. It just sat there and waited. Now I wouldn't go so far as to attribute any kind of sentience to this creature in the philosophical sense, I think therefore I am and all that, no. I freely acknowledge that I am projecting my own consciousness onto another being whose actions we can only assume to be based on primal instinct alone. But there was something almost defiant in its inaction. There was no hero here, charging bravely towards his own death because he had decided to lay down his own life in the pursuit of some higher purpose. There was no denial, no bargaining, no attempt to escape that which is coming for us all. There was no attempt to impart meaning onto the act of dying, it represented nothing other than the moment when a living creature's biological processes came to an end. And so I sat and watched, and waited, and when it finally died it took me a few minutes to be absolutely certain that it had really passed, because by this stage I could not have said whether the point of demarcation between life and death had become so narrow and precise that the moment had already gone by the time I had registered it, or that it had stretched out infinitely, encompassing the whole of our existence and that we were both dying together on that beach.”

Operator 258 had no response to this except to immediately change the subject back to something she could personally relate to.
“So anyway I was talking to my boyfriend last night about maybe moving in together, I don’t know if we’re moving too fast or whatever but it sure feels like he could be the one, I guess the only thing that bothers me is that I haven’t met his mom yet but he promised me that…”

Operator 260 stopped listening and mentally returned to the beach where he had found the dying turtle. He wondered what had happened to the turtle, whether the tide had washed it gently out to sea or whether it was still lying out there under the baking sun with a flock of seagulls fighting over the scraps of decomposing flesh hanging from its carcass. He found it calming in a way, to contemplate the scene over and over again, not as a memento mori to focus his mind towards the afterlife by accepting that one's present life is only fleeting, but simply to acknowledge that one's present life is only fleeting. In an alternate universe Operator 260 had crawled out of the ocean and died on the beach while the cancer-stricken sea turtle had paused to observe him on his afternoon walk. This thought also reassured him.

“Operator 260!” the Mission Commander shouted from the position behind him in either an enthusiastic greeting or a threat.  “You've logged into the terminal already, I see, how is today looking so far?”
“From a purely mission-focused perspective or more of a general overview?”
“That's good to hear. I'm great, thank you.”
“In that case it looks like another fine day to be in the service of the Land of the Free, Sir.”
The Mission Commander nodded approvingly. “You're absolutely right, it doesn't get any better than this!”
“No Sir,” replied Operator 260 with complete sincerity. “It really doesn't.”
The Mission Commander was pleased to hear the echo of his own opinion. He basked momentarily in the correctness of his observation before getting to the point.“Well I'm sorry to take you away from operations today but it has come to my attention that you're due for your annual polygraph re-evaluation.”
Operator 260 froze on the spot. “Really, Sir? Because it feels like just yesterday that I...”
The Mission Commander scowled. “What day is it today, 260?” he barked.
“It's a Tuesday, Sir. May 17th.”
“And what day comes before Tuesday the 17th of May?”
“Monday the 16th Sir.”
“And did you, at any point on Monday the 16th of May, undergo your annual polygraph re-evaluation?”
“No Sir, I did not.”
“Do not contradict me on my operations floor again.”