Camp Zester, USA

Standing there with everyone else, swaying with the erratic movement, it really came to me with a stark realization that I was mostly surrounded by women. Sure, it's one thing to be on a bus or in line, but with bunks, it was starting to really sink in that (barring some serious oddity of the way we were arriving) I would might be mostly around women for the whole 7 months.

Taking time to notice this, and being in closer proximity, I saw a similarity - we were all very athletic looking. In my case (besides being a distance runner anyway), I'd had 6 months of seriously difficult physical training, aerobics, weight training, and the like. I'd gained some muscle mass and eating right meant I'd shed anything resembling flab, getting some decent definition in my muscle groups.

These women were in a similar situation, it looked like. No one in our container would have been considered even by snobs as overweight, or even underweight for that matter. Sure, some were shorter or taller, but almost all of us were moving as if we were quite capable of handling any bouncing that this container could throw at us.

The quarters were pretty tight. A girl was standing next to me and intermittently bumping up against me with her left boob and sometimes shoulder. I looked over; she seemed to be ignoring me. We were all trying to ignore it, I decided, looking around. Looking again, I saw her look back and smile thinly, tight lips, a businesslike expression. Smiling back the same way, I realized this probably wasn't any more comfortable for her than me. We were space-constrained, there was no avoiding it for anyone.

After about 20 minutes of this, some people started to climb into their bunks despite the jarring, but they quickly found themselves nearly airborne when we went over a bump so they got out again.

Finally, we slowed down to stop and go motions, and we heard shouting from outside the container. More diesel exhaust smell came through the A/C.

Someone outside shouted, "It's down a level. Get Ed on the 2-9...." We heard him talking more quietly, over a walkie-talkie, "That's a block C. Gotta all go together. Stack powered perishable....", then, "Oh, yeah. Animals. Right. Very perishable."

We looked at each other, silently, not moving. The instructions on being quiet were very, very clear.

While we were stopped, we shifted around where we were standing a little, reasonably assured we weren't going to be jarred quite so violently.

As we rearranged a bit, the oddity of the situation started to sink in. We were in a friggin' shipping container. We were going to an unknown destination. We might find ourselves in dangerous situations, in harsh environments, like they'd said, having to do brain work of some kind, under pressure. I figured there was brain work involved based on the tests they put me through.

But, all things considered, it wasn't so bad to be cooped up a little. At the end, when we got there, I was going to make an insane amount of money, probably doing something mentally and physically interesting if not outright difficult. Plus, I'd be doing it for the government, which meant it must be in some way important, given the expenses they were pouring into this thing.

But, also, it hit me, based on these demographics, I would be in close quarters with lots of attractive women. Combining this with rules against fraternization and sexual harassment meant a situation ripe with danger. I would have to be on my watch for any tendency to be overly familiar. I stiffened up a bit and decided to risk a whisper.

I leaned over the 6 inches to her ear and whispered very low "Sorry I'm bumping you.".

She nodded seriously and leaned in to my ear, saying, "Can't be helped."

She looked around and leaned in again, whispering so soft I could barely hear her. "Probably will be there soon."

She was more or less right. Another 10 minutes and we heard clangs and bangs, some on our own container, and then a jerk just slightly upwards. Some of the girls pantomimed, "Hold on" and finger up, "almost" and another finger up, "Going up".

More clangs, some waiting, and suddenly a loud whining sound and we accelerated up, swaying to one side as we swung. More whining led to swaying the other way, and downward acceleration, followed by a bang as we were set down, probably atop another container.

For the first time in a while, we had a feeling we were somewhat stable and unlikely to move for a while. People climbed up into their bunks to get away from each other, including the girl next to me.

I went up to the top bunk, moving my backpack to a ledge above where my feet were. The bed was made, with a pillow on it held down by a layer of thick plastic cling wrap. Around the room, we were all stripping our cling wrap off. One girl decided to collect it, and then located the garbage bags. We were all still being really silent.

My bed was narrower than a normal single bed. Only 2 feet of aisle separated me from the bed on the other side, so it made sense they had to be narrower.

Sets of clangs and bangs kept happening all around the outside of the container as more containers were piled above and on both sides of ours.

One of the girls went to the bathroom, and we heard exactly how much sound insulation there wasn't.

Another girl went to the microwaves and opened one, finding the promised 'sheet of instructions'.

We perked our ears up and shifted over so we could all hear her. She moved to the center aisle of the bunks, and we all shifted around so we could see her and hear clearly, which took a minute or two.

Seeing we were all settled, she started, in a stage whisper, "I'll just read it out loud. Here goes:"

This container is designed for 18 persons. It contains 2 weeks of provisions, or 4 weeks of minimal rations. Do NOT over-use your water!! This is your most vital resource. Drink sparingly, and only when you are quite thirsty. The toilet tanks are small and space must be preserved there also. If the toilets fill up, or if you encounter violent sea conditions, you should probably lock the sealing top down over the toilet bowl. In emergency situations, it is possible to drink your own urine, up to twice. Boiling urine in the microwave is possible but not advised as the odor might induce vomiting. Do not drink toilet tank water as it contains both a chemical disinfecting agent and otherwise poisonous fecal matter.

She made a face. I wasn't surprised; someone guffawed. She read the document; we all read it over and over later to try to discern any further clue as to what would happen next.

The 1st evening, a crewman will connect your container to ship's power. You will hear him doing so. BE VERY SILENT for this. Ship's power will enable you to have comfortable air conditioning and/or heating. Once hooked up, the light on your PowerWall will turn GREEN. If it does not do so for whatever reason within 1 day of being onboard ship, please shift the air conditioner setting to 'exchange fan only' to ensure continued fresh breathing air, and do your best to cope with any temperature variations. Even without power entirely and thus no fresh air circulation, there is enough air in your container to last 18 people almost 5 weeks, so you're safe from that perspective.

Again, BE VERY SILENT while the crew connects power cables!

Afterwards, pay close attention to staying as quiet as possible. Whispering only. No talking out loud. No coughing -- cough into a pillow. Your voices could carry and the ship's crew could discover you. Crew are not cleared on this operation. If you are discovered, you will probably be arrested as stowaways and you will forfeit any chance at future pay coming to you. You would also jeopardize the lives and financial well-being of your fellow interns. No help will be given to you from anyone if this occurs. So, police yourselves, listen to each other, and be careful.

The manufacturer of the microwaves has assured us this model is silent also; there is no beep on keypresses or after completion of cooking. If you have a microwave that makes any beeps at all, consider it defective and do NOT use it. Those beeps can be heard at a distance.

NEVER turn on the TV sound system. Repeat: NEVER TURN ON THE TV SOUND. It makes far too much noise. Find the case of rechargeable Bluetooth TV headphones.

Each top container corner has a tiny observation porthole. These enable viewing outside. While in a harbor, keep watch to ensure no crewmembers are nearby. No watch is needed outside of harbor, but some glances are a good idea.

Be tidy, respectful, move carefully, and be Quiet at All Times.

At the end of the voyage, you will be required to write confidential reports on your compatriots grading their attention to detail and observance of procedures.

ON ARRIVAL:

Engines will slow to half-speed ~ 4 hours before entering harbor. Start keeping watch - crew will unhook power cables. Quietly Pack Your Things! Tidy container well before docking.

You may bring along anything in the container you wish, as long as you can easily and quickly exit the container and carry it walking for 20 minutes.

Once unhooked, PowerWall changes from Green to Blue. Unloading will be less than 4 hours from docking. Unloading: crane lifts, transfers container to a truck, drives to secure location.

At the Secure Location, loud loud loud loudspeakers will give exit instructions. Your life will depend on following their simple instructions exactly and promptly. Your container will go into fumigation and then cold storage for several months until return trip preparations begin. If you remain aboard it you will assuredly die either from the fumigation poison gas or the cold, so exit promptly.

As you exit, help ensure containers near you are opened and people are exiting.

Your voyage should take at least 3 days and no more than 24, depending on your destination.

Safe Travels, and we look forward to working with you!

I looked at the faces around me. Besides myself, there was one other guy and 16 women in our container.

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We didn't have much else to do, so she read it again, start to finish. After that, most of us, having to be quiet until the ship's power guy came and went, went up and laid on our bunks to relax. It had been a pretty hectic couple of hours.

I lay back in my bunk and closed my eyes for a minute. The immediate stress was over. We had done what we were supposed to do. All that remained was being quiet and waiting until we got somewhere. Where, we didn't know.

I was pretty sure we'd have better accommodations at whatever 'facility' we went to than where we were. But, they'd said to be ready for rough conditions, it's why we had to do all that physical conditioning. Maybe we'd be on a mountainside, or swimming a lot, or even (my imagination went wild) in some secret rocket-powered space habitat.

The hiking boots made space unlikely.

I was sure they had useful tasks they wanted us to do for them, I just hoped it wasn't so dangerous I'd regret the trip.

Some of the girls were clustered around the viewports near each top corner to give us 360-degree views. What we couldn't do was change the fact that we were surrounded by other shipping containers that cut off our view of almost anything interesting. The girls said they could see a slice of ocean in one direction, so we weren't totally clueless.

I heard a small noise and looked down the aisle to see a girl bending over the TV area. She stopped, stood up, peeled off her T-shirt to reveal a jogging bra, and went back to doing what she was doing. I liked what I saw. She was medium height, blonde, really beautiful, with an hourglass figure and ponytail that bounced as she moved. As she leaned over the set, her very buxom front became obvious, even from the rear. I felt my eyebrows go up, and looked at the ceiling so I didn't have to look at her. That body, moving like that, was likely to turn me on, and I had no way of solving that problem in the enclosed space.

-----

Later that afternoon, we heard clanging as the crew came by and very, very muffled shouting. Our air-conditioning unit, which had been off since we were unhooked from the truck on the dock, turned back on, and made a fair bit of white noise.

The girls watching out the portholes made hand-signals (they developed this, it was funny) saw them and then indicated the crew was moving to the next stack and away.

Happily, once they were gone, we could make a little bit of noise, so there started to be more side conversations as people negotiated where their stuff was, what we were going to eat, etc. That turned out to be, obviously, MRE's.

I'd heard of MRE's before, but never had seen one up close. Covered in very thick black plastic, each packet had (according to the label) over 5000 calories of food in it. It tasted okay, but I couldn't finish all that food. Plus, there were snacks in the refrigerator of different types. My good diet went to hell quickly, with pouches with pudding, ice cream sandwiches, and even carrots and small peanut butter containers.

Setting sail was obvious by the fact that we started swaying side to side regularly but gently, and the ship's horn, a giant foghorn blast enough to wake the dead, sounded out in the night stillness. We were on our way.

All of us took turns looking out the portholes; we could only see a tiny sliver of sky, and lots of other containers around us.

Many Days at Sea

Settling in took a bit of time. We learned each other's first names and some basic things about each other. Some girls didn't want to say a single thing about themselves except their first names because of the OPSEC statements. Despite this, the rest of us pretty much decided we'd be okay sharing what colleges we were from and majors, on the presumption that's what we'd share with a stranger in a bar anyway. What emerged from this conversation, though, was that we were all pretty high achievers.

Everyone had at least an undergraduate, about half had a master's degree or were in a master's program. All of us ranged in age from 21 (except me, I was 20) to 24; all had gone to state schools or big-name private ones.

The exception was a gal that had gone to Liberty University for undergrad. She said she was a lot more liberal (religiously) than her undergrad friends, but it was what her mom & dad would pay for, at least until her Junior year. Then, they got divorced and the money stopped. Due to Liberty's isolated religious nature, lots of other colleges wouldn't let her transfer her credits in, saying her religion-filled curriculum wasn't a match for theirs. Transferring would mean throwing all her work so far. At graduation, she had lots of student loan debt, and almost no way to get a good-paying job to pay it back. Her only option became getting a master's in a good-paying STEM field, so she spent 3 years adding a Chemistry Master's from Rutgers and hoping for a good job at the end of it. When nothing came, she found this internship.

Most everyone had a financial situation like that. We didn't talk about how much we were getting for our internship, but we did all agree it was a lot, and thus we could pay off the massive student loan debt we all had.

The degrees we had were surprising to me in that most were somehow technical. We had a lot of biology, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, and relatively few social sciences, with only 2 liberal arts majors, one in German Literature and the other in Political Science. Based on my informal understanding of majors and gender distribution, it seemed pretty STEM-heavy as a mix.

The general geekiness of the group led to many discussions of Dr. Who and various anime series being superior, transcendent, or broadly applicable to current events even though they were made thus-and-such many years ago. Even the somewhat ancient 'Future Boy Conan' and 'Code Geass' series were deemed prescient in dealing with the nuclear attacks on Seoul and Chicago 5 years before, and whether it really was the correct ethical choice to burn Pyongyang's entire metro area down to bedrock slag-glass in five-times-over fiery retribution.

During my schooling, every once in a while, the attacks would come up in conversation -- where were you when you heard, all that. One of the guys I'd known in college had actually lost a cousin who lived in Wrigleyville and worked downtown. That kind of conversation was something people fell back on when people got bored. It always included speculation on where would be next, whether it had been another country trying to make it look like it was North Korea, and other conspiracy theories.

No one could know who did the bombs, but we all kind of accepted the history Congress laid out after we'd seen the footage of the North Korean artillery shelling the survivors in the nuclear blast rubble of Seoul. Whether they started doing that just because they figured a war had started so they needed to get in the fight, or whether they were ordered to, that fueled rumors for a long time.

Aside from these conversations, the rest of the time, the TV's were playing some movie or another. The headsets made it quiet (despite the flashing from the screen during explosions).

I got a lot of sleep, though I did get stiff. On the 2nd morning, one of the girls went around and said, "Yoga session if you want to." Of course, with nothing else to do and stiff joints, everyone joined in. I noticed at the start that the ship's gentle rolling wasn't what I'd practiced when balancing a natara jasana or vrik sasana.

Granted, we were tightly packed in with nowhere to go in terms of floor space, so we made do by being careful not to bump into (or lean on) our neighbors. That wasn't the complicating part for me, though. My problem was all the skin.

I don't object to being near scantily clad women, certainly. It's eye candy! But, when I'm close nearby, I have trouble not watching and staring and inhaling sharply when I see Very Nice Things.

We started the yoga just as we were, which was for everyone jeans and t-shirts since that's what the instructions said to wear to travel in. Once we tried the first stretch, though, everyone said stop and we all, to a one, stepped out of our jeans. It's pretty hard to do yoga in jeans. That left me in my boxers and a t-shirt, and everyone else in whatever color of underwear they chose to wear that day. Some were small dainty panties, others were bigger cotton, but all covered Nicely Proportioned Parts, I absolutely could not help noticing. They were in my face, metaphorically and physically.

Restarting, everyone had to adjust their range of motion to prevent getting snagged on things close by. The big t-shirts were the problem there, so we stopped again and people pulled off their T-shirts, revealing a variety of types, sizes, shapes, and designs of bras.

It's at this point that things became a little difficult for me. My last girlfriend-based sexual escapade had been over 8 months before then, and even though I regularly, even frequently, undertook to relieve myself of tension at home, I hadn't had time or focus to take care of myself much in the last week before leaving and certainly not since I'd been in the container.

So, I got a boner.

Since I was in my underwear, it became obvious that I had one. I realized it was happening, and noticed some girls looking at me, or, at least, glancing at my crotch. I stopped, took off my shirt, and (as best I could) tied it around my waist like we did when we were running. It almost helped. It also didn't really hide everything.

In fairness, the views I was getting were amazing. The girl to my left had a beautiful set of C cups inside a jogging bra with prominent nipples from moving around, I would presume. A slight sheen on her beautiful skin that made my eyes just stay locked in place longer than I wanted them to.