Camp Zester, USA

Of course, I was all of 3 feet from her boobs, since we were all kind of limited in standing room space and trying to align the same direction so elbows didn't collide with eyeballs. After that, my eyeballs collided with her panty-covered crotch, and after that, I had to examine a tight sixpack as she bent backwards and then up again, and backwards, her chest moving with her breath.

The girl to my right, as we turned for the next pose, was wearing a lace-topped net bra that left very little to the imagination. Her skin was incredibly soft and smooth looking, so touchable, so, so, so touchable, so close to me and I ... egads. I couldn't keep staring at her, it was rude, it was really distracting as I tried to relax and focus inward as they say you're supposed to do for yoga.

I might have whimpered.

Moving around, she then bent the other direction, to make more room, and I saw clearly as one leg went into the air, where her outer lips camel-toed her panties and the small tuft of landing-strip pubic hair raised her panties above her mons.

Wow.

I couldn't avoid looking at these women. I tried shutting my eyes, but my cock was full and I was jones-ing to touch any of them. Of course, at the same time, I knew they were completely out-of-bounds by the rules we were given, and I could do nothing about it. Closing my eyes didn't help much. Having Etta means I can easily recall entire images, and I had some that I was sure would stick in my head for a long, long time.

After about 15 minutes, though, my erection subsided a bit, and I could again concentrate on just the yoga moves, breathing properly, aligning myself right, and getting the pose correct. Poses are really remarkably hard work to get right, so that work helped distract me a bit. It occurred to me, though, that as much help as my underwear (boxer shorts, thankfully with a button on the fly) was when I was standing up, when I was bent over sideways the shirt fell away slightly and everyone could see my tent-pole.

Focus, dammit, focus! It was hard to do. My hard-on finally, eventually, subsided.

The leader had been a yoga instructor, and she tried to softly tell us directions, but she couldn't walk around and move us like my instructor had all this last year.

Eventually, the session ended and we re-dressed, or at least most of us did. The A/C had been turned to about 22 (70 fahrenheit), so even the exercise warmth eventually faded and we all ended up dressed again. That night, though, the temperature dropped quite a bit, so someone climbed up on a couch-back and looked at the controls, to set them to heat up to 19 (64 fahrenheit), which was a welcome change. We all figured we were sailing through colder waters.

That evening, the yoga instructor came over to me while I was sitting and reading by the TV's. Other people were watching a movie about sisters going on a road trip or something. She squatted next to me, then leaned over to whisper in my ear. I leaned in.

"Thank you for covering yourself earlier."

I moved my head, and nodded to her, a half-shrugged 'whatcha-gonna-do' expression on my face.

"I wasn't the only one who noticed. You were discreet about it and that's appreciated."

I leaned in to her and said, "I'm, like, ... 'oh my god, they're beautiful', then, my mind, it's, like, impossible to NOT think about. Plus, once I'm ... I'm hard, it's hard... it's difficult to clear my mind. I didn't know what to do, so ... my shirt."

She smiled understandingly. "Thank you for that, though," she whispered. She wasn't in a hurry to leave. We didn't have anything to do.

I leaned back to her ear, "No prob. I think it might be better next time... but, I don't know. I'll try. I'll think of my grandmother or something."

She laughed, nodded, and stood up, then laughed again and bent down and whispered, "Presuming your grandmother isn't secretly a porn star!"

I laughed, too. My grandmother most definitely wasn't a porn star.

Revealed Secrets

Most of the time, I don't tell people about my Etta. They tend to act weird, and usually want to test me in some way, then treat me differently afterwards. It's better all-around if I don't tell people. But, it occurred to me that our container would probably be lifted by some crane or something off the ship and onto the dock, so we might be able to see out the portholes and see where we were. Given there being 4 real viewing spots and 18 people, I figured I'd need to talk this out ahead of time to ensure I got to see anything.

The day after our first yoga session, day 3, I walked up in front of the TVs between movie showings and said, softly, but stridently enough, "Umm, can I have everyone's attention? Excuse me? Sorry, can I have your attention, please?"

Pretty quickly, people turned around, and I had all eyes on me.

"I'd like to bring up something and decide it now, so we have it all worked out. That is, once we dock, they're going to lift this container off the ship. When they do that, the portholes are going to be able to see in both directions quite a ways, right?"

I got nods from people.

"I'd like to propose we decide who is going to be lookout on each side when we do that. And, I have a reason for asking."

Traci (I'd learned their names) asked, "What? You want to be one?"

"Actually, ... yes." I heard some grunting as in, 'he thinks he's special' and I could readily see their point.

"Does anyone have a book I can borrow? Any kind of book?"

There was looking around; some girl in front held out her novel, "Rob Roy", it was nice and thick. I hadn't read it, but I'd heard about it.

I said, "Okay, give me 10 seconds, someone count."

Opened to a random page, looking away, looked at the page until the 10-count was up. I handed the book back to the girl and said, "Okay, so, open to page 271."

She looked through and found it. I said, "Top of the page. It says, quote, 'why I should not intrude on Miss Vernon when she chose to sit there in the evening.', next paragraph, 'To resume what I was saying, dash, I was not surprised to see a glimmering of light from the library windows: but I was a little struck,...' Am I getting that right?"

She looked at me with one eyebrow up, "This is some kind of trick... yes, that's right."

I said, "Pick another part of the page, I'll recite that part."

She said, "4th paragraph, last sentence."

I recited, calmly, "Suppose, notwithstanding the excellence of her understanding, the society of half a dozen of clowns."

She looked up, "He's right."

I said to her, "Thank you." Then, to the group, I continued, "Okay, so here's the deal. I have a trick memory. It's called ETTA syndrome. Without getting into neurobiology, let's just say we can call it 'photographic memory'. That means, if I see anything, I can recall the image of it pretty well, usually well enough to draw it, passably. Not that I'm an artist, like, at all."

I let that sink in a bit.

The yoga instructor spoke up, "So, ... you remember everything?"

"Nope, not everything. If I'm not trying to remember it, it goes away. But, if I do, it's just always there. I have to concentrate a little. When I tell people, usually their first question is, lunches. That is, do I remember them all. No, I don't remember what I had for lunch 2 years ago. I do remember the typical view out my window as I had lunches. And, I could draw the scene now, if I had a pen and paper. I can recite some of the conversations I had at that lunch table, start to finish. But, not which day was which, really, or what I ate."

Another gal said, "So, cut to the chase. You want to be the one of the four of us looking out, when we're lifted?"

"Yeah, ... I think it'd be good, 'cuz then I can tell you guys... people... what I saw, or draw pictures or something. So, everyone can know what was there."

The girl with the book said, "It's okay with me. I want to see your pictures, though."

I shrugged and said, "Of course."

Everybody nodded. It was apparently decided. I went back to my bunk.

Privacy

One more thing to mention about the voyage that was uncomfortable. The inside of the container was pretty quiet. Sure, there was engine noise, and some wave noise maybe, and the air handler made a bit of a hushed roaring sound. But, mostly it was quiet.

The walls were covered in shag carpet, as was the floor and ceiling, to keep the noise down should we make any. So, in general, sound control was pretty good. But, when it came to the 2 portable toilet booths at the front of the container, every single fart and plop came through pretty well. We eventually got used to it, mostly. But, there was a certain amount of dignity loss that came with hearing everyone else you're sleeping near poop and pee regularly.

Moves and Moves

In a large ship, there's a constant sound from the engines. It vibrates the whole ship just a bit, and quickly sinks into the background.

On day 6, at night, the engine noise changed, and we all sat up, noticing the same thing at the same time. Lookouts immediately went to the portholes. We turned off the overhead lights so people could see out easier. Luckily, no one fought me and I got a lookout seat, in direction of the front of the ship, which was actually the container's entrance/exit end.

People started packing up, including putting a lot of food, DVD's players, and even bedding into their backpacks.

Eventually, a few hours later, we banged enough that we could tell that we'd docked. After those sounds, we heard the banging of containers being unloaded.

Finally, as a container lifted from next to us, I could see down an area and out ahead of the ship. There was a giant storage area for containers, and then in the distance, a couple of kilometers at least, a fairly large mountain with snow on top.

Above us was a robotic wonderland. A set of automated crane arms were over the ship's container cargo, and many arms were dipping down, grabbing containers, and bringing them back to the dockside, which I couldn't see well at that point.

Another couple of minutes, and I got the full view. Grabbers were coming over the top of the crane on a rail system, lowering, down, grabbing a container, and taking it in a procession off to the dock, where each was lowered onto combination railway and conveyor belt apparatus. The stream of containers went into a yard area where various other arms dropped the containers onto waiting trucks that looked like they had no driver compartment.

Just about that point, with a bang, we were picked up, swinging freely and somewhat frighteningly as we were shifted, accelerated up, away, then slightly downwards.

Looking into the distance, I could see we were in a vast, amazingly huge container-shipping port. The container storage area was vast, with lots of containers stacked 4 high or more, off into the distance. The landscape outside that was only snow-capped mountainous, and with no cities in sight. Even the port area didn't seem to have any people that I could see walking around.

Looking for people and seeing none, I was fooled by the scale of the automated unloading equipment. Eventually, though, I did see people -- as tiny dots in glass booths scattered around each area, overlooking how things were moving.

The automated cargo shipping yard was just beyond immense!

I hadn't ever seen or really heard of one, but with the massive growth in Grohmann Robotics, all the planet had automation fever. A thought occurred to me, and I took note of the position of the sun in the sky; it was overcast but I could tell about where it was and how it lined up with the shipyard aisles. I had no outside way of telling time, but I always knew about what time it was so I noted that. If I did this right, I could figure out how far north we were!

Our container swayed as we were set onto the conveyor belt. We were all a little freaked by that, I could see on faces, it's an odd position to be in.

Grinding sounds resonated through the container, and I had to talk a little louder to narrate what was happening outside. I managed to warn everyone between our being set down and then picked up by the next crane-arm. That arm then lowered us down onto a vehicle of some kind. We got closer, and I saw it was just a box-girder frame robot with a bunch of motors and battery compartment on the outside and front, but no driver. As soon as we were settled onto it, some whining and clanks jerked us around a bit as it straightened us and locked the container into place. Then, we were off, driving -- in the other direction!

I scampered down quickly from the top, saying in an almost -loud, "SWITCH!" I was headed above the port-a-potty on the right, and clambered up there with some help, taking over the viewport (much to the frustration and disappointment of the girl who was there).

Out the front, now, I could see we were headed along a wide, jam-packed access road. It was full of other containers going somewhere as well, most in the same direction, not all at the same speed, some aisles were slower. Turning this way and that, we soon were in a line of containers headed down long rows of tall containers. We even went into and out of a few buildings, the scale of which was altogether massive as well.

Turning left and right, sometimes we seemed to double back towards the cranes, but most of the time we were headed closer and closer to the mountains, all through this giant yard full of containers.

Finally, we came to a really large building, still with lots of containers going in and out through many doors, but not nearly so many, and not nearly as fast. It was a long, large building, which got much bigger the closer we got to it. It was seemingly built at a crossroads of several sort-of-highways. Once inside, my eyes adjusted to see us turning off the path onto a ramp, and heading down a side passage, then turning again and going down a ... Tunnel! We were suddenly in a tunnel, a reasonably well-lit one. Ahead of us stretched a convoy of container-robots, and I presumed there were more behind us.

Slowing down, we passed signs reading, 'ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE!', 'DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE PROPERTY', and 'USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED / TURN BACK NOW'. Farther on, an even scarier one read in big red letters, in multiple languages, "WARNING: AUTOMATED LETHAL WEAPONS DEPLOYED. NO HUMAN ADMITTANCE BEYOND THIS POINT." I narrated these signs to the group as we passed, and when I glanced back at them, I saw there was an optimistic but nervous look to the group. Narrating was a good plan.

After the last sign, the girl looking out the other forward portal said, "Glad you go that. It went by too fast for me."

We passed over a set of wide metal patches in the floor. A sign overhead read, "ELECTROCUTION HAZARD, STAY INSIDE VEHICLE!"

Moving on, we approached a bunch of what looked like lollipop-balls sticking out from the walls. I narrated this, "Basketball-sized nodes high on the walls, all over... oh, gun barrels and cameras in them! Uh, wait, the barrels are tracking us, no, container in back... passing them."

After those, we got to some big wordy signs, one after another. We were going slow enough to read them, but not slow enough for me to narrate them, so I narrated them after we passed. There were surprised intakes of breath as I talked. They read: "CAUTION: STRONTIUM-90 SECURITY IONIZING RADIATION AREA AHEAD. STAY INSIDE VEHICLE. MINIMUM COVER 3mm METAL PLATE OR EQUIVALENT. COVER EXPOSED AREAS. CLOSE VIEWPORTS. DO NOT STOP. MINIMUM 40 KPH FOR SAFE EXPOSURE LEVELS. WALKING OR RUNNING WILL RECEIVE LETHAL DOSE. ALSO, BLINDING LASERS ARE SIMULTANEOUSLY IN USE. SHIELD EYES FOR AT LEAST NEXT 1 KILOMETER, UNTIL RUMBLE STRIP."

A loudspeaker, echoing in front and behind us, YELLED at us to shield our eyes until the rumble strip or we'd go blind then die. We got the message, and I moved away from the viewport, closing the metal plate and rug over it.

I looked around, and everyone already had gotten the message, covering their eyes and ducking down.

We obviously turned a corner, and then another one, then went down an incline and back up again. At a straight area, we sped up and went pretty fast in that section. I couldn't tell how far we went without seeing out, but probably at least that 1 kilometer if not significantly more, curving several times en route. Then, slowing down drastically, we turned a sharper corner and went up, then down again, then crossed over the promised rumble strip.

I waited just a moment more. After all, I remembered the joke-sign in most laser labs, "Do not look into laser with remaining good eye."

Opening the viewport, I cautiously looked ahead and saw the same old tunnel, lights every 20 meters down the center, the walls now barely big enough for us to drive through.

Another couple of kilometers of curving tunnel led us to a wider spot...then... the tunnel floor went away!

It was a gap, over 100 meters across, I could barely see the other side. The overhead lights didn't reach the bottom of it, either. We rolled up to the edge, where a raised pair of pads were waiting for our wheels. Interlocking the wheels and the pads started some mechanism that rapidly lowered a bridge from the ceiling.

It was super-cool, though I couldn't see all of it.

Once down, we crossed the bridge, and I had a feeling the bridge went up right after we drove off it.

After that, there as a tilted-roadway that would make you slip and fall into spikes unless you had a full axle-width to hold you in the right place.

The traps were ingenious!

There were 3 more security areas, including an inclined section where arms came out from the walls, went under our truck, the arms rolled down a set of rollers set into the walls, and then rotated up again to go back out of the way. It was very odd, but it worked well enough and I could see there were wide margins for error in initial placement and it would still manage to grab us just right.

Another section repeated the gap with lowered-bridge trick, and the last one had machine gun basketballs on the walls again.

We could hear loudspeakers ahead, but not what they were saying.

After another few hundred yards, the tunnel turned and widened, then we entered a large cavern. Loudspeakers (very loud ones) shouted at us:

PREPARE TO EXIT YOUR CONTAINER IMMEDIATELY.

PUT BACKPACK ON BOTH SHOULDERS.

Pull ASIDE carpet on wall opposite PowerWall, FIND EMERGENCY EXIT HATCH.

Emergency Exit hatch is BEHIND CARPET ON WALL NEXT TO TVS.

Emergency Exit hatch is BEHIND CARPET ON WALL NEXT TO TVS.

Emergency Exit hatch is BEHIND CARPET ON WALL NEXT TO TVS.

Break Seal, open door. DOOR PULLS INWARD. DOOR PULLS INWARD.

LEAVE DOOR OPEN. DOOR PULLS INWARD.

TURN OFF POWER. LAST PERSON, TURN OFF POWER ON WALL.

DO NOT RISK YOUR LIVES TO TURN OFF POWER.

PROCEED TO CAMP ENTRANCE.

WARNING. CONTAINERS WILL BE FUMIGATED WITH CYANIDE, MUSTARD GAS, NERVE AGENTS, AMMONIA, THEN LIQUID NITROGEN AFTER ARRIVAL.

REMAINING IN CONTAINER WILL BE FATAL.

We followed directions even before the container stopped moving.

The carpet had been so thick we didn't see the bulge from the emergency exit handles, but once we found it, it was simple to open. Coasting to a stop, we climbed out the portal onto the robot's girder, and stepped off onto the ground. Everyone paused for a moment to savor the idea of being outside. The last few people climbed out of our container carrying trash bags with the DVD players, DVD's, and a bunch of other stuff, a useful save we had decided.

We walked together towards the entrance sign.

Our container was in angle-in parking, truck-stop style, in several rows. Pillars held up the roof high overhead, but between them there were broad parking areas where an orderly procession of robots with containers came in, stopped, and people clambered out the side. I counted the arrival rate at about one every 15 seconds., but they were spread out enough that people could get around them pretty easily in the big chamber.