Camp Zester, USA

We walked under a giant sign, one of many arranged so you couldn't miss them. On the back, they said the same thing:

Do not attempt to ride on or leave with the robots.

Persons leaving this facility must be escorted in special vehicles.

For your safety, persons attempting to enter (or leave) this facility on foot will be killed by automated security measures.

Departure escorts are available mornings at 11 am.

Reveille is at 6 am (sharp). Shower before breakfast. Dress for work.

Directions to habitation modules are posted in the Great Entrance Hall.

As each robot-truck decided it had sat idle long enough, it sounded its horn 3 times loudly, then drove off to a machine that picked up the container and carried it to a tall stack in the distance. Unladen, the truck-robot turned and headed towards the clearly labeled, 'Exit Tunnel', above which was written:

"EXIT TUNNEL / Authorized Vehicle Traffic Only / Automated Lethal Security Enforcement"

Interestingly, at the bottom of that sign, someone had hand-written in big marker across another giant sign with a big DOD logo in the center:

"OK, just cleaned up THAT mess.

The funeral will be closed and empty casket.

See base commander - don't be stupid!"

This was almost funny. Tragic, sure, but almost funny. I wondered what situation led them to write that.

I turned, most of my traveling companions had gone past the line towards the door with the sign saying 'ENTRANCE / CAMP ZESTER, so eventually I followed.

My delay was from getting distracted by watching the dance of people exiting containers, looking bright-eyed at their new surroundings, taking in the sights and reading the signs, then moving onwards. It was kind of fun to watch. But, I didn't want to get too far separated from my traveling group (not knowing what was coming), so I hurried to catch up.

Right under the entrance sign was written, "Welcome to Camp Zester / Kodiak Island, Alaska / The Most Secure Place on Earth".

So, that's where we were. I didn't remember much about Kodiak except it was the second largest island in the USA, only Hawaii's Big Island was bigger. It famously had more bears than people - I knew lots of really useless stuff like that (fat lot of good it did me!).

Land was pretty cheap in Alaska - that had to be why there was a giant automated transshipment container terminal and port. It would be the perfect cover for both large-scale digging and whatever important, secret thing they had for us.

Entering Camp Zester

The truck-robots bringing our containers in had to swerve to go through the drop-off area, but if they had gone straight, they'd have just gone directly from the entrance tunnel into the same base entrance we were walking into.

A clearly labeled and brightly lit 'ENTER HERE' tunnel was our only real option anyway.

That part made sense, since it'd obviously be necessary to drive full containers into the camp if they wanted to avoid hand-carrying things. Sure enough, coming around the corner and going straight in, we could see a short container ahead of us, though off to the side in a wider area. But, beyond that... a Big Door.

The short container had an open front with a sign on the inside of the door, "Welcome Packets -- Take ONE only!" Inside were boxes of photocopied packets, each about 30 stapled pages, saying "Welcome!" on the front. Below that (on the inside of the door) it said, "Proceed ahead to Grand Entrance Hall before reading".

We were all doing that, and I followed the crowd.

The crowd was similar to the one at the departure center back in Seattle / Tacoma. We were all dressed about the same -- light jacket, t-shirts, blue jeans, cross trainer shoes or hiking boots. The girls mostly either had their hair in ponytails or cut short, almost no one had anything more than shoulder length. Again, there were very few guys, it was almost all girls.

We got to the Door. I should say, Doors, because there were two of them, one just past the other. Each was the same, the door swung open all the way enough to be nested into a grotto in the wall. This let the entrance be wide enough for two containers to pass side by side, which would have been vital if there were limited transport carriers.

The engineer in me really liked the details, it was cool to see what they'd done.

The thing about the doors wasn't their barn-door size - it was their MASS, an impressive OMG thing that... wow, it resonated in my head. They resembled bank vault doors, wider, but so thick that it was hard to imagine anything getting through that metal. At least 2 meters thick, obviously built to withstand a nuclear blast, and made of gleaming stainless steel.

The door itself, and the jamb, were shaped with a slight incline as we went in, so the door obviously fit in like a plug. The jamb, floor, and ceiling all had wide recesses where milk-jug-diameter cylinders from the door could extend out and lock into place, though the mechanism to do that wasn't visible.

The reason for this door wasn't lost on me.

When shut, a nuclear explosion would just pack the door in more tightly. I didn't know about nuclear weapon effects on 2-meter-thick stainless steel, but if it was a small nuke, maybe that door would survive, and maybe the second door, too.

It was a safecracker's nightmare or fever dream, depending on the person, I guessed.

I wasn't the only one who noticed. We all were looking at it as we went in.

Grand Entrance Hall

Coming to an intersection in the hallway, a sign read, READ YOUR WELCOME PACKET NOW / Proceed to your assigned area."

Looking backwards a moment, I saw there was a sign for people going the other way, saying, "Facility departures must be escorted / Escorts available daily at 11 am only / Meet here to request escort."

Just inside the grand entrance hall along the left wall, there was a big board, labeled, "Safety First!" On it were lots of pictograms of people doing stupid things and getting hurt or dying. Sure, most were simple - a guy was slipping while mopping, a guy falling backwards, a guy dropping a box on his foot, etc.

The rest were actually kind of funny. A simplistic helicopter was chopping someone's head off. An obvious giant jet engine blast was throwing someone off a cliff. Another had several people climbing rope, with one (not wearing gloves) falling to his death. There were several depicting electrical situations with water and wires. One had a teakettle blowing steam, and a hose with steam coming out spraying a person. That person was supposed to be dead, their eyes were X'd out, and the steam touched, the body was bones only. The message was clear - the steam will kill you.

There were several I didn't understand, showing a star-shaped portal with someone standing near it, and a person carrying a pole spearing them. Another one had a person behind a cart, with an orb out front, and a person near the orb without a head and blood spraying. Obviously, there were dangerous things here.

Lots of people were stopping to look at those, but I didn't need to because one glance and I'd committed them all to memory. There were some advantages of Etta, but also some hassles since there are some things I could never un-see.

We all shuffled on, carried by the crowd, but after we fanned out everyone was reading the welcome packets.

Inside was a letter, reading:

Dear Intern:

Welcome to Camp Zester! We're in the most secure place on planet Earth. It's a very new facility, so please bear with us while we are constructing new areas and adding features both for form and function. We're in process now on a project to expand the living areas. In fact, you've come in by a back entrance that makes accessible a brand new, quite large bivouac for temporary personnel like yourselves. You will be granted access to the rest of the Camp after you have been briefed on various security restrictions.

One of your first tasks was memorizing your ID number. This ID number is actually a key to helping you find your living quarters in this new section.

Living quarters, here, are called 'habitation modules', or 'habs.' We understand there is a minimum of privacy available, so you'll need to be courteous and respectful of the people you're there with, your 'habmates'. The leader or facilitator in a hab is called the 'prime', but they can only help you if you help yourselves by living courteously with each other. Please keep your things picked up, orderly, and tidy, talk through any problems respectfully, and you should get along fine.

Your ID number tells you where your hab position is. For example, an ID of DUC7D6E translates to Zester Area C, down to level 7, over Gallery ("Gal") D, down to Hab 6, and, once there, in bed-spot E. Areas, Levels, Galleries, Habs, and Beds are all clearly marked.

There will be a welcome ceremony tomorrow morning at 9 am. View it in the cafeteria on your level. You'll want to get to the cafeteria either tonight or early tomorrow morning to set up tables and chairs, and of course, to eat.

If you have any questions, you can have them answered at, or immediately after, the welcome ceremony.

Attendance at / viewing of the welcome ceremony is mandatory. It is a required briefing. It is vital that you know all important facets of the operation here.

We remind you that this facility, all that happens, and all you learn here is classified as Top Secret, SCI. Some parts of the operation involve Codeword Clearance material. The security oaths you took will apply for the rest of your lives. We take security quite seriously. On the plus side, everyone in your intern group has this same clearance. So, you may talk freely among yourselves, unless and until you are granted access to further material. Further clearances will require you to sign documents acknowledging receipt of specific material with an attached codeword. This will be covered in later security briefings.

We're glad to have you here, and look forward to having your capabilities applied to some rather vital projects. We hope this work is as fulfilling to you as it is vital to the nation. You have been chosen because you've demonstrated significant abilities, and we look forward, as I'm sure you do, to applying those abilities to help these United States remain the land of the Free and the home of the brave.

Cordially,

Brig. Gen. Harwell Theodocius McCall,

5th U.S. Army / 2nd Intelligence Battalion / Commanding Officer, Camp Zester

"Shine your light unto the darkness, cursing it not, but bringing forth glory with graceful alacrity." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes

After reading this, I looked up. I was struck with a sense that I was part of a grand undertaking. I felt, somehow, that the thing that I was charged with doing was Greatly Worthwhile, that what would occur would become Grandly Important somehow. I was part of something big. I liked that.

Looking around at the people that were also finishing reading their welcome letter, we were all smiling and nodding a bit. I realized then that I had been a bit scared, that the warning signs at the entrance had been a bit over the top, and that I'd held a part of me in reserve in nervous anticipation of some kind of upcoming danger. Now, though, I wasn't feeling that way. This letter made me feel good about the impending activity. Tomorrow would be good, I decided.

The pride of being there led to me thinking, hey, maybe I'll get to see some cool stuff, something high tech like weapons we have that no one knows we have or something, or ways to listen in on conversations on the other side of the world or something. But, then, it occurred to me, something my dad used to tell me. He used to say, "The army is filled with stuff that's cool for 10 minutes and then you spend an eternity taking it apart and cleaning it." My dad was great that way.

Time to find my hab, I thought. My ID, DUB3D2G, meant I was in area B, 3rd level, gal D, hab 2, bed G. That was easy, I thought. Looking up, the giant concourse had signs on the ceiling pointing in different directions. On the floor, these directions were well-divided into 3 sections by the tire-tracks scrapes on the raw rock floor of many robotic container haulers passing this way. The signs overhead pointed to 3 sets of destinations:

On the Left: BIV AREA-A / TERMINUS LEVELS ALPHA-THETA / PFI ENGINEERING / LAMBDA DRONES

In the center: BIV AREA-B / RTCC BACKPLAN / CONS JART / DD6-FFT / HANGARS YA-YK

On the right: BIV AREA-C / AAY COMMAND CENTER / ASSM AREAS / OWDD CENTERS / TERMINUS LEVELS IOTA-OMEGA / HANGARS YL-YZ

Almost none of those signs made sense besides the Area-A/B/C parts, so I just went with it. Bivouac Area-B was mine, so I headed there.

Some minutes later, walking down the long corridor from the great hall to Area-B, I got a feeling for the scale of this place. All along the corridor, above my head, covering the ceiling except for cages that held lights every 5 meters, were pipes of all sizes, from meter-diameter to conduits. A couple of times, a drop of really hot water hit me on the head. Like an older chem engineering prof had said, "All Pipes Leak". I chuckled again remembering that.

At odd intervals along the wall (sometimes 5 meters, sometimes 50) were slabs of flat steel that were seemingly doors without handles. Many of the doors had signs next to them or above them with acronyms for things, like 'AAUW-44', but I doubted that room was for the American Association for University Women and laughed a bit to myself for thinking it.

The walls themselves, I suddenly noticed, were oddly formed. At first, it looked like polished granite. But, walking over and examining it with a geologist's eye, I saw it was granite that had been melted and re-solidified. The floor, likewise, had been melted, it looked like, and turned to molten rock, before being re-solidified. On the surface, covering most of the center of the corridor, were carved or wavy grooves. It looked like they wanted to give it a hash-like texture to give it traction. There were no cracks in that, or in any rock surface I could see, anywhere. As a geologist, I expected to see lots of cracks. Cracks are a total part of Granite. But, in this case, there weren't any. The amount of tech used to create this hallway started freaking me out a little.

Basically, I was thinking, something had come through here, broken up the rock and removed it to make the tunnel. Then, some other process had come in and melted the remaining walls to such a degree that they became one giant solid mass. That spoke to me of a really, really, uber-huge-massive-OMG-can't-imagine-big heat source. The OMG part, I thought, was literal -- there was literally no way that I could imagine anything with enough power to dissipate that much heat. Further, doing that over part of the surface would crack the nearby cooler rock unless it was all done slowly or quickly enough to manage stress internal to the rock and entrained water content.

Wow.

Despite my advanced understanding of the geological sciences as human mining capabilities, this hallway defied my understanding of how any kind of modern tech could accomplish this miracle. The rock -- it just Was. It existed despite my disbelief of how it got to Be That Way. It was smooth, seamless granite; one giant rock that just held back all the forces of downward pressure of whatever mountain was above us, silent but immensely powerful in its new form.

In terms of the sizing of the place, though, aside from the rock itself, it was perfect for humans. The ceiling was plenty high enough, even with suspended pipes. There were cages and ladders that came down along the walls to give access to those pipes, but they were mostly unobtrusive. In no way did the corridor feel cramped or constrained. I thought about how it could have been, with low ceilings making it seem like the world was pressing down. Instead, it was open. The granite was black and white, with glittering quartz and some black feldspar and sparkly mica thrown in in places, and being polished looked like the entire place had been designed for beauty.

Dimensionally, the corridor was at least 10 meters wide and 15 meters tall, but the pipes only subtracted 2 or 3 meters at the lowest. So, walking around, there were always at least 12 meters of empty overhead space.

Most office buildings in the US had about 12 foot ceilings, but not 12 METER ceilings. That's 45 feet! That extra space made the place feel much more open.

Another oddity about the tunnels. Right at the start of the Area-B tunnel, there was an S-curve in the tunnel, and a large loose-granite rock sitting in front of it, then a constriction, like the rock was supposed to be plug for the tunnel but had been left in place, obscuring the sight line. The curve itself was plenty gradual, easy for a container robot to negotiate. This repeated twice more.

The idea that they were plugs made it occur to me that, really, that's what they were. Each of them was sized and placed so that the corridor was still easily passable, but if a nuclear blast came down the hallway, it would pick up these massive stone plugs and throw them forwards in the corridor, filling the available space and plugging the corridor completely.

If the front doors, the giant ones on hinges like doors to massive safes, failed? If a nuke went off in that entrance place and those doors melted? Then, these plugs were backup bomb protection. They wanted to be sure that a nuke wouldn't hurt us. Probably, the second nuke would hurt us a lot less, even, than the first one, because all the plugs would have been moved into place by the first blast wave.

When that General said it was the safest place on Earth, he likely wasn't kidding.

Hab Home

After trudging along in the crowd, all of us going about 4 km from the grand entrance hall (mostly straight but sometimes curving left or right), we came up to another potential corridor constriction, another unreasonably massive doorway.

It was open, the two doors obviously capable of meeting in the middle and sealing against a jamb on the ceiling and floor, but since the rock had been cut wider, the hallway remained just as wide as it was. Above, the pipes disappeared into precisely cut holes in the rock above the door.

Both doors were bank-vault in mass but normal vault, not battleship-hull 2-meter-thick ones like the entrance area. These were thinner, wider, and squared-off.

On one door, a smaller inset man-door (a 'wicket') allowed for entry of someone walking, but on the other, the cutout was 3 feet high, so someone would have to crawl on hands and knees to get through. I'd seen this setup for castle gates in Europe, allowing people to come through crawling could ensure safety since a defender could stab or behead them easily.

I realized, looking at it, that the doorway wasn't made for blasts, it was made for attacks of people! I just had to chuckle at the thought that went into it, a point-defense defilade. Leave it to an Army base to have a way to secure an area even if there was no good reason to secure it.

After the open doors, there was an open area, much smaller than the pillar-farm that was the Grand Entrance Hall, but still, big enough to span well over 100 meters. Set into the floor on the other end of this was a set of downward ramps, one on each side of the hallway, 2 or 3 traffic lanes wide. Signs pointed down to levels 2-8, so I followed most of the crowd downward, through open sweeping turns easily big enough for two container-robots to pass each other without slowing down. After descending a single wide turn and going down 50 meters or so, I reached level 2, and then again the same distance to level 3.

Opening out, the ramp split into 2 forks, A-D and E-H, then again split for A-B and C-D, and then C or D. Each split had ball-mirrors on the walls to allow you to see if anyone was coming as you headed back up towards the entrance. I realized these robotic or human drivers would need to know where they're going.