Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2023 02:07:10 -0700 From: Boris Chen Subject: Response Team Prequel Chapter 2 (Revised) Chapter 2. During our first summer in Austin we took some of our required bullshit classes, the electives credits most degrees required that often had nothing to do with your field of study but added some easy credits. One of the classes I took for three credits turned out to be a real life changing course, it was called Ethics and was a branch of Philosophy and we had an excellent professor. That was the first class (since 6th grade) where I got there early for a seat in the front row. The semester covered the ethics of capital punishment, abortion, euthanasia, and assisted suicide. What the class accomplished was to force the students to decide if killing humans was okay, why or why not. Both of us were hired at used computer store near campus but sales slowed to a crawl since the university was nearly empty. One interesting thing we noticed was during the summer we saw a dramatic increase in number of elderly customers that purchased computers or needed help with the hardware they already owned. The slower pace gave us time to teach them how to troubleshoot Windows and problems with a mouse or an inkjet printer. It seemed a cultural thing in people over 70 caused them to be more vulnerable to viral infections in their computers. They tended to believe everything they saw on the screen even the nefarious ones like: click here to restore your computer to its original speed. We also took Spanish-1 during summer-1 and Spanish-2 during summer-2. We discovered an older university pool was open to everyone during the summer and since it was too hot to be outside we spent time in the pool weekly and mostly just swam laps for an hour or two. I was surprised to see how many young men shaved their pubes and their arm pits too. I asked a couple guys and they said it reduced body odor (less surface area = less bacteria = less BO) some of them said they liked how it looked and felt. Over time I got used to seeing adult men with hairless dicks and at the same time seeing a guy with a huge bush that extended from his knees to his chest started to look like images I've seen of Neanderthals. ---- In early July we got invited to a private keg party off-campus at a private outdoor venue down near Bastrop, they had a DJ with a small laser show. We paid ten bucks to get in and fifteen more to join a keg and got a color coded cup with unlimited refills. We carpooled with some other guys we suspected were also silently gay. We all agreed to stay the night, sleep on the ground, go home after sunrise. That was a great 4th of July and we watched a professional fireworks show nearby. The DJ was decent and we tipped him too. He did one slow dance an hour and that was the first time I slow danced with another guy in front of people I knew. But I was glad to show off my boyfriend and slow dance under the blue lights with over a hundred people watching. That night we saw several blow jobs in-progress by couples on blankets, half of them were hetero but it was too dark to really see much. The best part of it was the fun atmosphere; nobody bothered us and we spent the night near the bonfire on a blanket, under another blanket with pillows, and kissed a lot. There were several couples around the fire (like us) and some of them were GxG and BxB. I told David I wished the couples that performed set out tip jars. One of the party organizers worked at a factory that built trailer homes and campers and had access to a huge pile of scrap lumber so they used a loader to get two truckloads for the bonfire, for free. We lay on the blanket with the other blanket on top of us because it got cool at night. David was on his back while I was beside him and unbuttoned his shirt and rubbed his body for hours. I was so proud to be with him I kept sliding the blanket down to show off his body above his waist, but he'd slide it back up when a group of people walked by us. After the fireworks the crowd thinned out, I moved around and sucked his dick for almost an hour. When he wasn't in my mouth then my face was pressed into his boy parts. I inhaled his scent and tasted every part of his groin. He came in my mouth and then we swapped places and he did me too. We spent the night spooned under the blanket and left the next morning after the sun came up at 5:50a.m. I'm pretty sure I fell in love with David that night, even though we still hadn't actually fucked. ---- Summer-2 semester ended just before Labor Day Weekend, the school was going to totally close for four days (everyone had to leave). We faced the prospect of having to go home, so we asked around and agreed to trade beds (and meals) for work and stayed at a farm also near Bastrop Texas, it was a big dairy farm with tons of flies and cow shit. We helped do their annual blow-down with pressure washers. We scrubbed the milking barn and milk storage tank room. We worked long fourteen hour days and got stinky but had a good time and were very well fed and slept on folding cots in an empty carpeted room inside the steel barn. We steam blasted the walls, ceilings, floors, and manure troughs clean with an industrial power washer and three very long high-output hoses. The room where they had the big refrigerated milk storage tank was built like a commercial kitchen inside. The guy we worked for was the son of the owners, he was in high school and was very masculine like a junior cowboy but he turned out to be a decent but extremely horny young man. Not wanting to risk trouble we never touched him but he begged us to fuck while he watched; he even bribed us with beer and said we were still being paid. We took turns fucking each other standing naked near the stainless steel milk tank. It was weird, it was erotic, and it was also bonding. We literally fucked with a 16 year old cowboy wannabe watching (from five feet away) and stroking his dick that hung out his zipper. We saw him come on the floor twice during our demonstration. David came up behind me and slid it up and down until he found the hole then gently pushed himself up inside me then humped while I stood with my legs spread, bent over at the waist. After David came he bent over and kissed all over my back and moments later the boy came on the floor and grunted kinda weirdly loud too. Then we swapped positions and started over. He had us perform two days of the four days we were there, at the end of our work day and after the other two guys left in their truck and it was just the three of us and fifty Holstein cows. Cowboy gave us beers to drink during our sex demonstrations, which made us need to pee. He stood us side by side to pee on the floor with him aiming the hose, rinsing everything down the floor drain. Cowboy even peed on the floor at the same time as us (on day #2 he pulled down his pants, boots, and socks during our show); he even stepped close enough so our streams hit his feet but he flushed everything down the drain. That milk storage room was built like a large shower stall, even the ceilings could be power washed. That room was twenty feet wide and twenty feet long and was next to their assembly line style milking area. The milking area had ten stalls and a walkway on both sides. The cows used one walkway and people used the other. When there was an empty stall Cowboy yelled something and one cow walked in and stepped into the stall and stood in place. She got washed and hooked to the milkers; there was a small trough of water at mouth height for them. After the herd was done we washed each other with soap and water and Cowboy sprayed us down and got us two small towels to dry off. He watched every move we made and stroked his dick the entire time, the spray nozzle in the other hand. After the show he went in the house and we went into the empty office room, ate dinner, and slept on the folding cots. The cots had foam rubber pads so they were actually okay to sleep on but they smelled like a dairy farm. The good part was we made some decent money and didn't have to drive down to Houston. That was the first time we actually fucked. It was also the first time I let a total stranger see my entire body and my erection too. The kid said he had a girl friend (showed us her picture too) but his entire story sounded like bullshit to me. He was sort of boyish cute looking with his half unbuttoned white shirt, jeans, boots, and cowboy hat. He was a natural dark blonde and had great lips and smallish nips, but he looked like he'd be a great kisser and had a decent size dick that shot out semen a couple feet. I think he was one of those guys that could come five times in three hours and squirt it out each time. I might have offered to blow him if he'd been eighteen. For a sixteen year old kid his lower tummy was rather furry. His BB was just a flat round circle, but his stomach was totally flat. I think he was a type-1 diabetic too, his name was Brad, but everyone called him Cowboy. We spent the entire Labor Day weekend on the farm doing chores and making the place all clean inside. I'm sure the cows didn't care. But the dairy inspector certainly liked the work we did. We milked cows twice a day all four days and when we weren't milking we were power washing the building. Cowboy said the cows liked the feeling of being rid of all that fluid weight. After milking most of them went back outside to graze then lie down and took a nap in the fields and they usually stayed together like a large Holstein family. All the cows knew exactly how the routine worked, they knew when to walk in and leave after milking, some of them even had favorite milking stalls too. Dairy cows were usually docile animals, each one had a personality and some had names. They actually came into the barn areas and stood outside the milking room door and waited their turn, then left and walked out to the pasture. Cowboy said they took turns which was based on their pecking order. Almost every day they walked in the milking room in the same order. But there were a few skirmishes as some cheated on the pecking order. Cowboy told us one of the cows was in charge. Planning our Futures. Contact with government reps started during our fifth year. The group of us working towards our Cheeseburgers had interviews with different agencies. We interviewed with the CIA, Raytheon, US Air Force, IBM, H&R Block, and several others (Motorola, Fairchild, GM, and NASA). The CIA lady was interesting but looked grim, she dressed Goth like Morticia Addams (actress Carolyn Jones). David and I met with her together twice and on our second meeting we swapped contact info, which lead to calls from a Pentagon recruiter but he was up in Dallas and wanted us to come meet him at some military purchasing expo near downtown Dallas next weekend, so we drove up together. He said there would be badges for us at the main entrance, report to the Will Call desk then find him at the Pentagon booths. We joked about meeting him would be like the Control agents in the TV series Get Smart, shoe phones, secret pay phone booths, hidden doors, and sports cars with machine guns hidden behind the turn signals. ---- Throughout that year, the following summer and into our 6th year at UTA we had regular contact with the same Pentagon recruiter. He was not a military recruiter but he was looking for grad students working in fields like ours, with physical attributes and personalities like ours for some rare upcoming job openings in the western USA, but he was very non-specific about the job. Eventually we started talking via email and stayed in touch about twice a month, he wanted to know about our projects and thesis papers. David was developing a new power transistor case, which would be cheaper, faster to make, and conducted heat more efficiently and easier for assembly robots to grip and place. I was working on a modulator/demodulator circuit for a visible red laser that became part of those handheld laser thermometers sold today, but had lots of remote sensing military applications too. ---- Starting in our fifth year we rented an apartment and both of us still worked part time as computer repair techs at a local computer store popular with students at UTA. We were paid minimum wage plus sales commissions. We purchased used computers and printers, but most students only wanted lightweight laptop computers with good battery life. For a fraction of the cost of a new laptop we could take a used laptop and install a new hard drive, battery, and memory and have it working like new and sold for 60% off the new price. We did mostly Dell, Acer, and Toshiba laptops. The university only used MS Office so seeing a Mac computer was rare, everyone used Windows 7 or 8 because every class wanted assignments submitted to be either in Excel or Word. The university used a proprietary grading program to review all papers for spelling, grammar, punctuation, and originality. It only worked on Word format documents. It wouldn't even accept papers written with one of the office clones (Libre and others) and saved in Word format, it had to be actually done in Word. At our store we offered MS Office on DVD-ROM that came with an authentic MS hologram authorization code but nothing else. Our price was almost 60% cheaper than Best Buy, so we kicked their ass in sales and made some decent money- but it all went to pay the rent and electric bill. His parents were paying his car insurance, health insurance, and his books. My parents paid for nothing except nice Birthday and Christmas cards. My parents were poor and semi-disowned me after the big accidental coming out fiasco in high school which gravely offended them. It was before the holidays during our 6th year we had our first serious meeting with the Pentagon recruiter, that time he actually described jobs, pay, location, rules, and what we had to do to qualify. The weird part was we had to go through over two years of very difficult military training programs, after that we'd work like civilians but be paid like high ranking officers `O6' (starting about $7000 pre-tax dollars a month). One nice part was the jobs did not require uniforms or specific haircuts, but there were strict rules about piercings and tattoos. If we accepted the jobs we started with eight weeks of US Army Basic Combat Training at Fort Bliss Texas. Next, we would go to US Navy Seal School, starting at Great Lakes NTC in North Chicago Illinois (for ten months), after that we'd attend portions of two Navy underwater demolition schools (BUDS) on the east coast (Florida and South Carolina), then we'd go to Nevada for training on a small military base to learn top secret military weapons and piloting different aircraft. If we passed those schools we'd be stationed in an office inside the airport in El Paso Texas and work like civilians and be sent anywhere west of the Mississippi River (not including Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, or Hawaii) to combat acts of terror using advanced technology and secret weapons to disrupt terror plots and defeat bad guys in the act. We'd have blanket permission to kill bad guys and could go through life with something like immunity from prosecution. That blew my mind. He said it wasn't like hand to hand combat, we'd use technology and remote control weapons to beat the bad guys. In most cases they'd never know who zapped `em. He actually told us if we got stopped by the cops for driving 80 in a 55 zone we could simply drive away and if the cops arrested us a team would arrive and arrest them. Our car would have a special sticker that alerted (most) police (and government agents) that we were never to be detained. If a cop confiscated our weapons case, or opened it after we warned them not to then a Navy (or AF) platoon would be dispatched to terminate them immediately. When we were on call we'd be immune from prosecution and could pretty much do whatever was needed to be where we were needed as quickly as we could arrive, and the pay and bennies were good too. He said we would occasionally get optional mission offers that might include big tax-free cash bonuses. He asked us, "If I gave you guys the controls to a Predator drone with missile capability and offered you fifty grand in cash to shoot a certain car on the highway to kill the driver we knew was a dangerous prison escapee, would you do the job?" We looked at each other and said, "Maybe yes." He told us that was a good example of the work we'd be doing all over the western states. He said they already had two teams going in the eastern USA. Then David asked: "What if we caught that fugitive in the bathroom at a truck stop and got him in handcuffs and turned him over to the FBI instead of killing him?" "Same deal, cash reward, dead or alive." David smiled and nodded yes and said "Cool." ---- That evening in our apartment we snuggled on the sofa, naked and sticky from two hours of cardio-fucking (and horsing around with some ass toys) on the living room carpet. We discussed the jobs and the risk of death and decided to accept the Pentagon job offers knowing we'd first have to complete part of basic Navy Seal BUDS school, they had a 70% drop out rate (for the full 26 month course). We'd been drinking and were in a very romantic mood at the time. David was on the bottom and I was on top of him, my hands on his chest, our faces several inches apart as we whispered about stuff. His breath smelled like beer and his mouth tasted like beer and semen. We kissed a lot during that chat, I finally got up the nerve to suggest we could get married in Chicago when we arrived for Seal training and I was surprised when he immediately said okay. On the day he said yes we'd been together just over six years. First we had to survive eight weeks of Basic Training in the desert with cactus, spiders, snakes, and sand in everything. They said the purpose of doing that first was to improve our odds of passing (a modified version of) the Seal school. ---- Two months after we graduated from UTA we packed all our belongings into boxes inside his car, and parked it at a storage place for military members going overseas, and reported to the Army recruitment station in Dallas and were flown to El Paso and treated like transferring prisoners as we arrived for Basic Training at Fort Bliss, neither of us had been to the far west end of Texas before. That was eight weeks of yelling, running, sleep deprivation, cleaning floors, laundry, push-ups, and marching. One of their favorite punishments was what they called Thunder Drills where we ran in place and when he blew the whistle we dropped and did push-ups, next whistle blow and we were back up running in place. We did those every day after any of us made a marching mistake. The worst part was what your hands landed on, especially if the ground was hot. We looked different from the rest of our class because David and I were both 25. Most of our fellow E-1 soldiers were 18 or 19. Our ages caused us to be treated differently. That was the era of `Don't ask -- Don't tell' in the Army. But we never announced our relationship just that we were college roomies. I think our commander knew we were going to work for the Pentagon and sort of backed off some of the abuse the teenagers got, also because we were already in great shape before BCT, but the exercise helped anyway. I lost ten pounds in four weeks. The nice part of BCT was seeing all those naked 18-19 year old boys in the barracks shower, almost all of them were horny and shaved hairless. And that group of guys all seemed fine with commenting on and staring at each other's dicks and asses. We even saw some goosing in the showers too, which surprised me that it had become socially acceptable, because it wasn't at Dawson High School in far southern Houston (Pearland Texas) when I was that age. David said it had become somewhat common at his high school too. The worst part was seeing what they did to the fatter recruits during BCT, it was brutal and we saw lots of tears and anger. One kid exploded and charged the sergeant, we never saw him again. We heard they tore up his enlistment contract and let him ride the bus home to east LA. My favorite sight in BCT was on Sundays when everyone had uniforms to wash and they'd sit naked on the counter top in the laundry room while their uniforms were in the washer, and another friend would sit on a stool in front of them and shave them hairless, front and back, from their ears down to their thighs. I wished I could have taken photos of those days, naked 19 year old hard body boys being shaved by their friends on display for everyone to see, some got hard, and others didn't. I got hard just glancing at their show. We always did each other in our room, not in front of dozens of guys in the shower room. I didn't want to be that one guy in the laundry room that was hard and with a silvery thread of pre-come swaying from his head. ---- When we finished BCT school we were picked up by some Navy E4 in an olive green van and driven across the country to Chicago and instructed how and where to report for Seal training about 50 miles north in the town of North Chicago. That's when we got married and hit the bars and took the redeye train early in the morning the next day, still drunk to the train station in North Chicago then walked to the Navy base and handed over our ID cards at the gate. We experiences the same welcome there and initially we were treated like inmates and eventually delivered to school HQ as the class of recruits arrived from around the country, luckily these guys were all a bit older, most of them were 19-22 years old and in good shape. At that age the difference between a 19 year old and someone a year older could be very noticeable. ---- We were the first civilians, and the first not under any enlistment contract to attend Seal and BUDS school. I think the fact that we were free men and could quit and walk away at any time really changed the seal training experience for us and sort of bothered our trainers. And since we weren't sailors we didn't salute the officers which offended some of them. Both of us graduated, but we were transferred to another seal school that taught more advanced demolition science than regular school, but when we arrived the Navy harassment crap started all over again. That time the base commander knew about us and told the entire unit we were married gay men, civilians, and college grads. We got a lot of crap from our classmates over that. Luckily we stayed together the entire time so we dealt 1:1, face to face with anyone that objected to attending classes with a pair of legally married men. Generally, we promised them we had no interest in (them or) any man except our spouse and if they wanted to make more trouble about it we'd kill them. Usually the death threats worked and we agreed to stay apart. I guess the thing that worked was not showing fear and not backing down. We started to receive our O6 pay after completing Seal school, but back in El Paso we earned $1700 a month during BCT, in Florida our first checks were for $6850 a month pre-tax. ---- The thing that was different for us with Navy training was we were not going to the school to graduate as a combat ready naval officer. Someone in the Pentagon mapped out specific BUDS courses to take that applied to the jobs we applied for, but we were not blowing up underwater targets or leading Marines onto a beach during an invasion. Most of the weapons we'd use in our jobs were top secret and had no schools to attend on how to use them. But we needed to learn explosives and demolition so they bumped us from class to class to get the basics of what they called AUDS, advanced underwater demolition school. One big difference between us and Seals was we'd be carrying tiny missiles with atomic warheads, not blasting things with plastic explosives underwater. They also wanted us to gain experience in hand to hand combat, seal style. After that we had to master advanced killing techniques as well as stealth and advanced comms in combat situations. The big challenge for us and the Pentagon was there was no school to train us how to best use our newest weapons: the micro variable atomic warhead and the helicopter seeking missiles. They were developed for our service and never existed before our service formed. Same problem with the spiders, they were brand new technology. We received training from the people that designed and built them but that was the most they could do. The nukes were developed on a computer and tested in underground salt mines, the helicopter device was tested on dummy drones in the air, but that technology wasn't that complicated -- it was a new marriage of existing technology. Our tiny A-warheads were made from an experimental new element called Daltonium (Dn), element 108. Better than plutonium or uranium it fissioned with much smaller mass and released x108 the energy of plutonium. Its daughters were not radioactive or unstable. On the down side it could only be made in a special reactor, one atom at a time. Like Plutonium it required an initiator, a neutron reflector, and a focused explosive charge to create a critical mass and trigger the explosion. A quarter pound of Dn created the equivalent energy released during an explosion of up to half a million pounds of TNT. The variable yield device could be adjusted down to 20% or up to 90%. The final warhead was designed to be highly portable and was close in size to a tube of Pringles, minus the controlling circuitry and rocket motors. After two different advanced demolition classes we were driven by some Navy guy from North Carolina to southern Nevada to a military base the size of a Walmart parking lot. It was double fenced (like a prison) and had nothing but windowless concrete buildings and a small parking area. Outside the base was a large open pit that served as a weapon testing range. We also attended private pilot flight school and helicopter school. We learned visual and auditory aircraft recognition, and were taught how to use advanced robotic weapons that looked like spiders. We also had training on quadcopter piloting and advanced surveillance techniques. During our training in southern Nevada we met our new boss and made arrangements to secure housing near the El Paso Airport (ELP), which was on the east side of that city, at the edge of the desert and the edge of Fort Bliss. He gave us credit cards that had a Pentagon account number and department name on the front but were ours to use for the costs of moving, getting settled, and operations in El Paso. We spent time working on top secret military clearance papers and investigations, although all of that was done when we were still in college, it was approved by the CIA/FBI or they never would have interviewed us in the first place. We both got (upset) phone calls from relatives about the interviews they had with FBI people over our security clearances. It was no surprise that they were angered when FBI people knocked on their doors asking questions about us. Technically we were civilian contractors for the Pentagon. We worked for the Pentagon and drew DOD paychecks once a month. Our insurance was the same as if we were officers in the Army, and our pay grades were higher than new hire civilian employees because of our education and military training. Basically we started work as new hires with the pay rank of full colonel (O6) in the Army. Our boss was a captain (O3), which was a strange arrangement. Part of the reason for that was the high level of clearance needed for our jobs because unlike most officers in the Army we would drive home from work each day with nuclear tipped missiles in our car! The Army didn't trust 99% of its officers with those weapons. If we fucked up with those devices the penalty for us would be near immediate execution or life in Fort Leavenworth. David joked one day in class when the lecture was about the penalties for accidentally discharging a nuke when he said, "The only way the Pentagon would overlook a fuck up like that would be if it was halfway up my ass when it went off." Everyone laughed. The consequences for having it lost or stolen were potentially severe, so we carried it almost everywhere with us, even to the grocery store and we took it to the theater when we went to see Men in Black 3. It became obvious early on that the metal case attracted unwanted attention, David said we should find some way to disguise it. I suggested sticking it in a backpack. They said we had to protect our equipment case with our lives, literally. We had to be willing to die or kill people to protect our gear. They told us eventually it would happen, it happened to everyone in our branch eventually, usually in the hands of a small town police officer. During our time in Nevada they clarified that the larger case that held our uniforms and machine guns was not as high a security item and could be left at home or in the trunk. We found out later we could leave the main case at home alone for short periods if our home met certain security requirements. The only incident we had was near the end of our time in Nevada we took the case with us for a two night trip to Las Vegas, we stayed two nights at Wynn and ran into a problem with security over our mysterious metal case, they wanted to inspect it or eject us from the casino, we disagreed. The thing that really surprised me was how angry David got when the security team grabbed the case and examined the latches. He stood up, pulled out his cell phone and started shooting video, which also upset them, he told them that was property of the Pentagon and opening it was a capital offence, subjecting those involved to summary execution. He repeated his warning that anyone tampering with the case was tampering with their lives and possibly those around him including family members. "When they come to kill you they won't care who's standing nearby." After his second warning they stepped back from the case and city police were called. Luckily Vegas police were fully trained in case rules and released us and our case. The casino security people were stunned and furious that it ended with an apology and a door held wide open for us to leave and return to the slot machines. We went to our room then went to the pool for a few hours. That evening late we had a knock on the door, hotel security and the manager wanted to apologize for our treatment but David pointed to the door and told them to fuck off and get out. In all honesty the hotel security people had no clue who we were or why they were apologizing. "What a bunch of poorly trained clowns!" He exclaimed into the hallway as they stood by the elevator. We ordered dinner around 11pm and found out later it was comp'd by management. We had steaks, baked potatoes, peas, salads, and a twelve pack of ice cold Coors Lite. We didn't know that until checkout time. ---- After nearly thirteen months of intense training (in Nevada), twelve hours a day, six days a week we graduated from school and drove east on I-10 to Texas. We arrived in our office in El Paso for our first day of work and were assigned temporary NCO housing on Fort Bliss because there were no suitable empty apartments in the area. We got onto wait lists at two apartment complexes near the airport on Edgemere Boulevard at Bellrose Drive. They looked old but had good ratings with the health department and a low history of criminal activity. Both had pools and laundry hookups in every unit. We also had to continue our training to earn our pilots licenses for fixed and rotary wing aircraft that was done at the pilot's school at the airport. ELP had one short runway for small planes it sat at the far east end of the airport, which was where we practiced flying small planes, mostly the Cessna 172 and Piper P28, and a few different helicopters converted for flight school use, like the Bell 205A-1, a 2-seat Canadian Mosquito, and the Ultrasport 496t. There was a huge fiasco when we arrived at the El Paso airport because nobody there knew us (except our boss and he was in Washington), we had no idea who to ask or where to go. We were taken to airport security and detained for about twenty minutes before an Army captain (the Officer of the Day, aka: OD) came upstairs to rescue us. He introduced us to the entire day shift security team (around the airport, including all TSA people) since we would be working together. Then we got our badges and were shown all the different routes to the hidden hallway on the ground floor, under the main passenger terminal. Access to the ground floor office area was limited to keep air passengers from accidentally walking downstairs. The part where the offices sat were in the oldest section of the airport from back when it was military property. The original civilian airfield property was now a cement manufacturer that was west of Biggs Air Base, the airfield part was still a field! The original air field was bordered by Fred Wilson Avenue, Railroad Drive, and Chaffee Road. ---- Soon after we moved to El Paso we were fitted with skin tight protective suits (at White Sands Missile Range, WSMR). They did not use metallic plates so if we got shot we'd certainly sustain injury but these were impenetrable and resistant to flame, gas, and liquids. They came with a removable head cover (balaclava) and a belt that went around our waists and one strap that ran over the far shoulder and down to the waist in back. Like Batman's belt, ours had pouches too, one of them held our spider drones in small cardboard boxes, another had bullets in mags. Our left forearm sleeves had a computer terminal built-in with a long rectangular LCD display and an advanced keyboard as well as voice command capability. That weekend we were flown in a high speed jet from the airport (ELP) to Dulles Airport then taken to the Pentagon for microscopic implants in our ears and throats. The implants allowed us to secretly talk to each other, wirelessly, without any other electronics involved, it was a system called Whispernet and had a limited range, maybe 100 feet. Our black high impact equipment case also connected to Whispernet and linked us with our support team if we wished to activate it. It also contained some serious computing and comms gear that linked via TDRS satellite to our office and the Pentagon. Both implanted devices were slightly larger than a grain of long rice (not including the tiny wire antenna), one went in the neck, it was injected with a large bore needle and located in the wall of the trachea beside the vocal chords. The other was implanted under the skin behind the ear and a wire was inserted through the skull via a tiny hole they drilled and connected to a coil placed beside the auditory nerve. We were sedated for that procedure but it only took 49 minutes from start to the time we walked to the waiting room and started chatting between ourselves without speaking out loud. It was very odd learning to whisper without talking and at first we sounded like drunk perverts heavy breathing over the telephone. Both of us were given tiny electronic jamming devices we could use to block each other's signals. For the first few hours the sounds we made for each other were hysterically funny but that part got old after a while so we used a jammer. After those implants were done we both got bruises on our skin just behind our ears. Later in the day we both had headaches we left the clinic office with pain and nausea meds. We were also fitted with glasses, which looked like regular black frame sunglasses that also linked us with our pelican case for two-way comms via satellite. Each pair had tiny speakers, stereoscopic microphones, stereoscopic cameras, and the lenses were computer screens that linked to the case and showed us outputs from the spiders, our comms gear, (and the Pentagon) it worked like a heads-up map, GPS, and augmented reality screens. During normal wearing they were in augmented reality mode that added info to what you saw. If the batteries died you saw nothing with them on because the screens went out. They recharged by placing them in special cutouts inside our pelican case and could run for about fifty hours continuous on a single charge. Like most of our gear, they could also link to our wrist panels, the spiders, and our weapons (even with comms in the case turned off). These systems all had triple redundancy, which added to their cost. The glasses were actually designed for use by people without Whispernet implants. After that we went back to the airport and were flown back to El Paso in the modified combat fighter jet that flew up to 1900mph and up to 50,000 feet ASL. I gotta say, if you've never seen something fly at 1900mph it's worth the effort! Highly impressive, neat as fuck. We flew from Washington to Kansas City for refueling then the rest of the way to El Paso, we got home at 7:45pm and both of us were exhausted. We were also sore and grouchy because those Pentagon transport jets were designed for speed, not passenger comfort. They operated a fleet of four jets in the USA for time sensitive transport of Pentagon brass, I guess our service was now on the list for transport to alert locations, and optionally for important errands. It cost a lot of money to fly someone across the US at 1900mph but it was the fastest transport in the USA for non-astronauts. While we were in the Pentagon Medical Unit we were issued something that functioned like a pocket pager but was much larger. It looked like a 1983 Radio Shack Pocket Computer-1 but had a small QWERTY keyboard and a two line LCD display. It sat on our kitchen counter with a tiny power cord that ran to a wall wart. It got signals from a military TDRS satellite and alarmed if we had an alert, and displayed text: how/where/when we were to report. If our boss in El Paso alerted us it was usually done over that system because it was very reliable and encrypted. When not being used it displayed outdoor temperature, sky condition, DEFCON number as a Roman numeral, the date and time. It just sat on the counter looking like a tiny weather service box. At first David was worried that it might also be a listening device but we opened the case and found no microphone. He also set a portable radio near it which would bleed into the audio section if it ever transmitted any signals we'd hear it on the radio speaker, just like your cell signal bleeding into the TV or radio sound in the same room. The base unit had a printer and it was capable of printing private messages or brief alert notes on the display. It printed on old adding machine paper rolls. The alert box was designed with an alarm that could be heard in every room in our house, including the basement. We also used it to alert our office of a change in status, like: off duty (+ reason) vacation-away, on duty, on duty restricted, etc. It was sort of like having someone from HR in our house 24/7. Our first free weekend in El Paso we flew back to Dallas to get his car and our apartment stuff in storage near Dallas and drove it back to El Paso after two hours of trying to get the car to start after sitting unused for three years. Our overnight trip turned into a four day pain in the ass but at least we had our stuff back that we packed from our apartment in Austin. Contact the author: borischenaz at gmail Keep up to date on my work at twitter: @borischenaz Most of my ebooks can be found: https://www.amazon.com/s?k="boris+chen"&ref=nb_sb_noss_2