RUM, BUM AND THE ROBO-LASH
“And what are the traditions of our Navy? They are rum, sodomy, and the lash.” —First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, 1913
Some of us were real perverts. Some made do with your standard porno. Some of us did ourselves with our less dominant hand, in the shower or in the rack. When we used each other, if it was consensual, we did it with a wink.
All of us knew it was forbidden on watch, but that was slowly changing, too. I’d say it was something of a miracle––the timing of the incident and that we got our supplement just before deployment.
What had happened was, some butter bar female reporting to a boat—in our squadron actually––they went out for a quick week-long dive to do something with sonar, and apparently the weapons chief was in such a state that he had his underlings corner the woman in the torpedo room and stripped her down to––I don’t even know if they call them skivvies on females. I mean, had she been some enlisted chick it would have been foxtail-swept under the proverbial rug/deck. But an officer––and by some dumb luck, she was the daughter of an influential senator––the whole thing got sent all the way up the brass to the Capitol. Became embarrassingly public. It’s unclear what they all did to her while she was undressed. We’ve been making up our own versions.
After the political jumping jacks, one thing led to the next, or you might say one seaman followed another, and the Secretary of the Navy was holding a press conference to defend the latest implementation of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, which this time had nothing and everything to do with orientation. It was about the fleetwide issuance of the Robo-Cubare©. The cutting edge cross-section of augmented reality and sex tourism, a robotic concubine for the 21st century sailor.
Navy’s task was to defend against the old block of Evangelicals who objected, with sure belief in their purpose, to the fringe settings of the Cubare. They were indignant on principle at the developers of the units’ software who had cast a wide net, so to speak, to attract the widest possible swath of users.
“Manning the watch is the most dangerous challenge we face in the modern navy. Such a problem will only begin to be solved when the vast population of our citizens who still believe we are fighting for 20th century ideals check in with the global reality and surrender their imagined moral high-ground. I will state now and definitively that no private sin (if we still have to use that word) will hinder any able bodied recruit from fulfilling their service.”
A growing block of our beastialist countrymen found this message encouraging, apparently, and many of them had no other means to scratch their itch––equephiles for example, given the extinction of all horses, donkeys, and ponies. Cubare had options across the entire animal kingdom, past and present.
An octopus guy, with a special knack for getting in and out of tight places, deployed with us to handle our shallow water recovery operations. I asked him one day as we were sharing a sink shaving if he had any reservations about how he used the technology to get off.
“The conscience was an evolutionary mistake,” he said. “The only thing on your mind with a tentacle climbing into the recesses of your ass is the burning need to break out of your spine. Vertebrates were probably nature’s worst failed experiment.” He puffed out his cheeks like soft, empty, leather pockets full of air.
by D. Beveridge
D. Beveridge writes in Los Angeles where everything is concrete. In the Global War on Terrorism he served aboard a fast-attack submarine in the Pacific Fleet. See www.dbeveridge.com