My brother Mitch was the one that followed in Dad’s footsteps, going into aeronautical engineering. My oldest brother Ollie, Mitch, and I all kind of watched one another to see who would follow Dad’s footsteps. It was fitting, I thought, that Mitch the favored son would be the one to do it. I think on some level Ollie and I felt that we might be expected to do the same thing that Dad did. It turned out that Dad tried to dissuade Mitch from going into aeronautical engineering and urged him instead to go into… computers… which Ollie and I both work in.

Mitch graduated from the University of Delosa while dating a Suzie who was in pre-med and unavailable to go anywhere (there are no aeronautical engineering jobs in Ephesus), a girl that he thought he was going to marry, so he stuck around Ephesus for a couple more years and picked up his graduate degree. Suzie left the picture and Brynn entered it, so he ended up having to leave a girlfriend behind anyway. He interviewed at a couple of places in Colosse, but Omicron, the defense contract that he’d interned for, wanted him in Washington DC. Further, he would be contracted directly to the federal government and simply drawing a paycheck from Omicron.

To this day we don’t know exactly what it was that he was doing in DC. We knew that it took him nine months to get started because he needed a very high level of clearance. Though boring, that was great for him because such clearance is money in the bank when it comes to promotions inside and outside of the company. We also knew that he had a rotating schedule working 16-24 hour days and then getting days off. On the other hand, he couldn’t tell us what he was doing or exactly what part of the government he was working with/for.

Interestingly enough, the second Christmas he worked there, his gift to me was a CIA mug.

The morning of 9/11/1 was mind blowing for a lot of reasons, but one of which was that it made what my brother was doing that much more important. Was he working in the Pentagon? It wasn’t a stretch as my father with similar credentials had done some DOD command work with some of it in DC. The chances that he did work at the Pentagon and that he was there at the time of the attacks were microscopic. I knew this, but it doesn’t matter when it’s your brother. It was, of course, fine.

Since he left that position and relocated to Colosse we’ve learned that whatever he was doing involved monitoring satellites.

After his move to Colosse, I’ve still long had little to no idea of what he was doing. He doesn’t work for Omicron anymore. The contract he was working on was bought out by another firm which kept him on in the same job at the same salary with the same seniority and benefits.

I did get a glimpse of what he’s doing, though, because he has a couple quotes in a recent edition of Aeronautical Digest, a Monthly (I think?) magazine for airplane, military, and science enthusiasts. He is apparently a “research engineer” and his team made some sort of discovery about the effect of the sun’s relative strength at any given point and automated flight or something like that. It’s not up my alley so I didn’t understand it.

It’s almost as cool as when my father got to go to the premier of the movie Stealth because of the technical assistance his group provided and rub elbows* with Jamie Foxx and Sam Shepherd.

* - By “rub elbows” I mean that almost literally. He accidentally brushed up against Shepherd. He didn’t actually talk to them or anything like that. He was actually able to go mostly because his boss was unable to so he was given the special pass. Pretty cool nonetheless, even if it is an awful movie.