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felled palm trunk when he felt a faint spray of wetness against his skin and he saw the yellow head of the dog swimming below, head up, very earnestly, then disappearing into the field without a look back. He bleated to it quietly. Nothing. He pounded the ground and hissed, and it came to him, tail wagging, ass down on the ground—excited. Probably barking. He saw its throat work. Urging him to come out into the field. There are strangers here! No, no, no. Quiet. Quiet, please. Then, glancing up, he saw trucks coming out the back gate. And then he was on his feet, scrambling, pushing out into the open, giving his broadest, most moronically chipper grin, the one used by American actors whose role was to be humiliated or, most preferably, ignored: Yes, hello, soldiers? I am not against you! Yes! Please stop! Please wait! There’s danger this way!

 
    3
    Subject: re: mobile camera network
    Sir,
    Request deployment of so-called mobile camera network, if such network should be operational. Destination would be Patrol Base Fortitude, intersection of Route Tender and Route Trap. Request that accompanying technician be familiar with the system.
    V/R,
    LT Emma Fowler
    Echo Company
    1st Division
    27th Infantry
    From: [email protected]
    Subject re: mobile camera network
    Lieutenant,
    Regret to inform you that cameras are still in the prototype phase. I appreciate your interest in our program and will be happy to comply with your request after a requisite testing period. The estimation from our project manager is one month to six weeks.
    V/R,
    Major Clarence McKutcheon
    HQ Company
    1st Division
    27th Infantry
    Pulowski lay in the meat pod of his trailer, surrounded by forty thousand other meat pods, across the acres and acres of Camp Tolerance, all piped in and nourished by the black goo of the American Forces Network and super-strong AC. Eighteen hours had passed since Fowler had left for the patrol base. Since then he’d showered, hauled his filthy uniform to the laundry, sucked up some meat pod television ( Doctor Who , over on the Sci-Fi Channel of AFN), but avoided email studiously. So it hadn’t been until midnight that he’d seen Fowler’s message, or McKutcheon’s response. Schlubby, white, with the sloped body of a swimming buoy, and a small fortune in hair plugs beading his forehead, McKutcheon had grown up in Sacramento, majored in communications at Chico State, and done ROTC to pay the tab—this back in the middle nineties, post-Gulf, when the last place anybody imagined going was Iraq. As a Headquarters Company officer, he prepared intel reports for the battalion briefings. He wrote PowerPoints, edited the battalion newsletter, supervised Pulowski’s installation of the battalion’s VoIP phone network, but most important, he had been Pulowski’s guide, his Laurence Fishburne, offering, in the smothered language of the true bureaucrat, two pills—fight, or stay inside in the meat pod farm indefinitely. McKutcheon had also made it clear which choice led to enlightenment, which was how Pulowski’s work on the mobile camera system had come up. It was funded under something called the Asymmetric Warfare Initiative. DoD oversight, private matching funds, forty-page progress reports: the true matrix. McKutcheon would get credit from the colonel for bringing in outside dollars. Pulowski would make his own hours, would no longer have to hang around headquarters, would be out of McKutcheon’s hair—and, implicitly, would not be at risk of doing something that might actually get him hurt. So he felt embarrassed to be formulating an argument that the cameras should actually be deployed, as if he were disappointing McKutcheon in some crucial way. But the argument was there, so after he’d lain awake awhile longer, he swung his feet onto the plywood floor of his trailer and turned on the light.
    The trailer was spotless, floor swept, programming manuals in