Pages 470–475

Y.D.A.U. — Gately at the podium · first-time reader guide · all scenes

When you've finished these pages: three things worth a second look, at the bottom.

"PRE-DAWN, 1 MAY — Y.D.A.U. ... STILL": the same single Arizona night you've been returning to since pp. 87–93, further along toward morning. Marathe and Steeply only, on their mountainside shelf, and the prose still leans Québecois because it sits close to Marathe's head. This installment is mostly Steeply telling a story — an old Canadian brain-research program — with Marathe needling him for slowness and, unsettlingly, already knowing the hardware vocabulary. Nothing heavy beyond lab animals dying; it's a talking scene with one big idea in it.

Terms, in order of appearance

Briggs electrodes / Kenbeck circuit (p. 470) — implantation-grade hardware; the plutonium-239 pacemaker pack Marathe knows from his father is real 1970s medicine.
Elder, or Olders (p. 470) — the misremembered "leading Canadian neurologist"; sounds a lot like James Olds, whose real 1950s rats self-stimulated at levers in Montreal.
Brandon Psychiatric Center (p. 471) — Brandon, Manitoba is real, hospital included; these particular experiments are the book's.
MK-Ultra (p. 472) — the C.I.A.'s real mind-control program, begun 1953; endnote 198 quotes the real lawsuit it produced.
Langley (p. 473) — C.I.A. headquarters, Virginia; shorthand for the agency.
N.S.A. / R.C.M.P. (p. 474) — real agencies: U.S. signals intelligence; Canada's federal police.
train-cultists (p. 474) — Steeply's needle at Marathe's wheelchair-bound cell; the jab implies legs lost to some train practice, and the aside is all the text gives so far.

After you read: three things

1. The lever, and who lines up for it. The rats press "thousands of times an hour, over and over, ignoring food and female rats in heat... stopping only when the rat finally died" (pp. 471–472). When word leaks, young Canadians trample each other to volunteer — knowing about the rats — and screening finds them "fascinatingly, chillingly average, normal" (p. 473). The horror the scene wants you to register isn't the electrode; it's the averageness.

2. The analogy gets said out loud. Steeply's distillation — "the sum of all possible pleasures refined into pure current and deliverable at the flip of a hand-held lever" (p. 473) — and then the direct question: is the Entertainment "somehow optical stimulation of the p-terminals," the electrode bypassed? After all you've heard about the cartridge's effects, this is the first mechanism anyone has proposed. And catch Steeply's three-word footnote, the serial's whole argument compressed: "By free choice, of course."

3. The story is also a move. Marathe spends the scene cataloguing Steeply's warming routines and reading his trained interviewer's blankness; the anecdote is aimed past Marathe at Fortier, who "might be induced to see just what it is he's proposing to let out of the cage" (p. 475). And that cage word arrives pages after Gately's escape from his "mental cage" (p. 468) — the splice reads deliberate.

Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.