the medical attaché receives the cartridge
He reclines before the viewer in his special electronic recliner, and his black-veiled, ethnically Arab wife wordlessly attends him, loosening any constrictive clothing, adjusting the room’s lighting, fitting the complexly molded dinner tray over his head so that his shoulders support the tray and allow it to project into space just below his chin, that he may enjoy his hot dinner without having to remove his eyes from whatever entertainment is up and playing.
Context
The lethal victim is built before the lethal cartridge arrives. Everything the Entertainment will do to the attaché — immobilize him, feed him where he lies, keep his eyes fixed until the body fails — is already the nightly ritual, engineered by furniture and a wordless wife. The tray is the telling detail: a device whose entire design goal is that the eyes never leave the screen, that eating and viewing merge so that no appetite can pull the gaze away. Spectation here isn't an activity, it's a posture the whole domestic apparatus exists to perfect, and the recliner even tips him from "unwound spectation into a fully relaxed night's sleep" without a break in the trance. The samizdat, when it comes, will only have to remove the sleep.