the AFR's two ways to the Entertainment
Less better was the indirect route: surveillance and infiltrating the surviving associates of the Entertainment’s auteur, its actress and rumored performer, relatives—if necessary, taking them and subjecting them to technical interview, leading with hope to the original auteur’s cartridge of the Entertainment.
Context
The whole human world around the Entertainment collapses into logistics here. Auteur, performer, relatives — every person who ever touched the cartridge is reduced to a route toward it, a stone to be turned on the way to the object, and the operative verb is "taking them and subjecting them" until the trail delivers the film. It's the theme's coldest framing of the artifact: the Entertainment is so purely a strategic object that the people who made and starred in it register only as vectors, means of acquisition, obstacles between the wheelchair-men and the Master copy. The lethal film has already begun consuming its makers before anyone even watches it.