Marathe and Kate Gompert at Ryle's — "No, but this choice, Katherine: I…"

Marathe draws the theme's one moral distinction: there are chains you choose and chains that come from not choosing, and only the first kind sets you free. His marriage to a comatose skull-less woman binds him utterly, but the binding is his own election of something over himself, and that election is what broke him out of the cage — whereas the "chains of not choosing," the drift toward whatever pleasure presents itself, is the bondage that only looks like freedom. It's the affirmative counter-statement the Entertainment has no answer to: choosing your master, deliberately and against your own comfort, is the single act the pleasure-of-not-choosing culture has forgotten how to perform. The cartridge is what awaits everyone who never learns it.