the AFR plans the E.T.A. raid
one of the newly acquired test-subjects […] was discovered to have been being severing and pushing beneath the room of storage’s closed door the severed digits of the second of the newly acquired test-subjects […] rather than his own digits, marring the statistics of Brullîme’s field-experiment
Context
The digit-price experiment on viewer-willingness runs on, and here it's corrupted by exactly the kind of addict's cunning the theme keeps insisting the Entertainment defeats. Broullîme's matrix requires each Subject to saw off his own finger for each re-viewing, to prove the desire is unsatiable — but one test-subject games it, feeding the other Subject's severed digits under the door to buy his own further viewings, so the statistics no longer measure willingness-to-self-mutilate at all. It's a black comedy of the appetite: the wanting is so total that a Subject will cheat, steal another man's fingers, do anything to keep watching — the cheat itself is the strongest possible confirmation of the very craving the botched experiment fails to quantify. The pleasure outruns the instrument built to measure it.