Marathe and Steeply: the p-terminals
But Rémy, apparently the purest, most refined pleasure imaginable. The neural distillate of, say, orgasm, religious enlightenment, ecstatic drugs, shiatsu, a crackling fire on a winter night—the sum of all possible pleasures refined into pure current and deliverable at the flip of a hand-held lever. Thousands of times an hour, at will.
Context
Pleasure conceived as pure deliverable current — the Entertainment's fantasy stated as neuroscience. The p-terminal isn't a particular pleasure but "the sum of all possible pleasures refined into pure current," orgasm and enlightenment and warmth distilled to a flippable jolt, "at will," with no object, no earning, no world attached. This is exactly what the samizdat promises through the optic nerve instead of an electrode: not a story or an image you enjoy but pleasure as such, undivided and total, the thing Erdedy's cartridge-scanning was reaching for and the attaché's loop delivered. The horror is the purity — a pleasure with nothing in it but pleasure, aimed at no one, "deliverable at the flip of a hand-held lever," which is to say a pleasure that has severed itself entirely from any reason to live.