Marathe and Steeply: the Master copies and temptation (pp. 489–490)

The weapon that cannot be examined, only suffered. Both sides now hold Read-Only copies of the Entertainment — confiscated, inventoried, stockpiled like ordnance — and both face the same impossibility: you cannot study it. To learn what's on the cartridge is to watch it, and to watch it is to be lost; there is no detached vantage, no safe read. Marathe's paired questions ("who can know … who can study … while detached?") name the thing that makes this weapon categorically unlike any other in the stockpile: intelligence, the whole apparatus of analysis and countermeasure, has no purchase, because the act of gathering intelligence is itself the fatal act. The Entertainment defeats the one faculty a state relies on to defeat threats — the ability to look at a danger without becoming its victim.