Rodney Tine's samizdat dossier — "seventeen police, paramedics, and teleputer-technicians in…"

The institutional casualty ledger, and it accretes by rescue. The Entertainment surfaces in a Berkeley home and takes the film-scholar and his companion; then the two cops sent to check; then the six cops sent after the two; then the sergeant and partner sent after them — "seventeen police, paramedics, and teleputer-technicians in all," each wave consumed trying to retrieve the last, until someone finally thinks to cut the power from outside without looking. It's the same self-feeding horror as the attaché's apartment (028) at institutional scale, repeated across Tempe (two-thirds of a film festival), New Iberia, Boston. The ledger's grim logic is that the natural human response to a casualty — go in and help — is itself the fatal act, so the weapon converts every rescuer into a new casualty. The state cannot even count its dead without losing more of them to the counting.