Marathe and Steeply: choosing nothing to love (pp. 319–320)

The appetite precedes the weapon, and the appetite is the actual death. Marathe refuses Steeply's framing that the collapse is coming; he says the collapse already happened, invisibly, the moment a people became "unable to choose appetites." The Entertainment doesn't cause the death — it reveals one that already occurred, makes visible a population that will take death-by-pleasure the instant it's offered. "This is the death": not the twenty-three corpses in the attaché's apartment, but the condition that made them possible, the incapacity to want-otherwise that the cartridge merely exposes. The samizdat is a diagnostic instrument, and what it diagnoses is a self that has lost the ability to master its own wanting.