Marathe and Steeply: the p-terminals — "And suddenly the neuro-team at Brandon…"
And suddenly the neuro-team at Brandon pull in to work one day and find human volunteers lining up literally around the block outside the place, able-bodied and I should remember to recall mostly young Canadians, lining up and literally trampling each other in their desire to sign up as volunteers for p-terminal-electrode implantation and stimulation.
Context
The appetite proven on human beings, and the terrifying part is that they volunteered. Word leaks, and people line up "around the block," trampling each other for the chance at fatal brain-implantation — in full knowledge, Marathe notes, of the rat's and the dolphin's death. This is Marathe's whole thesis rendered as a fact rather than an argument: a population that will stampede toward a pleasure it knows will kill it. And the psych-screens make it worse — the volunteers test "fascinatingly, chillingly average, normal," no deviants, just "regular young people," which means the hunger isn't a pathology in a damaged few but the baseline condition of the ordinary. The Entertainment doesn't need to seduce a vulnerable minority; it can count on a line around the block, because the appetite for total pleasure-unto-death is simply what normal looks like.