Rodney Tine's samizdat dossier — "It had popped up in Berkeley…"
It had popped up in Berkeley NCA, in the home of a film-scholar and his male companion, neither of whom had appeared for appointments for days; and now lost to meaningful human activity henceforward, by all appearances, were the scholar and companion, the two cops dispatched to the Berkeley home, the six cops dispatched after the two cops never followed up their Code-Five, the watch sergeant and partner dispatched after them—seventeen police, paramedics, and teleputer-technicians in all, until the lethality of whatever they’d caught sight of presented itself with enough clarity for somebody to think to go around back and kill the Berkeley home’s power. The Entertainment had popped up in New Iberia LA. Tempe AZ had lost two-thirds of the attendees of an avant-garde film festival in Arizona State U.’s Entertainment Studies amphitheater before a level-headed custodian killed the building’s whole grid.
Context
Early November YDAU, the federal casualty ledger — and the film's first known victims are film people: a Berkeley film-scholar, then two-thirds of an avant-garde festival audience in an Entertainment Studies amphitheater. The mechanism is stated in passing as sight itself ("the lethality of whatever they’d caught sight of"), and the only working countermeasure both times is killing the power — you can't rescue the viewers, only the projection. The film kills as cinema, through the eye, and its natural prey is its own ideal audience.