the Entertainment as war-trigger: Fortier's bus reverie — the A.F.R. utopia — "He imagines teacups clinking thinly beneath…"

The pickup's payoff and the anthology's clearest vision of the A.F.R. utopia: riding the empty bus, Fortier imagines "two-thirds of NNE's largest urban city inert, sybaritically entranced... fouling their divans" — America euthanized by its own appetite. Then the political sequence he is engineering: "M. Tine holding the hand... of President J. Gentle as the O.N.A.N.ite President signs declaring War," and "teacups clinking beneath trembling hands in... Ottawa's sanctum of power" — Gentle's futile war-declaration and Ottawa's terror as it realizes it must expel Québec to survive. This is the whole strategy of 145 rendered as a dream: not conquest but a nation's self-inflicted collapse, with Québec freed in the wreckage.