the Wild Conceits essay: le Jeu du Prochain Train — the A.F.R.'s crucible — "known to have originated at least…"
known to have originated at least a decade prior to Reconfiguration among the male offspring of asbestos, nickel and zinc miners in the desolate Papineau region of what was then extreme southwest Quebec
Context
The origin story that explains the wheelchairs: the A.F.R.'s legless core "can be traced to... 'Le Jeu du Prochain Train,'" the train-jumping ordeal-game of "the male offspring of asbestos, nickel and zinc miners in the desolate Papineau region" — the same E.W.D.-festooned mining country (n112) the cell now defends. Six miners' sons at a level crossing race to be "the last of your round's six to jump... across the tracks... before the train passes," the train itself "regarded rather as le jeu's boundary, arena, and reason," legs lost to "orthopedic saws applied to... violently angled masses of unrecognizably contuded meat." The cell that assassinates from wheelchairs was forged by a game that took its members' legs — the A.F.R.'s bodies are the residue of a nihilist rite in the pre-Experialist mining towns, so that the insurgency's very physical form is a product of the extractive Québec the Reconfiguration then poisoned. (The Russian-Roulette / suicide-mechanics of the game are depression-anhedonia's, 111's companion; landed here is the game as the A.F.R.'s political-formative crucible.)