Tine in Boston: the casualty cascade — the federal scale of the loss
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
Context
The crisis's scale rendered as a body-count the state cannot admit publicly: at the Berkeley site alone "seventeen police, paramedics, and teleputer-technicians" were lost, each wave of responders consumed by the thing before anyone thought "to go around back and kill the... power." The samizdat is a weapon that eats a government's own personnel — cops, medics, technicians — faster than the government can grasp what it is. This is the material fact that turns a stray cartridge into an N.S. emergency and forces the whole federal apparatus onto it.