the A.F.R. search the Antitoi shop

"Technical interview" is the whole book's universal euphemism, and here its A.F.R. dialect is exposed as torture-to-death. Steeply's "technical interviews" (035, n.44) are engineered silences and feigned idiocy; the A.F.R.'s are "strenuous" and "regrettably fatal," the burglar's "electrical-surge-tolerance" the actual measure taken. Both services use the identical bureaucratic phrase for interrogation, and the scene traces the Entertainment's location backward along a chain of these "interviews," each one a body. The method is universal across factions, the register uniformly clinical — every faction interrogates, every faction calls it an interview, and only the corpse-count distinguishes the dialects.