The samizdat's authorship and the hunt for the Master: JOI the optics-man as the Entertainment's auteur — the "verifiably lethal" pole

pivotal · Nov YDAU (years after JOI's death)

• When: Nov YDAU; the A.F.R. and U.S.O.U.S. campaigns to locate the lethal cartridge
• What: Across this range the samizdat "Entertainment" is treated as unambiguously JOI's. Steeply to Marathe: "The filmmaker'd been a cutting-edge optics man. Holography, diffraction. He'd used holography a couple times before, and in the context of a kind of filmed assault on the viewer. He was of the Hostile School" (scene 098). Poutrincourt's match-side reference tags Hal as "the samizdat Entertainment's director's other son" (130). The A.F.R. run two routes (143): the direct hunt for a Master, and, failing that, "surveillance and infiltrating the surviving associates of the Entertainment's auteur, its actress and rumored performer, relatives." Having secured a Read-Only copy off DuPlessis's death (147) — verified lethal by the deaths of Joubet and Desjardins, who viewed it until they died — they field-tested "the samizdat cartridge's motivational range" on the captured WYYY engineer and turned to "the more arduous and risky task of taking for technical interview known persons associated with the Entertainment and locating the original maker's duplicable Master copy," with attention "focused on the cartridge's performer and on the Academy of Tennis of the auteur's estate." Orin's own name gets snagged: his profiler-"Subject" raises "samizdat" in connection with "The Mad Stork," and Hal insists "Himself's work was all very self-consciously American... His interest in politics was subordinate to form. Always. And none of it's banned" (n110). [Authorship and the Master-hunt: the authorship and Master-hunt surfaced richly; whether the samizdat is truly JOI's finished lethal film left open — cf. Joelle's "joke," event 16, and the wraith's "reach-the-son opus," event 21.]