A.F.R. U.S.A.-cell leader: the aim, the command web, the weaponized wheelchair

texture · STANDING

• When: STANDING — role, body, and objective framing every dated event; the underlying scenes span 30 Apr-1 May YDAU (desert meetings) through 14 Nov YDAU (Ennet House canvass), plus 145's narratorial capsule (~9-11 Nov)
• What: Fortier leads the U.S.A. cell of Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents and is Rémy Marathe's superior ("his A.F.R. superiors Fortier and Broullîme," 088): he wished the Marathe/Steeply interfaces conducted in Québecois French as a small symbolic concession (029), and he set the purpose and co-scripted the intro lines ("Good night, I am addicted and deformed, seeking residential treatment for addiction, desperately.") for the demi-maison canvassing Marathe executes at Ennet House (149/151/153). His aim, as the U.S. side reads it, has no conventional politics: Behavioral Science can find no territorial goal, and he is indifferent to Reconfiguration, tariffs, and redemisement (088); Steeply calls it a "blind desire for harm against the U.S." (096) resting on the thesis that Americans are children who will kill themselves for a sufficiently perfect pleasure (072); "M. Fortier finds the theories of content irrelevant." (098). Physically: legless, wheelchair-bound, owner of flesh-tone polymer prostheses responsive to neural stimuli from his stumps, which he rarely wears in the U.S.A. and never on public transit — he prefers the solicitude the weak substitute for respect, using American condescension toward the wheelchaired as fuel and cover (145). The cell believes Marathe a loyal triple agent (103); the narration flags the trust as mortal in both directions — were Fortier to learn of Marathe's real betrayal, he would kill Gertraud and Marathe both. The tie between the two men predates the cell: Fortier is "the former boyhood friend of Rémy Marathe's late older brothers, both struck and killed by trains" (n39 p. 0994) — indeed he "had overseen both jeux du prochain train at which Marathe's elder brothers had been struck and killed, and Fortier has long nursed a suspicion that Marathe nurses dreams of redress for this"; on that suspicion, "Suspected but unknown by Marathe, Fortier plans to have Marathe view the Entertainment by force before plans for the dissemination of copies from a Master are firm in execution." Nor is the leak of the cell's pure-malice agenda to U.S.O.U.S. necessarily a loss to him: "it is not impossible that Fortier deliberately allowed Marathe to pass along this datum [...] for the hope of instilling even deeper chills of fear in Sans-Christe Gentle and his O.N.A.N. chiens-courants" (n302 pp. 1054-1055). (All of the command-web material is reported through Marathe/Steeply, never dramatized from Fortier's POV; the body capsule is 145's narration. Marathe's reporting every word back to Fortier is corroborated by passing name-drops — see Dating notes.)