The disrupted Wednesday and the unlabelled "HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!" cartridge from Phoenix

pivotal · 1 April YDAU, evening

• When: 1 April YDAU, evening; he is sent home early ~1800h, arrives ~1840h to an empty apartment, settles in with the cartridge at 1927h
• What: After a fit of "febrile thrushive pique" from Prince Q———, the attaché is replaced at the royal bedside and told to make an early Wednesday evening of it. He gets home to find the apartment empty (his wife at tennis, gone with the diplomatic-plate car), dinner unheated, and — worst — no entertainment cartridges obtained from the InterLace outlet. Casting about the InterLace Pulse-Matrix he finds only sports, opera, a children's program and aerobics, none acceptable. The only cartridges in the apartment are that day's mail: among them "a plain brown and irritatingly untitled cartridge-case" in a featureless white First-Class mailer postmarked "suburban Phoenix area in Arizona U.S.A.," its return-address box bearing only "HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!" and a crude smiling ballpoint face, the cartridge itself embossed with the same circular smiling head where the codes should be. Puzzled and irritated (the term "anniversary" fits neither his 2 April birthday nor his October Rub'al Khali wedding), he resolves to "scan just enough" to judge whether it is irritating or irrelevant — and settles in. This is the inciting act; everything after is loss of agency.