Aftermath: the casualty toll, patient-zero status, and the living-death in a ward — the lethality exhibit, mechanism unexplained

pivotal · 30 April YDAU + later YDAU

• When: the death/incapacitation itself is 2 April YDAU; the references collating it are the 30 April YDAU desert briefing (scenes 029, 072) and Rodney Tine's later briefing dating the event to "late last spring" (scene 107)
• What: The Boston incident becomes the intelligence agencies' first hard proof of the Entertainment's lethality. Steeply relays that "upwards of twenty" — later "twenty-three human beings lost for all time" — are "out of commission altogether": the attaché, his Saudi-citizen wife, "four more raggers, all with embassy cards," a couple of neighbors, and the police who went in before someone thought to kill the power. Tine's briefing counts "a diplomatically immune Near Eastern medical attaché and a dozen incidentals" now "all in wards" — "docile and continent but blank, as if on some deep reptile-brain level pithed," possessed of "roughly the mental/spiritual energies of a moth." Marathe cites the same event to Steeply as evidence the samizdat is real and unstoppable: "The attaché and gendarmes of the razzle incident — more proof." Steeply also floats the attaché's "prior possible involvement" with the auteur's widow (cross-ref event 1). Note: the outcome (mass rapt incapacitation, the pithed-ward survivors) is attested across three scenes; the novel does not explain how or why the cartridge does this, and this spine follows suit.