The A.F.R.'s Entertainment posture on the mountainside: Read-Only copies, testing losses, and "the theories of content irrelevant"

texture · 30 April – 1 May YDAU

• When: across the 30 April – 1 May YDAU mountainside night (pre-dawn and dawn installments)
• What: Over the night the A.F.R.'s stance on the cartridge is inventoried. Nobody is known to hold the duplicable Master allegedly taken in the DuPlessis burglary; the A.F.R. holds at least one Read-Only copy (as, it's assumed, does every anti-O.N.A.N. cell but the despised copyless Albertans), and has already "lost persons" in its own testing — "The samizdat is not to be played crazily about with, so. We too have lost persons. It is serious." Marathe insists he has "not been tempted" to view it; the A.F.R.'s interest is purely in ends and efficacy, never in the content — the cell's instrumental doctrine that "M. Fortier finds the theories of content irrelevant" (against O.N.A.N.'s compulsion to understand the pleasure it cannot stop consuming; Steeply reports Tine's round-the-clock I/O testing and its own casualty, Data-chief Hank Hoyne, now "empty of intent"). Steeply's recurring plea is that even Fortier might be induced to see "just what it is he's proposing to let out of the cage." The night also disposes of the rumored counter-weapon: pressed on "this quote 'anti'-Entertainment the film's director supposedly made to counter the lethality" — potentially an A.F.R./F.L.Q. "chip for concessions," "some kind of remedy or antidote" — Marathe allows "no evidence except craziness of rumor" (038). The doctrine of chosen attachment underlying all of it lives at character depth — See Marathe's timeline (event 11).