The WYYY engineer: snatched at the Public Gardens, made the first digit-per-viewing test Subject

texture · ~mid-Nov YDAU

• When: ~mid-Nov YDAU — the Public Gardens pond-draining snatch (a gray weekday) and the field-test "on the day of Fortier's return" (~14 Nov)
• What: Hunting Madame Psychosis (Joelle) — "an expensive source" in her former M.I.T. department having reported her "last known employment," the small Cambridge radio station (147) — the A.F.R. abducts her WYYY student engineer — the last institutional trace of her radio life — in a "public but low-risk operation": at the annual Public Gardens duck-pond draining, under the literal nose of O.N.A.N.'s Chief of Unspecified Services (Tine, watching from the State House Annex), a legless fleur-de-lis-masked operative in a "madly squeaking brass-colored blur" of a scoop-fronted wheelchair slaloms the crowd and scoops the engineer into a waiting white van. He divulges everything at the mere description of technical-interview procedures, then is used as the cell's first Entertainment field-test Subject: head strapped, given two free viewings, then priced by blindfolded Broullîme at one self-amputated digit per further viewing — building a matrix that confirms the desire is bottomless, "the ninth digit... had to come off as quickly and willingly as the second." The insatiability data are the empirical spine of the A.F.R.'s war-of-appetite thesis (event 10).