The samizdat surfaces across the U.S. and is named; the U.S.O.U.S. counter-hunt begins

pivotal · two summers past → early Nov YDAU

• When: the cartridge began "popping haphazardly up" ~two summers before early Nov YDAU (2009); Tine's Boston coordination is Early November YDAU; the razzle "late last spring"
• What: From the U.S. side the object is a spreading, unexplained lethality. It surfaces in Berkeley (a film-scholar and companion, then two cops, then six, then a watch sergeant — "seventeen police, paramedics, and teleputer-technicians in all"), New Iberia, Tempe (two-thirds of a film-festival audience), and Boston (the attaché "and a dozen incidentals"), leaving survivors "Docile and continent but blank, as if on some deep reptile-brain level pithed," with the mental energies "of a moth." A Leavenworth test-subject reports only that it opens on "a veiled woman going through a large building's revolving doors" before his attention is unrecoverable even under near-lethal voltage. Tine's staff settle on a name — "the samizdat" — and Chief Rodney Tine is dispatched to metro Boston to run the counter-hunt, the cartridge's defining feature being that "whoever saw it wanted nothing else ever in life but to see it again, and then again, and so on." Two provenance threads emerge with the hunt: Boston follow-up reports "possible indications of the victim's prior possible involvement with the widow of the auteur" — the first tie between the mailed object and the Incandenza family (the attaché himself "born in the hated-by-you Ottawa"), the same family-provenance theory the A.F.R. will work from the other side (events 12, 16) — and matrix-tracing without viewing places "the likely dissemination-point someplace along the U.S. north border, with routing hubs in metro Boston/New Bedford and/or somewhere in the desert Southwest," the Canadian-involvement finding that makes the hunt U.S.O.U.S.'s special province. See the U.S.O.U.S. thread (the O.N.A.N. counter-hunt); the AFR thread (event 7).