Why it's lethal — the open mechanism: holography-density, the p-terminal analogy, "empty of intent"

texture · 30 April – 1 May YDAU (2009)

• When: across the 30 April – 1 May YDAU mountainside serial
• What: The novel floats mechanisms and settles none. On the U.S. side "the developing theory is that it's holography" (Steeply, crediting "Certain departments in Virginia"; Flatto's I/O lab runs the testing) — the auteur was a holography-and-diffraction man, and Tom Flatto's "personal theory is the appeal's got something to do with density," that "the density plus the realism might be too much to take" (Desai wants to test the root code for Fourier equations signifying holo-grammatical activity). Steeply's long p-terminal anecdote — the Canadian Brandon-Hospital experiments where a rat, then dogs, monkeys, a dolphin, and finally hordes of trampling human volunteers pressed a pleasure-lever "over and over" until death — is offered as "analogy. A precedent in your own nation," and Marathe glosses the samizdat as "a somehow optical stimulation of the p-terminals." P.E.T.s on sacrificed U.S.O.U.S. subjects show "not near enough alpha to indicate hypnosis or induced dopamine-surges" (107). The one settled datum is the effect, not the cause: the eyes of the lost are "empty of intent." What makes the samizdat lethal is a standing open crux, recorded as open. See the U.S.O.U.S. thread (I/O testing); Marathe's timeline (event 11).