The cost of studying it — U.S.O.U.S.'s testing losses: the intern and Hank Hoyne

texture · prior to 1 May YDAU (reported on the mountainside)

• When: the losses occur during U.S.O.U.S. controlled testing before the 30 Apr – 1 May YDAU colloquy, where Steeply reports them
• What: Merely studying the object costs bodies. "We've lost a couple already," Steeply admits: an "idiot intern" in Data Analysis who "got hold of Flatto's I/O lab's clearance card and went in and viewed," and — "The real loss" — Henri ("Hank") F. Hoyne, U.S.O.U.S.'s own head of Data Analysis, a "Twenty-year man" of iron discipline who went in after the intern to pull him out. Hoyne now lies restrained beside the intern, begging "for just even a few seconds — a trailer, a snatch of soundtrack, anything," his eyes "wobbling around like some drug-addicted newborn," the diabetic self-control that once let him put down all sugar with "Not even a whimper or backward glance" gone with everything else. Willis on the I/O night-shift coins the memo phrase for the victims' eyes — "Empty of intent" (event 8) — which Steeply himself revises upward: not inanimate but "stuck. Fixed. Held. Trapped. As in trapped in some sort of middle." Marathe concedes the mirror-loss on his side: "We too have lost persons" (the viewing rotation's toll made explicit at the Antitoi shop, event 14). Both hunts learn the same operational lesson — the samizdat can be handled only blind. See the U.S.O.U.S. thread; the AFR thread (event 8) (the A.F.R.'s parallel testing losses).