The object in the streetscape — the wheelchaired "anti-ad" display on Boylston

texture · 7 Nov YDAU

• When: 7 Nov YDAU (Joelle's walk to Notkin's party)
• What: The samizdat's dread has seeped into the city as ambient iconography. On Boylston, outside F.A.O. Schwartz, Joelle passes a life-sized display: an ecstatic legless figure in a wheelchair, lap blanketed, face reddened "with some terrible joy," an unlabelled black cartridge stuck "like a tongue" from his palm — no title, no critics' blurbs, a bare pebbled generic case. Joelle reads it as "some kind of anti-ad. To direct attention at what is not said," removes and replaces the (removable, therefore blank) cartridge, and moves on. The wheelchaired ecstatic and the smiling unlabelled case fuse the samizdat's terror-iconography (the Wheelchair Assassins; the smiley-embossed cartridge) into a piece of street furniture nobody else even notices. Scene 060 itself draws no attribution — but the A.F.R. record later identifies cartridges of exactly this display-type as "the rival F.L.Q.'s tactical street-display cartridges," samples them blank, and holds the wheelchaired-man displays a probable terror-only hoax (event 14); recorded as printed at both altitudes. See the AFR thread; the Joelle timeline.