The Entertainment enters circulation by physical mail — the delivery infrastructure exploited

pivotal · 1 April YDAU

• When: 1 April YDAU, ~1927h (scene 007's clock)
• What: The tech thread's collision with the samizdat plot, seen purely as infrastructure. InterLace's two hubs — manufacture and dissemination in Phoenix AZ and Boston MA respectively — frame the medical attaché's world (his Prince is the Saudi "Minister of Home Entertainment," in Boston to "cut another mammoth deal with InterLace"). Home content arrives two ways: as "the spontaneous disseminations of the InterLace Subscription Pulse-Matrix" (so cryptographically complex to order from that the attaché has always left it to his wife) and as cartridges — the daily news summary comes "either transmitted to TP by unrecordable InterLace pulse or express-posted on a single-play ROM self-erasing disk." Into this arrives, in a "featureless white three-day standard U.S.A. First Class padded cartridge-mailer" postmarked suburban Phoenix, its return-address box holding only "HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!" and a crude ballpoint smiley, a plain unlabelled black cartridge embossed with another smiling circular face where the registration- and duration-codes belong — the Entertainment, entering not through the pulse-grid but around it, through the low-tech postal channel the whole dissemination architecture assumes is beneath notice (the padded mailers' "distinctive rectangular bulge" mixed haphazardly with the ordinary mail). See the Samizdat thread (the Entertainment-as-artifact and the victim) and the A.F.R. thread (the attaché "razzle"); held here to the delivery-mechanics altitude.