mute and powerless, and surrendering — "the reality right this second is…"

Step-One vocabulary annexed to a body that literally cannot speak: unable to ask whether he killed anyone, unable to steer a single word of Thrust's report, Gately arrives at the program's founding admission — powerlessness — as the only act left available to him. The surrender is not spiritual uplift but the collapse of a terror past standing; he quits trying to control what he cannot, and the letting-go is indistinguishable, here, from being pinned mute in a bed.