the earliest utterance, already unreceived — "Pardon me?'…"

Hal's first quoted words in his own life-chronology are a perfectly clear declarative sentence that produces only "Pardon me?" and then hysteria: a miniature of the admissions room built decades earlier. The child stands emitting accurate data nobody can process, "like the report of some kind of audit," proffering the evidence with a seriousness that the adult world can only receive as emergency. The clarity of the message and the completeness of its non-reception are the same event.