too many possible answers to say anything
I could see my asking him where he'd been all week leading to so many different possible responses and further questions that the prospect was almost overwhelming, so enervating I could barely get out that I'd just been lying here on the floor.
Context
Speech seizes up here as a computation problem: every possible utterance branches into so many possible responses and counter-questions that running the tree exhausts Hal before he can pick a branch, and what finally comes out is chosen "almost at random." The inner Hal is teeming — this is the opposite of empty — but the sheer overload of the interior is exactly what strands it, so that the richest mind in the book can barely push a flat sentence across the gap to his closest friend.