late Hal on the VR5 floor: too many potential responses

The register war migrated inward and become a paralysis. Flat on the VR5 floor in advancing anhedonia, Hal is stalled not by having nothing to say but by the register-choice itself — every remark forks into "witty ones and earnest ones," he runs "a response-tree," and "finally had to choose almost at random." The irony/sincerity contest that the novel stages between people has become, in late-Hal, an internal switch he can no longer throw: cut off from the ability to mean, he can't even select the register in which to fail to. The inability to choose between wit and earnestness is the exact shape of his collapse. (The Paul Anthony Heaven coda — the film-teacher droning in a "deadening academic monotone" while "silently weeping, very steadily" — is JOI's buried-sincerity-under-irony image, film-optics' / 150's; noted, not mined.)