the V.R.5 collapse: the body's odometer, all of it at once

The panic totalizes the athletic body — not the self, the body, tallied. Hal reexperiences "the years' total number of steps, movements, the breaths and pulses," the whole physical ledger of an E.T.A. life run at once, then the identical sum still owed until he graduates into "some dormitory at some tennis-power university somewhere." The regimen is revealed as sheer repetition seen from inside: a finite machine of steps and pulses, grinding the same circuit forever.