the locker room after drills: the top player shutting the neural net down
Ortho Stice and John ('N.R.') Wayne seem less fatigued than detached; they have the really top player's way of shutting the whole neural net down for brief periods, staring at the space they took up, hooded in silence, removed, for a moment, from the connectedness of all events.
Context
Amid the communal exhaustion, the two best bodies in the room do something different: they power down. "The really top player's way of shutting the whole neural net down" marks the elite athletic body as a system that can be switched to standby — a capacity the lesser players don't have, and a first glimpse of the self-erasing detachment Schtitt's doctrine prizes. Stice and Wayne aren't just tired; they've gone offline, the tennis body's highest trick previewed in a locker room.