the V.R.5 collapse: one megagram of meat, two megagrams

The body reduced to its industrial throughput. Hal sees the lifetime's food as raw tonnage — "a broad cool well-lit room piled floor to ceiling with nothing but the lightly breaded chicken fillets I was going to consume over the next sixty years" — and weighs the meat in megagrams, then the answering "dimmer room" of excrement bowing its steel door outward. The overtrained athletic body, always being fueled and measured, is finally just an organism converting mass into waste on a horrifying schedule.