Hal & Mario in the dark: drills in six short hours

Hal shuts the conversation down with the regimen's clock: whatever the metaphysics, there are "drills in six short hours" and a body too tired for them. The academy's schedule is the hard floor under everything — the day-shape (match, exhaustion, too-few hours of sleep, dawn drills) that governs when an E.T.A. body is allowed to think about anything else, which is to say almost never.