the blizzard morning: the body that hopes it won't have to play
A kind of cold hope flared in me because I realized this could be cancellation-weather. The backlash of this hope was an even worse feeling than before: I couldn’t remember ever actively hoping not to have to play before.
Context
The machine refuses its function for the first time, and Hal knows it's a threshold. Snow could mean cancellation, and "a kind of cold hope flared in me" — followed at once by dread, because "I couldn't remember ever actively hoping not to have to play before." For a body built and drilled entirely toward playing, wanting not to play is a systems failure more alarming than any injury; the wanting itself has turned against the thing the whole body is for. This is the withdrawal-physiology collapse, caught at its first flicker.