'I hate them!': his dread-question drives Hal's loneliness disquisition

pivotal · 3 Nov YDAU, before dinner

• When: 3 Nov YDAU, the unstructured period between showers and communal dinner, in Viewing Room 6.
• What: Splayed on the V.R.6 carpet with Hal's Big Buddy group while a SyberVision Stan Smith visualization loop plays, Blott brings the real question up from the locker room: watching guys six, seven, eight years in and still miserable gives him this dread — "I see seven or eight years of unhappiness every day and day after day of tiredness and stress and suffering stretching ahead," all for a shot at a Show he's starting to feel means even more suffering. Hal builds the whole session on it ("Kent's point's the misery in that room just now"; "Blott. You, Kent. This was your question."): the bitching is ritual, the seeming sadism is calculated, the staff give the kids a common enemy so 136 deeply alone people can feel like a community. Blott looks about ready to cry at the word loneliness. When the henchman roll is called — "DeLint. Watson. Nwangi. Thode. All Schtitt's henchmen and henchwomen." — Blott cries out "I hate them!", the raw feeling the theory is built to explain, and Arslanian and Ingersoll pile on ("Purchase a clue Kent Blott!"). But he tracks the argument to its end faster than they credit — "'They know what's going on,' Blott says, bouncing a little on his tailbone. 'They want us to get together and complain.'" — and it is Blott who prompts the landing: "So the suffering gets less lonely." By the scene's close he is passing the lesson down, giving Peter Beak his aperçu.