Before daybreak

 He couldn't figure out this very simple procedure. It no longer worked. In fact, everything was completely different. It was hard for him to breathe. Rock couldn't believe the difference. He wondered why his house was such a mess so long before daybreak.

Lockdown

 The press box at Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort was on some sort of lockdown. Everyone assumed it was for a new coronavirus outbreak, which was reasonable. The oddity was that provisions were limited to a hefty supply of coffee, soda pop, and tubes of food nearly identical to the stuff Apollo astronauts were fed in the 1960s. It was chalky and nearly flavorless. As dehydrated as he was, Rock found it particularly—even distressingly—difficult to eat.

The short cut

 Rock felt great as he ran the final yards of the Little Rock Marathon's new layout. Just before the finish in a random hallway of a downtown hotel, he had passed a much younger and extremely talented twenty-five-year-old Hasher whose name he could not recall. The only problem was that Rock could see that the timer by his name on a large electronic results board had failed to stop. It was instantly obvious to him that he should have turned right out of the elevator. By going left, directly toward the finish line, he cut several yards off the course. Technically, he had not yet finished, which angered him. "This is great," he said with a nod toward an official seated by the timer. "The guy working the finish line doesn't know how to direct people to the finish line."