Hal in there, and no one able to reach it · S1
he can manipulate them well enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he's in there, inside his own hull, as a human being—but in fact he's far more robotic than John Wayne.
Context
The book's flat diagnosis of the gap the opening dramatizes: Hal runs a convincing emulation of an inhabited person, good enough that everyone but Hal is fooled into thinking someone is home. The loneliness is specific and airtight — his own mother, closest reader he has, hears her own voice bounce back off his emptiness and mistakes the echo for her son, so that the more warmly he's "known," the less anyone actually reaches him.