solipsism as a man's whispered cosmology — "I'm here to tell you. Listen…" · S4

A dying-eyed man kneels in and delivers the theme's terminal case as street prophecy: everyone you have ever known is one of only twenty-six machines, wearing swapped faces, and the entire moving world is a projection on the walls of a single room where the few real people sit fooled. It is solipsism stated as literal fact — the horror that other minds are not there, that you are alone in the one room — braided with the book's figurant idea that the crowd is a small rotating cast in masks. His proof is pure isolation logic: the real ones "won't let you right up close," will even pay you to back off, so intimacy itself becomes the evidence you can never get. [sweep · shared-ground entertainment-self]