the one channel that opens is the boy everyone overlooks · S5
people can sometimes forget you're there, even when they're interfacing with you. You almost get to eavesdrop.
Context
The book's rare working channel runs precisely through the boy the world does not fully register: Mario's visible damage makes people assume nobody is really in there, and so the guardedness drops and the truth gets spoken around him. What looks like being overlooked is the exact condition under which real contact becomes possible, and Mario, listening, forges the connection nobody else can. It is the inverse of Hal's "I am in here": here, being taken for empty is what lets another person fill the air with what they actually believe.