The thing groans before it gives you anything. You feed it a wrinkled dollar, it spits the dollar back, you flatten it against your thigh and try again, and somewhere inside the machine a motor decides you have earned it. Then the coil turns. Slow. A bag of chips inches forward and hangs at the edge, and you stand there in a fluorescent hallway at 2 a.m. holding your breath over whether it will fall.
I used to think this was a stupid way to spend a feeling.
Now I think about the water. Every bottle in that lit-up column was pumped up from the ground and trucked here and stacked behind glass so that a person who could not sleep would have something cold to hold. The whole business of keeping a human alive, boiled down to a box you can lean on.
Up there the atmosphere is a blue line thinner than the skin on your knuckle, and below it, everything. Every drop of water that will ever exist, already here. Nobody is making more.
And we put it in a machine in a hallway and let it wait for us, glowing, all night, in case we get hungry.
The chips fell. I heard the thump, reached into that cold slot, and stood there a second longer than I needed to. There is a whole planet's worth of nothing in every direction, and someone made sure this one lit corner of it would feed you at two in the morning without asking why you were awake.