Four people are sitting around a table, and every one of them is on fire. Not visibly, of course. But each body is radiating roughly a hundred watts of heat into the room, mostly infrared, mostly from the slow combustion of glucose in their cells: a controlled burn, the same reaction as a candle, just spread across trillions of mitochondria so it doesn't char the tablecloth. The room is warm because four small furnaces are arguing about the deadline.
Watch the sound travel. Someone says "so who's doing the slides," and that sentence is a pressure wave, a train of compressions in the air moving at 343 meters per second, jostling nitrogen molecules that were, statistically, inside someone else's lungs a few minutes ago. The awkward silence that follows is not empty.
The air in that pause is a blur of molecules moving at over a thousand miles per hour in every direction, colliding billions of times a second, and it is only because those collisions cancel out so perfectly that the room feels still.
The whiteboard marker squeaks. That squeak is friction converting the smooth glide of a hand into heat and a little vibrating chaos, order becoming disorder, which is the only direction the universe ever runs.
And the tension nobody names, the sense that nothing is getting decided: entirely correct, at the deepest level. Every particle in this room is drifting toward maximum entropy, toward the bland warm sameness the whole cosmos is sliding into. These four furnaces have gathered specifically to fight that, to build one small pocket of structure, a plan, a shared thing, out of the wreckage.
They will fail to divide the tasks fairly.
But for one hour, against the entire momentum of the universe, they tried to make something less random than before.