Fourteen people are standing in a corridor, and they are all radiating.
Every one of them glows in the infrared, a soft continuous spill of photons pouring off skin at roughly a hundred watts each. Fourteen hundred watts of body heat, more than a small space heater, all of it draining silently into the tiled walls, because that is what the second law demands: warmth flows out, order runs down, and the queue is a small, patient engine feeding the universe's slow slide into sameness.
Listen to the bass through the door. That thud they can feel in the sternum is a pressure wave, air molecules slamming into the chest wall thousands of times a minute at speeds near the speed of sound, though no single molecule travels anywhere; they just jostle their neighbors and spring back. The whole thumping wall of sound is a rumor passed between particles that never leave home.
The phone screens glowing in every hand are catching electrons excited across a semiconductor gap, dropping back down, releasing their surplus as a specific color of light. Blue-white photons, manufactured on demand, held six inches from faces that are, themselves, mostly empty. The nucleus of an atom is a fly in a cathedral; these people are less than one part in a trillion actual stuff. Fourteen columns of almost-nothing, leaning on a wall, checking the time.
And the carbon in every impatient body, the calcium in the bones shifting weight foot to foot, the iron warming the blood in those flushed cheeks: forged inside stars, flung out in explosions that predate the Earth.
They queued for four billion years to arrive here, at this door, behind someone who is definitely taking too long.