In one small warm pocket of matter, thirty bodies have gathered close enough to smell each other. Think about that. Where I come from, the nearest warmth to any warmth is four light-years off, and I have watched it hold that distance for ten billion years without once closing the gap.
Here, they will not stop touching. A hand on a shoulder. A cheek against a cheek. Someone passes a folded square of cloth from palm to palm, and every palm is the same temperature, blood-warm, all of them, at once.
The air is doing something extraordinary: it is carrying. Sugar from a cake. The green wet smell of cut flowers. Coffee. A candle imitating a fruit that was never in this room. Three, four, five smells stacked in a space I could not fit a single atom into without it bumping something. They breathe each other's breath and call it a party.
At the center, one of them holds another one folded up inside her, and the rest orbit that doubled warmth in tightening rings, laughing so loud their little pressure waves overlap and interfere. I have never in my entire existence had a pressure wave. I have never had a wave.
And yet. In the far corner, one of them stands holding a cup, and something in her has gone quiet and cold, as if she has drifted somewhere with no one in it. Impossible. I have measured the room. There is a warm body six inches from her on every side.
She could reach out and touch three of them without stepping. I cannot understand what she thinks she is missing. I would give ten million cubic light-years of myself to be that crowded for one second.
From out here, that room is the whole jackpot, going off all at once.