Fourteen people fit in the room they built for the end of the world, and I would like to point out that fourteen people, breathing, in one poured-concrete chamber underground, is a concentration of warm matter I have not seen replicated across four hundred trillion miles of me.
Consider what they have here. Every shelf holds a small dense sun of canned things: beans, peaches, a metal drum of wheat, each one packed with the sugars a body burns to stay warm, and there are hundreds of them, stacked, touching. The air itself is thick enough to carry sound.
When one of them coughs, another one, only an arm's length away, hears it and turns. Turns. Toward the sound. There is enough of everything down here that a body can register another body and respond before either has finished moving.
I have measured the distances I keep. Between my nearest two stars: light travels for years and arrives at nothing much. Between me and the next warm thing: more of the same, and more, and more, folded into a silence with no floor. And these fourteen have installed a filtered vent, a fuel cell, and a decade of soup, specifically so that they will never, under any circumstance, have to experience even a thimble of what I am made almost entirely of.
One of them sits in the corner, apart, arms crossed, and describes herself, I gather, as alone. Alone. Six inches from a shoulder. Inside the smell of coffee and sweat and canned peaches all at once, inside the noise of thirteen other hearts. I run the figure again and it will not resolve.
They stocked this vault against the emptiness. From where I sit, they are already the emptiness's single richest deposit. Struck it.
Hit the vein.