A box the size of a small closet, and inside it, six of them. Six.
Where I keep my things, a single hydrogen atom drifts alone for a distance you could not walk in a hundred human lifetimes before it meets another. That is the going rate. That is the density I am accustomed to: almost nothing, spread thin across almost everything.
But here. Six bodies, each one radiating heat, each one exhaling used air that another one breathes a half-second later. Their shoulders are closer than the width of a hand. I count the smells: coffee gone cold on someone's breath, wet wool, a floral thing sprayed at the throat, the metal tang of the cable overhead, skin, more skin.
Six hearts beating within reach of one arm. You could, from where any of them stands, touch every other living thing in the enclosure. I want to tell them this. I want them to understand what they are standing inside of.
They stare at the numbers above the door. They face forward, spines straight, and make themselves narrow, as though the miracle were a crowd to be endured. One of them sighs. One of them, I notice, feels alone. Alone. Surrounded on all sides by warmth, by breath, by other pulses close enough to feel through the floor, and something in it has decided it is by itself.
I cannot make the arithmetic work. I have run the numbers on a truly empty place, and this is not it. This is the opposite of it. This is everything, stacked and humming and touching, held in a lit box the size of a held breath.
The doors open. They scatter, relieved.
They were, for eleven floors, the richest place I have ever seen.