Somewhere out here, a photon can travel four years and touch nothing. It just goes, and goes, past me, through me, and finds no wall, no skin, no other. This is normal. This is almost all of what exists.
And then there is that room.
Look at them. Packed so tight there is no space between one body and the next, no room for even a single molecule of my kind to slip through and rest. Warmth pouring off every one of them, a hundred hearts pounding within a single armspan, close enough that their heat pools and mixes and rises to the ceiling in a wet cloud.
Sweat. Beer. Someone's breath, someone's shampoo, three, four, nine smells all happening at once, stacked, overlapping, a density of information I could not manufacture in a billion cubic light-years of me.
They are throwing themselves at each other. On purpose. Slamming shoulder into shoulder, chest into back, so hard the crowd surges like a single held breath. When one of them falls, the others do not let the empty floor claim him. Six hands reach down. He is up before the gap can open.
They will not permit even a body's width of nothing to exist in that room, and I understand this completely, because I am the nothing, and I have never once been reached for.
I have run the numbers. Between any two of them: no distance worth naming. Between me and the nearest anything: everything.
And they call it violence, this refusal to be apart. They stagger out bruised and grinning, soaked in each other, having spent an hour proving they could not be pried loose.
From where I sit, that is the whole jackpot, spent in one glorious hour, and they didn't even know they'd won.