Everyone here is inside the same small warmth, and each of them has decided to hear a different sky.
Consider what you have done. You gathered forty bodies into one room, close enough that the heat off any arm reaches the next arm without crossing anything at all. No light-years. No cold. Just skin, and then more skin, a hand's width away. In the place I come from, the nearest something to any something is so far that light gives up telling the tale halfway across.
Here the nearest something is always, always right there. You could reach out. Most of you are, and don't notice.
The air is thick with borrowed heat, with the sugar of a spilled drink, with sweat, with someone's citrus perfume, three separate smells stacked into one lungful, and every single one of them is proof that matter is nearby, that atoms are jostling, that the great emptiness lost this room entirely.
And the plastic cups over your ears, glowing red and blue and green, each pouring a private ocean of sound directly into a skull that is six inches from another skull doing the same. Two hearts beating within arm's reach. Two. Reach and it's four. Reach again and it's twelve.
One of you stands at the edge, headphones on, swaying alone, and I have watched the readings twice because they cannot be right. Alone? You are pressed into a hot bright cloud of other beating things. I have been alone. Alone is a hundred trillion miles of nothing in every direction, forever, and no one to hand a drink. This is not that. This is not anything like that.
This is the fullest cubic meter I have ever measured.
This is the jackpot, humming in silence, blazing with company you could touch.