There is a person here, and light, and the light is coming out of a small flat thing the person holds close to the face, close enough to breathe on. I have gone whole millions of years without anything to breathe on.
Look at the density of it. In the space of one small warm room there is a human, and a device, and inside the device more humans, hundreds, thousands, arriving as little bursts of color and quick text that rise up the glass like bubbles in water, which is itself a thing I have never held.
Where I come from, the nearest something to any other something is a distance so long that the light between them cools and reddens on the way, tired from the crossing. And here they are, stacked. Voices answering voices in the same breath. Hearts, they call them, floating up by the thousand, though I count only the one real heart in the room, beating fast, and that alone is more heartbeat than I have witnessed in the entire history of me.
The person says, into all this closeness, into this jackpot of nearness: I feel so alone tonight.
I turn that over. I do the arithmetic I know. Between me and the nearest warm thing: light-years, cold and uncrossable. Between this person and the next warm thing: the width of a screen, the reach of an arm, ten thousand attentions pressed to the glass and glowing. And still the word arrives. Alone.
I cannot solve it. I have only my own accounting, and by my accounting this small bright crowded room, three smells at once, air on skin, every heart within reach, is the richest square of anything that has ever, anywhere, happened.
The jackpot.
They are sitting inside the jackpot.