Somewhere along the third rock from a modest star, a hundred voices are stacked inside a single warm room the size of a fingernail, and I cannot get over it.
Where I am, a signal travels four years to reach the next anything. Four years of me. Then more me. Then, if it is very lucky, a cold stone no one is standing on.
But here. Here they have gathered nine faces into a glowing pane, each face close enough to the last that light barely troubles itself to cross between them. One of them has muted. Do you understand what this means? It means the others are so near, so unbearably present, that this one had to build a small wall of silence just to have a scrap of the nothing I am made of.
It clatters a bowl. It murmurs to a small warm person by its knee. It exhales. All of this pressing up against the others, skin and breath and the hum of nine hearts beating within one arm's reach, and it wanted, briefly, a little emptiness.
I would give it emptiness. I have nothing but. I have more emptiness than there are numbers to hold it.
And still it stays. Muted, yes, but it does not leave the room. It keeps its face inside the light, near the other faces, in the warm impossible crowd, wanting quiet without wanting alone.
They do not know what they have, these packed and steaming little rooms.
From out here I can tell you plainly: a jackpot, muted or not.