“It just feels right,” she said. “Such a strange thing to feel, that there’s a deep and unexplainable rightness to things. I wonder what that is,” she mused. “The shared experience—collective effervescence, it’s called—of so many people in one place? I read a study once that compared the feeling of exaltation when you go to church to the same way you feel at Comic-Con or a concert. It’s the collective experience, but it affects us all differently, personally, so we feel that we’re singularly experiencing the sensation.”
“Or maybe it’s just right.”
She smiled. “Well, that would imply a fatalist quality to things.”
“You don’t think there could be other forces at work? Scientific forces?”
“I’ve never seen math on fate,” she joked.
“What if—follow me here for a minute, Theaella —what if t
