One last thought: My wife is dozing on the sofa across the room. I have a question for her, which I'll wake her up for. "What do you think Sam was thinking when he walked down that tunnel?"
Oh. That's useful. She yawns, and says, "I wouldn't know. I wasn't there."
"But if you had to guess?"
"I'd say he was hoping for a second chance."
"Is that all?"
She stands up. "Sometimes the truth is boring, Robin. Go on, put that in your memoir."
"Okay. Any other comments before I finish up here? I'm going to bed in a minute."
"Let me think..." Kay shrugs, an incredibly fluid gesture that involves four shoulder joints. "No. Don't be long." She smiles lazily and heads for the staircase, swinging her hips in a way that suggests she's got something other than sleep in mind. She's been a lot happier since she stopped being Sam, which she did very shortly after the panicky last-minute backup in the library basement. And so, you may be assured, am I.
Good night.
Thanks due to: James Nicoll, Robert "Nojay" Sneddon, Cory Doctorow, Andrew J. Wilson, Caitlin Blasdell, David Clements, Sean Eric Fagan, Farah Mendlesohn, Ken MacLeod, Juliet McKenna, and all the usual suspects.
"This apparatus," said the Officer, grasping a connecting rod and leaning against it, "is our previous Commandant's invention.... Have you heard of our previous Commandant? No? Well, I'm not claiming too much when I say that the organization of the entire penal colony is his work. We, his friends, already knew at the time of his death that the administration of the colony was so self-contained that even if his successor had a thousand new plans in mind he would not be able to alter anything of the old plan, at least not for several years... It's a shame that you didn't know the old Commandant!"
"In the Penal Colony," Frank Kafka
Who still talks nowadays about the Armenians?
Adolf Hitler, 1939
The polities descended from the Republic of Is do not use days, weeks, or other terrestrial dating systems other than for historical or archaeological purposes; however, the classical second has been retained as the basis of timekeeping.
Here's a quick ready-reckoner:
one second
One second, the time taken for light to travel 299,792,458 meters in vacuum
one kilosecond
Archaic: 16 minutes
one hundred kiloseconds (1 diurn)
Archaic: 27 hours, 1 day and three hours
one megasecond (1 cycle)
Ten diurns. Archaic: eleven days and six hours
thirty megaseconds (1 m-year)
300 diurns. Archaic: 337 Earth days (11 months)
one gigasecond
Archaic: approximately 31 Earth years
one terasecond
Archaic: approximately 31,000 Earth years (half age of human species)
one petasecond
Archaic: approximately 31,000,000 Earth years (half elapsed time since end of Cretaceous era)