Measurements of temporal reference points in a dynamic system

Keeping track of time in a dynamic orbital system is relatively easy. Nothing moves fast enough for relativistic effects to be noticeable, so setting a reference clock with picosecond resolution is practical. At lower resolutions though is where you have problems.

It isn't that people can't resolve time on different scales, it's that our temporal references are all local. We can understand that one day on, say, Murshan's World, is nineteen and a half standard hours long, or that a day on Ariel is closer to twenty eight hours. When we're living there, we adapt naturally and it's just normal. It's when we have to call our friend on Murshan's from Ariel that things get confusing. They were a couple hours off the last time you called, but now it's the middle of the night.

Different rotational periods give different lengths of day. Different orbits give different lengths of year. Sure, there's a standard day and a standard year for a standard calendar. But our bodies can't track that. Our bodies track the changing cycles of day and night, and maybe the seasons if we're paying attention.

That makes it really hard sometimes to remember people's birthdays. You know when it is on the standard calendar, but sometimes you're not thinking on the standard calendar.

Lily, of course, doesn't have these temporal problems. She knows what day it is, where, when, pretty much anywhere. She also knows when it's her birthday. If that's really correct. Lily wasn't exactly born, so much as created. What defines her birthday, I'm not really sure. First breath? First coherent thought? It doesn't matter. The anniversary of her birthday is marked on the standard calendar, which is sometimes hard to track in Hale's Moon years.

Still not an excuse for most of us forgetting just what day it was.

It took a little while to figure out what Lily was upset about when she said she wanted to be 'Emaciated' - emancipated, really. I know she'd been hurt by Td and Imrhien going their separate ways and leaving the family in function, if not in spirit. That just left me and Sabrina on Hale's, and with Sabrina's off-surface work, Lily didn't see much of her. I had to think that was contributing to her feeling neglected.

But I did remember, if not right away. And like in the song, which several of us sang to her, we did want her to be happy, and were glad she was born. Or created. Or whetever. What mattered was that her birthday mattered to her, and we did, at least after a fashion, show her that her birthday mattered to the rest of us too.

I love you, little Mei Mei.

Even if I'm sometimes bad with dates.