A Lesson in Time

DATE: Year 308-B. Sol 395

LOCATION: The Cydon Academy, West Mars Republic

STATUS: Math Class – Level 2

The classroom smelled of old paper and kernel oil. No vanilla.

It was a smell that cost money. In the settlements in and around New Paris, schools were digital feeds pumped directly into a child’s headset while they worked the assembly line. But here in the Northern Lowlands near the north pole, deep inside the crust of West Mars, they believed in the physical. They sat at wooden desks. They held stylus pens. They breathed air that didn’t smell like a chemical factory.

Clara adjusted the metal braces on her legs. They clicked softly. She was ten by the cycle count. When humans first settled on Mars, they kept track of Earth years by dividing the Martian year, about twice as long, into two cycles. There were leap months to keep things on track but when the Rip happened, when contact with Earth was lost, they fell out of use. Earth years, or their Martian approximation as “cycles”, are counted from an estimate of when the Rip happened.

Clara was a Lanky by birth. Her bones were long and hollow, evolved for the asteroid belt, not the relatively crushing gravity of Mars. The braces kept her upright. Without them, the planet would snap her femur like a dry twig.

-Attention, the teacher said, tapping the blackboard with a piece of chalk.

The chalk was real calcium carbonate. Another luxury.

-Who can define the Beat? He asked. He was an old man and wore the crimson robes of the West Mars Republic Academics, which plucked children from across Mars and beyond for the promise of a better future.

A boy in the front row, a stocky Heavy-Bone native to Mars, raised his hand.

-A Beat is the fundamental unit of the Standard Day, Magister. There are one hundred thousand Beats in a solar rotation. Thirty-three thousand beats in a labor shift.

-Correct.

He wrote the number 100,000 on the board, then drew a jagged line through it.

-That is the corporate definition, the teacher said. The MTC created the Beat, zero point eight-six of a true second, to decimalize your life. They wanted a day that fits into a spreadsheet. A day that divides evenly into quotas.

The teacher turned to the board and drew a circle.

-But the universe does not run on decimals. It runs on oscillation. The Earth Second was based on the vibration of a Cesium atom.

He looked at the class.

-The beats fit into the Martian day, which is about half an hour longer than the Earth day was. A years and B years are about the length of the old Earth year. We tried to fit everything to something we had known, our forefathers did, but no place is like Earth, and with so many humans living disconnected from the Sun or the rotation of the planet on which they dwell, these measurements define the beats of our life. It’s not great, the teacher added wistfuly.

-How long is 200 chits?

-Chits are a price. 400 chits, MTC money, makes a heethree, or Helium-3 note. It costs 200 chits to fill an oxygen tank. The teacher paused. Even for ten-year-olds it was a lot.

-200 chits is about 15 minutes, he finally said. That was about how long it took to fill an oxygen tank for a week, and how much it cost. Lanky slang.

Clara had stopped listening. The math made her head hurt. It didn't matter how they sliced the time. Time was just a measure of distance. And there were too many beats.

She reached into her pocket and touched a small, jagged piece of plastic. It was a shard from a drone helmet.

She closed her eyes and remembered the separation.

It was three cycles ago. The raid on the Phobos squatter camp near the Mars space elevator. The MTC Asset Management Unit had come in their black ships, looking for unauthorized biomass.

Her mother had screamed. Hide the little one.

Clara had fit into the ventilation shaft. Her baby brother, they just called him Small back then, had been too terrified to move. He had crawled into a shipping container.

She remembered the sound of the mag-locks slamming shut. She remembered the container being lifted into the sky by a cargo drone.

That’s why you didn’t name the young, but Clara didn’t want to forget Small.

She herself had been found by a WMR missionary patrol a week later. They took her in. They fixed her legs. They gave her a name, Clara, and a desk in a room that smelled like dust.

But she knew Small was out there.

-Clara?

She snapped her head up. The teacher was standing over her desk.

-You are drifting, he said gently.

-Sorry, Magister.

-We were discussing the Frequency, the teacher said. You are a child of the Belt, are you not?

-Yes, Magister.

-Then you know that rhythm is survival. If an engine beat is off by a micro-second, the ship tears itself apart.

A bell chimed, a soft, analog gong sound.

-Dismissed, the teacher said. Remember, tomorrow we study the Seven Wonders. I expect you to know why the Terminator on Mercury requires a non-decimal sync.

The class shuffled out. Clara gathered her books, her leg braces whirring as she stood up.

She walked out into the corridor. It was a wide tunnel carved directly into the red rock, illuminated by bioluminescent moss, Saganite tech used by the WMR.

A group of older students were gathered around a wall-screen near the cafeteria. They were whispering, looking excited.

Clara pushed through the boys to see.

The screen was showing a grainy, pirated feed from an orbital relay.

BREAKING NEWS: UNAUTHORIZED CONVOY ENTERING EARTH ZONE.

The image wobbled. It showed a line of rusty ships burning hard against the black. A massive freighter led the pack, towing habitat modules.

-Zionists, one of the older boys scoffed.

-Religious nutjobs. The MTC fleet is going to vaporize them.

-Look at the lead ship, another said.

-That’s a scavenger boat. Flying lead.

-It’s all a hoax. Nobody goes into the forbidden zone. Why would they even let them in? This stinks.