Unfractured Calendars - Where Love Meets Again.
Ten Light‑Years, One Shared Moment
Heart of Aletheia Story insert after chapter 11
Julian is about to call his sister‑in‑law and wants to sound calm after Chris vanishes into the heavens. Chris is moving faster than anyone ever has—maybe close to light speed—and Julian runs the signals through his head: when Chris recedes, the flashes red‑shift and spread into slow knocks; when he returns, they compress into tight, fast beats. If Chris ever reached light speed relative to Julian, Julian wouldn’t see him again until he slowed. That possibility sparks a thought: there must be a borderline moment, a tiny threshold, where the outbound beat thins to a whisper while the inbound beat at the same speed is effectively unseen. That boundary feels like a pulse, a universal heartbeat you can measure. Flip “meters per second” inside out and read it as “seconds per meter” — that pulse is 1/c, the cadence linking distance to the time it takes light to carry information.
Julian sets the tablet on his knee, breath steadying as he taps the screen and waits for the feed to connect. The moonbase frame blinks alive, and for a moment the void outside the window seems to press closer. He steadies his voice and says, “Elia, I’m here,” then listens for the two questions he already knows are coming.
Elia’s face fills the screen, eyes rimmed red; she doesn’t wait. “Where is he?” she asks. “Can I talk to him?”
Julian keeps his voice even. “He’s gone faster than anyone before — too fast and too far for our comms to keep up. You can’t talk to him right now; any message has to chase the light he already sent, and if he’s moving away fast enough those signals stretch too much to recompress.”
He leans a fraction closer to the camera. “This is normal. Light keeps the same beat for everyone — a fixed wait-time per meter. Our clocks may disagree about elapsed time, but the rhythm of what we see is set by that cadence, 1/c. That doesn’t make him less real; it just tells us how the universe keeps time between us.”
After the call Julian leans back and thinks: as Chris climbs toward light speed there’s a tiny border where a meter’s outbound light is heard as a whisper while that same meter’s inbound beat is gone. Whatever frame you pick, light keeps its pace — about 3.3356 nanoseconds per meter — the universe’s little metronome.
Moving into a Thought Experiment
In the last post we showed a travel table that lists how our three characters age at various speeds. Using accepted physics we found that Chris’s ship clock can be driven arbitrarily short at high speed, while the outside stations — Elia on Earth and the Mayor at Eridani — remain anchored by the light‑time between them. That fixes a hard minimum: light needs ten years to cross ten light‑years, so any station‑based measure of departure → arrival sits on the order of ten years (twenty for a round trip). That strict arithmetic doesn’t serve the story’s needs, though, so for the sake of the tale we’ll lean on plausible local choices and small narrative allowances — and hope reality is forgiving enough to let lovers meet.
We’re going to focus on the balance point.
What if the trip could be:
Speed Gamma (γ) Earth round trip Chris one‑way Chris round trip
0.866c 2.000 11.55 yr 5.77 yr 11.55 yrHow can that be? Here’s the intuitive picture, no formulas:
The universe charges a baseline: light needs ten years to cross ten light‑years. That ten‑year light‑time fixes the external stations’ optical‑present relationship — each location’s “now” about the other sits in the other’s ten‑year past.
Chris’s onboard clock is his private ledger — the one account no external signal can distort. Because he moves fast, special relativity reallocates how many of those external ticks he personally lives through. So while the external mission clock reads ≈11.55 years for the trip, Chris’s ship clock only accumulated ≈5.77 years on the one‑way leg.
Signals distort appearances, not lived hours. When an outside observer first sees the departure, that visual event is already 10 years old by light‑time. If Chris is moving fast toward the arrival, later incoming photons can be blue‑shifted and the story of his motion looks compressed — but that compression is about how the light carries information to the observer, not about how many years anyone actually lived.
Concretely: once the departure is visible to the Mayor, the Mayor is already watching an event that happened ten years earlier in the Mayor’s frame. From that moment the rest of Chris’s trip can look shortened on the Mayor’s screen because of Doppler effects, but the Mayor’s own clock between the official departure and the official arrival still records the external interval set by distance and mission definition.
Light sets the invoice — ten years for ten light‑years. Motion rearranges who pays how much of that bill in lived hours. Apparent speedups and slowdowns are Doppler tricks of the light, not thefts of lived time.
Meanwhile, back on Earth — what does Elia actually see during the round trip?
As Chris accelerates to relativistic speed his emissions toward Earth become redshifted and stretched. At 0.866c his ship’s proper time for the one‑way leg is about 5.77 years, and his round‑trip ship time is about 11.55 years. The 10‑year light‑time between Earth and Eridani remains fixed, so Elia is watching a time‑delayed, Doppler‑tinted movie of his journey: the outbound signal she receives is redshifted and stretched, and the return signal is blueshifted and compressed. In other words, the photons she gets from the outbound leg arrive more slowly (redshifted), producing a drawn‑out outbound segment on her screen, then after the light‑travel delay the blueshifted return plays back much more rapidly — but those visual stretches and compressions are features of the light she receives, not changes to the actual proper times the participants live.
One‑line: “Elia watches a delayed, Doppler‑tinted movie: an outbound stream stretched by redshift and a return stream compressed by blueshift, all framed by the 10‑year light gap.”
Elia watches a delayed, Doppler‑tinted movie: a redshifted outbound middle of ≈5.77 years, then a blueshifted return of ≈5.77 years, framed by the ten‑year light gap.
Moving into the Numbers
Three observers keep time on the same 10-light-year route:
Elia waits on Earth.
The Mayor stands watch on Eridani.
Chris rides the ship between them.
Here’s how their clocks compare when Chris flies at different fractions of light speed.
Speed γ Elia & Mayor (watched movie) Chris (ship clock)
0.25c 1.03 red 40 yr + blue 40 yr = 80 yr 77.4 yr
0.50c 1.15 red 20 yr + blue 20 yr = 40 yr 34.6 yr
0.75c 1.51 red 13.3 yr + blue 13.3 yr = 26.6 yr 17.6 yr
0.866c 2.00 red 5.77 yr + blue 5.77 yr = 11.55 yr 11.55 yr
0.95c 3.20 red 3.29 yr + blue 3.29 yr = 6.57 yr 6.57 yr
0.999c 22.37 red 0.45 yr + blue 0.45 yr = 0.90 yr 0.90 yrLegend
Speed — ship velocity as a fraction of light speed.
γ — Lorentz factor γ=1/√(1−(v/c)2)γ = 1/√(1−(v/c)²)γ=1/√(1−(v/c)2).
Elia & Mayor — what each stationary observer sees through light (outbound redshifted, inbound blueshifted).
Chris — time actually recorded on the ship’s proper clock.
At γ = 2 (≈ 0.866 c) all three experience one full optical arc of 11.55 years — the cadence balance point. After that balance point the calendars remain linked: light fixes the external baseline, motion reallocates lived time.
(Later we’ll see that this apparent stability only holds within a closed system. As the range widens, a slow outward drift begins to tilt the balance.)