Galactic Standard Time could not be established simply by assuming that time passed uniformly throughout the galaxy. After the First War ended, the peripheral settlements disputed the order of battle commands, passage closures, and rescue requests. In the records of one star system, the rescue request came before the closure; in another, the order was reversed. To determine whether the institution that had ordered the closure had refused to reopen the entrance even after receiving the request, the sequence of events had to be recalculated. That required accepting that time did not pass uniformly throughout the galaxy. The problem was not limited to the war. After humanity spread across multiple star systems, the length of a day differed from planet to planet, while spacecraft and artificial structures had no rotation by which to define noon. Clocks that had traveled at high speeds and clocks that had remained near strong gravitational fields experienced different amounts of time. If one entrance of a wormhole remained in motion for a long period, a time difference accumulated between the two entrances as well. At first, each settlement used its own time. Expiration dates and contract dates listed both the date of departure and the date of arrival. Travelers checked the local calendar after reaching their destination. It was cumbersome, but trade continued.
The problem was responsibility. Two settlements entered into a contract to sell the same mineral, but in one set of records the price change occurred before the contract, while in the other it occurred afterward. The first dispute ended by dividing the mineral. As similar disputes multiplied, the cost of dividing the goods each time exceeded the profit from the trade. The first formal demand for an agreement came from the insurance alliance. An increasing number of routes made it impossible to determine whether an accident had occurred before or after insurance coverage began. One spacecraft accident occurred after enrollment according to the departure records and before enrollment according to the destination records. Each insurer submitted the date that favored its own position. The courts demanded a common standard for deciding which date to use. Physicists replied that there was no absolute present across the galaxy. The courts answered that they were not asking physicists to create absolute time. They were asking them to establish a method of calculation that could be used in judgments.
The first conference was attended by eight thousand star-system alliances and thirty thousand transportation networks, along with insurance companies, religious institutions, and personality-replication guilds. Delegations joined the conference through wormholes from many different locations. By the time the conference began, the opening ceremony had already ended according to the calendars of some delegations. The opening declaration was repeated thirteen times before it reached all participants. It took six years to decide which declaration should be entered first in the official record. Nor could the participants agree on where standard time should be located. Many star-system alliances proposed Earth time on the grounds that Earth was the origin of humanity. The central polity government argued for the time of the most heavily populated regions. The peripheral settlements cited the strong gravitational environment of the center as grounds for opposition. Each alliance argued for an objective standard while submitting the clock of its own region. Interest, wages, and the terms of public officials could all change depending on where the reference time for contracts was located. The choice of time was also the distribution of authority.
The conference did not adopt a single clock. Each region would preserve the records of its own clocks while also recording the gravity and motion affecting them and the state of nearby wormhole entrances. Galactic Standard Time was a coordinate system that converted those records by comparing atomic clocks, pulsar signals, and the motions of celestial bodies. It did not establish an absolute order for every event. For events capable of affecting one another, their sequence was verified; distant events that could not affect one another were assigned an order of record defined by the Accord. The courts applied the latter as a rule for judgment. The Accord was fair in that no regional clock was itself Galactic Standard Time. Maintaining that fairness had a cost. Signals from across the galaxy had to be collected continuously, and the time offsets between the wormhole entrances carrying those signals had to be measured continuously as well. Three reference networks were created to guard against error. If two networks produced different values, the third decided between them. If all three values differed, a separate computational system determined the permissible margin of error. After the Accord was concluded, it was discovered that this computational system was using the clock of the first reference network. The amendment was to create three comparison systems as well. The facilities required to maintain the reference networks grew to nine times their originally projected size. After the Accord, the order of accidents could be determined on more routes, and contractual disputes declined. The memory records of replicated personalities could also be compared under the same rules. The Accord was costly, and it was effective.
On the day the Accord was concluded, festivals began on several planets at the same standard time. On some planets that time fell in the middle of the night, while peripheral settlements without wormholes received the festival signal seventeen years later. Their residents held the celebration on the day the signal arrived. The central record classified these events as delayed reports of a festival that had already ended. The public was taught that the entire galaxy used a single clock. It was not an accurate explanation, but it was useful in schools and administrative institutions. People kept their own time while signing contracts and traveling under the belief that a common time existed. After the Accord, old records of wars and trade were also converted to the new coordinates. The conversion took decades. The standard-time reference networks continued to be used for transportation, rescue operations, and the adjudication of disputes, and the facilities required to maintain them expanded along with their scope. It was because of this Accord that later researchers of the deficit were able to compare records from different star systems. At the time the Accord was concluded, the first photon deficit had not yet been observed. Galactic Standard Time had not been created in anticipation of that phenomenon.