Mustafa Sern was often late for appointments. He was not lazy, inattentive, or inconsiderate of others. He was simply an ordinary workaholic who was always pressed for time. No matter how extensively humanity edited and modified its genes, it never managed to alter the workaholic gene. Sern was a human being who possessed exactly that gene. He expressed the trait to its fullest and designed Galactic Standard Time. It was one of the most difficult projects, one that even the highest-grade AIs had abandoned. Ironically, he synchronized time across the galaxy but never managed to synchronize his own schedule. Sern never wore a wristwatch. He was right-handed, but had lost his left wrist in an accident and therefore had nowhere to wear one. Strictly speaking, he was not a technician who made clocks. He was a planner who calculated the fact that different clocks were different. He disliked being called an engineer or an engineering scholar. He thought of himself as a planner who designed the future and strategy. In his youth, he worked as an expert witness in courts dealing with time disputes. In one case, two star systems argued over whether a company had gone bankrupt before a contract or after it. The records on both sides were accurate, and by the local time of each region, each side was correct. The judge asked Sern which side’s time was the real one. Sern replied that the expression “real time” had already made the question wrong. The judge said that even a wrong question still required a ruling. After hearing that, Sern decided that instead of searching for a single time existing in nature, he would create a method for comparing different times within a single record.
His first design had no central clock. If values from atomic clocks across the galaxy, pulsar signals, and other sources were collected and their differences compared, no one’s time became the standard. No clock could simply be used unchanged in another region; a common record could be created only by calculating the relationships among the clocks. Politicians liked the design. Strictly speaking, they liked less the design itself than the fact that it could be explained with the familiar phrase “political engineering.” No planet had to submit to the time of another planet. Scientists, engineers, and technicians all opposed it. Calculating the standard time would require installing new clocks and dedicated passages across the entire galaxy. Each time the reason for opposition changed, Sern took it as evidence that the design was succeeding. At first, everyone opposed it because it was unfair. Later, everyone opposed it because it was equally expensive.
The opening declaration of the Galactic Standard Time Accord Conference was repeated fourteen times. Each delegation had arrived at a different time. Sern was asked which of the first and last declarations should be recorded as the official time. He replied that they could calculate it backward after Galactic Standard Time was completed. The conference determined its own beginning using a clock that had not yet been created. Outwardly Sern spoke with solemnity, but inwardly he wondered what use Galactic Standard Time could possibly be to such fools. Regardless of what he thought, Galactic Standard Time went into operation because it was needed. Contract disputes across galactic civilization declined sharply afterward. Travelers’ ages and insurance periods could be calculated, and it became possible to determine which of several memory copies awakened on different planets had come first. Galactic Standard Time brought rescue, insurance, inheritance, and citizenship under a common standard and prevented countless disputes from expanding into wars. Later historians tried to calculate the number of wars the system had prevented and the lives it had saved, but recorded only that the number exceeded the limits of human language. This did not mean that Sern went unrespected in his own age. He became more famous than any celebrity. Citizens believed that he had made the same time flow throughout the galaxy. Whenever a master of ceremonies introduced him that way at a commemorative event, Sern corrected them: the same time was not flowing everywhere; what had been agreed upon was a method for converting different times. The master of ceremonies read the same introduction at the next event. Because the accurate explanation was too long to use in a congratulatory address, Sern eventually let the error pass by saying only that physical time was independent of human will. The audience loved and respected him even more for his modest remark.
Sern kept twelve clocks in his home. Each displayed the local time of a different planet, and none displayed Galactic Standard Time. When visitors asked why, he said that standard time was a relationship rather than a place and therefore could not be hung on a wall. According to his wife, however, it was recorded that he simply thought buying a thirteenth clock would be a waste of money. After Galactic Standard Time went into operation, Sern watched old records being converted into the same coordinate system. Dates assigned by different institutions changed, and sometimes even the order of events changed with them. He said, “For the first time, we can see the same mistakes together.” The sentence was later engraved on his gravestone.
Sern opposed the unlimited expansion of the reference network in order to increase the precision of Galactic Standard Time measurement. He argued that if dedicated passages were increased to calculate time more accurately, the galaxy after those passages had been added would no longer be the same object being measured as before. His objection was not a warning that predicted the photon deficit. It was the opinion of a designer that installing a new network also carried costs and consequences. The legislature recorded his objection as a cautious opinion and expanded the reference network as planned. After Sern’s death, old deficit records were compared again using Galactic Standard Time. The result suggested that the photon missing from the Photon Conservation Standard and the energy missing from passages might not have been unrelated equipment failures. Sern did not live to see that result. Billions of years later, the last scientist used Sern’s method of calculation to examine the time differences of passages in the past. The standard time made public so that no one could monopolize time was also used to read the flow of old energy. Sern had not predicted that use. Whether he would have chosen not to create the standard time if he had predicted it cannot be known. Without the standard time, it would have been far more difficult to record the galaxy as a single civilization. Because the standard time existed, the galaxy’s different endings could be recorded as a single history.