Oldboy - a BKNN News Bulletin

[The Zig]

Boron Kingdom News Network – Special Bulletin

Article: Oldboy
Author: Fu Jila, BKNN Senior International Affairs Correspondent


Bare-faced liars!
That was how I felt when I spotted Easitime’s latest ‘X3’ advertising campaign.
Can it really be that this company – this same company who have been embroiled in legal battles for twenty jazuras now – are still claiming their product has ‘no known side effects’?
They still dare to claim their technology is, as the slogan goes, ‘just convenient’?
The bare-faced liars!

If you have any grasp of anything you will know that Easitime manufacture the SETA device – the Singularity Engine Time Accelerator – that cheap, omnipresent spaceship device that makes your journey pass just that much more quickly. It is useful, and considered damn near essential, by most spacers. It is the sure-fire way to stave off ‘the space crazies’, and it has long been marketed as side-effect free. But that’s just not true; as certain Mr Phyel can attest.

At the time of writing, over a hundred people have tried to sue Easitime. And with the list ever growing, Easitime’s latest advert run is quite bewildering. The adverts are misleading, to put it mildly, and pressure is growing on them to admit the dangers of their technology. But for now they are sticking to their guns. The problem the SETA victims have encountered is that it is near impossible to hold Easitime legally accountable. The chief reason being that the SETA device’s one really nasty side-effect is actually one-and-the-same thing as its explicit commercial purpose... time acceleration.

An example will best explain.

One story that recently got the comm-nets buzzing was the case of aforementioned Mr Peter Phyel, the thirty-three-year-old Argon male, who accidentally got more than a little friendly with his own estranged daughter, aged... thirty-three.
Yes, you read that correctly. Yes, the ages are correct. No, that’s not a typo. Yes, really! And emphatically yes, this is the exactly the kind of weird dangers that you open yourself up to when you play around with time.

This is how it happened.
Straight out of school and with no real qualifications, Peter wound up working as a hauler for a shipping company out of Home of Light. Like many others, he made very good living by working very long hours. 10 hour days, six days a week was standard. An attractive fellow, before long he had a girl at every port. Casual relationships. Nothing long-term. Not that he was scared of commitment, nothing of the sort. Indeed, he actually wanted relationships to start with, but the problem was the women kept ageing on him. Yes... ageing. Think about it now: he worked ten hour days, most of which under SETA time acceleration. Time went faster for him – literally faster – by a factor six. What was just ten hours in his life was fifty hours to everyone else. Over two days! For every 24 hours that passed in his life, over sixty hours would really pass. So women aged beside him. Time itself drove a wedge between them. Of course, he made no promises and told no lies – never got attached – there were always new women. He was fine with that. Most of his friends were fellow haulers, they ate together, drank together, aged together; they scarcely noticed the odd decade slipping by every few years.

Peter had been scarcely nineteen when he met a girl in Argon Prime. He only met her three times; third time was the charm. It didn’t cross his mind that she might get pregnant. How could he know about the birth of his little baby girl nine months later.
Fourteen years passed him by – thirty-four for the rest of us. That was when he met that enthralling woman on Ringo Moon. They hit it off so well. They were the same age, similar types, similar interests. They had a powerful chemistry. She was an artist, a light sculptor. Made beautiful works of pure light. He took her to see Akeela’s Beacon. They grew closer. Quite by chance one day, he met her mother... for that fatal forth time. The rest is history.

Now, while I’m fully aware that this tale brings only bawdy, insensitive laughter in the bars across Herron’s Nebula, I would dare say it was a little traumatic for those involved. Indeed, it is a very inappropriate way to meet one’s parent.

I write this brief article in the hope of educating people to the very real long-term hazards of using the SETA device. Indeed the above is not the only such story – it is merely the most bizarre thread, in a tapestry of misfortune and misery. I can only hope that Easitime will do the responsible thing in face of this, and openly warn their customers about the very real potential hazards of using their SETA device.


Update: since the original publication of this article, Easitime have agreed to place the following warning ‘in the small print somewhere’.
“Caution: in exceptional circumstances this device may lead to electrical sparking, extreme temperatures and/or incest. Ensure that protective encasements are securely in place, and that all moving parts are regularly lubricated.”

While I don’t grasp the exact meaning, my Argon friends suggest that Easitime aren’t taking this 100% seriously.

[The Zig]

FYI...
The maths:
This is based on his experiencing 60 working hours/week, and a SETA factor of 6.
‘External’ = real time, time passed in the rest of the universe outside of SETA acceleration.

in 1 working week he experiences 60 hours.
Assuming 80% of his working week is travel, that is: 48 hours under SETA + 12 normal time
Externally, that becomes:
(48 * seta factor) + 12 = (48 x 6) + 12
= 300 working hours

In a week (= 7 days = 168 hours) he experiences: 60 working hours + 108 not-working
Externally, this becomes:
300 + 108 = 408 hours passed
= 17 days

So in a week of his life, 17 days pass in the external universe.
Net time acceleration factor: 7/17
= 2.43


This means:
He will age at between a half and a third of the rate of someone in normal time.
He will age 1 year for every 2.43 years of real time that passes.
He will age 4.12 years every decade, or 41.2 years per century.

Obviously, it would vary according to holidays and overtime. The longer he spends in SETA acceleration, the higher the ‘net acceleration factor’ rises to the SETA factor. If he lived in SETA, the net factor would equal the SETA factor of 6, and he would age 1 year for every 6 that passed – that is, 1.67 years every decade (just under 17 years a century!)

A higher SETA factor (like X-BTF and X-Tension’s value of 10) would exacerbate this effect (with the same working hours, and a SETA factor 10, the net factor becomes 3.58 ).

[KiwiNZ]

Hehe, nice one. Also interesting maths. But wouldn't it require only short trips to stay within the 10-hour range? What if he does long hauls that go on for days. Does it mean he gets time off accordingly to make up a 10-hour day/60-hour week? Wouldn't these people 'work' a lot longer because they sleep in the ship? I had a couple of my traders accidentally moving into Xenon sectors because they were sleeping at the time!

[=Sasquatch=]

[The Zig]

Cheers.

Been thinking about this SETA time-shift for a bit (as the maths probably shows) and was gonna write a whole story on it, but in the end it crystalised into one short! Even managed to get in a punchline! Cashback!

And yeah, KiwiNZ our Unversal Traders would pretty much live in SETA. They could easily outlive their great grandchildren (unless the Xenon get to them first!)

Does anyone else think this SETA phenomenon has narrative potential? It would allow people to live a VERY long time.

Anyway, nuff said.
Bye for now!

[KiwiNZ]

If you interpret it the way you do, it certainly has a lot of potential. I would prefer it to be a 'stasis chamber' or something like this. But going by the established description of the device it does time compression, so your take is a very valid one. Funny thing is, in the game it doesn't actually work the way it is described because all it does is have the clock tick faster. According to its description the clock should tick at the same speed or should it not? All SETA exploits for making lots of credits over night would be completely invalid if it was deployed correctly because the only entity in compressed time would be the player (and ship) but not any other items.

It is kind of strange but if time was compressed then your resulting speed to a passer by when you are traversing a sector should be kind of tenfold as well because, although travelling at say 200, you are doing it at ten times the rate of the person who is in the ship next to you. Yet, everybody is zooming at the same speed in that compressed time. Does that mean by applying SETA you are automatically speeding up everybody's life? Can't really happen because some may want to change their bearings which would disable SETA.

Consequently the 'correct' implementation of SETA would actually be a super speed upgrade that takes you faster from A to B, which is the whole point behind SETA. But that is in-game implementation. Generally, your take on it is correct and absolutely according to the description and would indeed lead to slower aging for those who use the device.

[esd]

Funny thing is, in the game it doesn't actually work the way it is described because all it does is have the clock tick faster. According to its description the clock should tick at the same speed or should it not? All SETA exploits for making lots of credits over night would be completely invalid if it was deployed correctly because the only entity in compressed time would be the player (and ship) but not any other items.

It is kind of strange but if time was compressed then your resulting speed to a passer by when you are traversing a sector should be kind of tenfold as well because, although travelling at say 200, you are doing it at ten times the rate of the person who is in the ship next to you. Yet, everybody is zooming at the same speed in that compressed time. Does that mean by applying SETA you are automatically speeding up everybody's life? Can't really happen because some may want to change their bearings which would disable SETA.

SETA's effect is extremely local. It simply alters the passing of time to you, not to anyone else. Your ship, to the passer-by is still doing 200m/s. The device wouldn't affect them whatsoever.

Time slows down close to gravitational forces, so if you were able to perch on the event-horizon of a black hole time would practically stop. Five minutes to you could be several hundred years to everyone else.
This effect has been shown to occur less dramatically, too. Take 2 identical digital clocks, and put one at the top of a very tall tower. Put the other on the ground floor. Leave them for a significant period of time and you'll find that the clock on the ground floor shows an earlier time to the one on the top.

So, SETA ingame effects the passing of time for the player. The computer has two choices - drop you into a real stasis field as you sit there at your PC, or speed up the passing of time for everything else. Obviously it opts for the latter.

[The Zig]

Cheers esd,
That's roughly what I imagined. Within the game, a SETA acts as a very localised time retarder, slowing down time within the ship, thus giving the relative appearance of accelerating external time.

The ship's clock only 'speeds up' because it is tuned to the external time.

If you were wearing a watch inside the cockpit (if this weren't just a game!) the watch would experience the same time as the user, and so wouldn't 'speed up'. So the longer you spent in SETA acceleration, the further the watch time would shift from the clock time.

In other words, less time passes within the ship than without.
In other words, you would age significantly slower than planet dwellers.
In other words, you could grow younger than your grandchildren and live for centuries.

Again... who thinks this has narrative pontetial!?

[Alienmoe]

Although I'm a terrible writer, I definatly think one of the far more tallented people that write stories could find a great thread to wrap around SETA.

*Random idea* Guy been out doing deep space exploration returns after what, to him, is 5 years, but living in seta it has been 50. Would be able to show the different tech from pre X:BTF to X3.

[Tenlar Scarflame]

Nice one, Zig.

And actually, that has definite narrative potential. At the very least, it could give planetside populations a very romanticized idea of space travelers- the idea of these kind of ancient, wise, "immortal" mavericks of space. Like a Buck Rogers or Han Solo plus Obi-Wan Kenobi. The more charismatic space traveling community would indefinitely play into that quite a bit.

[The Zig]

Mm?!
Was surprised to see this lil story back on the board!
Yeah, the SETA time drift was something I pondered for a while - I considered trying to work it into Terraformer Dreams, but I was already struggling to keep that story focussed! I even considered another short - but with TD hitting about 2 years old, I needed to get that done!

You certainly have a point about this adding to a spacer's mystique. A pilot's active career could quite realistically span a century of 'normal' time. Famous pilots could become near legendary within their lifetime.

The downside though, is that unless a pilot manages to synchronise his average SETA time with friends/family, he will find them all aging on him. Could be a lonely life for pilots, and economic SETA abusers!