[quote]Somehow, in some strange way, things always work out. The perceived difficulty in life is merely an effect of the human invention known as "the present." Come tomorrow, the problems of today will seem far less pressing. Tonight's worries will be tomorrow's joke. Given enough time, all problems are solved, all troubles disappear, and all hardship is forgotten. The trick to getting through today is to realize it's merely another yesterday that won't happen until tomorrow. The reason time heals all wounds is because our misunderstanding of it causes most of them.[/quote]

Or so I thought... But I see now that our very precise understanding of it causes them as well.


Amir woke to the sound of gunfire. Aleppo was full of it these days. His wife lay beside him, still asleep somehow. Their daughter likewise slept through the noise on her mat in the far corner of the room. Amir sighed. The sounds were fairly distant, and it was probably best to return to sleep himself. 

Far, far above, a wonder of the modern age circled the globe, its solar panels spread to capture the sun, which glinted off the gold and silver foil of its minimal structure. Inside, a vacuum even more perfect than that of the space surrounding the thing itself. The vacuum was flooded with precisely constrained magnetic fields, in which a tiny number of cesium atoms were confined, their vibrational modes tuned to exacting specifications.

For each vibration, the sensors in the machines recorded a tick, and that tick was added to a sum. Those sums added to higher and higher numbers, until the machine transmitted a signal, indicating this to all who would listen. Dozens of other metal birds, kin to this one and nearly identical, all orbited in their own given tracks, and did the same.

Far below, but still far above, another machine of fantastic construction flew over the city as its many cameras leered down. These images were sent to other kin of that first satellite, and back to operators on the far side of the world.

A camera turned, and switched to infrared. It began tracking a fixed spot on the ground. Moments later, a button was pressed, a signal was relayed, and the bird of prey passed that signal onto its payload. The payload released, and quickly began mixing oxidizer and fuel. Seconds later, it was streaking over the earth at several times the speed of sound.

On board that tiny, fast device was a radio, listening to that first satellite and all its friends. They each told it a story, the same, exact story, about those vibrating atoms, and just how fast they were twitching. But the story of each sounded just slightly different, the notes of the song shifted by the merest fraction of an octave. The little computer used those to learn where it was. It could do this, because it knew just how fast light itself could go. So the satellites a little further away were just the merest bit behind the ones closer overhead. But the satellites all sang so perfectly that those difference let it even measure the distance between its own nose and tail.

What that computer wanted to do was make its position match the one it had been given. So it twitched its fins in tiny movements to steer itself toward the destination. When it got close, it aimed down toward the ground, and smashed into the building, detonating the high explosives in its body.

It missed its target by less than three inches. A precision strike.

It wasn't the guidance that made the mistake, but the people setting the target. An ISIS stronghold looks no different than a civilian apartment building when viewed from space.

And that's why I'm now standing here, watching as Amir, tears in his eyes, tells his story of awaking later that evening when the building fell around him, and how he lost his wife and daughter. He holds the detonator for his vest high in the air as he tell us of his loss, and all I can hear is the tick-tick-tock of some imaginary version of that clock, hundreds of miles over my head in space, measuring out the precise picoseconds needed to guide a missile to a target by relativistic time dilation. We made clocks so good that Amir's daughter is dead. We understood time so precision that Amir now wants to kill us.