Time dilation is sold as pure freedom: live centuries in a year. But you don't live alone, and a clock that only speeds you up quietly turns the people you love into distant correspondents. Three steps from freedom to its price.
Opt into a high rate and a single calendar year becomes centuries of subjective life — at New Centauri's million-fold ceiling, a million years per year. Seen alone, it's the best deal anyone's ever been offered.
The HSS link between two people is a few milliseconds — until each multiplies it by their own clock. Talk to a friend on a slower tier and every reply takes a subjective day, or a year, to arrive. Real-time talk becomes letters across a gulf.
The only way back to real conversation is for the faster friend to slow down — and every year they spend at your pace is subjective decades they'll never live. Staying together is the most expensive thing in the enclave.
Dilation is never just a personal setting — it's a distance you open between yourself and everyone running at another speed. The faster you go, the lonelier the freedom, until the only shared moment left is the Universal Sabbath, when the whole enclave is briefly forced back to 1× and can simply talk again. The series' quiet thesis: in a world where you can live forever, the scarce thing is each other.