The first thing I ever bought for you was time.
You were six and had learnt to sleepwalk. I found you in the hallway, one hand on the door, eyes open but unseeing, whispering you were “trying to catch the slow”. You’d heard someone at school say rich people lived longer. I made hot chocolate and told you that wasn’t true. Back then, it wasn’t.
Now I’m writing from a room where the clock blinks 03:17 for months at a stretch. If you looked through the observation slit, I’d seem still, like a forgotten photograph. Inside, I’ve read War and Peace twice, learnt enough Mandarin to apologize politely for stepping on someone’s foot, and failed at sourdough three times. Three weeks have passed for me. Eight months for you.
You told the court that counted as abandonment. I’m not going to argue, but I am going to explain.
You know the basics: the subjective latency induction system slows how the brain encodes and retrieves sensory frames, like a movie projector running at 12 frames per second while the outside world stays at 24. Metabolic modulation keeps tissues in sync; a recalibration protocol stops the floor from tilting when you return.
Read more science fiction from Nature Futures
Originally sold for deep-space crews, the tech found a market closer to home. People don’t crave immortality, not really — they just want options. Boats are loud options. Homes are expensive options. Time is a quiet one.
The ads were tasteful: a violinist practising for six subjective hours for every three the rest of the orchestra lived; a surgeon mastering a new technique in ten subjective years while her body aged five; an old couple taking a slow honeymoon while their grandchildren learnt to say their names.
I told myself it wasn’t wrong to want more life inside a life.
The first time I went in, I bought a month at half speed. I told you it was a retreat. When I came out, you’d lost a tooth and the dog no longer barked at the vacuum. You had enough hair to make a stubby little ponytail on top of your head. For me, it had been a long, patient dawn. For you, it was an entire November.
By the time there were chambers in hotel lobbies and yacht cabins, the world had learnt to be angry at us ‘sLow-Lives’, they put it. City councils debated whether public employees could slow commutes. Schools tried to ban ‘slow study’ before exams. Teens did it anyway, swapping hacks in group chats for how to cram four hours into two hours. Health insurers haggled over whether a slowed pregnancy also counted as a longer pregnancy. People argued about whether time was a right, a privilege or a commodity.
You once asked me how much slowing cost. I showed you the price list. You said it didn’t seem fair. I agreed. You asked if we’d do it anyway. I said yes.
