Helvatia  - Bahnofstrasse/HB Kreis 1

           

f n = f n-1 + f n-2   if n does not equal 0

The Fibonacci sequence published in Pisa in 1202 follows a very simple pattern: each numeral is equal to the sum of the two that precede it; the sequence can be expanded infinitely.

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        Toska stood alone leaning heavily on one of the stilts which elevated the giant, 4 faced, cubic, Mondaine timepiece in the air. It was 21:00 on a Friday. Clusters of willow legged girls in black stilettos loitered by the tower, waiting for their night to start. Every few minute like clock-work, new bodies joined an assemblage prompting a round of three kisses. One and two becoming three. Three and five making eight.

       People meet under the Mondaine, but she had long since given up on meeting anyone in the city. And just as the phone calls slowly ceased to come when she stopped answering, no one seemed to catch her attention. She knew her lonliness wasn’t their fault nor her’s exactly. It was a magnetic force of habit that averted her eyes when his may have sought to make contact, the very same buffer that enabled her to move quickly through crowds without collision, repelling her from matter toward open space.

       Toska made a point of looking disinterested as she watched people, impassive, glossy-eyed even, as if she was looking past them, which she often did. The station’s architecture played on vanishing points and light. Windows composed of thousands of rectangular panes established patterns of linear perspective that quickly drew her eye far away.  

        High up in the stations rafters, the silhouette of a Merz’s bird in flight contrasted with the skylight. A neon number on its breast. Toska never thought much of it until one morning while checking for departures, she saw a second bird adorned with a three. A red line bent into a spiral, dangled from the rafters and linked the birds to one another. The Philospher’s Egg was a homage to the Fibonacci sequence. The red lines symbolized the life lines of the railway station: dynamism and mobility. The animals represented the coming and going in the station.

       21:03:07, the clock collected seconds. It was hard to ignore.

       Toska’s exasperation grew. He was late. How could he be? Only one train came in from Stuttgart. Call it a night and hop on the next one home, she thought. She could be back in Uster, in bed by the hour. It was a Friday night and she was alone. The idea was sobering but not unfamiliar.

       Rocking back onto the heels of her shoes, she let the metal dig deep into the space between her left shoulder and spine, craning her neck backward and eyes upward. The clock tower was at least 30 feet tall but was still dwarfed by the Renaissance revival arches. Seven massive semi-circular panes of glass linked the arches to the walls. Beneath each pane, three smaller arches framed french doors. Doors to cafes and ticketing offices. Doors leading out of the station.

       She needed a cappuccino. Her taste for stimulants was a recent affair. One she largely considered distasteful yet justified given it was fueled by Italian espresso and techno. Stimulants raise levels of nervous system activity. She hated missing details.

       She couldn’t leave. They’d agreed to meet under the clock. If she moved he wouldn't be able to find her.

       HB was like a giant circuit board made to shuttle bodies not electricity. The clock stood at its center, at the apex between the old station hall and the newer hyper-modern landing. The space was so colossal that from her perspective, Toska could see precisely when each light-rail train entered the station and keep time as it shot down the 420m long platforms. In her mind, when the passengers disembarked, people moved more like time-lapses, blurring into one another in temporal overlays. A zig-zagging of chaotic motion that with scale revealed itself to also have order. A daily ebb and flow derived from the commuting habits of the Zurich’s populous.

       As she looked on, she noticed the Swiss move in predictable ways. Often in unison and at constant rates. That is to say, Toska never encountered anyone who particularly sought to be early. Just precisely on time. It was a matter of velocity. No acceleration needed.

       Toska alternatively, danced her way through crowds, diving, dipping, breaking, twisting, tip-toeing and weaving her way down the Bahnhofstrasse. Existing in the spaces in-between. And it was like her time was not the same. Not faster nor slower, just different.

       21:11:00.

       “Entschuldigung.” Two men brushed passed her. Always polite.

       The neuroticism of the train station’s order sometimes inspired her. When she brought her camera to film, her desire to capture and synchronize the patterns would become manic. She never shot a frame. Most people didn’t understand the extent to which film was about control —control of an environment to create the illusion of consistent time in space. Controlled illusions.

       21:11:30.

       It took three men circulating in the periphery, four seconds to run palms through their dark fades before shuffling over to a group of well-dressed women.

       “Wohin gehst du heute abend? Gommer steil hut abig.”

       The women responded in stifled laughs. Something about bottle service at Die Zukunft.

       Hands in their coat pockets, they introduced one another in rapid Swiss-German. A girl with clear eyes smiled and shifted to allow them into the group. Minutes later they all departed, heading toward one of the raised concrete volumes that projected from the platform floor, hiding the escalators which descend to the underground tracks. Line 3 should take them to Helvetiaplatz.

       21:20:02

       Two couples arrived. Four other parties came and went. Toska pulled out her phone. It was practically useless. She hadn’t purchased enough data and data was all she used. She wondered where the nearest wifi hotspot could be. If she left to go find it, she ran the risk of missing him, if he showed up. If he shows up.

       Elia was an exception. Technically she hadn’t met him in Zurich. Family friends, they had known each other since primary school. He was one of few people she still kept in touch with that remembered her father. But she hadn’t seen him since her family moved to the States.

       He studied applied mathematics at the University of Stuttgart but had spent the past year or so in Nepal. Living between the University of Kathmandu and a Buddhist monastery, he was trying to derive a mathematical model out of Buddhist philosophies. She had no clue what his research entailed.

        Fuck. How were they suppose to find one another? It had been years since they’d seen eachother. She remembered a scribble of a boy who played the cello with a fervor and precision uncommon for his age. When they spoke it was always via phone or text. Recently, he was all about imparting her with Buddhist words of wisdom. She didn’t call often.  

       When she caught the eye of a man seated at the cafe across the hall, she did a double take. He was lanky and had his long legs propped nonchalantly atop a Patagonia pack. He wore hiking boots, kakis and a surprisingly clean white t-shirt. His curly hair, several shades lighter than Toska’s was tied back, exposing the four cartilage piercings in his left ear. As Toska looked closer she realized his forearms save for where his watch sat, were covered in an intricate web of indigo, polygonal tattoos. She knew it was Elia. He was a fan of Kurt Vonnegut. The tattoos were his harmoniums, the kite shaped creatures from Sirens of Titan that fed off musical vibrations from Mercury.  

       He winked at her before taking a sip of his espresso. All grown up now, clearly he knew what she looked like.

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       “The world is filled with natural time keeping devices. You’ve been in living in Zurich how long? And you still don’t know what a movement is? Toska...” Elia scoffed. She had joined him at the cafe and now contently sipped her caffeine.

       Toska shrugged. “I don’t wear watches.” In fact, Toska didn’t wear any jewelry. She found it constraining.

       “Ok. There are two types of movement,” he said leaning in. “Mechanical movement and Quartz movement. The easiest way to differentiate the two is by looking at the second hand. A Quartz watch will have a tick-tick motion,” he said using his hands for emphasis. “A mechanical will maintain smooth motion.”

       “Which is yours?”

       “Mechanical. Most luxury watches are mechanical because a higher level of craftsmanship goes into creating the intricate series of components. It’s an art with a rich history. The technology hasn’t changed for centuries.” He paused.  “Also I like that it’s powered by a spring not a battery,” he said looking down fondly at the face of his Piguet. “But the world runs off quartz.”

       “What do you mean?”

       “Quartz is piezoelectric. It transforms energy from one form to another. It converts mechanical forces into electrical signals and electrical signals into mechanical forces.”

       “Ok…Isn’t quartz a natural form of silicone?” Toska asked. She wasn’t a hardware person. She knew software.

       “Yup. To power a watch, a battery sends an electrical current through a small quartz crystal. The vibrations keep the movement oscillating, driving the watch hands. With the right electronic feedback loop, it can oscillate precisely forever. That’s why it’s not just used in watches. It used in every timekeeping device that exists. Phones…spacecraft electronic equipment.”

       “Satellites,” Toska whispered, realization dawning.

       “Quartz frequencies are the basis for the timing required to synchronize satellite payloads. Navigation, communication, military applications.” He said, eyes excited. “I mean data in its simplest form is primarily an exchange of time between devices. Synchronizing.”

       “Does that mean increasing the number of transmitting devises… further standardizes time?” The thought made Toska nervous.

       “Exactly.” He said. She couldn’t understand his excitement. “But get this. Even quartz frequency varies. It will drop seconds with fluctuating temperature and humidity. And then there is material difference. No two crystals are exactly alike. Real-time positioning systems, like GPS require insane level of precision. Clock ticks have to be accurate to 20-30 nanoseconds. They started using atomic clocks but even those need to take relativity into consideration.”

       “Relativity. Like Einstein?”

        “An observer keeping time on the ground sees satellites in motion relative to them. Satellites orbit high above the earth where spacetime is different. A combination of Einsteinian special and general relativity predicts that when viewed from Earth, clocks on a satellite appear to be ticking faster than clocks on the ground. If engineers didn’t account for the 38 microsecond disparity, a navigation fix would be false in about 2 minutes. Global position errors would continue to accumulate by about 10 kilometers per day. GPS would be worthless.” His eyes were bright. “If GPS goes to shit, transportation systems fail; Cities starve; Network synchronization fails; There would be not internet; Digital television and Radio can’t continue; Global finance systems crash. The modern world would come to a screeching halt.” He took a deep breath and leaned back, looking satisfied with himself.

       Toska squinted her eyes, trying to get her mental model straight. “Seems pretty paradigmatic to me.”

       Elia raised his eyebrows.

       “Well, time and its accuracy … at least as we understand it in the collective sense, is constrained to current technologies. We used to use sundials and astrology. And they were accurate enough until Galileo created the pendulum. Then we discovered electricity and silicon; we split the atom; Einstein discovered relativity and now atomic clocks are the standard. It seems like our perception of accuracy is more tied to our scope of understanding and metaphors than to an any essential understanding of time.” She sighed.

       “That’s the idea behind Humes ideas of causation — the rejection of essentialism. Pratītyasamutpāda.”

       “Prat-ee-tee-yuh-sa-muht-pah-duh.” Toska repeated rolling through  the word slowly.

       “Dependent origination is the oldest recorded description of the rejection of essences. An essence can be an idea or an identity — anything fixed really.”

       “Anything discrete.”

       “Sure. Nagarjuna requested his followers to ask one question. If you assume you have an identity why does that arise? Us as people, our ideas, are all caused by something. If you begin to break down what something truly is, in terms of how it came to be, essences are just a myriad of confluence. Making something,” he paused looking at Toska, “discrete is an act of convenience. We often lose the complexity of what we seek to describe and forget that a discrete description is nothing but a metaphor.”

       Elia looked thoughtful. “So that's the question. If time is this great continuum, why have we been handling it in discrete ways for centuries? The western world would say, because it works. It’s a tool. A tool that creates consistency between people for the sake of society functioning congruently.”

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