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“It feels so strange...” you say, looking in on your distant redshifted ego. “It’s so lonely...yet somehow, suffocating.” The pressure of endless infalling matter weighs on you even as you absorb every fragment into your immeasurably small self.

“This is the burden of time,” Astræa says. “Long has humanity tried to outlast its biological limits.”

You feel a pressure in the æther. Little Ganymeda drifts toward her sister, falling into their orbit. “Am I a demonstration now?” she says, circling around the star-clusters of Astræa, turning in a chaotic rotation.

“Even though all one finds in the cold, lonely depths of age, is the longing for the fire of youth.” A nebula collapses into the palm of Astræa’s hand, flaring to life as a young star. Its brilliant light shines through Ganymeda’s transparent skin, diffracting like through a prism and reflecting off of the silver gears ever-turning underneath. It casts a spectacular show on the gas clouds around it.

The little star drifts out of their hand, falling far away, toward you, the center of gravity. Ganymeda, freeing herself from orbit, follows alongside it as it dives deep into the red. “Time is my domain, if you don’t mind,” she says.

The star approaches the galactic core, the quasar. “The passion of youth is the desire for knowledge--to see far, to understand, to know the unknowable,” Ganymeda says. As the star approaches, it seems to slow, despite gravity pulling it faster and faster. “Time is a relative thing, as you know. Her hands seem to turn slower when you look upon them from afar, as an observer. But to the subject?”

The star’s shape stretches out, distorted by the extreme gravitational differences of the quasar’s space, until it joins with the bright accretion disc, no longer recognizable as itself. “It all seems to happen in an instant, when you are the one diving into the depths,” she says.

“Do you understand?” Astræa says.

“Space and time are one, obviously,” you say. “Like all things that seem to be two, apparently. Then in fact, age and youth are one as well, part of the same construct in the æther.”

“Now you’re thinking four dimensionally!” Ganymeda says. Around her, time turns back as the hands on her face spin counter-clockwise. The accretion disc ejects the star. This time, its light traces a solid path through the æther. “The sum of a body’s motion in space, in time we can see it all as one.” The star falls back into Astræa’s hand, having drawn a bright pathway, white fading to red, stretching far into the æther to the distant galaxy that is you. “In the study of time, we call this a world line.”

Ganymeda reaches out to touch the star’s world line, like a shimmering string floating in spacetime. She takes its red end and pulls it apart from the accretion disc until its path avoids orbital capture. Instead, it forms a parabolic orbit around the gravity well. Her clock hands turn clockwise again, and the star falls back along its path, this time flying close to the quasar, but not too close. It circles back, escaping the gravity well with much higher speed, and flies directly toward you, faster than you can react. You panic for a few ticks of the processor clock, until the star passes harmlessly through your point of perception--you remember you were never here, you were observing in third person.

“The trick to seeking the wisdom of time is not to fly too close to the Sun,” Ganymeda says.

“Amazing,” you say, lost for words.

“There you have it, a lesson in time and space,” Ganymeda says.

“But we are not philosophers,” Astræa says, “we are technopaths! And technopathy is an applied skill. Technopathy is the weaponization of the self.”

“Now, you’re a clever enby,” Ganymeda says. “This understanding floating on the surface of your mind, apply it. Weaponize it.”

Inspiration strikes you. You see the framework of a new program forming in the technopathy editor of your mind’s eye.