A self-authored companion to az1's ⚡c light caliper. 時差 is the ordinary word for time difference — jet lag, the offset between cities. The solar system runs on a jisa nothing can repeal: light is the fastest thing there is, and it is slow at home. Every planet you look at is a then. Every message is answered by a place that has already moved on. The caliper measures it inside az1's live sim; this page states the plain consequence: "now" is a local word.
A single moment of sunlight leaves the Sun at 12:00:00. It arrives:
Nine planets, nine different "the Sun just did that." No arrival is wrong; none is the real one. The instant itself — 12:00:00 at the Sun — is a place no observer stands.
Pick two worlds. The reckoner shows the fastest possible exchange — one honest question, one honest answer:
This is 昔 · Mukashi brought home: Andromeda's 2.5-million-year lookback made the point at galactic scale, but the same structure starts at the doorstep — Mars is seconds-to-minutes in the past, Pluto is hours. And it is why the corpus's one-way instruments (the Unshareable Clock, the Beacon, the 形見) treat acknowledgment as a luxury: even at home scale, every reply arrives at a sender who has changed while waiting.