A Guide to Weights & Measures

The Souvern Conglomerate is a system built on control. What you eat, where you sleep, how you work, and yes, even how you measure the world around you. In building the dystopian speculative fiction of The Algorithm of Life, Gillian made a deliberate choice: the language of systemic control should feel familiar enough to be grounding, and just alien enough to remind you that you are not home.

It starts with direction. North became norf, or norvern as an adjective. The Conglomerate occupies the southern half of a former nation, so souf and souvern run through the text like a geographic heartbeat. In CALLED, Clementine barely leaves the Conglomerate's central territories. Subsequent books will take her further, to the norf, the souf, the est and the oest, as her resistance expands beyond the map she was given.

Time, too, belongs to the Conglomerate. The fundamental unit is the sol. Within a sol, time is carved into chrons, subdivided into demichrons and, as the old Conglomerate marketing line goes: "hesitate a millichron and it'll be gone." Seven sols make a septad. Four septads make a lunaris, tied to a full lunar cycle. A collection of lunerii becomes a solaris, and ten solarii make a decennium. Ten decennia: a centad.

Simple, right? That's the point. The Conglomerate prefers its citizens to find the system logical...inevitable.

Writing around that system created its own quiet rebellions. "Today" became this'ol (a contraction, easy enough). "Everyday" resisted every elegant solution; in the end, characters in the story simply describe things as modern or commonplace. Sometimes the world pushes back.

On the ground, distance is measured in terraspans (scaled to mega or micro as needed). The digital economy runs on credits; anything left after paying for Conglomerate-mandated room and board is classified as discretionary. The older physical currency, scrip, is fading with each passing solaris. The Conglomerate would prefer you didn't notice.

A few everyday objects got the same treatment: sleep shelf, cookery. Small reminders that in this world, even the ordinary is under construction. Because in the Souvern Conglomerate, nothing is neutral. Not even the words.