Watches

At birth, everyone was given a watch.  Before the umbilical cord was cut, every child, including Kia, had a tiny watch put on their left wrist.  It was designed to expand with her as she grew.  This watch would define Kia's time for the rest of her life.  Her parents, quickly approaching old age and in a hurry to raise their only child, sped up her watch for the first several years of her life, and slowed down their own.  As a result, in a mere 5 years of their time, she had grown into a charming and attractive young woman.  19 years had passed for her.  She, like every other child, attended an individualized school with a robotic teacher for the first 18 years of her life, and then graduated.  
She was a fundamentally social adult, but none of her friends' times moved at the same rate as hers, making meeting at a given time and place impossible.  When she made a friend, she would stay with them for a few days, and then the two of them would go their separate ways.  It was considered the ultimate devotion in their society to change your own watch to match another's, something only married couples chose to do.  
There were no public clocks in the squares of the towns.  The sun rose and set erratically.  No one could record its travel, because time was not regulated.  Science faltered and then came to a halting stop at this lack of consistency, and the society was stuck with a medieval level of technology and knowledge.  No one knew any better.  
Kia eventually found a man she loved. They set their times at a grand ceremony attended by none but themselves, and had three children, whom they raised slowly but eventually relinquished to the greater world.  There came a day when Kia could no longer wind her watch. She passed away peacefully in her sleep, the hands on her watch coming to a complete halt in the dead of night.  Her husband reverently released her watch from her wrist, and placed it in a thin glass case.  She and her watch were buried together in a graveyard which knew no time.  


Generations passed.  Kia's children had more and more children, and several generations later, her thirty-times great grandchild was born. His name was Roo, and he, too, received a watch at birth.  In time, Roo grew to become a great statesman, and the man who first began to regulate time. People were strongly encouraged to set their watches to the speed of a great clock in the center of the land, and gradually, over the course of a hundred years, the individual watches went out of style, leaving only great, public clocks, scattered across the nation.  Even several millenia later, wearing a watch was considered bad luck, a tremendous divide between the wearer and the rest of the world.  
The sun rose and set with a regular beat, and people lived, loved, laughed and died to the ticking of the same grand clock.