Pemmaraju’s story urges us to consider the occasional senses of temporal dislocation that we all experience from time to time—instances of timecode drift within our consciousness, small insurgencies of slave clocks against a tyrannical master clock.

To bridge Aztec and ancient Greek ways of thinking, you could say that the basic sources for a lack of harmonic balance derive from: (1) metaphysical reasons, (2) observations about the complexity of the human psyche, and (3) observations about the role of moral luck. Even if we discard the Aztecs' view on metaphysical cosmology, the latter two