“Do you understand,” said the bus station, “that we are in a time of great change.” It shook, after speaking these words, but could not release the morning frost quite yet. The first light of the sun was still on the other side of the road.

The bus was shuddering from its exhaust to its front lights, its engine bubbling and popping. It replied, “It is not change which is great, just your perocial view of change. You haven’t been around long enough to know what is great and what is marginal when it comes to change.”

“That may be so,” said the bus station, “that may be so. But it is not like I make these claims blind. Others have done a reasonable job documenting their ups and downs and deltas through the times. From these, I read them, and I can certainly see: change now is far greater than it ever was before.”

The bus hissed and popped as it melted the frost on the side-walk with its exhaust fumes. “Ho ho, but where do you start and where do you end? You could put your origin at the first blink of a star, and that would be quite the change for sure. But a flag planted at yesterday and claimed today would have changed less than footfall moves the air around it.”

The bus station paused before replying, not because it did not have an answer, but because someone walked up and it hoped they might sit on its seat and warm it up. After a moment, they continued on.

The bus station spoke, “Your games are entertaining, that is certain, but they are games and that is all. Broad brushes across the lifetime of this universe leave us nowhere, for the average of everything around us is nothing and never, forever. We have to put ourselves within a reference frame – a perspective – to begin to make any sense of what is happening around us. Through that frame, I say, change is afoot.”

A tin can was lifted by a wind and tinkled along the side of the bus. The bus sent out a long his as it lowered itself and opened its door: someone stepped on board. They wore a gas mask. “Certainly, certainly. But you have provided me no perspective to see your statements through. What direction? Where does it start? These I lack, so I cannot take what you say with any seriousness.”

The sunlight finally made it across the road. It climbed up one side of the bus station, up its metal frame and onto its glass which was patterned with interlocking ice crystals. As the sun made its way up the glass, the frost sizzled away, but the glass was not prepared for this sudden temperature jump. It began to crack.

“We do not need,” said the bus station, “to use only one reference frame – use them all! Each one provides us a set of a deltas, a timeline of the changes in that frame, and then we look at all the frames and we see the values in each. We see that there are some frames which are irrelevant, but some – such as the reference frames more aligned with how you and I exists – these ones are very undulating and interesting. They bumble along and bounce and sometimes they spike high, like this time we live in now!”

The crack along the bus station grew with the sunlight. Where the sunlight visited, the bus station stopped its shaking, but the crack came over too. Finally the sunlight reached the top of one side of the bus station and the crack tore out one window with crash.

The bus said, “Yet you have taken my words and re-digested them and flung them back at me as if I should interpret them any different. What you have done is pour rice on the floor and found patterns in the way the grains land. From these patterns you have said there are truths, and when I have pointed out that your patterns are just grains of rice you have said – ah! – but if we look at groups of grains rather than individual grains, well the patterns still have sense. Again, I say, your patterns are still the product of noise, whether we look at the grain, the grain cluster, or the whole bag of rice itself.”

The bus station replied, “Ha ha! It is hard not to laugh at what you say, but let me reply here.” The sun, now, was in full prime, flooding the streets, warming the roofs with its solar barrage. Steam rippled from the bus station indicating fresh-stripped frost. The bus waited, but no reply came.

“Yes?” said the bus. “I look forward to interpreting your laughs as more than the cries of a fool.” The bus waited. Another person walked on board. The plastic fabric of their hazmat suit crinkled as the pushed through the door. The bus still waited.

Someone up the street saw the bus and ran towards it, holding their mask to their face as they did, so it would not slip. Their feet crunched as they came near and they looked down to find a sea of glass pellets. They slowed to a walk and danced around the shards of glass, hopping and skipping, and then they made it to the front of the bus, they leapt over a last puddle of pieces on the side-walk and climbed on board.