"I don't know - I don't know if anyone does - maybe the culture that had a number just met cultures without numbers and the ones without numbers were just like 'okay, I guess that's the number now'?"

"Huh. We had lots of ways of counting years until one of 'em won, I think some of the others are still around but there's a standard." 

"Are they all around the same number, like they were invented around the same time?"

"Nope." 

"Was it really hard for people to contact each other?"

"Well, some of them were completely cut off, some of them I don't know how far back they had any contact but it wasn't that much, some of them had lots of contact but still mostly used different systems..." 

"Huh. Maybe I just never learned about some competing number that thinks it's currently 2867 or whatever that's died out."

"No idea. There aren't lots of competing systems still in use, though, I think it's, like, the standard and the Chinese one and maybe the Mayan one? Which, you don't know what those are, of course. How do you count years for things that happened before the year one? Admittedly I don't know how the Chinese or Mayan systems handle that either but then I've never tried to live in China or South America or anything." 

"It goes into negative numbers from there."

"We do that too! Although we don't call them negative per se, we just call the positive numbers 'Common Era' and the negative ones 'before Common Era'." 

"I guess that makes sense."

"We used to call 'em something different that referred to what we were counting from, but the thing was the birth of a religious figure so they decided we should pretend that not that in order to be nice to people who're different religions." 

"Huh. The different religions people didn't like that person?"

"He didn't suck, but like, the religion he was associated with did a lot of cultural imperialism in the past and was trying to dial it back." 

"But not so much that you'd switch to one of the other years."

"To be fair I think at that point it woulda been a huge hassle." 

"I guess it would be, you'd have to update all the records of everything."

"And you'd have to decide which system to switch to, and some people would argue for making a completely new one, and there'd be a bajillion proposals for what new one..."

"There would, it'd be such a mess!"

"And they tried it already, after the French Revolution. Didn't stick. I think sticking with the years we've got was probably the right move." 

Kamuor nods.

"I don't remember much about the French Revolution calendar, but I remember they gave one of the summer months a name that just meant 'It's real hot this time of year.'"

Giggle. "Probably if you go back far enough some of our months are named things like that too."

"I bet! The month name system we've got is really eclectic, we've got a couple months named after gods and a couple named after emperors and a couple that are just like 'this is month number so and so'--but the so and so ones are off by two, because those two emperors inserted their months in ahead of them--"

"Oh no!"