The title refers to Atalanta, who agrees to marry anyone who beats her in a footrace. Swift-footed Atalanta won every time, until Hippomenes cheats by throwing at her golden apples he got from Aphrodite.
I did not expect fugues and refugees to be etymologically related. You learn something new every day, I guess. Even if it's something you'd prefer you didn't know, like that apparently six-month-old eggs don't smell weird enough to get noticed...if they're in a closed drawer at least. (Yes, that happened a while ago. It lasted through a reorganization of the fridge, too! Fun...)
Reminds me of the falling-blocks one, where IIRC he made the blocks 'spontaneously' create the necessary time by starting with them in the right order and then simply displaying it in reverse, due to the temporal reversibility of physics. So it simply looked 100% correct as somehow the blocks magically all bounced exactly right so as to turn into the time. If you did it 'forward', you'd be baffled, but it becomes trivial if you think like a Heptapod. :)
One could probably do the same trick here: start with the flies in the clock shape, then diffuse them, then display it in reverse. And stitch together each sequence by a bit of biased sampling to move each fly to its nearest counterpart in the next sequence? Then the flies magically assemble themselves into the time without ever moving unnaturally. "How do they know how to coordinate?! I just don't understand!" (Also a good analogy to AI diffusion models...?)
I occasionally feel overly concerned with how much time each thing I'm doing is taking. As opposed to getting pleasantly lost in whatever it is that I'm doing. Of course it's useful to check-in on the time every so often or get calendar notifications to keep from missing events, but I realistically don't need to check the time every minute or two.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempus_fugit