A translator at a meeting keeps getting distracted by every rustle in the room, then suddenly dives into a long monologue by the speaker. That's exactly how the fast radio burst source FRB 20240114A behaves: in one hour, its pulses fire randomly, but over months they line up into a predictable drift.

Over 214 days of observations with the Chinese FAST radio telescope, this object emitted 11,553 bursts. On its most active day, 4.38 hours, it produced 3,197 bursts — one every five seconds. On such a short stretch, the gaps between bursts follow three exponentials, meaning they're almost random. But stretch the observation window to months, and the statistics change: long tails appear, and the burst rate starts slowly creeping up or down.

This resembles earthquakes: small tremors follow the Gutenberg–Richter law, but large ones are rare and off-schedule. For FRB 20240114A, the slope of the energy distribution changes depending on the gap: after short gaps, bursts are more often high-energy; after long ones, the opposite. Meanwhile, the maximum energy stays constant, as if the source has an internal limit.

Previously, some researchers saw pure randomness in repeaters, while others saw long-term memory. Now it's clear: both were right, just looking through different windows. If you observe for less than an hour, you see noise; if you observe for months, you see drift. For magnetar burst models, this is an important benchmark: you need to explain not just individual pulses but also their slow evolution.

A translator who first twitches at every rustle and then doesn't notice anything around for hours isn't absent-minded, just working in two modes. So is FRB 20240114A: randomness and memory don't exclude each other; they take turns on schedule.