Now you've got time dilation, and we positively know this is real, clocks absolutely do slow down when they're "moving faster" - but this is an absolute fuckery for Einsteinian physics because Einstein says there's no preferred frame of reference - i.e. no definition of "stationary", so how can there be a definition of "faster"...
When you pose this question, the mumbo-jumbo and hand waving comes in heavy.
But lets return to the aether hypothesis again... We posit: electrons orbiting an atom are governed by C - so when you're going forward, their forward travel is much slower, their backward travel is (equally) faster, but their side/side travel is somewhat slower (which is not cancelled out by anything).
Now we suppose that everything we can use to build a clock is somehow dependent on atomic orbit speeds. After all, atomic clocks are directly measuring atomic orbits, and it's not really that much of a stretch to suggest that every other process that runs at a stable rate is likewise stable relative to atomic orbits...
Then we have our solution: When something moves faster (relative to the aether), the atomic orbits are slowed down, meaning everything slows down.
And yet we STILL can't measure our speed in space, because when we launch a clock off in one direction and another one in another direction, we have to get them back in order to check which one lost time, and getting them back means they both have to do the inverse of their original trip - and so they both end up showing slower than our clock that we kept "stationary"
