Friday Flash: Morphic Resonance

Morphic Resonance, ten years on

Toby MacNutt

This flash sequel takes place ten years after the events of “Morphic Resonance”, Toby’s story in Accessing the Future, and was written to celebrate the tenth anniversary of TFF. If you want to see more fiction like this in the future, please support our fundraiser, where you can pre-order the celebration anthology and pick up other exciting rewards.

Vasily had passed through enigma and out the other side. Any door would open if you could simply authenticate; this one, you exited clothed in a new skin. A subtle skin, light-rays bent tangibly around what wasn’t there, leading no one to question.

Little imps came to live under their true skin: a scatterer here, a deflector there, an aural modulator, a distributed projector. Early on, benign nanoresonators bustled, chewing bone and fat away here, depositing there, growing, inhibiting, finally drifting into hibernation. All the wiring is hidden, seamless-smooth, but will light Vasily from within and beneath with a blueprint of Ammon’s signature glowing amber, if requested. Sometimes their lover asks. Sometimes their fingers dance to the circuits’ inner hum.

Now they hang poised in the air, ’skipborne, secure and finely-tuned. Now they glow, not with circuits but with self, a true self constructed in back rooms and basement workshops. Now they glide between worlds, through doors without handles, twice locked. He chose once; they chose again. Now each day, the shifters’ gift, the luxury of choice.

Vasily had passed through enigma, and out the other side came Halcyon: once-secret heart, given wings.