The Morning Shift
An archive of moments that registered as ordinary—until they didn’t.
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Woke up already thinking about a phoenix.
The morning began without urgency.
Light through the window.
Coffee cooling too fast.
A smartphone already awake before I was.
Nothing suggested an event.
I stood in front of the mirror while the kettle finished.
The face returned as expected.
No lag. No distortion.
Same face, superficially.
I looked long enough to confirm it,
then left.
The news arrived in fragments.
Headlines stacked politely.
Infrastructure. Settlement systems.
Timelines measured in decades.
One item described a bridge—not of steel, but of exchange.
A mechanism designed to route value without passing through familiar centers.
It would take years to complete.
It was already treated as operational.
The language was calm.
No warning words.
Just scale, stated as fact.
It read the way weather does when it’s already decided.
I noticed how quickly the body adapts to information delivered without friction.
How fast a future is accepted once it’s framed as continuity.
Back at the counter, the coffee was no longer hot.
I checked the mirror again.
Briefly.
Still nothing remarkable.
At the time, this felt reassuring.
Later—
after the headlines blurred,
after the day accepted its shape—
I noted what had shifted rising from the countering sentiment.
That was why the overseas client called.
It was our first terse conversation.
The mirror hadn’t changed.
It had registered early.
The alignment I trusted that morning wasn’t wrong.
It was premature.
Normalcy had been intact.
It was already outdated.
Systems don’t announce adjustments.
They run.
They arrive complete,
then invite belief.
The bridge didn’t disrupt anything.
It extended what was already assumed.
Before leaving, I returned to the mirror once more.
Same face. Same light.
It felt archival.
As if I were looking at a version of myself
that had only been correct
briefly.
