MTLNOVEL Chapter 5: The Man with Too Many Pasts
Chapter Five: The Man with Too Many Pasts
The next assignment didn't come from the Archive.
It came from him.
Mors Walk stood alone in a sealed chamber—one not logged in any timeline, any mission queue, or any ledger. It was a forgotten pocket of the Archive's understructure. He had built it himself.
He called it The Mirror Room.
Not because it held reflections, but because it held versions—splinters of what he could have been. Each mission he completed, each choice he made, created possibilities the Archive pruned. But Mors didn't delete them. He stored them. Studied them.
And sometimes… he talked to them.
The glass lit up. A figure materialized behind it.
Same face. Different eyes.
"Version K-5," Mors said. "The one who chose mercy."
The figure tilted its head. "You're still doing their math."
"I'm doing my math."
K-5 smiled. "And how much longer do you think you can make those numbers add up?"
Mors ignored the question. "You asked for this session. Why?"
"I have intel you won't find in the Archive's stream. A fracture point—buried in a shielded thread. Hidden by another version of you. One who went rogue."
Mors raised an eyebrow. "Why would I hide something from myself?"
"You didn't," K-5 said. "He did. The one who tried to unwrite the Archive itself."
The air tightened.
There were only three known rogue versions of Mors Walk. One was dead. One was archived. One was... missing.
And now, perhaps, found.
"Where is the thread?" Mors asked.
K-5 smiled again.
"Timeline Zeta-Null. Designated The Man with Too Many Pasts."
Static hummed in the chamber.
"Warning," the Archive whispered. "Thread Zeta-Null is classified. Access unauthorized. Ethical debt projection: catastrophic."
Mors dismissed the warning.
Rell entered behind him. "Did you just flag a black-level thread?"
"Yes."
"You can't authorize that without—"
"I just did."
She hesitated. "What's in it?"
"Me," he said. "But not the kind you'd like to meet."
He tapped the console.
Reality folded.
They landed in a world of overlapping echoes.
Streets looped back into themselves. Buildings changed architectural styles mid-wall. People walked backward, forward, paused—repeating gestures out of sequence.
Rell clutched her head. "This isn't time distortion. It's—"
"Identity collapse," Mors said. "Someone broke narrative continuity itself. This place doesn't know what it's supposed to be."
From the static emerged a figure.
It was Mors.
But older. Worn. Eyes full of guilt instead of precision. He walked with a limp, as if bearing too many timelines at once.
"You finally came," the rogue said.
Mors nodded once. "I always do."
"You came to kill me?"
"No," Mors said. "I came to ask why."
The rogue exhaled. "Because the Archive is lying. We're not fixing time—we're burning futures for the ones we prefer."
"And?"
"And I stopped believing that was necessary."
Mors didn't flinch.
"That's why you lost."
He drew a small black device—darker than shadow, heavier than history.
Rell whispered, "What is that?"
"A key," Mors said.
He pressed it against the rogue's chest.
"I'm not deleting you. I'm indexing you."
The rogue smiled, almost gratefully.
"Even now, you want to understand me."
"No," Mors said coldly. "I want to predict the next one."
The device pulsed.
The rogue dissolved into a pattern of light.
Rell said nothing.
Then, finally: "How many versions of you have you archived?"
Mors didn't look at her.
"I stopped counting. It makes the math harder."