MTLNOVEL Chapter 7: The Man with Too Many Pasts
Chapter Seven: The Man with Too Many Pasts
The Archive didn't send the next mission.Mors Walk did.
In a room that technically did not exist, buried five floors beneath the Archive's ethical core and entirely disconnected from official timelines, Mors stood alone in the Mirror Room. It was a place not sanctioned, not maintained — and yet somehow never erased.
He had built it himself.
The walls weren't mirrors in the reflective sense. They were thin glass membranes tethered to filtered shards of discarded futures — fractured splinters of Mors Walk himself. Not metaphorical versions, but literal: echoes of him from timelines the Archive had pruned, stored, or quietly buried.
Each one had made a different choice. Each one had paid a different price.
He stood before one now. The glass hummed.
Inside it, a figure leaned against the opposite wall — same face, different posture. A flicker of weariness behind the eyes, a calm Mors Walk didn't recognize.
Version K-5.The one who chose mercy.
"You finally called," the man inside said, his voice slightly softer than Mors's own. "I was beginning to think you forgot how to be curious."
"I don't forget," Mors said. "I archive."
K-5 smirked faintly. "Same thing, depending on who's doing the forgetting."
Mors ignored the banter. "Why did you request this exchange?"
"I have data the Archive doesn't. A fracture point. A buried thread the main system never indexed."
"Where?"
K-5's eyes darkened. "Timeline Zeta-Null."
Mors narrowed his eyes. That wasn't just a lost thread. That was forbidden space. The Archive classified it under E-Class: Existential Risk. Beyond repair, beyond audit. Officially deleted. Unofficially… watched.
"That thread is locked for a reason."
K-5 stepped closer to the glass. "A version of you hid it. Not me. Not us. You. The one that tried to burn the Archive from the inside out."
A flicker — not of emotion, but of awareness — crossed Mors's face. There were only three rogue Mors Walks ever recorded. One was neutralized. One was archived. One was still unaccounted for.
"You think I'm him?"
"No," K-5 said. "But you're starting to ask the same questions."
Mors went silent.
The air inside the Mirror Room vibrated as the Archive detected unauthorized cognitive leakage.
"Warning," the system intoned remotely. "Thread Zeta-Null is restricted. Ethical debt projection: catastrophic. Action is discouraged."
Mors dismissed the alert.
Behind him, the door hissed open.
Agent Rell entered, her boots clicking against the stone floor that shouldn't exist.
She looked between Mors and the mirror, her voice cautious. "What are you doing?"
"Triggering an unsanctioned drop."
Her face went pale. "That's black-level. You don't have clearance."
"I don't need clearance. I am clearance."
He tapped his wrist console.
Reality didn't bend this time.
It shattered.
They landed in what looked, at first, like a city.
But it wasn't.
The buildings had shape but not structure. Their edges flickered, switching architectural styles mid-wall — Gothic turned to brutalist turned to raw concrete lines. Sidewalks curled upward. Windows looped back into themselves. Every few steps, the world seemed to stutter, trying to load a different version of itself.
Agent Rell stumbled as she walked, her balance thrown off by the lack of cause-and-effect.
"This isn't a broken timeline," she whispered. "It's... confused."
Mors scanned the perimeter. "No. It's overloaded. Someone rewrote the local identity map. Multiple realities overlapping at once."
"And you think it's your rogue?"
"I don't think. I know."
Then, from the fog, a figure emerged.
Same face.
Older. Slower. Wounded — not physically, but in how he moved, like memory weighed more than gravity.
He was Mors Walk. Or had been.
The rogue stopped several paces away. "So. The cleaner arrives."
"You buried Zeta-Null," Mors said. "You hid it from the Archive."
"I had to."
"Why?"
The rogue gestured around. "Because this timeline is the only one that didn't lie. Look at it. Raw, contradictory, painful — but true. Every version of me, every choice, layered into one place. No pruning. No deletions. Just... existence."
Rell looked around again. Her voice was tight. "This place is madness."
"No," the rogue said gently. "It's honesty."
Mors stepped forward. "And how many died to preserve it?"
The rogue smiled. "Does that matter to you? Or are you just here to balance the equation again?"
"I'm here to finish your unfinished work."
He pulled a device from his coat — matte black, shaped like a coin with no edges, like it had been smoothed out of time itself.
Rell stepped closer. "What is that?"
Mors answered without looking at her. "A null-indexer. I'm not deleting him. I'm recording him."
The rogue didn't resist. He even nodded, once, like a man giving himself permission to be proven wrong.
"I always wondered how I'd archive myself," he said.
Mors approached.
"You don't archive yourself," he replied. "You become reference material."
The moment the device touched the rogue's chest, he split — not in half, but in layers. Memories, timelines, voices, alternate selves pouring into the air like ink bleeding through dimensions.
The device hummed once.
Then it was done.
Mors turned away.
Rell watched the fragments dissolve into light.
"You still haven't told me how many versions of yourself you've... archived."
Mors didn't answer immediately.
Then he said, softly, "I stopped counting."
"Why?"
He looked up at the broken skyline.
"Because numbers require meaning. And I gave that up... several futures ago."
They vanished, leaving the city of contradictions behind — and one version of Mors, stored forever, as a warning.