Chapter One: A Useful Lie
The room was white.
Not sterile, not warm—just white. The kind of white that absorbed presence without offering reflection. Mors Walk stood in the center, hands deep in the pockets of his long coat, eyes half-lidded as if bored before the game even began.
He wasn't bored.
He was calculating.
Opposite him sat the interviewer—faceless behind a thin glass visor. The chair beneath Mors gave the faintest creak as he shifted his weight. Silence held the air for exactly eleven seconds.
Then the questions began.
"Name?"
"Mors Walk."
"Age?"
"Thirty-two. Unless time just betrayed me."
"Occupation?"
"Temporal logistics consultant."
A pause. The visor tilted slightly.
Mors's mouth twitched. "I solve problems that happen in futures which technically don't exist anymore."
"That's not a standard profession."
"And yet, here we are."
The interviewer tapped a hidden console. A soft hum whispered through the room. A projection shimmered into life: a burning city, frozen in the moment of collapse. At its center, a man stood calmly amid the flames.
It was Mors.
"In Timeline 71-R," the interviewer said, "you executed the Prime Minister of the Coalition Republic. Explain."
Mors didn't blink. "He was about to start a war that would've killed ninety million. Removing him brought that number down to nine thousand and change. Call it applied mathematics."
"By what authority?"
"None. Just necessity."
The projection faded.
The silence that followed was no longer curious—it was judgmental.
The voice returned. "Do you believe the ends justify the means?"
"I believe that asking that question wastes useful time," Mors replied, voice cold and exact.
The visor tilted again. Then, finally:
"Welcome to the Archive."
Mors smiled—not kindly, not proudly, but like a man who'd just been handed a key to a door he was already picking.
"About time," he said.
The elevator descended in silence.
Glass walls showed nothing beyond them—just an infinite black void, an architectural decision designed to unsettle recruits. Mors didn't look out. He had no need to pretend surprise. This place was unfamiliar only in detail. Structure? Function? He'd already mapped the idea.
Beside him stood a woman in a gray uniform, expression carved from apathy.
"Your handler will be with you shortly," she said.
"Will she be competent?" Mors asked.
"She will be standard."
He gave a single breath—too short to be called a laugh.
The elevator stopped.
The hallway that greeted them was long and metallic, humming faintly with buried mechanisms. Doors lined the walls, marked not with numbers but with timestamps—each one a precise coordinate of time, some in the future, some in the past, all unstable.
09:18:46 / August 12, 2394.
15:00:01 / December 7, 2176.
END:UNKNOWN / CLASSIFIED.
He walked without asking. The gray-uniformed woman didn't follow.
At door 13:14:03 / March 3, 2212, he paused only long enough to let the mechanism acknowledge him. It slid open.
Inside, his handler waited.
Young. Intelligent. Nervous—good. That meant she knew what she didn't know. The best kind of ignorance.
"Mr. Walk?" she asked.
"No," he said. "But I'm the one you'll be working with."
"I'm Agent Rell."
He didn't acknowledge the name.
She pressed a panel. A memory construct formed in the air: a city in smoke, children screaming in negative light. It flickered with unstable probability, a barely-contained collapse of cause and effect.
"A city erased itself," she said. "No enemy, no event, no warning. Just... gone. And then the timeline adjusted, as if it had always been missing."
Mors stepped forward, eyes scanning the image without blinking.
"No one erased it," he said. "It erased itself."
Rell hesitated. "You sound certain."
"I'm not," he said. "But I'm correct."
He turned.
"Prep the drop. I want boots in the probability field in under an hour."
"We haven't confirmed full temporal leakage yet—"
"Which is why we go now. Not after."
She hesitated. "What are we even looking for?"
Mors paused at the doorway. His voice was calm. Almost disinterested.
"A useful lie," he said. "The kind you can build a future on."
And then he walked out.