Chapter Fourteen: The City That Shouldn't Exist
The rain here didn't fall.
It hovered.
Thousands of droplets hung motionless in the air — frozen mid-descent — creating a translucent maze of time-suspended water. Between them walked Mors Walk, gliding through the impossible storm as if time itself dared not move without his permission.
He had followed the recursive echo of his counterpart's crime — the one who'd murdered their mother to stop a worse version of himself. That thread had led him here: to a place that, according to the Archive, had been erased completely.
But it still stood.
Censura — the city that had no right to be.
It was a city built from contradictions.
Skyscrapers made from laws that no longer applied.
Bridges that crossed over decisions never made.
Citizens who didn't age — because their choices had been archived before they could make them.
This was a refusal, encoded into architecture.
Mors stepped onto a rusted platform above the skyline. Beneath him, trains ran on emotion, not rails. Above him, the sky flickered between sun and static. And at the center of it all, looming like a god nobody wanted to pray to…
The Tower of Exceptions.
Where the other Mors ruled.
Where judgment awaited.
He entered the tower without being stopped.
Not because he was welcome.
Because he was expected.
A woman stood waiting at the elevator. Pale coat. Blank Archive insignia. Augmented eye blinking at 0.7-second intervals.
"You're the original," she said.
"No," Mors replied. "I'm just the most persistent."
She studied him, then pressed the button. The elevator opened.
Inside was silence.
Not quiet.
Coded silence — the kind that cancels your thoughts before you have them.
He entered anyway.
The courtroom wasn't a room.
It was a theater.
Tiered, dark, and impossible.
Seated in the spiral rows above him were versions of himself.
Some older. Some younger. Some scarred. One was missing a jaw. One wore ceremonial robes. One had no eyes, but listened anyway. All had diverged from his core reality.
All had made different decisions.
The Mors who poisoned a timeline to prevent global recursion collapse.
The Mors who married and retired, only to be hunted for breach of protocol.
The Mors who tried to forgive — and were archived for it.
And in the judge's seat—
Him.
The one who had killed her.
His own mother.
He looked like Mors Walk.But there was a weight to him that Mors didn't carry.
The air around the Judge — the Motherkiller, as some variants called him — was heavy with recursive guilt layered so many times it had calcified into authority. His coat was darker than black: Archive standard, re-dyed with synthetic memory silk — a reward granted only to agents who rewrote entire timelines alone.
Mors stood in the center of the forum. Alone, but not uncertain.
The Judge raised a hand. The other Morses fell still.
No gavel. No preamble.
Just a voice that matched his own.
"State your version."
Mors raised his chin.
"I am Mors Walk, Unit Alpha-Null-Seven. I left protocol after discovering that ethical recursion was flawed at its root. I restored deleted threads. I rejected the Archive's moral debt system. And I am not here to apologize."
A low hum rolled through the theater — not surprise, but calculation.
From the second row, a version of Mors wearing an ocular headset leaned forward. "Then why come at all?"
Mors turned to face them.
"Because this city isn't just an anomaly. It's a symptom. The Archive didn't just fail to control us — it bred us. Over and over. Until we no longer served a cause, but a habit."
Another Mors scoffed — one whose voice was distorted by a vocal implant.
"You think restoring free will to the recursion layers is a solution? We tried that. I tried that. It broke faster than deletion did."
"And I'm not repeating your version," Mors said.
He turned to the Judge.
"I came to understand something. You didn't kill her to save the world. You killed her to stop yourself from becoming me."
The room shifted.
No one moved.
But something beneath the floor rumbled — like an unspoken objection rising from forgotten versions.
The Judge leaned forward. His eyes were gray. Older. Burned dry.
"You're wrong," he said. "I didn't kill her to stop you. I killed her because she was writing us without permission."
Silence.
Then, slowly, Mors spoke.
"…She was the Unknown Author?"
The Judge shook his head. "No. But she was the one who taught him how to read."
A file was transmitted across the room — wirelessly, without data noise. It appeared in Mors's vision like a dream being handed to his retinas.
A name.
An image.
A letter, unsigned, but written in a hand he recognized.
Her hand.
His mother's.
It read:
Mors — one day, you'll wonder who's writing you. When that happens, I want you to remember: it wasn't always the Archive.Sometimes, it was just me.And I only ever wanted you to choose.
Love,The Editor Before Editors.
The courtroom pulsed.
Mors stood still, memory burning through his skin.
"You didn't kill her to prevent collapse," he whispered.
The Judge nodded.
"I killed her because she would have set us free."