Mickey7 (Mickey7, #1)

by Edward Ashton

At that moment, I suddenly remember being nine years old in my grandmother’s country house back on Midgard. It was a sunny spring morning, and I’d caught a spider in my bedroom. I scooped him up in my cupped hands and trapped him, ran down the stairs and out the front door with his sharp little feet scrambling around and around my palms. I crouched down in the front garden, put my hands near the ground, and opened my fingers. As he scuttled away, I felt like a benevolent god. Through the hole in the wall, I can see the snow-dusted bulge of our main dome, no more than a couple of kilometers away. I’m the spider. I’m the spider, and that thing in the tunnel just set me down in the garden.

There is not a single living cell in my body that was alive and a part of me ten years ago, and the same is true for you. We’re constantly being rebuilt, one board at a time.

I’m not the most sensitive person, but I’ve been alive long enough to figure out that telling a miserable person about how much worse things could be is usually a bad idea.

It occurs to me at one point that I’m sleeping away my last hours of existence, but I can’t bring myself to care.