Mickey7 (Mickey7, #1)

by Edward Ashton

Here’s a thought experiment for you: Imagine you found out that when you go to sleep at night, you don’t just go to sleep. You die. You die, and someone else wakes up in your place the next morning. He’s got all your memories. He’s got all your hopes and dreams and fears and wishes. He thinks he’s you, and all your friends and loved ones do too. He’s not you, though, and you’re not the guy who went to sleep the night before. You’ve only existed since this morning, and you will cease to exist when you close your eyes tonight. Ask yourself—would it make any practical difference in your life? Is there any way that you could even tell?

As it turned out, the problem that I had with Midgard was exactly the problem that I had with getting off of Midgard. I wasn’t a scientist. I wasn’t an engineer. I had no talent for art, or entertainment, or rhetoric. I was—I am—the sort of person who in an earlier age would have been a low-level academic of some sort.

There also weren’t any factory jobs, or mining jobs, or even any infantry, for that matter. My standard stipend gave me enough to keep a roof over my head and food in my belly, but try as I might, I couldn’t figure out what it was all for. I couldn’t think of a single way the universe would be different if I stepped off of my balcony one morning. And so, like bored young men throughout history, I spent an unfortunate amount of my time finding ways to get myself into trouble.

If I die now, though, there won’t be another me coming out of the tank. The other me is already here, and despite all appearances, Eight is most definitely not a continuation of me. Honestly, he doesn’t even seem to like me very much.

I could see right away that we were in the presence of someone who thought of himself as In Charge of Things. From his jet-black tight-fade haircut to his perpetually clenched jaw to the fact that he somehow managed to look like he had a metal rod for a spine even in free fall, he was almost a parody of the sort of cold-eyed, combat-hardened military man that Midgard hadn’t ever actually had or needed.

“This is the key to accepting this job, Mickey. You are the Ship of Theseus. We all are. 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. If you actually take on this job, you’ll probably be rebuilt all at once at some point, but at the end of the day, it’s really no different, is it? When an Expendable takes a trip to the tank, he’s just doing in one go what his body would naturally do over the course of time anyway. As long as memory is preserved, he hasn’t really died. He’s just undergone an unusually rapid remodeling.”

I expect Mickey8 pov after this

“Do you think you’re immortal?” Did not expect that. “What?” “Do you think you’re immortal? You’ve been killed, what, seven times?” “Six,” I say. “It’s only six so far. That’s kind of the root of the problem.” “Whatever. Are you the same person you were when you boarded the shuttle off of Midgard?” I have to think about that. “Well,” I say finally. “This isn’t the same body, obviously.” “Right,” Cat says. “That’s not what I was asking.” “Yeah,” I say, “I know. So, yeah, I remember being Mickey Barnes back on Midgard. I remember the apartment he grew up in. I remember his first kiss. I remember the last time he saw his mother. I remember signing on for this stupid expedition. I remember all of that stuff as if it was me who did it, not someone else. Does that mean I am Mickey Barnes, though?” I shrug. “Who the hell knows?”

“Nothing but the best for the sacrificial pig, right?” “Lamb,” she said. “What?” “Lamb, Mickey. You sacrifice a lamb. Pigs are gross. You don’t sacrifice them. You just eat them.” I sighed. “Either way, they end up just as dead.”

I’m pretty confident that when Nine comes out of the tank afterward, it won’t be me looking out through his eyes, Ship of Theseus be damned.

“My point is that all that stuff Jemma crammed into our head back on Himmel Station—all the bits about immortality, anyway—that was all bullshit. This is it. The past six weeks are the only life I get, and the last few days are the only life you get. We’re fucking mayflies, and when Marshall shoves us down the corpse hole, that’s it for us. I don’t care if he pulls Nine out of the tank or not, because even if he does, Nine won’t be me. He’ll just be some other guy who sleeps in my bed and eats my rations and gets his hands all over my stuff.” Eight shakes his head. “No. I don’t buy it. Remember that Ship of Theseus thing? Remember Kant? If he thinks he’s me, and everyone around him thinks he’s me, and there’s no way to prove that he’s not me, then he’s me. This stuff you’re doing right now? This is exactly why they don’t allow multiples.”

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.

So that we could have bombarded the creepers from orbit, he means. So that we could have committed genocide before putting any of ourselves in harm’s way.

I have to remind myself at this point that Eight is me, six weeks or so removed. How can I be so horrified at what he’s saying? Have the creepers really gotten that far into my head?

you’re not some kind of villain from a vid drama, and I don’t know why you’re trying to act like one now.

In the movie Marshall is turned into a villain

It’s a truism that every new technological advancement in human history has been applied first to advance the interests of the horny. The printing press? Some Bibles, mostly porn. Antibiotics? Perfect for treating STIs. The ocular? Don’t get me started on what those were first used for. Large-scale antimatter production didn’t really fit that model, though. There’s nothing remotely sexy about a rapidly expanding cloud of high-speed quarks and gluons. The second area where every new technology is applied, of course, is war. In that space, antimatter worked out heinously well.

Most historians think that the launch of the Ching Shih, which took place less than twenty years later, was a direct reaction to the Bubble War. What else could explain the Diaspora? What else could explain the fact that we left the one planet in all of creation that we were actually evolved to inhabit, the one that didn’t require any terraforming or inoculations or wars with native sentients, for . . . well, for places like Niflheim? It was clear to those people that if humanity stayed in one place, we’d eventually kill one another—and they were almost certainly right. Nobody has heard a peep out of old Earth in over six hundred years. Our only hope for long-term survival was to spread.

It was also clear to them that the Diaspora would be futile if antimatter weapons came with it. We’ve ostracized old Earth from the start of the Union, and at this point we don’t even know if there’s anyone left alive there. We like to think that we’re different from them, that we’re more enlightened or evolved or some such bullshit. It’s not true, though. The people of the Union are no different, at the end of the day, than the ones of old Earth. We still argue with one another. We still sometimes fight.

“We should split up,” Eight says. “Get as far away from one another as we can, then pull our triggers simultaneously. That way we get maximum spread, and we shouldn’t have to worry about the blast from one of our weapons screwing with the dispersal pattern of the other.”

Kamikaze

The best explanation I’ve seen is that the entire reason humans wound up developing spears and houses and flitters and starships is that we were lousy at being regular animals.

by the time they finally bumped into one another, the colonists were well established enough to stop being constantly afraid. Time. That’s the key. We just need time.

where the concepts aren’t there, there’s not much you can do to translate.