001
“I JUST SAW myself in the corridor.”
Nasha looks up from her tablet. She’s sitting in our desk chair, feet propped up on our bed, wearing nothing but underwear and boots. That’s not a look that many people can pull off, but Nasha manages it with aplomb. She pushes her braids back from her face and drops her feet to the floor.
“Nice to see you too,” she says. “Close the door.”
I step into the room and let the door latch behind me. My rack looks a lot smaller than it did before Nasha moved in. The first thing she did when she got here was shove her bed in beside mine to make an almost-double, and the second was to fill up most of the remaining floor space with a meter-long footlocker that I’m not allowed to go into. Also, for some reason Nasha herself takes up a lot more space than her actual size would lead you to believe.
To be clear: I am not complaining about any of this.
I sit down on the bed and take the tablet from her hands. A look of annoyance flashes across her face, but she doesn’t resist.
“Did you hear me? I saw another me. He was on the bottom level, near the cycler. I think Marshall has started pulling new copies of me out of the tank.”
Nasha sighs. “That’s impossible, Mickey. Marshall wiped your patterns when you resigned, right?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I mean, I think so. He said he was going to.”
“And he hasn’t pulled anyone out of the tank in the meantime, right?”
“I don’t think so. Berto told me they wound up burning two drones when they shoved the fuel from my bubble bomb back into the reactor. I doubt they would have wasted those kinds of resources if they’d had a bunch of extra Mickeys lying around.”
She leans back and props her feet up on the bed beside me. “Right. So unless Eight’s really been hanging out with the creepers for the last two years and just decided to rejoin us, you couldn’t have seen yourself wandering around the corridors. Are you sure it wasn’t Harrison?”
“Harrison? You mean Jamie Harrison?”
She grins. “Yeah. He’s like your doppelgänger, right? I could definitely see you mistaking him for you.”
Jamie Harrison works in Agriculture. He takes care of the rabbits, mostly. He’s short and skinny, with mousy brown hair that sticks up from his head in tufts, a perpetual nervous squint, and a prominent overbite. He looks nothing like me.
I don’t think he looks anything like me, anyway.
“Look,” I say. “I know what I saw, and what I saw was me. Maggie Ling was hustling him down Spoke Three toward the hub. They crossed in front of me just past Medical. They were probably twenty meters away and I only saw them for a second, but I know what I look like. It was definitely me.”
Nasha’s grin fades. “The hub, huh? And he was with Maggie?”
Maggie Ling is head of Systems Engineering. The last couple of times she hustled me somewhere, I wound up dying of radiation poisoning within the hour.
“You believe me now?”
She shakes her head. “Didn’t say that. Let’s assume you’re right, though. After two years, however he managed it and for whatever reason, Marshall decided to pull Mickey9 out of the tank. What would he be doing with Maggie Ling, on the bottom level, headed toward the hub?”
I can feel my face twisting into a scowl. “The reactor.”
“Yeah,” she says. “That seems like the most likely bet, doesn’t it?”
Mucking around inside the antimatter reactor is a prime job for an Expendable. We can withstand the neutron flux in there for longer than a drone can, and when we die, we’re a hell of a lot easier to replace. Just chuck the old body in the cycler, fire up the bio-printer, and wait a few hours.
Of course, I’m not an Expendable anymore. I’m retired.
Unless I’m not, I guess.
“Anyway,” Nasha says, “whatever’s going on, it’s not really your problem, is it?”
I’ve got a lot to say to that. What’s my obligation to care about what happens to another instantiation of me? Is that me getting irradiated, or is it just some other guy who looks like me? What does the Ship of Theseus have to say about a damaged hull that gets left behind on an island somewhere and forgotten? But after five seconds of opening my mouth, changing my mind, and then closing it again, all I manage to come out with is, “What?”
“Think about it,” Nasha says. “What’s the worst-case scenario here?”
“Um … that Maggie Ling just sent a copy of me into the reactor core?”