If you somehow haven’t heard of Mickey7 yet, you will soon: Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel will be a 2024 Bong Joon-ho movie (retitled Mickey17) starring Robert Pattinson, Steven Yeun, Naomi Ackie, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo. Ashton’s sequel, Antimatter Blues, arrives in stores today, and io9 has the first chapter for you to read (or listen to!) right here.
It’s described as the “thrilling follow up to Mickey7 in which an expendable heads out to explore new terrain for human habitation.” Here’s a more detailed synopsis, followed by the audio and print excerpts:
Summer has come to Niflheim. The lichens are growing, the six-winged bat-things are chirping, and much to his own surprise, Mickey Barnes is still alive—that last part thanks almost entirely to the fact that Commander Marshall believes that the colony’s creeper neighbors are holding an antimatter bomb, and that Mickey is the only one who’s keeping them from using it. Mickey’s just another colonist now. Instead of cleaning out the reactor core, he spends his time these days cleaning out the rabbit hutches. It’s not a bad life.
It’s not going to last.
It may be sunny now, but winter is coming. The antimatter that fuels the colony is running low, and Marshall wants his bomb back. If Mickey agrees to retrieve it, he’ll be giving up the only thing that’s kept his head off of the chopping block. If he refuses, he might doom the entire colony. Meanwhile, the creepers have their own worries, and they’re not going to surrender the bomb without getting something in return. Once again, Mickey finds the fate of two species resting in his hands. If something goes wrong this time, though, he won’t be coming back.
Here’s the first chapter of Antimatter Blues by Edward Ashton! You can listen to the excerpt via Soundcloud, or scroll down to read it.
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“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?”
“Right. So something needed to get done, and she did it. If she hadn’t pulled a new Mickey out of the tank to do it, what would her alternative have been?”
I know the answer to this one. Nasha stands, then pulls me to my feet and into a kiss.
“Worst case,” she says, “is that somebody just got sent into the core, and that somebody wasn’t you. I don’t know about you, babe, but you know what? I’ll take it.”
So here’s a solid fact: Warm Niflheim is a much nicer place than Cold Niflheim. It’s green and wet and covered with all manner of crawly things. You can even go outside now without wrapping yourself up in six layers of thermals. You’ll still need a rebreather, but the partial pressure of oxygen is almost twenty percent higher now than it was when we made landfall, so you won’t feel quite so much like you’re drowning while you’re walking around. On a good day, you can almost imagine that we’ve found the sort of place that they promised us when we boarded the Drakkar.
Here’s another solid fact: Warm Niflheim isn’t going to last forever. Winter is coming.
Miko Berrigan and his minions in Physics have spent most of the summer poring over records of the thirty years of observations that were made of Niflheim’s sun before the Drakkar boosted out. There were three warm spells in that period. The longest lasted seven years. The shortest was eleven months. The four winters that surrounded them ranged from two years to nine. The transitions weren’t abrupt, and they weren’t smooth. They were marked by lengthening oscillations between hot and cold that eventually stabilized into one steady state or the other. The season we’re in now went through a half dozen false starts before it really settled in.
The physicists back on Midgard thought what they were seeing was all due to interference from interstellar dust. Cute, right?
We haven’t been wasting the summer. Hieronymus Marshall is a jackass, but he isn’t stupid, and he wants this colony to live. We’ve been stockpiling food, studying the local fauna to figure out how they survive the winters, building out the dome to accommodate the first round of decanted embryos, releasing engineered algae that are supposed to begin the work of pushing the atmosphere further toward something we can breathe, etc., etc., etc.
The problem is that it all takes time, and that’s something we don’t have an infinite supply of. All the things that keep us alive here take enormous amounts of power, and right now the only real power source we have is the Drakkar’s antimatter reactor, still spinning away under the hub, slowly drawing down the last of the fuel supply that brought us here.
Which brings me back to Maggie Ling, hustling another me down Spoke Three toward the hub. Without the reactor, we might just barely be able to get by, as long as the weather holds.
That’s the thing, though. The weather is not going to hold.
I’ve spent almost all of my work shifts since my resignation with Agriculture. This isn’t because I have a green thumb or anything. I Source: Gizmodo