“We could just tell them what actually happened.”
He shakes his head. “We have to be a little creative with this. Command is really sensitive about losing calories and protein from the system right now, and Marshall is not about to accept responsibility for it, even though these stupid sorties are on his orders. He’s probably going to be pissed at you for not defending yourself adequately, and he’s definitely going to be pissed at me for not swooping in and recovering your body. Honestly, if this keeps up, he may just refuse to authorize your regen one of these times.”
A shiver runs up my spine. Was that a premonition?
“Hey,” he says. “Are you okay? You don’t look so good, Mickey.”
I rub my eyes with my right hand, and hope he doesn’t notice that my left hasn’t come out from under the blanket this entire time.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m good. Just need to sleep off the tank funk. I’ll meet you at the caf in an hour.”
He looks me up and down, then gets to his feet, reaches over, and pats me on the leg.
“Good man. I’ll save you some cycler paste.”
“Thanks, Berto. You’re a pal.”
“By the way,” he says, just as the door is closing behind him. “I couldn’t help but notice that you’ve had your hand on your junk the entire time I’ve been here. Careful with that. Nasha gets jealous.”
“Yeah, Berto. I know. Thanks for noticing, though.”
“No problem. See you in an hour.”
I can hear him snickering as the latch clicks closed.
* * *
I’VE DIED SIX times in the past eight years. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, wouldn’t you?
To be fair, one of those was a surprise, one was an emergency situation, and one of my instantiations refused to upload before he died. I only remember what gets uploaded, so all I know about what happened to those iterations of me is what Nasha or Berto told me, or what I’ve seen on surveillance vids. The other three, though, were planned, and standard procedure is to have the Expendable upload as close to his termination as possible, basically for the reason I gave Berto—the next iteration needs to know what happened to the last one, so that hopefully he can keep it from happening again. So, I guess I’m more familiar with the hollow feeling that’s settling into the pit of my stomach right now than most people ever get to be.
This isn’t exactly like any of those times, of course. For one thing, those other Mickeys knew for shit sure they were going to die. Unless Eight is planning to shiv me or something, I’ve only got a fifty-fifty chance of going down this time.
I’m not really sure that’s a good thing. There’s a certain peace that comes from knowing without a doubt what’s going to happen to you. The possibility that I might survive this morning is a source of anxiety as much as it is a source of hope.
The uncertainty isn’t the big difference between this time and those others, though. The big difference is that up until now, every time I went down I could at least halfway believe the crap my handlers were feeding me about my own immortality. I knew that a few hours after Mickey3 died, Mickey4 would come out of the tank, and I could imagine that it would just be me both times, closing my eyes and then opening them.
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.
* * *
THE CYCLER IS on the lowest level, and halfway across the dome from my rack. It’s not a long walk, realistically speaking, but it feels like one this morning. The corridors are nearly empty, and as I pace down them the only sounds are my footfalls and the pounding rush of blood in my ears. I know it’s irrational, but deep in my belly I can feel that this isn’t going to go my way. When I take the two shallow steps up to the entrance to the cycler chamber, it’s like I’m mounting the stairs to the gallows.
The bio-cycler is the heart and soul of any beachhead colony. It takes our shit, our tomato stems, our potato peels and rabbit bones and half-chewed gristle, our hair clippings and fingernails, our dropped-off scabs and wadded-up tissues, and eventually our corpses. In return, it gives us protein paste and vitamin slurry and fertilizer. Nobody wants to live on cycler paste, but a desperate colony can do it for a very long time.
The cycler works by breaking down anything you drop down the corpse hole into its component atoms, then piecing them back together in whatever order you specify. This takes an obscene amount of energy, but our power plant is an antimatter-driven starship engine. Energy is the one thing we have more than enough of.
I’ve finished transmitting my access code to the control console when Eight walks in. I lift the safety cover and press the big red button, and the corpse hole irises open in the center of the floor.
The corpse hole is one of those things we try not to think too much about. I’ve only seen it open on the rare occasions that I’ve been seconded out to garbage duty, and I’ve never really looked inside. I’m not sure what you’d expect an antimatter-driven, all-devouring maw to look like—roaring flames and a stench of sulfur, maybe?—but it’s actually quiet and odorless and kind of pretty. It’s just a flat black disk at first, but then the disassembler field starts grabbing dust motes, and they disappear one by one in tiny firefly flashes.
It doesn’t look so bad.
Better than being ripped apart by a swarm of creepers, anyway.
“So,” Eight says. “You ready?”
I shrug. “Yeah, I guess so. Kinda regretting not going judicial at this point, to be honest, but let’s do this.”
He smiles, and claps me on the shoulder. “You’re okay, Seven. I’m gonna feel really bad when I shove you down that hole.”
My heart stutters. “What do you mean, shove me?”
His smile disappears. “Think about it. Do you really want to go into that thing conscious?”
Huh. That’s a good point. Actual corpses get lowered into the hole pretty slowly. I don’t know what the maximum feed rate is, but if it’s less than infinite, unconscious or already deceased is probably a smarter way to go.
Eight turns to stand next to me, looking down into the hole.
“You know,” he says, “you could still do the decent thing, and volunteer to be the one to go.”
“Sure,” I say. “So could you.”
He puts his arm around my shoulder. “Not gonna happen, huh?”
“Probably not.”
The disk has gone black again. Out of dust, I guess. Eight hawks up a glob of tank goo and spits. It flashes when it hits the threshold, sizzles for a second, and disappears.
“This may be less painless than I thought,” he says.
“Truth,” I say. “Tell you what—I could strangle you first, then push you through.”
He grins. “Thanks, Seven. You’re a real humanitarian.”
We stand in silence for a while. His arm around my shoulder grows heavier and heavier. Finally, I step out from under it and turn to face him.