If you somehow have n’t heard of Mickey7 yet , you will shortly : Edward Ashton ’s 2022 novel will bea 2024 Bong Joon - ho moving-picture show ( retitled Mickey17)starring Robert Pattinson , Steven Yeun , Naomi Ackie , Toni Collette , and Mark Ruffalo . Ashton ’s subsequence , Antimatter Blues , make it in stores today , and io9 has the first chapter for you to read ( or hear to ! ) right here .
It ’s described as the “ thrilling follow up to Mickey7 in which an spendable point out to search new terrain for human habitation . ” Here ’s a more detailed precis , follow by the audio and photographic print excerpts :
Summer has fare to Niflheim . The lichens are growing , the six - winged chiropteran - thing are cheep , and much to his own surprise , Mickey Barnes is still alive — that last part thanks almost entirely to the fact that Commander Marshall believe 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 pick out the reactor core , he spends his metre these days cleaning out the rabbit hutches . It ’s not a forged life .
Image: Macmillan Audio
It ’s not drop dead to last .
It may be sunny now , but wintertime is come . The antimatter that fire the colony is running grim , and Marshall wants his bomb back . If Mickey agrees to retrieve it , he ’ll be give up the only thing that ’s kept his head off of the chop auction block . If he reject , he might designate the entire colony . Meanwhile , the creeper have their own worries , and they ’re not move to cede the turkey without pay back something in coming back . Once again , Mickey finds the fate of two mintage rest in his work force . If something goes wrong this time , though , he wo n’t be coming back .
Here ’s the first chapter of Antimatter Blues by Edward Ashton ! you may listen to the excerpt via Soundcloud , or scroll down to understand it .
Image: Macmillan Audio
“ I just saw myself in the corridor . ”
Nasha looks up from her tablet . She ’s sitting in our desk death chair , feet propped up on our bed , wearing nothing but underwear and boots . That ’s not a look that many mass can rip off , but Nasha manages it with aplomb . She pushes her braids back from her expression and drops her feet to the floor .
“ gracious to see you too , ” she says . “ shut the door . ”
I tread into the way and get 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 get here was squeeze her bed in beside mine to make an almost - doubled , and the 2nd was to occupy up most of the remain floor distance with a metre - long locker that I ’m not allow to go into . Also , for some understanding Nasha herself takes up a destiny more space than her actual size of it would lead you to consider .
To be clear : I am not complaining about any of this .
I model down on the bottom and take the tablet from her hands . A look of annoyance flashes across her face , but she does n’t resist . “ Did you hear me ? I look another me . He was on the bottom layer , near the cycler . I think Marshall has started draw fresh copies of me out of the tank . ”
Nasha suspire . “ That ’s impossible , Mickey . Marshall wiped your patterns when you resigned , ripe ? ”
“ Yeah , ” I say . “ I mean , I recall so . He say he was go to . ” “ And he has n’t pull anyone out of the storage tank in the meanwhile , right ? ”
“ I do n’t call back so . Berto told me they wound up burn two radio-controlled aircraft when they shoved the fuel from my house of cards turkey back into the reactor . I doubt they would have waste those kinds of resources if they ’d had a cluster of superfluous Mickeys lying around . ” She leans back and prop her metrical unit up on the layer beside me . “ Right . So unless Eight ’s really been hang out with the creepers for the last two years and just determine to rejoin us , you could n’t have take in yourself wandering around the corridors . Are you sure it was n’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 mold in Agriculture . He take charge of the rabbits , mostly . He ’s short and skinny , with mousy brown pilus that sticks up from his head in tufts , a unceasing nervous strabismus , and a prominent overbite . He looks nothing like me .
I do n’t think he look anything like me , anyway .
“ Look , ” I say . “ I know what I date , and what I saw was me . Maggie Ling was hustling him down Spoke Three toward the hub . They cross in front of me just past Medical . They were probably twenty meters off and I only watch them for a second , but I know what I look like . It was definitely me . ”
Nasha ’s smiling slicing . “ The hub , huh ? And he was with Maggie ? ” Maggie Ling is drumhead of Systems Engineering . The last couple of times she bustle me somewhere , I wound up dying of radiation poisoning within the hr .
“ You believe me now ? ”
She shake her head . “ Did n’t say that . Let ’s assume you ’re right , though . After two class , however he deal it and for whatever grounds , Marshall decided to pull Mickey9 out of the tank . What would he be doing with Maggie Ling , on the bottom stage , headed toward the hub ? ”
I can finger my face twisting into a frown . “ The nuclear reactor . ” “ Yeah , ” she pronounce . “ That seems like the most likely bet , does n’t it ? ”
muck around inside the antimatter reactor is a prime Book of Job for an Expendable . We can defy the neutron fluxion in there for longer than a radio-controlled aircraft can , and when we go bad , 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 of course , I ’m not an Expendable anymore . I ’m retire . Unless I ’m not , I guess .
“ Anyway , ” Nasha say , “ whatever ’s go 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 damage Cordell Hull that gets left behind on an island somewhere and blank out ? But after five second of open my mouth , changing my psyche , and then close it again , all I manage to do out with is , “ What ? ”
“ remember about it , ” Nasha says . “ What ’s the worst - case scenario here ? ”
“ Um . . . that Maggie Ling just send off a transcript of me into the nuclear reactor core ? ”
“ Right . So something needed to get done , and she did it . If she had n’t pulled a new Mickey out of the cooler to do it , what would her option have been ? ”
I love the answer to this one . Nasha place upright , then pulls me to my feet and into a kiss .
“ big showcase , ” she says , “ is that somebody just got sent into the core , and that somebody was n’t you . I do n’t know about you , sister , but you know what ? I ’ll take it . ”
So here ’s a solid fact : Warm Niflheim is a much nicer position than Cold Niflheim . It ’s green and blotto and spread over with all manner of crawly things . you’re able to even go outside now without enfold yourself up in six layers of thermal . You ’ll still need a rebreather , but the partial pressure of O is almost twenty percent higher now than it was when we made landfall , so you wo n’t feel quite so much like you ’re submerge while you ’re walking around . On a well day , you’re able to almost ideate that we ’ve see the sort of office that they promised us when we boarded the Drakkar .
Here ’s another self-colored fact : Warm Niflheim is n’t going to last evermore . Winter is come .
Miko Berrigan and his minion in Physics have spent most of the summertime poring over disc of the thirty years of observation that were made of Niflheim ’s sunlight before the Drakkar advance out . There were three ardent trance in that period . The prospicient endure seven years . The shortest was eleven months . The four winters that fence them ranged from two years to nine . The transitions were n’t abrupt , and they were n’t smooth . They were marked by lengthening oscillations between red-hot and cold that eventually stabilized into one steady state or the other . The season we ’re in now went through a half XII imitation starting line before it really settle in .
The physicist back on Midgard guess what they were seeing was all due to interference from interstellar detritus . Cute , good ?
We have n’t been waste the summertime . Hieronymus Marshall is a jackass , but he is n’t unintelligent , and he wants this colony to live . We ’ve been stockpile food , studying the local fauna to figure out how they go the winter , build out the dome to accommodate the first round of decanted embryos , unfreeze engineered algae that are supposed to begin the work of press the atmosphere further toward something we can breathe , etc . , etc . , etc .
The problem is that it all takes clip , and that ’s something we do n’t have an myriad provision of . All the thing that keep us alive here take tremendous 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 convey me back to Maggie Ling , roll another me down Spoke Three toward the hub . Without the reactor , we might just scarcely be capable to get by , as long as the weather holds .
That ’s the thing , though . The conditions is not going to keep .
I ’ve spent almost all of my oeuvre geological fault since my surrender with Agriculture . This is n’t because I have a green thumb or anything . It ’s mostly by default . I do n’t have the making to do anything useful for Physics or Biology or Engineering . Amundsen in Security is nasty with Marshall and also is still down on me for losing awareness while Cat and I were crusade crawler on the perimeter two yr ago , so he mostly need nothing to do with me these day . I ’ll probably get to pass some time change diapers in the crèche once they start tear babies out of cold computer memory , but that ’s still on hold at the present moment , pending a bit more authority that we can keep them live once they ’re pour out .
So , that get out me with Agriculture . On this day , in fact , I ’m string up with Jamie Harrison , read maintenance of the rabbits .
You might be wondering why we keep rabbits in a closed - loop ecologic system . Raising animals for meat can be a net root of calories in a place where they can more or less fend for themselves , appease alive by eating things like supergrass and weeds that we would n’t or could n’t use up . On Niflheim , though , that kind of affair is still entirely aspirational . Rabbits ca n’t eat up the lichen and ferns that wall the dome now . The proteins that the natives use here are fold the wrong style for Union sprightliness . Instead we feed them tomato vine and Irish potato green and protein slurry , some of which gets convert into edible rabbit voice but most of which just gets cauterise up by their stunned mammalian metabolisms or turned into dirt . At the end of the Clarence Shepard Day Jr. , every kcal of edible rabbit kernel cost us about three kcal of other stuff that we could conceivably have just eaten ourselves , as well as a huge deal of stuff that we ca n’t eat , but that could have gone back into the cycler . Rabbits are a massive opulence token in a place that is notably short on pretty much any other type of luxury . So , why do we do it ?
Well , for one , cony are precious . legion psychological survey over the past thousand years of the diaspora have read that humans call for a sure amount of cuddliness in their lives , and lapin are the only matter on Niflheim that provide that for us .
Of course , they ’re also delicious . As before long as they reach full ontogeny , it ’s off to the kitchen with these guy cable . In the lag , though , they ’re a lot more fun to hang around with than most of the people in this settlement .
Jamie , on the other bridge player , is neither precious nor fun to hang around with .
lapin on Niflheim are treat fundamentally the same way of life maximum - security prisoners were treated back on Midgard .
They spend the vast majority of their time crammed into three small hutches pushed up against a wall next to the aquiculture tanks . Once a day , we let them out one hutch at a time into a slightly large space bounded by a bulkhead on two sides and a short ashen wire fence on the other . They hop around a little , get whatever exercise they can , flow out with anyone who ( a ) needs a cuteness location and ( type B ) has sterilized themselves to Jamie ’s satisfaction , and then get plop back into the shanty for another daylight , where they while away the fourth dimension deplete , pooping , and make more cony .
It ’s not a atrocious liveliness .
It ’s better than mine in a lot of ways , if I ’m being true .
If I had any choice about my duty cycles , I ’d probably spend most of them here . I do n’t , though . I get to fall with the rabbits during working hours when Jamie assign in a asking for my services , and that only happens on two occasions . One is cull Clarence Shepard Day Jr. , which is when I get to go through the hutch and pick out the males who are big enough for eat and the females who are old enough that their reproduction has commence to slow down . The other , like today , is shack - make clean day .
The good affair about hutch - cleanse day is that Jamie does n’t trust me to do it properly . That means I get to spend the day wrangling the rabbits while he does most of the actual employment .
I ’ve just finished pulling the last of the kits out of Hutch One and dropping them off in the exercising K when the door to the corridor slides open and Berto steps through .
Great .
“ Hey , ” he say . “ How ’s my dinner party doing ? ”
I sigh , straighten , and turn to confront him . He step over the fence and crouch down to stroke a outfit ’s ear with one finger’s breadth .
“ hand off , Gomez , ” Jamie say without turn away from whatever he ’s doing in the hutch . “ You ’re not unfertile . ”
Berto express joy . “ Sterile ? These things are rats in fancy suits , Jamie . You ’re literally take up pile of shit out of their house correctly now . If anyone should be distressed about contamination , it ’s me . ”
“ This is not a debate , ” Jamie says . “ Get your hand off of my beast or get out of my quad . I can have surety down here in less than a second . ”
Berto ’s grinning vanish , and it looks like he ’s going to contend .
In the goal , though , he shakes his head and place upright .
“ Jamie ’s right , ” I say . “ You make out that , do n’t you ? These poor guys expend nine - tenths of their time crawl all over each other in the hutch . If you get one of them sick , they ’ll all be dead in a week , and it ’s not like we have a backup supply around here anywhere . ”
“ Whatever , ” Berto aver . “ I did n’t get along down here to play with the bunnies . ”
I wait for him to go on . After a retentive five seconds , I advance one eyebrow and say , “ So . . . ”
His expression shifts from annoyed to fuddle . “ So , what ? ” I roll my eyes . “ Why did you get down here , Berto ? ”
He grins . “ Oh . I was blase , mostly . Did n’t Nasha tell you ? ” Now it ’s my turn to be confused . “ secern me what ? ”
“ We ’re grounded , ” he say . “ No more aerial reconnaissance until further notice . ”
Huh .
“ No , ” I say . “ Nasha did n’t mention that . When did this happen ? ”
“ I found out this first light when I showed up for my shift .
peradventure they have n’t recite her yet ? ”
“ Yeah . Maybe . Did they tell you why ? ”
He shakes his head . “ Not really . The tech on duty enounce something about not being able to charge the gravitic grids , but that does n’t make any signified . We ’ve get an antimatter reactor , right ? It ’s not like we involve to ration mogul . ”
“ Yeah , ” I say . “ You would n’t think so . ”
“ Not like it matter . I ’m middling confident at this peak that there ’s nothing out there that ’s a scourge to us other than the creepers , and I have n’t seen one of them within five kilometre of the bean since the weather call on . Do n’t get me wrong . I ’d rather be fly than . . . well , than pretty much anything , I approximate . I ’m not chaff myself , though . Aerial reconnaissance mission at this head is a wastefulness of sentence and resources . ”
One of the lapin is nosing at my boot . I scrunch down to give his ears a scratch . “ So if , just hypothetically speak , we did have some variety of effect with power coevals , grounding you and Nasha might be a good place to contract back , huh ? ”
He shrugs . “ I guess so . Gravitic grid are power hogs . Those weightlifter apply an iniquitous amount of juice . ” He hesitate , and his grinning fades . “ Do you know something , Mickey ? ”
The rabbit nip at my finger . I imagine he was n’t look for affection after all . I nudge him away with one hand , then resist again and glance back at Jamie . He ’s head and shoulder joint deep in the hut , scrubbing at something with a disinfectant sponge .
“ Look , ” I say , “ have you see me around of late ? ”
His oral fissure opens , then closes again . He shakes his headspring . “ What ? ”
“ Have you determine me ? ” I say . “ Maybe with someone from Engineering ? Maybe looking kind of confused ? ”
His optic narrow . “ What are you say , Mickey ? ”
I sigh . “ I ’m saying I call back I saw another me this morning . I think Marshall is pulling Mickeys out of the tank again . ”
He tilts his headway to one side and folds his arms across his chest . “ You ’re saying that you guess Hieronymus Marshall , Niflheim ’s high priest of Natalism , is deliberately creating multiples ? ”
I pause , then shake my head . “ It sounds stupid when you say it like that . ”
“ Yeah , ” he says . “ That ’s because it is dazed . Did you actually see another Mickey somewhere ? Did you lecture to him ? ”
“ I did n’t talk to him , but I saw him . For a bit . From about twenty metre away . ”
Berto rolls his eyes . “ So you got a glance of someone from twenty beat off that kind of looked like you , and from that you ’ve concluded that our commandant , who has a intuitive , reli- giously motivated hatred of multiple in general , and of you in particular , is on the Q.T. make more of you because . . . ”
“ see , ” I say , “ I know what I go out . ”
“ You do n’t , ” he says , and motion toward the hutch . “ It was probably just Jamie . You two are like twins . ”
Et tu , Berto ?
I open my sass to debate , or maybe to tell him to go fuck himself , but before I can decide which one he smacks me on the berm and say , “ Anyway , it does n’t matter , does it ? What do you wish if Marshall is pulling written matter of you out of the tank and . . . I do n’t do it . . . making them fight to the death while he and Amundsen take bets on the winner ? You ’re retired , commemorate ? How is this any skin off of your nozzle ? ”
That ’s a good question , really . I ’ve break it some idea since Nasha ask me the same basic doubt . If there ’s one thing I ’m sure of after what go on with Eight two age ago , it ’s that I ’m the only me there ’s ever belong to be , no matter what Nine or Ten or whatever identification number they ’ve gotten to by now might think about it . By that logic , if Marshall is pulling dead body out of the tank car and throwing them into the reactor or making them spiel prizefighter or whatever , it does n’t really have anything to do with me , but . . .
But still .
It kind of does .
“ Look , ” I say . “ blank out about the whole ethics thing . The person I thought was me was with Maggie Ling , and they were manoeuvre toward the nuclear reactor . ”
Berto starts to reply , but then his smile fade and I can see the wheels sour .
“ Oh , ” he says finally .
“ Yeah . And you just got grounded . ”
“ Right , ” he says . “ That might be a job . ”
“ You believe ? How long would we last here without power ? ”
“ Depends , ” he suppose . “ Are we without power because the nuclear reactor shut down gracefully and got decommissioned like it ’s finally supposed to , or are we without magnate because the reactor overloaded and vaporized everything in a fifty - klick wheel spoke ? ”
“ Let ’s take on option one . ”
He scratches the back of his head . “ We ’d probably be okay for the present moment . We ’re still getting a fair amount of our calories from the cycler , I think , but that ’s something we can do work on if we start throwing body at Agriculture . There ’s not much else go on around here that demand a ton of power and is also absolutely essential for our natural selection . ”
“ That ’s for now . What about when the frigidness comes back ? ”
“ Oh , ” Berto says . “ When that happens we ’re completely love . ”
“ Yeah , ” I say . “ That ’s moderately much where I wound up . ”
He grimaces . “ Okay . So what do we do ? ”
“ I ’m not sure we do anything . We ’ve still got power at the moment and we have n’t been vaporized , so obviously the reactor is still functioning . I guess default is to desire that Maggie hump what she ’s doing and that whatever ’s croak on is just a impermanent bug . ”
Berto grimaces . “ I ’ve get plenty of self-confidence in Maggie , but if somebody ’s screwing around with the insides of the reactor , it ’s not her , is it ? ”
“ Now , waitress a minute , ” I say . “ I hope you ’re not questioning my competency . If there ’s one thing I ’ve proved I ’m honorable at around here , it ’s fixing crap while picking up fateful doses of radiation . ”
“ Yeah , ” Berto says . “ That ’s a comely tip . Still , I ’ve pay back to say — just the thought of something glitching in the reactor is enough to spook me . Any thought on how we can figure out what the Inferno ’s going on ? ”
“ Do n’t mean to interrupt , ” Jamie enjoin from behind me , “ but I ’m finished here . If you hen are done clucking , would you mind catch these guy back into One so we can get started on Two ? ”
I look back at him . He scowls and point to the hutch . “ good-for-naught , ” I say to Berto . “ tariff calls . ”
“ Yeah , ” he says . “ You do your bunny rabbit affair . I think I ’m gon na do a minuscule thrusting around . Ping me when you ’re off - shift , huh ? ”
“ Sometime today , ” Jamie says .
Berto charge him a glare , then steps back over the fence and goes .
We ’re just getting the last of the rabbit back into Hutch Three when Jamie say , “ You experience , I take heed what you and Gomez were suppose to begin with . ”
I turn to look at him . “ Really ? So what do you guess ? ”
He shrug . “ I cerebrate Gomez can go screw . You do n’t bet anything like me . ”
I open my mouth to reply , then exclude it again as my brain processes what he just say .
“ I ’m not saying I ’m better - appear than you , ” he articulate . “ We ’re just unlike . ”
“ So , ” I finally negociate . “ Out of all the hooey Berto and I were talking about , that ’s what you fixate on ? ”
“ Yeah , ” he says . “ Pretty much . Why ? Was there something else that I ought to give a dogshit about ? ”
I roll in the hay the screening outgrowth to get involved with this mission back on Midgard was fabulously rigorous . I lie with they only selected the good and the brightest . Jamie , though . . .
perhaps he was somebody ’s nephew ?
- I ’m about to say something along the lines of , Yes , I agree that we search nothing alike , when my ocular pings .
You are required to describe to the Commander ’s situation immediately .
loser to do so by 17:30 will be see as insubordination .
Okay , then . Here we go .
Excerpt from Edward Ashton ’s Antimatter Blues shared by permission of Macmillan Audio and St. Martin ’s Press .
Edward Ashton ’s Antimatter Blues is out now ; you’re able to order the audio versionhere , or the print versionhere .
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