To understand the visceral reaction that most citizens have to the idea of multiples, you have to understand Alan Manikova, and you have to have at least a passing familiarity with what he did to Gault.
We’ve only had Expendables for a couple hundred years, but the bio-printer was actually invented long before that, even before the launch of the Ching Shih. Until Manikova came along, though, it wasn’t much more than a curiosity. The systems they had then could scan a body, store the pattern, and re-create it down to the cellular level on demand, just like the bio-printer I pop out of every time Marshall gets me killed. Eventually they even figured out a way to reproduce synaptic connections, which modern systems don’t bother doing. Theory at the time said that should be enough to accurately reproduce behavior if not consciousness, but repeated experiments, first with animals and later even with humans, demonstrated pretty clearly that their theory was fundamentally flawed. The things that came out of the bio-printers then were empty, tabula rasa bodies with less awareness or physical competence than a newborn baby. They were okay for creating fodder for medical experiments if you could overlook the obvious ethical issues, but they were not in any way a path to immortality.
To be fair, the old bio-printers weren’t completely useless. People did occasionally use them to bring back babies who’d died in childbirth or shortly after—but even in those cases it usually didn’t work out. The babies mostly came out of the tank breathing and with beating hearts, but they couldn’t suck, couldn’t swallow, couldn’t cry. Sometimes, with a lot of intensive care, they made it through. More often, though, the parents just wound up burying another baby a few days or weeks after the first.
Then came Manikova.
Alan Manikova started life as the sole scion of a fantastically wealthy political dynasty on Eden. If he’d wanted to—and honestly, wouldn’t you have wanted to?—he could have finished life that way as well. Most people in his position would have partied their way through school, maybe slipped into a mid-level government position at some point or maybe not, and either way spent their lives rich, fat, and happy.
Alan Manikova, though, wasn’t most people. He was an epoch-defining genius, a mind so active and restless that he’d acquired doctorates in three seemingly unrelated fields before he turned twenty-five.
He was also a sociopath. That will become relevant later in the story.
Right around the time Manikova decided he was finished collecting graduate degrees, his parents both died suddenly, of unexplained causes, within a few days of one another. Six months later, after the local authorities had tried and failed to link Manikova to their deaths, he became one of the ten wealthiest people in the Union. Within a year, he’d plowed every penny of his inheritance into a venture he called Universal Eternity, Inc.
The popular press on Eden at the time thought that Universal Eternity was a boondoggle, or maybe some kind of tax dodge. Manikova didn’t treat it that way, though. He could have kept the company virtual if the idea were to pull off some kind of financial scam, but he most definitely did not. Universal Eternity built a hulking research facility two hundred kilometers from the nearest town, hired huge numbers of engineers and scientists, and then …
Well, and then nothing. People came and went from the campus, but nobody said a word to anyone about what went on there. There was speculation that the company was engaged in aging research, or maybe in cryo-storage, but there was never any actual evidence for either theory. After a year or so, the press got bored, and people stopped paying attention to whatever Manikova was doing out there.
Five years later, he showed up on a talk show to announce that he’d finally uncovered the secret to recording and replicating a human mind.
Here again, we see the difference between Alan Manikova and most people. Immediately following an initial demonstration, in which he produced a duplicate of his company’s HR director, had her say a few words to the assembled dignitaries, then immediately tranquilized her and broke her back down into slurry, the stock price of Universal Eternity skyrocketed, and Manikova went from being one of the ten richest people in the Union to far and away the richest, and in the public mind on Eden from a creepy possible parent killer to a creepy celebrity genius—maybe the greatest genius humanity had yet produced. Most people at this point would have acquired a palatial estate, maybe found a trophy spouse or two, and then spent the rest of their lives basking in the adulation.
Once again, Manikova didn’t do any of that. Instead he liquidated everything he had, including Universal Eternity, Inc. The transactions involved so much cash and so many shell companies that he’s one of the few people in history who can be credited with single-handedly causing a planetary economic recession. A year later, he boosted out of orbit alone in a custom-built interstellar transport packed with equipment, supplies, and the same prototype replication unit he’d used in his demonstration. He didn’t tell anyone where he was going. Speculation was that he planned to become the first person to cross the galactic plane, reproducing himself as needed so that he’d still be alive at the end of the journey.
It would have been better for everyone if that had been the truth, but in fact he was bound for a recently established beachhead colony about seven lights anti-spinward from Eden that the founders had named Gault.
Even before Manikova showed up there, Gault was an interesting place. Unlike nearly every other successful colony in Union history, the expedition that founded it wasn’t pulled together by Eden’s planetary government. It was funded by a private group made up mostly of incredibly wealthy people who weren’t happy with the fact that Eden, like Midgard and most other Union worlds, taxed the owners of the automated systems that produced pretty much everything in order to make sure that the people who didn’t own those systems didn’t starve in the streets.