There also weren’t any factory jobs, or mining jobs, or even any infantry, for that matter. My standard stipend gave me enough to keep a roof over my head and food in my belly, but try as I might, I couldn’t figure out what it was all for. I couldn’t think of a single way the universe would be different if I stepped off of my balcony one morning.
And so, like bored young men throughout history, I spent an unfortunate amount of my time finding ways to get myself into trouble.
003
“SO,” I SAY. “It seems like we’ve got a problem.”
I’m in my desk chair, turned to face the bed. Eight is sitting up now, leaning forward with his head in his hands. I know how he feels. Waking up straight out of the tank is like the world’s worst hangover, with little bits of leprosy and the bends mixed in for flavor.
“You think? We’re screwed, Seven. We’re worse than screwed. How did you let this happen?”
I sigh, lean back, and rub my face with both hands. “Which part? The part where Berto assumed I was dead because he was too afraid of getting eaten to come back and rescue me? Or the part where I inconveniently didn’t actually die?”
“I don’t know. Either one. Could you hand me a towel?”
There’s a hand towel hanging over the wardrobe door. I pull it down and toss it to him. He scrubs the worst of the gunk off of his face and neck, then tries to work it back through his hair.
“That’s hopeless,” I say.
He glares at me and keeps rubbing. “I know that, asshole. I remember when you woke up from the tank, right? I remember when Six woke up, and Five and Three and … well, I guess that’s all, actually. Anyway, I remember everything you remember.”
“Not everything,” I say. “I haven’t uploaded in over a month.”
“Great. Thanks for that.”
I sigh. “Don’t worry. You’re not missing anything good.”
He flings the goo-covered towel at me, climbs out of bed, and pulls open the wardrobe. “Haven’t been keeping up with the laundry either, huh?”
“Not really. It’s been a rough few weeks.”
He pulls a grimy sweater and a pair of wind pants down from the top shelf. “Got any clean underwear at all?”
“Check under the bed.”
He shoots me a look exactly halfway between hatred and disgust. “What’s wrong with you? I don’t remember us being a pig.”
“I told you. It’s been a rough few weeks.”
He drops to one knee and pulls a pair of boxers out from under the bed, holds them up at arm’s length, then brings them in close and gives them a tentative sniff.
“They’re clean,” I say. “They just got kicked under there.”
He glares at me again, then turns around and dresses himself.
“Thanks,” I say. “It’s weirdly uncomfortable to look at yourself walking around naked.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I’m sure it is.”
He sits down on the bed again, and runs his hands back through his hair. It’s still stiff and shiny black, but at least it’s starting to break up into individual strands. It won’t look right until he’s been through the scrubber a couple of times, though.
“So,” he says. “What now?”
I stare at him. He quits playing with his hair and stares back.
“What?” he says.
“Well,” I say. “I mean, you shouldn’t have come out of the tank, right? I’m not actually dead. If Command finds out we’re a multiple…”
His eyes are hard now, and angry. “Say what you mean, Seven.”
“Come on,” I say. “You know this as well as I do. One of us has got to go.”
* * *
THE CLOSEST ANALOGUE in the long human story to the Diaspora and the formation of the Union is probably the colonization of Micronesia. The islands of the Pacific back on Earth are small, they’re separated by hundreds or sometimes thousands of miles of open ocean, and they were settled by people paddling twelve-meter-long outrigger canoes. When those folks landed on a new island, they had whatever was left in their boats after the journey to tide them over until they could make the new land yield them up something to eat.
That’s basically the situation we’re in, except that our boats are a little bigger, our journeys are a hell of a lot longer, and we can’t even be sure that any of the crops we’ve brought with us will grow where we make landfall. As a consequence, there is one hard and fast rule that everyone who boards an ark knows and accepts: there are no fat guys in beachhead colonies.
Rations when we made landfall were set at fourteen hundred kilocalories per day, base, with bonuses based on current lean body mass and work schedule. They’ve been cut back twice since then because, for reasons unexplained, even the hydroponics tanks are having a hard time getting anything to grow here. We’re not quite down to cannibalism yet, but most of us are definitely on the gaunt side these days.
The upshot of this is that even if having multiple copies of yourself hanging around at one time weren’t the strongest taboo in the Union, there’s not a lot of leftovers at dinnertime for a surplus Expendable.
* * *
“LOOK,” EIGHT SAYS. “If you think I’m just itching to hop into the bio-cycler for you, you’re about to be seriously disappointed. I get that this situation isn’t one hundred percent your fault, but it’s zero percent my fault.”
I’m pacing back and forth now, which is not very satisfying in a four-by-three room. Eight is sitting on the edge of the bed, elbows on knees, trying to massage the tank-funk out of his temples.
“This isn’t about fixing the blame,” I say. “It’s about fixing the problem.”
“Okay, so let’s fix both. You go jump in the cycler.”
I shake my head. “No, that’s not gonna happen.”
He glares up at me, then grimaces and digs a chunk of hardened tank fluid out of one ear.
“How is this fair? I’ve been alive for, what, maybe twenty minutes? You’ve gotten a couple of months, at least. You should be the one to go.”
I smile, but not in a friendly way. “Oh no,” I say. “Don’t try to pull that shit on me. You’re thirty-nine years old, just like me. You’ve got every second of memory and experience that I have, less the six weeks since my last backup. You wouldn’t even have known you just came out of the tank if you weren’t covered in dried goo.”
He stares at me.
I stare at him.
“There’s no point in trying to argue this out, Seven. I mean, we can’t really compromise on this, can we?” he says finally.
And he’s right, of course. This isn’t the kind of disagreement where one person or the other just gives up after a while. It’s not like picking up the check in a restaurant. We can’t take turns.
“Okay,” I say. “So what do we do? Take it to Command?”
“No,” Eight says, a little too quickly. “Bad idea. Marshall thinks we’re an abomination already. If he finds out we’re a multiple, he’ll kill us both on the spot. We need to keep this between the two of us.”
The truth is that if we went to him now, Marshall would probably just say that Eight never should have come out of the tank, and that therefore he should be converted back into slurry without delay. I think about mentioning that now, but …
I don’t know. Maybe Eight has a point. It does seem unfair somehow to shove him back into the void before he’s even had a chance to get the tank goo out of his ears.