“There are no fat guys in beachhead colonies”

There are no fat guys in beachhead colonies is the hard rule that turns the Great Diaspora’s precarious economics into a blunt image of the body. The phrase is not merely about appearance: on a new world where food is uncertain, each person’s survival is bound to the supplies brought ashore, the crops that can be made to grow, and the labor required to keep the colony alive. On Niflheim, where even hydroponics struggled, the saying becomes an everyday measure of scarcity—and a reason that Mickey’s second, simultaneous instance cannot be treated as an abstract problem of identity alone.

A rule born of landfall

The narration compares the Diaspora and the formation of the Union to the settlement of Micronesia. Pacific islanders crossed hundreds or thousands of miles of open ocean in twelve-meter outrigger canoes, arriving with only what remained in their boats to sustain them until the land yielded food. The colony ships are larger and their voyages vastly longer, but the basic uncertainty persists: settlers cannot know that the crops they have brought will grow at their destination. The saying gives that uncertainty the form of a rule every person boarding an ark is understood to know and accept.

Its force comes from the distance between a successful landing and a functioning food supply. A beachhead is not yet a self-sufficient settlement; survival depends on stores carried from elsewhere and on the difficult work of establishing agriculture. The phrase compresses those conditions into a judgment about bodies, making scarcity visible without softening it into an abstraction.

Niflheim’s rationing and the extra body

At Niflheim, the rule has a precise material basis. The initial ration was 1,400 kilocalories a day as a base allowance, with bonuses determined by current lean body mass and work schedule. The allowance was cut twice after the hydroponic tanks failed to grow enough. The colonists were not yet resorting to cannibalism, but most had become gaunt. In this setting, a second instance of Mickey means another person requiring food from a supply already under pressure.

The narration links the shortage to the Union’s taboo against multiple copies: even without that taboo, there would not be much left at dinner for a surplus Expendable. The comparison matters because it puts social prohibition beside immediate material need. The two instances face a conflict over who must die, but the colony’s rationing logic makes continued duplication appear costly before any question of personal identity can be resolved. The saying turns that pressure into common sense: bodies are counted against the food available to sustain them.

The Expendable in the colony’s survival system

Mickey’s own position shows why the rule applies unevenly. He signed on as an Expendable because he needed passage from Midgard and had no practical skill that would otherwise secure him a berth. The job placed him first in line for dangerous assignments, from external repairs and exposure to local life to medical experiments and combat. On a beachhead, some tasks expose a human body to lethal conditions for longer than a mech can endure; other experiments cannot be done by a mech at all. And with heavy industry still far off, lost metal cannot readily be replaced, while the materials needed to make another Expendable depend on getting agriculture online. The colony’s scarcity therefore does not eliminate dangerous work: it helps determine who is expected to perform it.

The Biological recycler makes the same dependence tangible. It processes waste, food scraps, and eventually corpses into protein paste, vitamin slurry, and fertilizer. Its corpse hole breaks matter down into component atoms and reassembles them as specified; the process consumes enormous energy, but the antimatter-driven power plant supplies it. This system can keep a desperate colony alive for a long time, but it does not make the food problem disappear: it recycles available matter into sustenance and fertilizer, while Niflheim’s efforts to grow food remain troubled by local microbiota.

The saying’s hard edge

The expression’s plainness is part of its meaning. It sounds like a settled fact of colonial life, yet the conditions behind it are contingent: crops may fail, local organisms may interfere with cultivation, and supplies cannot be assumed to last. The saying makes bodily deprivation legible as a collective rule, but its application also reveals who bears the colony’s risks. The Expendable is essential precisely because human bodies can be used where machines cannot, while the same food economy treats an additional instance as surplus.

The colony’s recycling capacity depends on energy as well as matter. Producing two devices later makes a dangerous dent in the remaining antimatter stores; no replacement fuel is expected in the foreseeable future, and loss of power would threaten everyone. Against that background, the rule is not a promise that infrastructure has solved scarcity. It is the compressed social language of a settlement whose food, labor, and power systems remain vulnerable—and whose survival calculations reach all the way down to the number of bodies at the table.