Expendable

The Expendable is a colony expedition’s deliberately replaceable human worker: a volunteer whose tissue and uploaded memories allow another instance to be produced after a death. The title promises immortality, but the work depends on treating each body as expendable, and the procedure leaves open whether a recreated person is truly the one who died. Through Mickey Barnes’s repeated deaths, the role becomes both a practical answer to the dangers of settlement and a test of what survival means.

Identity and Recruitment

The role is sold under a more appealing name. On Midgard, recruiter Gwen Johansen calls it becoming an Immortal, while the job’s official title is Mission Expendable. Mickey volunteers, signs the contract, provides tissue samples, and undergoes the upload process. The choice is not presented as a response to a crime or punishment: he needs passage off Midgard, has no specialized occupation that would secure him a berth, and sees the first colony ship to depart in two centuries as his way out. His consent is real, but it takes shape under severe practical pressure.

Before he signs, Gwen reads through possible assignments, including external repairs during interstellar transit, exposure to local plants and animals, medical experiments, and combat against hostile forces. Mickey understands that individual versions of him may die doing this work. What he underestimates is how frequently a beachhead colony will need dangerous labor. He assumes remote machines will handle many of the worst tasks, as they do on Midgard; the realities of a settlement with little industry make that assumption untenable.

The role’s operating logic rests on a comparison between human bodies and machines. In a reactor chamber after shutdown, neutron flux can deliver a lethal dose through combat armor in under a minute. A drone exposed to high-energy particles may shut down within that same minute, while a human body can keep functioning for an hour or more before its damage becomes incapacitating. The person is not expected to survive the assignment; the relevant measure is how much useful work can be done before death. Away from Midgard’s industrial base, a damaged drone is also harder to replace than a human whose materials can be supplied once the colony’s agriculture is operating.

Repetition, Risk, and Colonial Use

Mickey describes the central arrangement as dying in one body and waking in another who possesses the dead person’s memories, hopes, fears, and sense of self. The new instance believes it is the same person, as do the people who know it. Yet Mickey distinguishes remembering what Mickey1 did from remembering being him, and notes that his recollection excludes the final minutes before that earlier instance died. Mickey2, for his part, woke believing himself to be thirty-one and to have been born on Midgard. Memory supplies continuity, but the moment of death leaves a gap that the process cannot resolve from the inside.

The role’s risks are not confined to spectacular emergencies. On Niflheim, the first task of a new colony is to determine whether the local microbiota threatens human health. The expedition’s method is to expose its Expendable to anything that can be isolated from the environment and observe the result. Before the colony had been on the surface for a full day, a medical technician named Arkady put Mickey in an isolation chamber and fitted him with a scanning helmet for continuous upload. The helmet also preserved a record of his experience so that others could ask about it later. The arrangement turns both his body and his testimony into expedition resources: he bears the exposure, while the colony retains what can be learned from it.

Expendables are a comparatively recent technology, viable for about two centuries, and not every colony expedition has used them. Mickey’s research identifies objections beyond the obvious religious opposition: taking people from the street or prison and making them die repeatedly raises ethical concerns, while a volunteer changes some—but not all—of those considerations. He had not investigated the history before providing his DNA. The thought that he might have negotiated a larger signing bonus captures the gap between the abstract promise of a job and the bargain as experienced by the person doing it.

A Contested Idea of Immortality

The promise of the role becomes most unstable when more than one instance is alive. Mickey’s conflict with Mickey8 makes their different accounts of continuity explicit. Mickey argues that the six weeks he has lived are his whole life and that the last few days are Mickey8’s; a possible Mickey9 would not restore either of them, but would be someone else occupying their place and using their belongings. Mickey8 answers through the Ship of Theseus identity metaphor: if the successor believes itself to be him and everyone else does too, he sees no way to prove otherwise. The same process that makes the Expendable useful thus produces a personal-identity problem it cannot settle.

Mickey connects the prohibition on multiple instances to Alan Manikova’s attempt to take over the universe. In the immediate confrontation over Mickey and Mickey8, however, the colony’s concerns are also material and political. Marshall says the expedition began with 198 people, made landfall with 180, and had fallen to 175, leaving it near the population limit for a viable beachhead colony. He cannot simply kill both instances without consequence. Later, when 176 people remain and the colony is moving to a war footing, Mickey8 argues that the settlement needs every body, including its only Expendable. Marshall counters that Cat Chen has volunteered to take the berth if needed. The role is therefore not an intrinsic identity: Command can treat it as a position another colonist may fill, even as the person occupying it experiences the assignment as a life-and-death condition.

Duty, Coercion, and Refusal

The system’s language of duty does not remove its coercive force. When Marshall presents Mickey and Mickey8 with the prospect of being sent down the corpse hole, he clarifies that their patterns and body template would be erased from the servers. This would not be an ordinary death followed by another production cycle, but a final sentence with no successor. He then offers them a mission as the way to avoid that outcome, invoking the work attached to Mickey’s job description. The Expendable’s replaceability is conditional: the expedition can repeatedly reconstruct him, but Command also holds the power to end that possibility.

The boundary of the role appears when Mickey refuses Marshall’s order to return antimatter fuel to the reactor. He argues that Marshall had plans for the colony to survive without it, and proposes alternatives: use those plans, risk a drone, or do the work himself. Mickey will not take the antimatter back. Marshall responds by threatening to erase his pattern and recordings and personally send the last instance down the corpse hole. The refusal reverses the role’s usual allocation of risk. Mickey does not dispute that he has been assigned dangerous work; he rejects the assumption that the assignment obliges him to carry out this particular order.

Narrative and Ethical Significance

The Expendable joins colonial logistics to a question of personhood. On a distant settlement with a small population, scarce machinery, and hazards that can defeat remote equipment, a reproducible human body appears more practical than a replaceable machine. But practicality is purchased by making one volunteer absorb risks that the wider community cannot or will not distribute evenly. His consent at recruitment does not make each later death meaningless, nor does the ability to produce another body establish that the same person has survived.

Mickey’s dry account of lethal assignments, from reactor repairs to vaccine testing and a potentially poisonous drink, exposes the gulf between the institutional label and its bodily cost. The institution can count a continuing template, a new body, or a restored worker as continuity; Mickey’s experience insists that each instance also has a finite life of its own. The role’s central contradiction is therefore not simply that an Immortal dies. It is that the colony depends on treating replacement as survival while the person being replaced may understand it as death.