Mickey Barnes's Multiple-Instance State

Mickey Barnes’s Multiple-Instance State is the condition created when Mickey Barnes and Mickey8 exist at the same time. What first appears as an impossible breach of the colony’s rules becomes both a practical dispute over scarce resources and a crisis of identity: the two men share a past, but disagree over whether that makes them one person. The state puts Mickey’s private survival directly against the colony’s law, its precarious supply of food and biological materials, and the question of what a backup can actually preserve.

Recognition and Accidental Duplication

The duplication becomes undeniable through the differences between two otherwise recognizable versions of Mickey. A woman identifies one as the Mickey she had breakfast with that morning and who had been in her bed the previous night; that version has a busted hand and was off shift. She had encountered the other in the corridor a few hours earlier, with an uninjured hand, after he had spent the day growing tomatoes. The contrast in injuries, duties, and recent whereabouts makes the existence of two bodies concrete rather than speculative.

Her recognition also makes clear that the secret has escaped Mickey’s control. She has not reported him to Command, despite understanding that he is a multiple, but she says she has a serious problem with what he is doing and asks how the Bio-printer was made to produce a second Mickey. Mickey denies arranging the duplication: he knows the law and says he has no desire to be turned into slurry; the second instance was a mistake. The circumstances of that mistake are not explained here. What is established is the distinction between deliberate multiplication and an accidental result—and that the distinction does not make the resulting state lawful.

The Colony’s Case Against Them

When Mickey8 argues his case to Hieronymus Marshall, he does not deny that two of them should not exist. Instead, he asks Marshall to consider what their simultaneous presence could accomplish: the colony is barely viable, and two workers might be twice as useful. His appeal treats the second Mickey as an additional capacity the settlement can ill afford to discard.

Marshall rejects that calculation. He points to the seventy kilograms of calcium and proteins consumed in creating the duplicate, resources taken from a colony already close to starvation. He also insists that one version should have returned to the cycler as soon as they understood that a multiple had been created. In his view, the accidental nature of the event does not erase either the resource cost or the obligation to end it. The argument therefore concerns more than a rule violation: the colony’s depleted stores make Mickey’s extra body a measurable claim on collective survival.

Marshall’s anger sharpens when he adds that Mickey and Mickey8 have been having relations with each other. He calls them monsters and declares that both will go into the cycler. The threatened response reaches beyond the two men: Marshall says the discussion must determine whether there will be a ninth iteration and whether Nasha Adjaya should go down the corpse hole with them. The existence of two Mickeys thus puts another person’s life within the scope of the command decision.

A Dispute About Identity and Continuity

The two versions do not agree on what the state means for personal identity. Mickey Barnes tells Mickey8 that they are not the same person. The ideas about immortality that Jemma had put into their heads on Himmel Station, he now says, were false: the six weeks he has lived are his only life, just as Mickey8’s last few days are his. A future Mickey restored as Mickey9 would not, in his account, be either of them. It would be another person using the same bed, eating the same rations, and handling the same possessions.

Mickey8 argues for continuity from the opposite direction. Invoking the Ship of Theseus Thought Experiment and Kant, he reasons that if a future version believes himself to be Mickey, and everyone around him accepts that identity, then there is no way to prove that he is not Mickey. To Mickey8, the claim that the copy is a different person is not a neutral distinction: it helps explain why the colony forbids multiples and why the two men are now in danger.

Mickey Barnes rejects that explanation of the law. He connects the ban not simply to the problem of personal identity, but to Alan Manikova’s attempt to take over the universe. Their disagreement leaves the state unresolved at its deepest level. A shared name, remembered past, or social recognition might sustain continuity for Mickey8, while Mickey Barnes insists that no such account can make another person’s life his own.

Consequences and Significance

The multiple-instance state forces abstract questions about backup-based immortality into immediate, bodily terms. The versions are not merely competing accounts stored for some future restoration: they occupy separate bodies, have different injuries and recent experiences, consume material needed by other colonists, and are subject to a command that can send them into the cycler. Even the prospect of Mickey9 is framed not as a simple return, but as a possible new life whose relationship to the existing two remains contested.

The state also exposes how identity is governed collectively. The colony’s prohibition gives Marshall the authority to treat duplication as a condition to be eliminated; scarcity supplies a practical rationale, and Mickey8’s proposed usefulness supplies a counterargument. Yet the two men’s disagreement prevents the situation from settling into a simple contest between law and convenience. The question of whether one should die to restore a single Mickey depends on what counts as the person being preserved—and whether the version who survives would be a continuation or only a successor.

At this point, the available account establishes a threat, not its outcome. Marshall has announced that both existing versions will be sent to the cycler, and Mickey Barnes has denied that a ninth iteration would save him. The multiple-instance state therefore ends this portion of the conflict as an unresolved collision between survival, colonial necessity, legal power, and incompatible understandings of the self.