Multiples

Multiples are simultaneous copies of one person, a possibility made materially real by the bio-printer and treated across the Union as a profound social taboo. Their apparent practicality—several copies could perform dangerous work without risking an unrelated person—collides with the history of Alan Manikova’s conquest of Gault, where replication became a means of turning a fragmented population into the raw material and army of one man. On Niflheim, the same prohibition makes Mickey Barnes’s accidental duplication a crisis of survival, identity, and law.

Definition and Technology

The term refers not simply to a person who has been restored after death, but to multiple instances of that person existing at once. The distinction matters because the copies can occupy separate bodies and perform separate tasks: when Nasha recognizes that Mickey Barnes is a multiple, she identifies one version by a broken hand and a day off shift, and the other by an unbroken hand and a day spent growing tomatoes. Their simultaneous, different circumstances make the duplication visible before its cause is understood.

The technology behind this possibility predates the role of the Expendable by centuries. The bio-printer was invented before the launch of the Ching Shih, and early systems could scan and store a body’s pattern, then reproduce it down to the cellular level. Researchers later learned to reproduce synaptic connections, hoping that this would be enough to recreate behavior, if not consciousness. Experiments with animals and then humans showed that the theory was fundamentally flawed; the resulting bodies were described as empty tabula rasa forms. The historical account thus distinguishes the old printer’s unsuccessful reproduction of a person from the later technology that makes an Expendable’s repeated return possible.

Making a body also has a substantial material cost. A printer requires calcium, protein, and other inputs; supplying it with basic elements still entails large quantities of food crops and meat, and the process generates considerable waste unless the leftovers are recycled into food. An existing human body is the most direct source of raw materials. In the Niflheim crisis, Marshall calculates that the two Mickeys have taken seventy kilograms of vital calcium and protein from a colony already near starvation. Duplication is therefore not only a metaphysical question or a breach of custom: in a rationed settlement, it has an immediate cost measured in scarce bodily resources.

Manikova and the Historical Taboo

The strongest explanation for the prohibition begins on Gault. Its original principle, Radical Liberty and Self Reliance, left its 120 landfall colonists unwilling to contribute to a common good. They divided into more than twenty family groups and established separate enclaves. Although Gault was relatively hospitable and many settlers had resources, neighbors did not help those in trouble. By the time Alan Manikova arrived, the population had grown to about ten thousand, living in a fragmented society whose groups were established but poorly coordinated.

Manikova first appeared useful. He brought supplies and technology that the separate settlements could not readily produce, gave food, seeds, and newer equipment to a small clan, and received a home and base in return. Once secure, he set about making copies of himself. He exhausted the feedstock he had brought within about nine months, by which point nearly a hundred copies were active and he had built two more replication units. At first he abducted indigent and isolated people, whose disappearances attracted little notice; later, as that supply ran out, he began taking people with relatives and friends who would miss them.

The hosting clan’s Security forces came to question him, but they discovered that he had withheld the advanced military technology he had brought. Manikova used his copies and that advantage to transform replication into conquest: he put members of the host clan through the printer as copies of himself, armed them, and attacked a neighboring group. The other clans took nearly a year to consider a unified response. By then Manikova was an absolute majority of the planet’s human population. The remaining clans eventually joined forces, but too late to reverse his dominance; their last desperate action included sending a message back to Eden.

The catastrophe made the word multiple carry a force beyond the technical fact of copying. The account places Gault’s destruction among the gravest crimes in Union history: turning one of the few potentially habitable worlds into molten slag is treated as an unparalleled offense. Farhome is not blamed for what happened; responsibility is laid on Manikova. Since then, in much of the Union’s public imagination, being a multiple has carried an unusually severe stigma—even compared with being a child stealer or a collector of human heads. The association is not presented as a neutral assessment of every duplicated person. It is the cultural afterlife of Manikova’s crime, which makes the category itself seem dangerous.

Law, Survival, and the Niflheim Crisis

On Niflheim, the taboo meets the practical needs of a colony close to failure. Mickey Barnes’s duplicate argues that two Expendables could be twice as useful, particularly when the colony has only 176 people left and is moving to a war footing. The appeal is concrete: a dangerous role ordinarily assigned to one person could be performed by two versions of the same person. But the extra body also consumes food-derived material at a moment when the colony is short of it, and Marshall treats the duplication as a grave violation rather than a useful exception.

Marshall insists that one Mickey should have gone back into the biological recycler as soon as the pair realized they had become multiples. He also invokes the intimate relationship between the two copies as part of his denunciation. His proposed punishment is not merely the loss of one body: he threatens to send both to the corpse hole and erase Mickey’s personality and body template from the server, preventing any future iteration. In that formulation, the copy is simultaneously a body, a person under law, and a reproducible pattern that the authorities can permanently delete.

The colony’s military needs complicate, but do not dissolve, the prohibition. When Mickey8 argues that the colony cannot afford to discard its only Expendable, Marshall counters that Cat Chen has volunteered to take the berth if needed. The exchange reveals that the office is considered replaceable even when the individual’s stored identity is not to be duplicated. The threatened sanction against the Mickeys is therefore not simply a response to a shortage of labor; it enforces a boundary around how many instances of one person may exist, even under emergency conditions.

The Wider Union Order

The ban on Multiples belongs to a broader Union effort to prevent repetition of the disasters associated with humanity’s past, but the narrative distinguishes it from the prohibition on antimatter weapons. Historians are said to regard the launch of the Ching Shih, less than twenty years after the Bubble War, as a direct response to that conflict. The Great Diaspora followed from the conviction that humanity could not safely remain on one planet; the same history also produced the rule that antimatter weapons could not accompany humanity into space.

The Union’s antipathy to Multiples is intense, but the antimatter prohibition is described as even more deeply rooted in collective instincts. A world that breaks that rule and is discovered by a neighboring world will be struck by The Bullet. This comparison places the two bans beside one another without making them identical: the prohibition on simultaneous copies is inseparable from the memory of Manikova and Gault, while the prohibition on antimatter is the Union’s hard limit on how its worlds may fight. Together, they show how the legacy of catastrophe becomes law—and how, on Niflheim, a second Mickey turns that distant history into an immediate judgment about who may live, in how many bodies, and at what cost.