Taboo Against Multiple Individuals

The Taboo Against Multiple Individuals is the Union’s powerful social prohibition against multiple living instances of one person. It makes Mickey Barnes and Mickey8’s accidental coexistence more than a private dilemma: their shared identity risks exposure, condemnation, and destruction, while Niflheim’s scarcity makes the second body appear to be a material burden as well as a moral offense. The taboo rests on a history of abuse, is reinforced by religious opposition to restoration from a tank, and is intensified by the practical rules of a struggling beachhead colony.

Origins and Social Force

Mickey Barnes describes the Union as permissive about many matters of morality, but says that the early days of bio-printed bodies and personality downloads produced serious abuses. That history gives the taboo its force: on most colonies, being a multiple is treated as worse than being a serial killer or a child stealer. The comparison measures the depth of the stigma, not a formal ranking of crimes. The evidence establishes a strong social judgment and the danger of discovery, rather than setting out a specific legal penalty.

For Mickey, that judgment is immediate and personal. Trapped beneath the surface after being left behind, he worries that Nasha might allow Berto to file a loss report before confirming that Mickey is actually dead. His concern is not only that a report could close off a route back to the colony. If another instance were created while he remained alive, the taboo would expose him as a multiple. He receives no communications signal underground, and fears that if Nasha knew he was walking with only a headache and sprained wrist, she would return to rescue him. He does not want her to risk herself for him. The rule’s social danger thus reaches into an intimate decision made far from the people who enforce or uphold it.

Mickey Barnes and Mickey8

The taboo becomes an immediate crisis when Mickey Barnes discovers that Mickey8 has emerged from the regeneration process even though Mickey Barnes is not dead. Mickey Barnes points out that the new instance should not have been produced and that Command must not learn they are both alive. He treats the prospect of discovery as so dangerous that he assumes one of them has to die. Mickey8 rejects the expectation that he should simply surrender his life: the circumstances are not entirely Mickey Barnes’s fault, but they are not Mickey8’s fault either. Their argument exposes the unequal burden the taboo places on two people who share an origin but are now separately alive.

The threat comes from both public stigma and the colony’s command structure. Mickey Barnes believes that Hieronymus Marshall already resents having even one Mickey Barnes in the colony; a second would make the situation far worse. That fear has a history. About a week after the Drakkar left Midgard, Hieronymus Marshall learned of Mickey Barnes’s encounter with Darius Blank and took it as evidence that criminal elements had entered the colony. Mickey Barnes recalls that Hieronymus Marshall came from a religious tradition that regarded bringing people back from the tank, even one at a time, as an abomination. He nearly had Mickey Barnes ejected from an air lock before the Drakkar’s captain, Mara Singh, reminded him that he was not in command of the mission until it made landfall on Niflheim. The episode makes clear that religious hostility to restoration and the taboo against simultaneous instances are related pressures, but not identical claims: one condemns tank-based return itself, while the immediate crisis concerns two living instances at once.

Scarcity and the Beachhead Colony

The colony’s rationing system gives the taboo a stark practical dimension. Mickey Barnes explains the rule through the history of settlement on Earth: island colonists in Micronesia crossed long stretches of ocean in small canoes and had to survive on what remained after the voyage until they could produce food on arrival. The arks and journeys of the Diaspora are larger and longer, but the same uncertainty governs a landing: colonists cannot know whether the crops they have brought will grow at their destination. In this setting, the accepted rule is that beachhead colonies cannot support people carrying excess weight.

At Niflheim, this principle is reflected in specific ration limits. Landfall rations began at 1,400 kilocalories per day as a base, with bonuses determined by lean body mass and work schedule. Because even the hydroponics tanks are struggling to grow food for unexplained reasons, rations have been reduced twice. Mickey Barnes says the colonists are not yet resorting to cannibalism, but most are gaunt. Under those conditions, a second instance means another person drawing on an already diminished food supply. Even if the taboo did not make multiple copies of one person profoundly unacceptable in the Union, the colony has little surplus for an additional Expendable.

Mickey8 tries to answer the immediate food problem by suggesting they live on discounted paste. At the cafeteria, it is selling for 25 percent less; on an all-paste diet, each would receive 1,250 kilocalories of actual nutrition. Mickey Barnes accepts that this might keep them from starving right away, but insists that it does not solve the larger danger: the colony’s response if Hieronymus Marshall finds out there are two of them. The exchange distinguishes a temporary logistical adjustment from the taboo’s deeper consequences. Food can be stretched, but concealment does not become safe merely because the two instances can reduce their consumption.

What the Taboo Reveals

The taboo draws a hard social boundary around the number of bodies that may legitimately carry one person’s identity. Mickey Barnes and Mickey8’s shared origin does not make either one disposable in the other’s eyes, yet the prevailing expectation turns their continued coexistence into a problem to be solved by eliminating one. Mickey8’s insistence that he bears none of the blame challenges the assumption that the newest instance should pay for a process he did not choose. The conflict makes the danger of the rule concrete without resolving it as an abstract debate about technology or identity.

The story also places this human anxiety alongside Mickey Barnes’s account of the creepers as a communal intelligence. He explains that they appear to understand their smaller forms as ancillaries, parts of a whole rather than independent intelligent beings, and to assume that individual humans are organized similarly. This contrast does not erase the human taboo or explain its origins; it shows that the colony’s insistence on singular human identity is not a universal way of understanding life. Against Niflheim’s crowded caverns and the creepers’ communal organization, the taboo marks the human demand that one person occupy one recognized place at a time—a demand made especially harsh when two living instances must decide who is entitled to remain.