Mickey 7
by Edward Ashton
St. Martin's Press, 2022

Mickey 7 is a far-future science fiction / adventure novel, a fast-moving dark comedy centered around a clever, if not especially original, theme.

Mickey is an expendable, a human that has had their physical and metal state scanned and uploaded so that they can be cloned and reload their personality and memories. In exchange for this functional immortality, expendables do all the jobs that no one else will, usually because they are fatal.

Mickey 7 is the 7th incarnation of Mickey Barnes, each of his predecessors having met a messy and painful end while protecting the colony ship Drakkar on its journey to a new world, checking out the new world for hazards, and just generally being the first body to step into any uncertain situation. He is the only expendable on the ship, so he gets all the dangerous assignments. He's 100% backed up, so…

laying on my bed with the erratic sounds of guerilla toss flooding over me
withdrawal felt like coming up on acid at first, not so bad
a tingling in my hands and mouth
a tensing of my body
that taste in my mouth and the feeling creeping up my throat
a slow heat behind my face
textures grew sharp and grimy in my taut vision
(i could see the handprints on the wall, white on white slicked in oil and matte with grime)
but that feeling came with it, grown fundamental as…

I have spent so much fucking money this past week. I'm not even going to open my bank statement, it's just going to go in the bottom drawer of my dresser to be (hopefully) forgotten. Maybe I should just shred it.

The first "big" expense was that I splurged and bought a computer mouse. I keep "saving money" by buying cheap mice, and my mice keep breaking. After my third mouse, I said "screw it" and…