54 pages • 1-hour read
Mickey7
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “001”
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.
Mickey Barnes, or Mickey7, lies on his back in an ice crevice on the planet Niflheim. He was exploring a cave when he saw a rock that looked like a monkey, which distracted him and led him to walk right into a hole. His body aches, and his wrist is sprained. He uses his ocular implant to scan for any way out, but he’s lost. He checks in with Berto, his friend, handler, and pilot, via the chat function in his ocular implant. Berto says that Mickey7 is too deep in the hole to retrieve, so he’s going to leave him there to die.
Mickey7 is an Expendable, a person whose job it is to do dangerous work that often leads to his death. When he signed up to be an Expendable for the Drakkar colonization mission to Niflheim, scientists uploaded his consciousness. Now, when he dies, he wakes up in a newly printed copy of his body with all his memories intact. He uses the numbers in his name to indicate what version of himself he’s on. He’s died six times, and now he’s going to die again.
His love interest, Nasha, a pilot, flies nearby and offers to try to reach him, but Mickey7 tells her not to, as he doesn’t want to risk her safety. He hasn’t backed up his memories in six weeks, but Nasha promises to fill him in on what he forgets. She suggests that he take off his space helmet and suffocate, but he decides to let himself freeze.
After Nasha leaves, Mickey7 contemplates freezing to death, but he realizes that he’s less hurt than he thought; only his wrist is sprained. He gets up and starts exploring the tunnels around him. He’s worried about creepers, white, centipede-like creatures that are a meter long and a few dozen kilograms heavy, the native inhabitants of Niflheim. However, he encounters a new creature that looks like a giant creeper but is brown and has an extra set of mandibles. The creature picks up Mickey7 in its mandibles, keeping him immobilized as it drags him through the tunnels. Mickey7 imagines being eaten by the creature’s rows of teeth, which he can see up close.
However, instead of eating Mickey7 or feeding him to its young, the creature takes him to the surface and releases him. Mickey7 thinks of the time he found a spider as a child in his grandmother’s house on Midgard, his home planet. He captured the spider and released it, feeling like a benevolent god. He thinks that now he is the spider, and the creature is the benevolent god.
Mickey7 finds his way back to the perimeter around the dome where he and the other colonial settlers live—Niflheim’s icy climate and low oxygen levels make it impossible for them to live outside the dome. He hopes that Berto did not already report him as killed in action. If he did, and Mickey8 has already been printed, there will be trouble. Duplicates are regarded as more dangerous than serial killers, thanks to a wealthy man who took over another colony by printing hundreds of copies of himself.
He meets the guard at the perimeter, who lets him in without a fuss, giving Mickey7 hope that he hasn’t been duplicated yet. When he returns to his room, however, there’s someone in his bed. He makes eye contact and realizes that Mickey8 already exists.
Chapter 2 Summary: “002”
When Mickey Barnes volunteered to be an Expendable for the Drakkar, the ship traveling to Niflheim to establish colonies there, he didn’t really understand what the role entailed. Instead of calling the role an Expendable, the ads called it being an Immortal. The recruiter explained the horrific details of the job, with potential outcomes like radiation sickness, which could lead to Mickey’s internal organs literally liquefying. She seemed to try to talk Mickey out of it, and Mickey asked why. The recruiter told him that she wanted the role to go to a bad person, given how much suffering they would go through.
Mickey took the job because he had to get off Midgard. Not because Midgard was not a nice planet (it was beautiful and uncrowded, unlike Old Earth) but because, lacking a true purpose, Mickey had gotten himself into trouble and needed to escape.
Chapter 3 Summary: “003”
Mickey8 gets dressed as he and Mickey7 discuss what to do about their situation. Mickey8 is missing his memories of the past six weeks, so he wonders why their room is so messy. The problem with duplicates is the lack of resources. After humans destroyed Old Earth with antimatter weapons in the Bubble Wars, the Diaspora of humanity was formed, which led to the creation of the Union. Mickey7 states that the Union is most historically analogous to the colonization of Micronesia, in which settlers paddled outrigger canoes from island to island, relying on the resources from their boats when they landed until they arrived at the next island. The Drakkar expedition moves from place to place, relying on crops grown in hydroponics and hoping the crops will grow in the new environments. Food is heavily rationed based on people’s bodily requirements, so most people are small and thin, even gaunt. Multiples require more rations, which is a problem.
Mickey7 wants to tell Command about the situation, but Mickey8 reminds him that Commander Marshall practices Natalism, a religion that thinks duplicates are an abomination, and would likely kill them both. Mickey8 goes to the shower after they agree to handle it themselves.
Berto arrives and assumes he’s speaking to Mickey8 when Mickey7 opens the door. He asks Berto what happened to Mickey7, and Berto lies that both Mickey6 and Mickey7 were killed by creepers while investigating the tunnels under the ice. Mickey7 wonders why Berto lied to him and what else he’s lied about before.
Berto asks Mickey7 to go fill out a report about the incident, but Mickey7 lies that he needs a nap first. Berto leaves after telling Mickey7 they need to lie to Command about Mickey7’s death, as they are worried about losing calories and protein and might not regenerate Mickey the next time; Berto worries that Marshall will think he should’ve done more to try to retrieve Mickey7.
Mickey7 has died six times in eight years. Three he did not see coming, and three he knew about in advance. It was easy to imagine himself being reincarnated as a new version of himself with the same consciousness. Now that he’s met Mickey8, though, he thinks that Mickey8 is not a continuation of him.
Mickey7 and Mickey8 meet in the cycler, the “heart and soul” of a beachhead colony, which takes human waste (including corpses) and food scraps and turns them into protein paste, vitamin slurry, and fertilizer (37). Mickey7 opens the corpse hole, which makes him nervous, as he’s only seen it while working on garbage duty. Mickey7 and Mickey8 verbally spar about who must die before deciding to play a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Mickey7 loses with rock, when Mickey8 chooses paper.
Chapter 4 Summary: “004”
Mickey7 kneels over the corpse hole and recalls what led him to decide to become an Expendable. Mickey Barnes studied history in school, which made his teachers and community look down on him because of the communal fixation on STEM. He knew Berto in school, and Berto excelled at everything, including academics and sports.
Berto got a coveted spot on the Drakkar expedition, and before he left, he decided to enter a professional pog-ball tournament after years without playing. Mickey bet against him, certain he would lose. Berto won, and Mickey found himself in debt to Darius Blank, a dangerous man. Blank sent a man to hurt Mickey to remind him of his debt, and afterward, Mickey asked Berto to help him get the job as an Expendable on the Drakkar. Berto told him that the job was bad, and he wouldn’t need help to get it. Mickey signed up soon after, desperate to get off Midgard and away from Blank.
Chapter 5 Summary: “005”
Mickey8 can’t bring himself to push Mickey7 into the corpse hole, so they decide to try to stay alive together. Cycler paste is cheap at the canteen, meaning they can get enough paste to exceed their 2,000 calorie allotment, enough to keep them both alive for the time being. Mickey8 asks if they can tell Nasha, who they’ve been in a relationship with since they were Mickey3, but Mickey7 thinks it would put her in too much danger. Commander Marshall doesn’t like them as it is, and in addition, he is a religious zealot who doesn’t believe in the ethics of regenerating bodies. He also disapproves of Mickey’s past with Blank, so they have to be careful. Mickey8 wraps his own unhurt wrist and hand so that he and Mickey7 match.
Mickey7 has a memory of flying with Berto when he was Mickey6, when he realized he was still afraid of death and didn’t believe in immortality. Mickey7 eats cycler paste with Nasha and Berto, and Berto seems suspicious. He also reveals that the guard that Mickey7 encountered when he returned to the dome has gone missing. Mickey7 worries that a creeper followed him back to the dome.
He gets an ocular ping from Commander Marshall demanding to see him. He’s nervous, but he goes after chatting via ocular with Mickey8, who needs to sleep after being regenerated.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
Edward Ashton starts Mickey7 in the middle of the action, or in medias res, with the Drakkar expedition already having made landfall on Niflheim. The opening line, “This is gonna be my stupidest death ever,” immediately establishes the importance of death and survival in the narrative (1). Mickey’s role as an Expendable is an integral aspect of the theme of The Ethics of the Human Drive for Survival. Mickey’s job, at its core, is to complete tasks that will kill him. Death should be familiar, as he’s already died several times, yet he notices that he still has the innate desire to survive: “I’ve died six times in the past eight years. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, wouldn’t you?” (36). Mickey “learned” to die during his Expendable training, a training he finds incomplete, as he notes, “Training was one hundred percent about dying. I don’t remember them dedicating much time at all to staying alive” (51). With Mickey’s character, Ashton also wrestles with the question of the ethics of the Expendable role. Mickey’s self-awareness is an important aspect of his characterization, and he understands that no matter how many times he dies, he cannot shake his intrinsic drive for self-preservation, and he cannot become comfortable with the process of dying. This situation also immediately establishes the tension between the individual and their community in the text, highlighting the theme of The Conflict Between Individual and Collective Needs.
The question of clones also relates thematically to ideas of Identity, Personhood, and Self-Awareness. Mickey wrestles with the question of his own humanity in light of his frequent deaths, positing a hypothetical situation that describes his plight:
Imagine you found out that when you go to sleep at night…You die, and someone else wakes up in your place the next morning. He’s got all your memories. He’s got all your hopes and dreams and fears and wishes. He thinks he’s you, and all your friends and loved ones do too. He’s not you, though, and you’re not the guy who went to sleep the night before. You’ve only existed since this morning, and you will cease to exist when you close your eyes tonight. Ask yourself—would it make any practical difference in your life? Is there any way that you could even tell? (8).
Ashton frequently utilizes hypothetical questions to illustrate Mickey’s inner turmoil and to break the fourth wall by having Mickey ask questions that appear to be directed toward the audience, a device called “direct address.” Mickey establishes the question of his own humanity by walking the audience through his conundrum. Whenever Mickey dies, his consciousness is uploaded into a reprinted clone of his body. He has the same memories, personality, and body, but the body is new. If no one told Mickey he died, he’s not sure he would know, and he doesn’t fully understand how it impacts his life.
Mickey’s understanding of himself and his identity through the lens of death becomes even more complex after the printing of Mickey8. When Mickey7 meets Mickey8, the cycle he’s accustomed to is broken, leading him to think: “If I die now, though, there won’t be another me coming out of the tank. The other me is already here, and despite all appearances, Eight is most definitely not a continuation of me. Honestly, he doesn’t even seem to like me very much” (37). In addition, Mickey8 does not have Mickey7’s memories, as Mickey7 hasn’t uploaded in six weeks. Their situation prompts Mickey7 to see a disconnect between himself and Mickey8 that he did not see between himself and prior Mickeys. He realizes that “despite all the training, despite the indoctrination, despite the incontrovertible fact that [he]’d died five times by then and [he] was clearly still alive—deep down, in [his] heart of hearts, [he] did not believe in immortality” (54). Mickey7 does not believe he is immortal, which complicates his view of himself as a human being. Is he human, or is he just a copy of someone who once was human? Who is he if he isn’t Mickey Barnes? As the novel progresses, Mickey7 continues to wrestle with this issue as he tries to hide the existence of Mickey8 from the other colonists.
Unlock all 54 pages of this Study Guide
Get in-depth, chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis from our literary experts.
- Grasp challenging concepts with clear, comprehensive explanations
- Revisit key plot points and ideas without rereading the book
- Share impressive insights in classes and book clubs