Mickey Prime

Mickey7 (inspiration for the film Mickey 17) is back in Edward Ashton's latest novel in which a plague on Niflheim forces Mickey to return to his old job as an expendable.

Mickey Barnes is an ex-Expendable. For the past five years he’s spent his time tending tomatoes and cleaning out rabbit hutches instead of mucking around inside active reactor cores and getting dissected by creepers. When a sudden, virulent plague strikes the fledgling human colony on Niflheim, though, he’s forced to return to his old job.

Mickey is pressed into duty as both a first responder and a lab rat, expected to die and be replaced as many times as necessary to find a cure. Funny thing, though. Despite the best efforts of the colony’s medical team, Mickey seems to be the only person unable to contract the bug.

As more and more colonists sicken and die and the colony spirals into panic, Command is forced to contemplate Reset—sterilizing the colony completely to eradicate the plague, then repopulating it with hundreds of stored embryos, to be raised under the watchful eye of a dozen freshly printed copies of Mickey Barnes.

No matter how bad things get, Mickey can’t let that happen. He has a daughter of his own now, and even if he has to die a hundred times in a hundred different ways, he’s determined to find a way to make sure that she survives. It’s a lot, but after all, Mickey’s already died seven times. After that, how hard could this be?