Antimatter Blues


 Contents
 
 Title Page
 Copyright Notice
 Dedication
 Chapter 001
 Chapter 002
 Chapter 003
 Chapter 004
 Chapter 005
 Chapter 006
 Chapter 007
 Chapter 008
 Chapter 009
 Chapter 010
 Chapter 011
 Chapter 012
 Chapter 013
 Chapter 014
 Chapter 015
 Chapter 016
 Chapter 017
 Chapter 018
 Chapter 019
 Chapter 020
 Chapter 021
 Chapter 022
 Chapter 023
 Chapter 024
 Acknowledgments
 Also by Edward Ashton
 About the Author
 Newsletter Sign-up
 Copyright
 
 
 
 Guide
 
 Cover
 Title Page
 Dedication
 Chapter 001
 Acknowledgments
 Contents
 Copyright
 
 
 
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 Table of Contents
 About the Author
 Copyright Page
 
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 For Jack.You taught me what it means to be an artist.I truly hope you’re pleased with the result.
 
 
 
 001
 
 “I JUST SAW myself in the corridor.”
 Nasha looks up from her tablet. She’s sitting in our desk chair, feet propped up on our bed, wearing nothing but underwear and boots. That’s not a look that many people can pull off, but Nasha manages it with aplomb. She pushes her braids back from her face and drops her feet to the floor.
 “Nice to see you too,” she says. “Close the door.”
 I step into the room and let the door latch behind me. My rack looks a lot smaller than it did before Nasha moved in. The first thing she did when she got here was shove her bed in beside mine to make an almost-double, and the second was to fill up most of the remaining floor space with a meter-long footlocker that I’m not allowed to go into. Also, for some reason Nasha herself takes up a lot more space than her actual size would lead you to believe.
 To be clear: I am not complaining about any of this.
 I sit down on the bed and take the tablet from her hands. A look of annoyance flashes across her face, but she doesn’t resist.
 “Did you hear me? I saw another me. He was on the bottom level, near the cycler. I think Marshall has started pulling new copies of me out of the tank.”
 Nasha sighs. “That’s impossible, Mickey. Marshall wiped your patterns when you resigned, right?”
 “Yeah,” I say. “I mean, I think so. He said he was going to.”
 “And he hasn’t pulled anyone out of the tank in the meantime, right?”
 “I don’t think so. Berto told me they wound up burning two drones when they shoved the fuel from my bubble bomb back into the reactor. I doubt they would have wasted those kinds of resources if they’d had a bunch of extra Mickeys lying around.”
 She leans back and props her feet up on the bed beside me. “Right. So unless Eight’s really been hanging out with the creepers for the last two years and just decided to rejoin us, you couldn’t have seen yourself wandering around the corridors. Are you sure it wasn’t Harrison?”
 “Harrison? You mean Jamie Harrison?”
 She grins. “Yeah. He’s like your doppelgänger, right? I could definitely see you mistaking him for you.”
 Jamie Harrison works in Agriculture. He takes care of the rabbits, mostly. He’s short and skinny, with mousy brown hair that sticks up from his head in tufts, a perpetual nervous squint, and a prominent overbite. He looks nothing like me.
 I don’t think he looks anything like me, anyway.
 “Look,” I say. “I know what I saw, and what I saw was me. Maggie Ling was hustling him down Spoke Three toward the hub.