Last time, while Tris grudgingly recognizes the tactical value of information, she wants to do the minimum learning possible.

Today, blessed Caleb will tell us about biotech.
Tris desperately tries to tune him out by staring at cutesy A<3B graffiti in the table, but we still get the dialogue, which is that biotech is an old technology (presumably meant to mean we’re that much farther in the future, could just be that he’s including selective breeding as is accurate), and then

But Erudite scientists developed this highly effective mineral solution a while back. It was better for the plants than dirt,” he says. “It’s an earlier version of that salve they put on your shoulder—it accelerates the growth of new cells.”

I should really have seen this coming. The author clearly isn’t a big fan of learning. It follows that this would happen when they tried to provide more information.

Firstly, minerals are elements, and there’s only so many of those. You may not be clear on the latter part because scientists keep announcing new elements, but those new elements are created by smashing atoms together in increasingly expensive giant machines and then frantically trying to find proof of their existence before they spontaneously stop existing again, all while irradiating everything. Basically, we have a very limited number of potential inputs here, if there’s a magic combination it’s not that hard to suss out.

Then there’s cell growth. Look, there’s two reasons cells don’t grow. One is lack of a vital resource. Well, we’ve cracked the vital resources for most food plants already. We’re good. The other is some sort of chemical signal saying now is a good time to grow at max speed, and while it’s true all life comes from a single source and shares similarities, we are not, in fact, so similar that you can slap the same stuff onto a plant and a human and it’ll tell both sets of cells to go into overdrive. That’s without getting into the fact the real issue with human wounds is at least as much about avoiding scar tissue as it is just speed, or the fact that plants don’t “heal” so much as they grow new layers over damaged areas, while humans generally find it creepy if a new tiny arm tries to grow out of the damaged spot of their current arm.

Anyway, in both cases, while some minerals may encourage some species’ cells to behave slightly differently, for the most part growth is governed by hormones, which are not minerals. If minerals could do anything like this, I promise, we’d have figured it out by now.

In conclusion, this is even stupider than the Left Behind miracle-gro plotline, and that was something the authors intended to be an impossible miraculous act of God.

His eyes are wild with new information. Not all the Erudite are power hungry and devoid of conscience, like their leader, Jeanine Matthews. Some of them are like Caleb: fascinated by everything, dissatisfied until they find out how it works.

Yes, I assume the transition happens the moment they’re told they cannot, in fact, find out anything more. Then they snap and begin getting power hungry because without power they’ll forever be kept ignorant by your own power-tripping former faction.

“So Erudite and Amity work together, then?” I say.
“More closely than Erudite and any other faction,” he says. “Don’t you remember from our Faction History book? It called them the ‘essential factions’—without them, we would be incapable of survival.

Pretty true. Abnegation clearly aren’t needed to dole out everything when the individual factions handle their own groups fine, and Erudite and Amity appear to be the only ones doing anything useful at all. In the event a threat ever does occur, Erudite can probably handle it through tactics, training and weapons development – and a tech-heavy defense may allow Amity to take part, since shoring up the walls and such isn’t necessarily participating in conflict. Murdering the factionless is pretty horrible, but if you’re going to insist on this insane faction system in the first place, it does seem like the only real option, and I’m not sure it’s really much worse than keeping them around solely to justify Dauntless existence as a boot stomping on a human face forever, which seemed the previous system. Erudite’s plan to eliminate them suggests that the jobs they’re currently doing either aren’t necessary in the first place (clearly, the trains are automated, they could probably do something similar for the buses) or the faction members would be willing to do them. Certainly Dauntless seems to be somewhat self-sufficient with plenty of jobs that aren’t directly connected to the bravery thing, could be Amity and Erudite are willing to have a couple people be janitors.

And who knows? Maybe shifting over to murdering all those who don’t fit a faction would mean they’re not so willing to do it at the drop of a hat, and factionless has been repeatedly compared to death or worse than death already, and the evidence points to deaths of malnourishment and disease. IQ test the kids for Erudite, the low scores go to Amity, the troublemakers who fail there are murdered by Erudite. Shitty, but more functional than anything we’ve seen so far. That’s a society you could see other people discovering hundreds of years later! They’d probably be pretty horrified, but they wouldn’t just spend a solid day boggling at how a system like that even lasted so long. Plus selection pressure would probably breed you an amicable but bright population before too long, reducing the kids you have to kill for not giving proper deference to the cheese god.

It doesn’t sit well with me, how much our society needs Erudite to function. But they are essential—without them, there would be inefficient farming, insufficient medical treatments, and no technological advance.

That said – you hate prosperity, remember? What do you care about improving anything when you don’t think it’s possible?

Right now there’s good enough farming and medicine and cars to function, and your utter certainty that anyone getting more than they get at this instant can only happen by taking it from someone else suggests you understand the basic idea of technological change but not the idea it can actually add to anything. If Erudite is eliminated, everything just chugs along as it has. You don’t really need them to function, you just need them for your society not to slam to a halt.

Possibly things are even more desperate than we’ve been told and their farms and resources are actually in steady decline, with only Erudite’s continued innovations keeping them afloat. But that just makes Erudite’s attempt at a coup more reasonable. They of all people would be able to see the writing on the wall, and if it takes all their effort just to stop from starving, it’d explain why Jeanine was so concerned with wiping out the unproductive factionless and fine eliminating chunks of Abnegation. Decimating their population will reduce the pressure on what few resources are left.

This actually works surprisingly well. All through last book, there was the problem that everyone seemed to view lives as disposable, which is generally something that happens when you have more people than you can use the labor of, or not enough food to go around. Both at the same time would get you a casual disregard for the lives of incoming adults, as we see with how Dauntless’ initiation is designed to discard half their potential members, and wild plans that hinged on wiping out competing groups, which fits Erudite’s actions to a T. Abnegation would seem to be trying to deal with it by acting like nothing’s wrong, and that would horrify Erudite given they’d be best situated to see how badly things were deteriorating every year.

“I’m amazed by how they live here,” he says as he takes the toast from my plate. “They’re completely self-sustaining. They have their own source of power, their own water pumps, their own water filtration, their own food sources…. They’re independent.”

Which suggests Amity is really the only faction needed. It’s a shame they’re all nutjobs too, I liked my last book guess that they’d figured out the rest were insane and were doing their best to cut ties.

“So I take it Amity wasn’t one of the factions you had an aptitude for,” he says, grinning.
“No.”

That’s really not true. She refuses either choice and the tester appears to decide to send her along the non-Amity track with the dog, given we’re told the test branches at each option. Either not instantly huggling the cheese means you fail Amity utterly or more reasonably, her refusal to go along with the voice and stubborn insistence on not playing along meant the tester flunked her on cooperativeness.

Why, though? She never really says. I’d guess that it’s because she’s aggressive, which doesn’t fit either Abnegation or Amity, but Abnegation is about crushing your feelings down and behaving like you’re supposed to, while Amity is about wearing your heart on your sleeve and wanting to be nice. It’d be really nice for her to explain this herself, though – she hates Amity, but she also hates Abnegation but supposedly fits fine because she’s divergent, for all what we’re actually shown is her being the most dauntless Dauntless.

Speaking of, her brother wants to know what her test results were.

He looks just as he did a few months ago, when we were living across the hall from each other, both of us considering switching factions but not brave enough to tell one another. Not trusting him enough to tell him was a mistake I do not want to make again.

I’m assuming the book goes to hell based on the comments, but so far there’s actually been a lot of promising attempts to fix last book’s stuff. First her guilt about Will, now her realizing that back then, he’d been struggling just like she had with the decision and she could’ve reached out. She even admits offhandedly exactly what I complained then: but not brave enough to tell one another.

So she says she got a tri-faction result. Since his research project for Erudite was how the simulation worked, he knows this is pretty shocking:

It’s really difficult for a person to get two results—the program actually doesn’t allow it.

But because we still hate learning, this is expressed in the most jumbled way possible. I’d like to give the benefit of doubt here and assume what he’s trying to say it’s only possible when the program goes off the rails at one choice (as it did when Tris noped out of picking anything, say) and the administrator has to intervene, and that’s the really difficult bit.

But no, we’re explicitly told whatever the really difficult thing that the program itself doesn’t allow to happen at all is, it does not involve administrator intervention:

But to get three … I’m not even sure how that’s possible.”
“Well, the test administrator had to alter the test,” I say. “She forced it to go to that situation on the bus so that she could rule out Erudite—except Erudite wasn’t ruled out.”
Caleb props his chin on a fist. “A program override,” he says. “I wonder how your test administrator knew how to do that. It’s not something they’re taught.”

So two scores is impossible in the program as written, but not something that requires any altration to the program as written to happen occasionally.

This is also retconny, because it suggests the administrator was going above and beyond in running Tris’ test. You could say that, after seeing what happened to her brother, the woman had volunteered precisely to be able to help out divergents, but if needing intervention to keep the program running is completely beyond the normal scope of things, then there’s no point in overriding anything, Tris is divergent. If her results were automatically sent in, the administrator could’ve tried to keep it going in the hopes it’d produce a non-divergent result, but we know they’re entered manually.

The only reason to intervene now becomes that the author wanted to show off Tris’ traits and give her a special snowflake three results.

Anyway, Tris explains that the woman must have known how to alter things because she transferred to Dauntless from Erudite, but that suggests that fifteen year old Erudite are already trained in how to handle the simulations in defiance of the fact no one’s supposed to know anything about the test beforehand…which actually would be reasonable going with the idea they’ve been sneaking sleeper agents into other factions.

Caleb, shockingly, is curious about this, wondering if the shape or chemistry of her brain is different.

“I don’t know.

Now, last book I’d have sort of accepted this as you having bigger issues, but you’re made it clear already in this book that you just don’t give a fuck. Even though we also know it holds the key to fighting off future attempts at mass hypnosis.

All I know is that I’m always aware during simulations, and sometimes I can wake myself up from them. Sometimes they don’t even work.
…
in one of mine … the one where Tobias figured out what I was … I just did something impossible. I broke glass just by putting my hand on it.”

Caleb finds this fascinating and starts actually thinking about what she says, which is horrible:

My cheeks grow warmer—he is analyzing my brain like he would analyze a computer or a machine. “Hey,” I say. “Come back.”
“Sorry,” he says, focusing on me again. “It’s just …”
“Fascinating. Yeah, I know. You always look like someone’s sucked the life right out of you when something fascinates you.”

So yeah. My current theory is a textbook murdered the author’s parents.

Anyway, she says she’d like to drop this subejct because while she knows there aren’t specifically Erudite or Dauntless to kill her here, she’d still rather no one ever knows. This may be the series starting to transition toward the movie’s bit where everyone knows “divergents” are enemies. Last book no one knew what it was except Erudite and they only cared because it’d get in the way of their murder plan, and assuming any aspect of that plan is still in play and they’re still motivated to kill divergents, well, they already know she’s one. The only reason to be uncomfortable with Amity or Abnegation hearing is if we’re doing the movie version of divergents as boogeymen.

Susan then arrives and sits next to Caleb. You know, I wonder what she thinks of this. Caleb has ditched Erudite under duress to rescue his original faction, and between that, the breakdown of order, and the fact Abnegation is really hurting for people, I’d think they’d let him back in. Is she thinking the same, that he’s back in her faction? (She smiles at him, and Abnegation only show emotion within their group.) Or is this cross-faction romance now? Or is Abnegation even going to remain a faction at this point? Their leadership is dead, their power is shattered, and they don’t seem like they were ever particularly numerous. They may end up absorbed into Amity. Her brother’s there, maybe Caleb will join as well. (Amity wouldn’t mind someone with Erudite tendencies, by all appearances, and his Abnegation background should help him fit in.)

Anyway, they start talking “in careful, polite Abnegation conversation” to Tris’ abiding disgust, because how dare people who’ve split up expecting never to see each other then seen their family and friends murdered revert back to familiar patterns when first encountering each other again.

Tobias shows up before she can “flee” the horror of people talking to each other normally, and things have not gone well.

“In their enthusiasm for conflict resolution, the Amity have apparently forgotten that meddling creates more conflict,” says Tobias. “If we stay here much longer, I am going to punch someone

He refuses to clarify, instead saying he’ll explain later. This is obviously for suspense but it’s just annoying, because it thinks I’m invested in the question of will they get thrown out by Amity, but I’m actually invested in what Tobias means and why the Amity would be meddling when indeed, it absolutely does promote conflict and their previously stated behavior of lying for the sake of smoothing things over seem like they’re people who wouldn’t meddle and just let things fester beneath the surface.

My two guesses here is either that Amity are really in your business all the time and constantly offering suggestions for how to be more of a hive mind, which might actually work to promote harmony within their group by making everyone’s behavior stick to the center of the bell curve and forcing anyone too far off the norm out, OR they’ve picked up he doesn’t like Marcus and are shoving them together, which fits with his barely restrained fury but not their stated no-conflict goal. The Amity must be aware some people get along better than others and the best way to keep things smooth is not to force people who don’t get along together but allow them to peacefully hang out in different spheres.

The book therefore suggests it’s the second one, because that’s what Tobias likes to keep quiet about because he doesn’t like the dubious looks the Abnegation give him when he refers to Marcus’s cruelty. Has he done that enough for it to be a rule? He’s been keeping their relation a secret and even among the few people who’ve seen his loathing for the guy, I’m not sure he’s actually given any explanation. If he wasn’t keeping it a secret I’d assume he’s referenced it off-camera, but we’re still making a big deal of it being ultra-secret.

Incidentally, that’d have been a perfect reason instead – he doesn’t want to talk about the guy period with Abnegation nearby, lest dots be put together.

Anyway, speak of the devil and he will appear, so…

Tobias goes completely still when a hand falls on my right shoulder, sending prickles of pain down my right arm. I clench my teeth to keep from groaning.
“She got shot in that shoulder,” Tobias says without looking at the man behind me.
“My apologies.” Marcus lifts his hand and sits down on my left.

Hm. Is this the first evidence for Marcus being an all-around dick and not just a guy who beats his kid? Because that’s both an impressive coincidence and a very poor apology.

Tris continues to be even worse than Tobias at acting halfway civil toward the guy, which makes sense in that Tobias is scared of him and doesn’t want to attract attention. Marcus says they’ve decided not to stay and want to go back to the city to find the rest of the Abnegation and ooooh right I sort of thought all the Abnegation ran for Amity but yeah, that was only the group her mom rescued.

Come to think of it, how’d any of them get out of the city? Tobias knowing the way through the gate was a big deal.

And wait, why even run out of the city? Amity has a huge precense within the city, running the hospitals. Isn’t it easier to run there for asylum? Okay, you’re closer to the murderous people, but on the other hand, you’re not crossing large stretches of witness-free ground where you could be ambushed and wiped out.

Tris, showing that she does have a brain even if she resents all that filthy knowledge business, immediately figures that Marcus has some other reason for wanting this and it may even be him singlehandledly pushing the decision through. She doesn’t seem to notice the main oddity, though, which is that sending people back to the city to check on the rest makes sense but packing up all of the Abnegation who’ve fled to head back in order to find out if they’re still getting shot on sight is insane.

I stare at him for a few seconds and then look at Tobias. He has relaxed a little, but he keeps his eyes focused on the table. I don’t know why he acts this way around his father. No one, not even Jeanine, makes Tobias cower.

Uh, because he’s one of the four fears Tobias can’t even get over? Dammit Tris, you literally were inside his head.

Okay, so she presumably means she doesn’t get how it can be such an unconquerable fear, but it shouldn’t be that hard with a basic understanding of psychology. Tris got a decent grounding just from going through the fear sims and seeing other people’s fears. Moths, for example. Totally harmless, irrational fear! Add on that two of Tobias’ other fears appear to be outgrowths of his dad’s abuse (explicit with the confinement, suggested with the shooting), then a dash of how Tris herself should have just had her own feelings with her parents thrown into high relief as both of them die, and she should understand how Tobias’ fears, which she clearly understands can be irrational, is based in part on the fact he still sees his dad as some all powerful figure.

We can even have this little set piece without her needing to boggle at it. She could get it and reference her own parents’ deaths, realizing she also felt like her parents were untouchable and wondering if when Marcus dies Tobias will finally realize his dad is just a human being and not a god.

At least she’s supportive despite not getting it. Tobias says they’ll go two days from now, and she holds his hand for support while thinking that one way or another, she’ll find out what’s going on.