Last time on Matched.com, games.

Sundays are for work; there are no leisure activities

Yes, finally learned what happens on Sundays! So, either this is a deliberate fuck-you to religion or this world had people pick Saturday over Sunday as the day of rest. I know that’s a Jewish thing, but I can’t see them then turning into this sort of society, and I think all the Christian groups that do it are pretty fringe as well.

We’re told this because she wants to tell Ky she’s sorry his parents are dead for real this time. All revolves around Ky.

it’s different now that I really know what happened. Before, I knew they died, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t know that he saw it rain down from the sky

No, you have no earthly idea what the hell happened. You’re acting like knowing Ky’s emotional response is more important than the fact that you have no idea why they died. Death does not rain down from the sky in your world. Death doesn’t anything in your world but happen at eighty in a controlled setting.

Luckily, this is interrupted by some officials showing up. They seem pleased with her work, and they’re just there to say that they’ll get her later for the next sort of test.

They’ll take you to sort something real—actual data, like news, or actual people, or a small subset of a school class—to see if you can apply things in the real world. If you can, you move on to the next step, which is likely your final work position.

This seems like it’s saying that what she’s been sorting isn’t real but just an awful lot of training, which isn’t the impression I got earlier. It might just be that they’re distinguishing between processed data and unprocessed in the field stuff, like her father looking through artifacts.

She says it’s happening faster than expected.

In fact, everything seems hurried lately: the hasty removal of the artifacts from personal residences, my mother’s sudden trip, and now this, more and more of us leaving school early in the year.

So, is there any connection between those things, and is there something wrong about how fast people are getting moved to their main jobs? I wouldn’t expect the book to be pointing out that last bit if it wasn’t an anomaly that’s going to matter down the line, but the book’s plot has been determinedly avoiding what I’d expect (yet again, Cassia’s complete lack of interest in the question of how Ky’s parents died over thinking about how now she knows that Ky saw it) so who knows?

Then it turns out her mom is on another trip, stressing everyone. And she notices her mom used up a green tablet, so it’s straining her more than she lets on.

What she’s dealing with is difficult enough to make her take the green tablet, so it must also be difficult to keep inside, to not share with us. But she is strong and she keeps the secrets because it protects us.

I really wonder how things are supposed to function here. It looks like spouses are the primary support for each other and that fits with how much attention their society gives finding the perfect match, yet they can’t talk about even the most minor details of their work. (Come to think of it, shouldn’t her mother have been banned from telling Cassia about plants at all? It’s not information that’s directly relevant to her employment.)

It’s all a recipe for disaster. If you ban them from talking about anything, they’ll get more and more stressed and sooner or later some (likely most or even all) will break down and talk, and they’ll probably do it about something major because that’s what pushes them over the edge. If you let people talk about normal things and only required them to keep certain stuff a secret, then things wouldn’t build up to the point where talking about the big things is inevitable, as well as preventing any number of breakdowns. A mentally healthy workforce is a productive workforce, overlords!

Anyway, hiking.

Ky and I walk into the trees and find the spot where we stopped the time before. We start marking again with red flags.

Okay, so, last time they walked up the hill/mountain until they were called down again. Even assuming that tying the flags took time and that all the marked things were removed between now and their last hike so it’s an easier climb, it’s still going to take them a while to get up there. And every successive time they do this, they’ll spend a greater amount of time getting to their previous point with less time left over to mark things. How is this supposed to work?

The book cares not for my logistic questions and just has Cassia telling him how sorry she is.

His hands shake a bit. I know what that brief moment of losing control means for someone like Ky
…
I see the pain in his eyes. His look begs me not to say any more; it is enough that I know. It may be too much.

This is the sort of insight she should have with Xander, or, if we’re meant to think Cassia is naturally super-good at reading people, then her insight into Xander should be orders of magnitude better.

She tries to distract him by asking about that Sisyphus. He says his dad told him about the guy.

I think he wanted to be like Sisyphus, because Sisyphus was crafty and sneaky and always causing trouble for the Society and the Officials.”

Huh. Okay, that’s somewhat clever, the story’s been warped beyond recognition. But only somewhat.

“There’s a story about how Sisyphus once asked an Official to show him how a weapon worked and then he turned it on the Official.”

See, why would Sisyphus be turned into this? How on earth did people with classical education start connecting rebellion to Sisyphus? It doesn’t even make much sense as a joke that other people picked up without understanding, because Sisyphus is so attached to that one iconic image of rolling the rock, where the point is that it’s endless monotony as much as it’s futile. Rebelling against the unstoppable overlords may have no lasting impact, but it’s not rolling a rock uphill nor is your punishment for failing having to do it again.

I mean, maybe you could torture the metaphor into the officials referring to the concept of rebellion as a rock getting pushed uphill to fall back inevitably, but that would require an awful lot of complacency on their part, and still wouldn’t explain why rebels took up the name – even on just general defiance logic, anyone heard using the term would be flagging themselves as knowing about it and probably a rebel.

Admittedly, Sisyphus was considered a clever guy, but if you’re so knowledgeable about the myth that you know that, you’re probably not the sort to butcher it in the first place, and it’d have to have been butchered pretty heavily to begin with before anyone else could start repurposing it like this.

What’s even more annoying is that Sisyphus actually did do the whole “show me how it works” trick so I’m pretty sure the author means this to be about how people reinterpret old stories yet one of the major things people do when reinterpreting things is change the name, and also, it’s not like Sisyphus was the only story to ever pull that trick.

In conclusion, I don’t care how many classes you took on Greek mythology, it does not need to be shoehorned into a book like this. How people actually work is more important than shouting LOOK UPON MY LEARNINGS PLEBS.

Ky says it’s an old story from back when officials had weapons, so on top of all that, it’s not even being kept updated.

What he doesn’t say, but what we both know, is They don’t have to. The threat of Reclassification is enough to keep almost everyone in line.

What horrible people they are to try to keep people from committing crimes by nonviolent methods! Truly a violent uprising is utterly justified in that case.

“The Society decided that they needed to give Sisyphus a punishment, a special one, because he dared to think he could be as clever as one of them, when he wasn’t an Official, or even a citizen. He was nothing. An Aberration from the Outer Provinces.”

I have seen nothing so far to suggest the society is anything but a meritocracy. The closest we get is Ky’s classification based on his dad’s crime, and that seems to be a matter of assuming he learned subversive ideas rather than some sort of class/caste thing. For that matter, given Ky obviously did learn subversive ideas and has been acting weird (there is no way someone going through enormous lengths to always look perfectly normal wouldn’t trip a million flags) it’s quite likely they classified him as an aberration because he totally is one, and when they say it was his dad’s crimes they mean they consider subverting a kid another aspect of it, as well as likely not wanting to go into the details of exactly what their classification reasons are.

(Also, Sisyphus used a weapon on someone, and we have no reason to think it was a nonlethal weapon let alone undamaging. Ky’s recounting is that Sisyphus initiated the whole thing. Punishing him for things like that is not about punishing him for cleverness.)

And then Ky explains about the whole rock-pushing thing, which really loses all of its impact when it’s a regular person who’ll just die eventually and also where absent some sort of magical contract it’s not like getting to the top would matter, so what does it matter if he gets it to the top and then it rolls back or if it rolls back when he’s only most of the way?

I would also like to point out that rolling a rock uphill still beats out on how we treat most prisoners in this country, to say nothing of the ones we’re explicitly torturing just outside our borders, so it doesn’t make the society look particularly bad.

“Was he from your Province?”

This is some very understandable stupidity from her, and Ky doesn’t respond by being much more knowledgeable – he doesn’t know if it’s about a real guy or not, rather than knowing it’s obviously not.

Cassia doesn’t get why you tell stories that aren’t real, so I guess no epic poems made the cut and there isn’t any Hundred Prose to go with the Hundred Poems.

Ky pauses for a moment before he answers, his eyes wide and deep like the oceans in other tales or like the sky in his own. “Even if he didn’t live his story, enough of us have lived lives just like it. So it’s true anyway.”

Eh, I find it more likely that they’d just assume he was real. If people in Ky’s area grasp this sort of a concept, they would be upfront about it rather than him having no idea, and if they don’t, then it should be assumed real.

I’ve been thinking in terms of absolutes; first, I believed our Society was perfect. The night they came for our artifacts, I believed it was evil. Now I simply don’t know.

Actually, you were whining constantly about your match well prior to that. Still, points for addressing the interesting plot.

Ky blurs the lines for me.

Admittedly, I’m baffled by how you’ve back off from it being evil when you know Ky’s family and everyone else was deliberately killed. It doesn’t seem like there’s anyone around but your government, and that would mean they are, in fact, pretty evil. If there’s some other explanation, you really should have mentioned it.

She asks why he throws games and Ky gets testy and makes it clear he wishes he could win …who cares, really? The point of a game is to play it. I can understand the frustration when it’s a matter of failing a game, but if you’re going to win and throw it on purpose, you’re not doing that. Or the frustration of wanting to play as hard as you can against someone of similar skill, but Ky isn’t saying anything like that, he’s saying he wants to win the games he does play against regular opponents.

Then she asks what color his eyes are and he thinks it’s obvious and she explains he’s got magic color changing blue eyes.

“What are they now?” he asks.
…
“Everything,” I tell him. “They’re everything.”

please please please let Ky be killed or arrested or assigned to a new city or anything to get him out of the plot.

Cassia reiterates that she loves him and it’s a different love than with Xander. If she doesn’t at least give an excuse for why she can’t break up with Xander in that case, she’s getting renamed to Mako. Don’t think I won’t, Cassia.

As I tie another red flag on the trees and wish for the fall of our Society and its systems, including the Matching System, so that I can be with Ky, I realize that it is a selfish wish. Even if the fall of our Society would make life better for some, it would make it worse for others. Who am I to try to change things, to get greedy and want more? If our Society changes and things are different, who am I to tell the girl who would have enjoyed the safe protected life that now she has to have choice and danger because of me?

Thank you for this, Cassia. It’s a rare book that thinks beyond the main character’s personal issues. Even if you’re right that the matching system blew it for you, if it works more often than the alternative, your happiness would come at the cost of other people’s unhappiness, and that’s bad.

The answer is: I’m not anyone. I’m just one of the people who happened to fall in the majority. All my life, the odds have been on my side.

This is a confusing continuation of that paragraph, though. It doesn’t follow well from what she’s saying, nor does she say anything more to explain it.

Then Ky decides to teach her another letter, the first letter of his name.

This letter is more difficult and it takes me several tries to even come close. In spite of my practice with the other letters my hands are still not used to this; to writing in any way but tapping.

It’s not about writing, it’s about if you ever use fine motor control for anything. K is made of three lines, if you’re struggling with this you should struggle not to stab your face with a fork.

The whistle sounds behind and below us. Hearing it, I wonder how I could have ever thought that the birdcall I heard earlier sounded anything like the Officer’s whistle. One sounds metallic and man-made and the other is high and clear and lovely.

I’d just like to pause a moment and point out birdsong can be pretty annoying, and I’d guess it’d only be more so if you weren’t used to it. Of course, it’s possible birdsong exists outside this area (they have trees in their backyard and birds are pretty hard to keep in one place) but she doesn’t mention it.

“I can never be Matched,” he says, looking first at our hands and then into my eyes. “I’m an Aberration.”

Cassia doesn’t tell him she knows already, but he can probably guess by the fact she responds with: “But you’re not an Anomaly,” I say, trying to make light of things, knowing immediately that it’s a mistake; there’s nothing light about this. as if she isn’t at all surprised or needing a moment to process what he says.

It’s odd he’d bring up the bit about matching now, though. Remember, people not only don’t choose who they get matched to but it’s incredibly rare for it to be someone you know. If they really are both in love, it doesn’t matter for their relationship if he’s banned from getting matched.

Cassia does say that it’s wrong he had the choice taken from him, which is identifying the core problem well.

What would it be like to be alone? To know that you could never choose anything else?

But he can still date and have friends! The point isn’t that it’s objectively bad it’s that he had no options.

That’s when I realize that the statistics the Officials give us do not matter to me. I know there are many people who are happy and I am glad for them. But this is Ky. If he is the one person who falls by the wayside while the other ninety-nine are happy and fulfilled, that is not right with me anymore. I realize that I don’t care about the Officer pacing below or the other hikers among the trees or really anything else at all

Oh Cassia, and you were doing so well.

I don’t know why this has to be in such all or nothing terms. You could be saying you want to improve things further, that it doesn’t have to come at a cost.

Ky confesses he loves her too.

I cannot go gently now. Not even for the sake of my parents, my family.

Not even for Xander.

THEN BREAK UP, MAKO