Last time on Matched.com, the matching was perfect and Cassia is the nicest character we’ve seen.

I‘ve always wondered what my dreams look like on paper, in numbers.

Huh, that’s weird, why would you-

Someone out there knows, but it isn’t me. I pull the sleep tags from my skin, taking care not to tug too hard on the one behind my ear. The skin is fragile there and it always hurts to peel the disk away, especially if a strand or two of hair gets caught under the adhesive on the tag. Glad that my turn is over, I put the equipment back in its box. It’s Bram’s turn to be tagged tonight.

Oh. Because someone’s recording your dreams. Creepy! Not actually evil yet, though – I’m sure we’ll find out they’re using it to crush dissent or something, but for now it’s just different.

I wonder if this has any connection to how they’re able to match people?

This also means that she was being very literal when she said she’s finally allowed to dream about Xander. But what exactly would they do if she’d been dreaming about him before now? Do they have some way to actually control dreams if they don’t like the content?

Their breakfast is oatmeal.

We eat for health and performance, not for taste.

…they don’t have to be opposites.

Since our calories had been moderated all week long, last night at the Banquet we could eat everything in front of us without significant impact.

There’s more to nutrition than just calories! In fact, oatmeal has pretty much nothing to recommend it beyond that it’s cheap and filling. It’s not exactly ideal breakfast food.

I can’t tell if this is the author not knowing anything about the subject or if the society doesn’t or if it’s the party line she believes but no one in charge actually thinks it’s true.

Anyway, this is more evidence that civilization was wiped out with only the boring classes surviving. Are there robots doing all the jobs? Because otherwise I wouldn’t expect them to be able to rebuild everything on their own.

(Also, a minor point but – why didn’t this come up at the banquet? Since her brother wasn’t going, his diet wouldn’t have been adjusted, so that should have been why she couldn’t bring food back.)

As a younger kid, her brother still has school on Saturday instead of work. I’m more interested about Sunday, this society doesn’t have religion but the fact Saturday has a different schedule suggests they have a weekend system. Also, he’s about to be late for it, and this won’t be the first time. There’s concern he might be cited, though not clear what that means yet.

They talk about how they have to give the dress back.

“They’ll send you a little piece of the fabric, remember?” she says, and I nod. Each gown is designed with an interior panel that can be cut into pieces, one for each girl who wears the dress. The scrap, along with the silver box that held my microcard, will be the mementos of my Matching.
But still. I will never see this dress, my green dress, again.

It’s still not clear if the way they live is this way because they don’t have the resources otherwise or because the people in charge are crazy puritan. I think this is supposed to be tapping into resentments about not getting to own your own stuff, but to me the unfairness is really that she can’t wear dresses, not that she can’t keep this particular one in her closet forever.

Cassia recounts how she told the worker her pick at the “clothing distribution center”.

“That’s the one you were most likely to pick,” she said. “Your personal data indicated it, and so did general psychology. You’ve picked things outside of the majority in the past, and girls like their dresses to bring out their eyes.”

So it seems the bizarre science speak thing isn’t limited to the teens. They’re just all science cultists.

Also it’s been mentioned before that her dress was unusual, and now we’re told that she’s generally goes for the unusual choices.

Now, there’s usually justification for why the character we’re following in the conformist dystopia is unusual, and maybe this is going to play into why there’s something wrong with her matching. But I would prefer a protagonist who was totally normal because if the problem is with the dystopia, then the problem should be there for the majority and not the occasional outlier.

Back to Bram. He leaves at the last second, and the train is about to get there.

he breaks another rule, the one about running in public. I can almost hear his footsteps pounding on the sidewalk as he runs down the street, his head lowered, his school pack bumping against his skinny back.

How are they getting enough exercise?

Right when he gets to the stop, he slows down. He pats his hair into place and walks casually up the steps toward the train. Hopefully, no one else has seen him run.

Why is there no one waiting at the train? If nothing else neighbor girl must be the same age since Cassia joked about them being matched and everyone matched is the same age.

Her mom asks what Cassia plans to do for rec hours. She says she and her friends will play games, since they’ve seen whatever’s being shown (movies? Plays?) and the music …” I shrug.
My mother laughs, completing my sentence. “Is for old people like me.

I don’t really get this. I mean, yes, different generations usually have different music, but it’s not like your music preferences are determined by age, it’s that there’s a variety of music and people usually end up liking whatever they heard as a teen and listening to it when they’re older. If there’s only one type of music, that’s what everyone listens to.

She says she’ll also visit “Grandfather”, so sounds like she’s only got one (and has for some time, since it’s rare for people to immediately change how they refer to someone when someone else dies). This is apparently not on the list of what you’re usually allowed to do but on the eve of someone’s Final Banquet, visiting is encouraged and permitted.

So…that sounds like they kill people to me. Cassia’s claim people live super long in their society is looking suspicious. Hell, people in the current society have great-grandparents sometimes, and we tend to have kids later than they do here.

In fact- let’s see. We can figure out how old he is from what we know. Let’s say Cassia’s parents had her at twenty-five, well past the age the matching system aims for. And let’s say that the parent is the grandfather’s second child, had at age thirty-two (the age gap we see with Bram) instead. That would make him seventy-four. If we adjust down to assume the first child is born at age twenty-two instead, he’d be sixty-eight.

Wow.

And as I said it seems like her other grandfather is already dead, so whatever age he is, it has to be some amount lower than whatever the maximum possible one is.

To put this in perspective, the current global average for human life is sixty-seven. America’s is seventy-eight. Bear in mind this average includes children who die in infancy as well as every other disease and accident that happens after then, not the maximum length you can expect your body to last.

This is a far cry from Cassia’s claim everyone in their society lives exceptionally long. It’d be a step up for a lot of places, but it’s not exactly the limits of what we’re capable Currently, Monaco has an average that’s pushing ninety as well as various other successes. Plus, I bet they get to eat things other than oatmeal for breakfast.

She gets on the train to go to her work and suddenly, snow. In June.

“It can’t be,” the man says again. People twist, turn to the windows, looking agitated. Can something wrong be true?

Holy shit they are absolutely fucked. Science is a wonderful way to run things, but the point at which you start worshiping the past results in the point you are no longer even in the ballpark of science. If you respond to new data by saying science says it isn’t happening, you’re doomed.

Cassia thinks it’s cool but everyone else is panicking. She doesn’t get why. I’m mildly annoyed by this – the panic is obviously a cultural reaction so she should share it even if we the readers wouldn’t, and I’d rather know why they feel like this.

When the train stops she reaches out to touch a flake and discovers it’s a cottonwood seed instead, although some are still worried by why there’s more than usual. Then one of the new passengers explains they’re removing some cottonwood trees by the river so they can plant something more useful, and everyone’s happy.

They mutter about being glad it isn’t a sign of another Warming; thank goodness the Society has things under control as usual.

So that does go a ways to explain why they’re reacting so badly to unusual weather – it’s not that they just can’t handle anything out of the ordinary, it’s that we broke the climate a while ago and people are still jumpy at the idea it might have happened again. They’re still doomed science cultists, but at least they’re adult in outlook.

Cassia explains that cottonwood trees aren’t particularly useful because they don’t fruit and their wood isn’t good to burn.

This is a bit sad and worrying.

Cottonwood trees do indeed produce very low quality wood. A shitton of it, and because it’s not as hard as most hardwood trees it’s very easy to process. And they’re extremely hardy, capable of handling the varying water and soil levels you get around rivers without a problem. It still isn’t clear if Cassia’s society actually is resource poor or just dicking with its people, but if they are struggling, they should be better at making use of a wide variety of things. Cottonwood trees are a good source of renewable disposable material and their roots help hold the riverbanks together.

The way it’s presented makes me think that the society is terribly hidebound and relies on a limited number of species, discarding the rest. I mean, just listen to her here – it doesn’t produce fruit or firewood, so it’s useless? That’s simply not as efficient, even though on paper it can seem that way. Only growing the most useful crop sounds good…except the most useful crop only grows best in certain habitats, and the further you go from that, the less you get out of them. Plus, most useful crops require human care, while something like these cottonwood will grow up all on their own. You just need to harvest it.

Cassia says her mother calls them weed trees, since they are, but still loves them because of the seeds. So she’ll probably be sad to hear of the grove being gone.

Then she says the idea of snow reminds her of Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.

It is one of my favorites of all the Hundred Poems, the ones our Society chose to keep, back when they decided our culture was too cluttered. They created commissions to choose the hundred best of everything: Hundred Songs, Hundred Paintings, Hundred Stories, Hundred Poems.

Oh yeah we’re getting into the dystopia proper here. Apparently it was because things were too cluttered. Even if that’s true, couldn’t you have pared things down a bit less horribly drastically? Assuming one a day, you’d have experienced all of them within two years.

For the best, the Society said, and everyone believed because it made sense.

The way she talks about the Society is starting to irritate me, and this bit is particularly bad.

A society is society, yet when she discusses it she acts as if the Society is some separate group calling the shots. Which it probably will be considering we’re seeing no signs there’s a real connection between the majority of the population and the people in charge, down to having a pill distributed to everyone without any explanation of what it does. But in that case, why Society and not Council or something? And why is it this way, why can’t it be that the Society is the society? Why can’t it be that the culture at the time believed this, instead of talking about it as if it’s a subgroup convincing everyone else?

Also, on a writing level, “everyone believed because it made sense” is just awful. If that’s how you feel about it, you wouldn’t need to say it. It isn’t about believing it, it’s just true. You’d just say it was for the best.

How can we appreciate anything fully when overwhelmed with too much?

The next line is far better, to the point that the bit about the society should really just be cut. This tells you the reasoning without needing to break out the neon signs going THIS IS A BAD IDEA AND ONLY DELUDED PEOPLE BELIEVE IT.

My own great-grandmother was one of the cultural historians who helped select the Hundred Poems almost seventy years ago.

Huh. So then, the current government is probably relatively recent, though admittedly, we don’t know how much was already in place by the time they decided to destroy most of everything.

And from the sounds of it not everyone at the time was really sure this was a great idea. Cassia explains that her grandfather said his mother would repeat bits to him as lullabies and he tried to remember them as long as he could, which sounds an awful lot like she was trying to keep them around.

Then Cassia tries to have deep thoughts about the poem.

I think to myself that this poem would be a good lullaby if you listened to the rhythm instead of the words. Because if you listened to the words you wouldn’t feel rested: Miles to go before I sleep.

Not really, Cassia, poems about being tired and having to keep going can make you sleepy.

I’d like to know what criteria they were using to pick this stuff. The obvious one is it’s just the ultimate English class reading list of the classics, but if you’re wiping out most of your culture, I think you’d care less about which are objectively the hundred best and more about which are most suitable for the new world you’re trying to make.

We find out what Cassia’s job is, sort of. She sorts things. Today she’ll be sorting numbers. She’s apparently really good at whatever the point of this is and hasn’t made a mistake in three months, so her boss barely talks to her because she’s the sort of person who isn’t chatty.

The book so far has a surprising lot of women. The first other person we’re introduced to is Xander, since he’s her love interest, and her dad does seem to have the more important/plot related job, but we learn about her mother’s job at the same time and so far, it’s her mother’s job that seems to inform more of her outlook. Cassia’s job, which doesn’t seem stereotypically female, has a woman for the boss. And Cassia goes on to explain that her dad and grandfather worked there, but so did her great-grandmother – apparently the sorting skills generalize to sorting out stuff from old area or sorting the hundred best whatevers. It’s also a skill the matching committee uses…so I guess there isn’t a fancy algorithm for that? Weird. How do they know about the genetic compatibility aspect? Oh, and the official at the matching party was female as well.

but I’m not interested in that. I like my stories and information one step removed; I don’t want to be in charge of sorting real people.

She’s totally going to end up on the matching committee, isn’t she?

The government has computers that can do sorts much faster than we can, of course, but we’re still important. You never know when technology might fail.

This actually seems like a pretty good outlook.

Cassia says it’s a boring job, and the reason she likes it is because it’s a gateway to the more interesting ones. And we do generally use machines to free people up from drudgery, and that’s a good use for them. But they have to train people for the more interesting but also more important jobs, and training is always going to be boring. So here they’ve set up a system where they’re using people as a redundant component to guard against failure in the process of training them for better jobs, which is quite a good use of personnel. Certainly better than you’d expect from people who don’t understand what else you can do with trees if they don’t produce fruit.

That’s what happened to the society before ours. Everyone had technology, too much of it, and the consequences were disastrous. Now, we have the basic technology we need—ports, readers, scribes—and our information intake is much more specific. Nutrition specialists don’t need to know how to program air trains, for example, and programmers, in turn, don’t need to know how to prepare food. Such specialization keeps people from becoming overwhelmed. We don’t need to understand everything. And, as the Society reminds us, there’s a difference between knowledge and technology. Knowledge doesn’t fail us.

Of course, being smart in one specific way won’t save you if you’re an idiot in every other.

This paragraph starts out as a different outlook (okay, so these people are a bit twitchy about technology) and rapidly descends to wow, doomed. Humans are not ants. The real disastrous consequences happen when you overspecialize. They’re able to recognize the importance of having humans trained to sort things in case the computers fail, but not humans trained to do a job in case the other humans fail?

And from the sound of it, it’s not like people are anything close to being overwhelmed. When Cassia talks about what she’ll be doing with her free time, she says she’ll go play games, not because she particularly wants to but because the music is boring and she’s seen all the shows so the only remaining option is games. I bet she and other people would jump for the chance to hear the most boring lecture on how to cook food ever made.

Anyway, time to sort. She has a touchscreen full of numbers and she has to put the numbers in boxes. Okay then.

Halfway through, the pattern we are looking for changes. The system tracks how soon we notice the changes and how quickly we adapt our sorts. You never know when a change will happen. Two minutes later, the pattern changes again, and once more I catch it on the very first line of numbers. I don’t know how, but I always anticipate the shift in pattern before it happens.

Huh, if she’s actually got sorting precognitive powers I could see them getting mad about that because it’s impossible. It’s funny how sufficient amounts of science cultism wrap back to accusing people of witchcraft, isn’t it? I think it might just be that she’s so good at seeing patterns she’s noticing whatever pattern of pattern changes is.

So she sorts all the data perfectly because she’s great at this. Then she goes home. Seems the society actually isn’t that obsessed with exact scheduling, because by the time she gets there the rest of her family’s already eaten and gone out again.

…but then to confuse things, right then the nutrition van arrives with her meal. So does it come around multiple times and somehow know exactly who’s where, so that it brought the rest of her family the meal already? Or did they punch in asking for their food to be dropped off elsewhere, or… And apparently it has to sync up perfectly because it seems implied they have no way of reheating food.

My dinner steams as I open it up. We must have a new nutrition personnel director. Before, the food was always lukewarm when it arrived. Now it’s piping hot.

So, how is that kind of thing handled? This doesn’t seem like the sort of place with a complaints form or that does periodic surveys about how satisfied you are, and there’s no way to use market forces to punish poor performance either. I guess they just rely on watching everyone all the time and punishing slackers, but that takes a lot more effort than having natural feedback, and you start running into problems where you need watchers watching watchers and suddenly half your labor pool is tied up.

Since she finally has the house to herself, just her, her microcard, and the ever-watchful government eye, she jumps at the chance to read the matching card. She pops the card into the port.

and my heart beats faster in anticipation, even though I know Xander so well. What has the Society decided I should know about him, the person I’ll spend most of my life with?

There’s just something weirdly cute about this.

The computer says that they’re pleased to present her match and displays a picture of Xander, as is the standard opening.

But before she can look at the info about him or the guidelines, the screen flickers and the opening repeats:

“Cassia Reyes, the Society is pleased to present you with your Match.”

My heart stops, and I can’t believe what I see. A face comes back into view on the port in front of me.

It is not Xander.

Well. So it looks like she got matched twice.

Considering the whole choice thing, is it considered dogma that there’s one true soulmate for everyone, so the idea that there might be other people where a relationship wouldn’t be a complete disaster is unthinkable? Because if so, the matching committee must be insanely tightlipped and have some really good orientations for the new people, since they’d know it doesn’t work that way.

Or maybe they’ve suddenly realized something wrong with the Xander/Cassia pairing and the computer just updated to tell her that her current match is now that guy. She thinks the data’s on the card, but it could just be the code to access her approved files from the central database.

As motivations go, I guess love is a pretty common one, but it seems silly compared to how boring this world is. You can’t run, there’s only two hundred pieces of fiction to read and one hundred songs to listen to, and you can’t even pass the time reading nonfiction because that kind of information is need to know only. I can see why they memorized the matching pamphlets and why reading the few extra guidelines is such a huge deal, these are some of the only things in existence that that they haven’t already read. And you eat oatmeal ever damn morning. Riot already!