Last time on Matched.com, the red pill!

Somehow I’ve run out of fear; I feel lethargic instead, which is almost worse. Why care about a flat planet populated by flat people? Who cares about a place where there is no Ky?
This is one of the reasons I need Ky, I realize. Because when I am with him, I feel.

Still better than Twilight, though.

She thinks more about Sisyphus for no reason in a way that doesn’t fit with the story’s concepts.

But forget about that, the red pill! It kicked in to erase the last half of the day.

Within the hour, a delivery of new containers and tablets arrived with a letter of explanation that ours were found to be defective and removed earlier this morning. Everyone else in my family accepts the explanation without question.

What an idiotic way of doing things. The officials could just have replaced the red pill at the time. Instead everyone’s going to think it’s weird they don’t remember giving away their containers, and if the red pill is used often, sooner or later people will start to notice the containers always get replaced right when they can’t remember the day before.

Cassia reports her mom and brother are all confused, but her dad isn’t, and she guesses this must have happened to him a lot. So…higher ranking officials get mindwiped more than regular people? That doesn’t make much sense and returns to the question of who the hell is calling the shots here.

Her brother leaves and Something happens to me when I look at Bram leaving our house, and things become real again. Bram is real. I am real. Ky is real, and I need to get started on finding him. Now. Whatever, as long as it means you’re doing something.

She decides to go into the city because hiking was canceled but there wasn’t another assignment.

This in itself is an oversight, another little hitch in the well-oiled machine of our Society that proves something is wrong somewhere.

Maybe it should be, but they didn’t seem particularly concerned about giving alternate assignments when hiking had weather cancellations, and from how working seems to involve variable amounts of time, it just doesn’t seem like they’re actually that concerned with scheduling on anything beyond basic practicality.

Then her mom gets a call telling them they’re getting relocated to the farmlands, or Farmlands as they’re known to our capital letter obsessed bunch.

“I suppose they don’t want those of us who saw the rogue crops to continue working in positions of authority,” my mother says. “We know too much. We might be tempted to do the same. They’ll put us out in the Farmlands where we won’t be in charge. Where they can watch us and wear us out planting what they tell us to plant.”

See, you just can’t function like this. They just lost three skilled workers investigating two other workers. And for what? She already knew one of the crops was edible, and all this showed was that so do the society officials in charge so trying to grow them will get you in trouble. The only thing to hide is the very concept of rebellion by growing food crops, and that’s apparently so commonly known even Cassia finds it obvious.

Now, the fact she hesitated so long on the report? Sure, that was suspicious as fuck and probably made it obvious she wanted to cover things up. Hell, she says out loud to Cassia that she only told the truth because she was scared for her family, and Cassia’s previously (if inconsistently) indicated that homes are monitored.

Oh, and it’s a different province’s farmlands.

Cassia’s mother is stunned and just goes on about how she did what she was supposed to. Only after they threatened you, though.

Cassia goes outside, intending to go find out about Ky as fast as she can. She sees Em, who says that Patrick has been transferred to a new and better job in whatever the “Central Government” is, and that’s why the Markhams are all gone. So, while there’s nothing directly telling us, of the two times it’s come up, the wife has moved based on the husband’s job.

Cassia thinks again how no one but the officials there now know what really happened, and only she and “her” official know she knows.

Patrick and Aida, gone for good, too. Have they been assigned Aberration status or a quiet Retirement somewhere far from here? Have they taken the red tablet, too? Do they look around their new place with surprise, wondering what happened to their second son?

Considering what officials were willing to do to your mom for what she claims is just seeing what they sent her out to investigate, I don’t see why you’d think they’d get treated as anything but traitors. They’re probably getting shipped off to a village like Ky.

Cassia’s brilliant plan is to go to City Hall, then when she gets there she realizes you can’t just walk in and also hey they probably wouldn’t tell anyone, but luckily when she turns to walk away she sees the museum, sorry, Museum.

Because she’s humanly incapable of actually having a good idea and then acting on it, apparently. She has to walk headfirst into a wall and succeed by falling over just right instead.

“Welcome,” says a curator, sitting at a round white desk. “Can I help you find anything?”
“I’m wandering,” I say, trying to look relaxed. “I have some extra time today.”
“And you came here,” the curator says, pleased, puzzled.

She lives in a world where there’s only three other things to do with free time. Why the fuck wouldn’t people go here all the time? Also they recently took everyone’s artifact, so anyone attached to those would have come to see it.

She reminisces about what was apparently her only trip to the place before now, back when she was in elementary school. It’s just that it was exciting and Xander was chatty.

Speaking of artifacts, apparently those weren’t put out, there’s just an extra giant empty case with a sign saying they’ll put them out soon.

I realize that our artifacts will likely never make it into the case. The sign is the only display there may ever be. I don’t know what they’ve done with them.

BUT THEY HAVE NO REASON TO DO THAT, IT’S DUMB.

The sign makes people expect it’ll happen. It reminds them there’s other artifacts around. And it makes things look sloppy and incompetent that they can’t even dump artifacts into a case within a reasonable timeframe.

So she goes into the basement to see Oria’s history, as was her plan. We continue to not hear anything about what that history entails because lol history is dumb who cares.

A guy comes up to ask her if she wants to know more about history! She decides that no, her poem only means something if only two people know it, and says nope.

even though I would like to know the true history of this place where I live. But I don’t think anyone knows it anymore.

Bullshit, Cassia, had you any interest you’d at least tell us what the claimed history is. Also, you could just strike up a regular conversation with the guy.

Before I leave, I look once more at the geographic map of our Society. There, in the middle of the map, fat and happy, sit the large plump shapes of the Provinces. And around their edges are all the Outer Provinces

BUT WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU? How big is it? Are you on a single continent? How many provinces are there, and how big is a province? Is your country a circle, as if it expanded evenly, or is it another shape suggesting pressure from other countries at various points? Is any of it on the coastline?

She asks the guy about the fact none of the outer provinces had their names listed, and he says they’ve just called outer provinces, because surely that wouldn’t be confusing as fuck when trying to administrate anything.

Something stands out to me, one piece of information lodges in my sorting brain: Sisyphus River. It threads through some of the Western Provinces and then through two of the Outer Provinces and off into the void of the Other Countries.

Why the fuck would they have named a river that when they don’t have Greek mythology anymore? It’s not that hard to homogenize a culture! Renaming things is the easiest step!

Cassia decides that this means Ky’s from one of the two the river flows through, even though he treated Sisyphus as a person and made no mention of ever hearing the name in another context. Now, if Ky had done anything, anything at all, to hint that he meant it as a coded reference – maybe even shouting to remember the rock or something when he was getting taken away – this would work, but he decidedly did not. Furthermore, that would only tell us where he grew up, not where they’re sending him.

Also, hey, so there’s more than one other country out there. No way of telling if she knows names for them or how many there are. Just stupid capitalization.

The guy asks again if he can help her with anything, and she realizes he seems like he actually means it instead of that he’s fishing for a trade. Yay for people not being dicks. She asks about the river, and he says he heard that A long time ago the river turned toxic partway down and no one could live near its banks.

Continuing our absurd leaps of reasoning, she decides the society must have poisoned the river because it flows into enemy territory because that’s just like poisoning the elderly. I guess they’re too dumb to realize you can poison it on the edge of your territory instead of in the middle. So she decides that since Ky’s village wasn’t poisoned they must have been further up the river. Or they might just not have lived right on the banks of that one river, that could also be it.

Anyway, so she leaves and finds the demonized official waiting for her right outside.

“I made a mistake. You have to bring him back.”

Cassia you know they don’t actually give a fuck and Ky made it obvious from his reaction that he knew too much, anyway.

The official says Ky already got special treatment just being here and also hello she’s proving why this kind of thing is bad, just look at how she wants to falsify data for emotional reasons! The official goes on to say that anyway, the sort was right about his qualifications.

“He should be the one who decides whether to go or stay. Not me. Not you. Let him choose.”

Not actually how society works, Cassia! And I do mean all societies ever, not just your own Society. Societies require making rules and obligations. Obviously it’s better to maximize freedom whenever possible, but it’s not inherently wrong just because it wasn’t his choice.

“If we did, everything would fall apart,” she says, patiently. “Why do you think we can guarantee such long life spans? How do you think we eradicated cancer? We Match for everything. Genes included.”

I think the author meant to use matching to be the centerpiece of this story – just look at the title. But it’s completely failed at that. No emphasis was made on matching people to the right job or the right free time activity or the right friend or the right food. The first and last of those are picked for you by the government, but they never had the emphasis of matching. The middle ones both share a great deal with matching, but they’re left entirely to people’s choices.

So, the couples matching can’t be seen as properly symptomatic of the larger issue, nor can “matching” be seen as a broader term for society’s general refusal to let people make choices. It’s just not how it’s been used in the story.

And matching obviously involves more than genes (indeed, there’s every sign genes aren’t even a factor, just obvious phenotypes, since Cassia supposedly did a test sort for matching and genes weren’t one of the data types, plus these are science cultist loonies who can’t get DNA after a 24-hour window and don’t realize DNA doesn’t encode personality, like hell they know how genes work). And there’s no reason to make it so that couples produce their own children in the first place. The author was fine stealing so much else from the Giver, why not that?

Also not how cancer works.

Also does anyone in this world realize eighty isn’t a long lifetime? My maternal grandfather died in his seventies, “Which isn’t very old,” Dad adds unprompted when I ask him to check if I remember right. It was cancer by way of pesticides in someone who was already extremely unhealthy, the sort of thing that’s all preventable once society realizes it’s going on. My maternal grandmother is alive and in her late eighties with breast cancer, that side of the family having genetic tendencies for it. You do not need perfect genes to get to eighty.

Cassia just accepts the idea that it’s a tradeoff between long lives without any freedom vs mayfly lives that are free, instead complaining about the whole poisoning thing. The official doesn’t even try to give their justification for it! She just says but it’s really awesome before then and also we’re super nice about the poisoning and everyone else throughout history would love to live in our boring society with terrible food and free murder at the end!

“So we eat to die.”
She dismisses my concern. “Everyone eats to die, regardless of what we do.

Which is very true and yet totally unconnected to the rest of the conversation.

Your problem is that you don’t respect the system and what it offers you, even now.”

But, Cassia says, all the examples the official has were from the last two months – presumably that’s the time this book took place during, wasn’t really paying attention because my eyes glazed over at the hiking hiking hiking Ky bits – because before then she was always good.

If she had a way to track all my memories, she would see they are pure. That I truly wanted to fit in and be Matched and do everything the right way. That I truly believed.

Well, not really.

I mean, yes, in the early chapters Cassia says their society is awesome. But the moment anything contradicts it, she immediately assumes the problem is theirs, not hers. She first insists that Ky must be her real match and then that the matching system was wrong, never actually making any attempt to go along with her official match after that point. She goes on about how she loves Ky and Xander differently, but never considers for an instant why she’s so certain the love she feels for Ky is the one that’s supposed to go with a matching rather than the love she feels for Xander. She seizes on every little thing to disprove the matching system, from her own attraction to Ky to her dad not telling her mom about the sample, rather than considering the possibility it’s a flaw in the individual. If she believed, it’s the type of belief that’s always waiting for a single instant of imperfection to reject it all out of hand.

The official then adds that you know, whatever, the experiment needed to end because they need to assign people to more important jobs. Cassia asks what she’s talking about, then says she already knows when she’s told it’s the whole Ky and her thing, then is SHOCKED to learn it wasn’t a mistake Ky was in the pool, even though that was obvious the moment Ky told her officials took him aside just to tell him about it.

She says they add aberrations occasionally just to see what the data shows, but when they saw Ky match with Cassia they decided to see what’d happen. Apparently this went all the way to putting them together in the same pair, even though that only happened because they were the two fastest climbers. I mean, you can assume that maybe if Cassia and Ky wouldn’t be paired by that criteria they’d have used another one, but it’s quite a coincidence and if it was meant to be because of interference it should have been that the kids were paired randomly and it just happens they’re together.

She smiles. “It was so intriguing; we could control so many variables. We even reduced your meal portions to see if that would make you more stressed, more likely to give up.

And if that was the idea, it’d have been nice for Cassia to have ever mentioned feeling hungry or stressed or anything but mentioning it as curious the two times she notices it at all.

The official also compliments her strength for never using a green pill, because obviously everyone secretly agrees with her grandfather about it being bad to use them instead of officials viewing refusing it when miserable as akin to self-harm. She goes on about how interesting and intriguing Cassia is, which is lame sueishness, but at least it’s Cassia getting it for once instead of fucking Ky.

It would have been interesting to see your situation play out to the final predicted outcome.” She sighs, a sigh of genuine sadness. “I planned to write an article about it, available only to select Officials, of course. It would have been an unparalleled proof of the validity of Matching. That’s why I didn’t want you to lose your memory of what happened this morning at the air-train station. All my work would have been for nothing. Now, at least I can see you make your final choice while you still know what happened.”

So, in conclusion, totally 1984 with creating their own opposition for the lulz, minus everything that actually worked when 1984 did it.

Cassia demands to know why she’s being told this.

She looks surprised. “Because we care about you, Cassia. No more or less than we care about all our citizens. As the subject of an experiment, you have the right to know what happened.

This is actually an interesting idea, it’s just at odds with everything else. Then again, maybe it’s better to say that their handling of the experiment is what’s at odds with everything else. They can predict everything about Cassia but not the part where she’ll be upset her perfect match she’s head over heels in love with is taken away to die because of a choice they tricked her into making and it was all just because they were bored?

She asks if they told Xander.

“Of course not. He’s still your Match. In order for the experiment to be controlled, he had to remain in the dark. He knows nothing about any of this.
Except what I told him, I think, and I realize that she doesn’t know.
There are things she doesn’t know. With this realization, it is as though something has been given back to me. The knowledge drops into my anger and distills it into something pure and clear. And one of the things she knows nothing about is love.

Actually, the sane interpretation of that would be “of course we didn’t tell him we were doing an experiment”. For some reason the book thinks the topic’s changed to Xander knowing about her cheating on him.

And obviously she knows about love. Your whole argument they didn’t know about it prior to this hinged on Ky not being your chosen match, but he was.

“So you watched us all the time,” I say.
“Not all the time,” she answers. “We watched you enough to get an effective sample of what your interactions were like. We couldn’t watch all of your interactions on the Hill, for example, or even on the smaller hill. Officer Carter still had jurisdiction over that area and did not look kindly on our being there.”

Bear in mind her examples of their interference are all about manipulating the hiking to get them closer together, but for some reason they were never actually observing them during that time! That is not how experiments work, science cultists!

Belatedly, this science cultist seems to realize that, because she asks if Cassia will tell what happened there. Of course, if she actually wanted testimony to go with her data, she could have easily pretended to be Cassia’s friend this whole time, waited for Cassia’s final confession about what went on during hiking, and then told her it was all a social experiment.

Let’s all think about how much better that book would have been. Cassia not knowing at the start of the book to hate the woman based on what she’d do at the very end. Cassia trusting officials like we’re told she does. The reader given something to figure out, instead of just sitting and waiting for the hiking to be done with so the plot can wrap up, with hope for the readers who fell for it (surely officials are nice and they’ll let Cassia be with Ky!) and suspense for those who distrust the convenience of a nice matching official happy to chat about a matching failure.

The official says she’ll get Cassia a work position now so she won’t have to go to the farmlands, because it’s not like Cassia has any reason to distrust a verbal agreement. Also, the point of sending the family away was knowing about the crops and her mother already blabbed to Cassia about them.

Cassia, once again showing that keen sorter’s mind that failed to pick up on any of this at all, is tempted because she’d like to stay there, and only refuses because she’s planning to leave to find Ky anyway.

The prisoner’s dilemma. Somewhere Ky keeps faith with me and I can do the same for him. I won’t give up.

THAT’S NOT WHAT IT IS.

The official says that’s what she expected the answer would be. Cassia asks what the final prediction she’s so attached to is, and the official is all well it’s the thing you’re about to do, obviously.

But I’ll tell you if you’d like.”

Cassia decides that she doesn’t want to know after all because the official didn’t know some other stuff so probably it isn’t true anyway. Bad protagonist! Bad!

Then she asks again about the fact they put Ky in the pool and when the official says yes, Cassia sees it’s a lie.

The faintest twitch of muscle in her jaw, a slight shift of her eyes, the smallest ring of performance in the tone of her voice. She doesn’t often have to lie; she’s never been an Aberration, so this doesn’t come easily to her, she hasn’t had as much practice. She can’t keep her face perfectly still the way Ky does when he’s playing a game and he knows what he has to do, whether it’s better to win or lose.

Actually the perfect stillness thing is the way you can tell. There’s a bunch of things that mean “not lying” and when trying hard to convince you, people will usually try to do as many as possible as hard as they can. There’s a sort of trustworthiness uncanny valley produced where the end result is unsettling but you can’t quite tell why because they’re certainly sincere-seeming, aren’t they?

Fun fact! People actually have a hell of a time detecting lies. See, lying and lie detection are under the same pressures as lion/antelope interactions. People who don’t often lie will be bad at it, but people who don’t often judge if the other person is lying will also be bad at it. Cassia should be absolutely terrible at this while the official does have a job where she must lie moderately often. (She also has need to lie in a very different way than an aberration would.)

But the point is that it seems someone else added Ky’s name and the official doesn’t actually know why.

If the Officials didn’t, who did?

You realize this could sum up just about everything that’s happened in this book. There’s no sign of who’s actually in charge and making decisions.

If the almost-impossible happened before—my being Matched to two boys I already knew—then it can happen again.

CASSIA YOU ALREADY KNOW THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKS YOU TOLD YOUR FRIEND BEFORE THAT ONE UNLIKELY EVENT DOESN’T MEAN ANOTHER UNLIKELY EVENT SHUT UP

I can find him.

ALSO BOOK LEARN TO HAVE CASSIA ACCOMPLISH THINGS BY SOMETHING OTHER THAN DUMB LUCK