Ah, back to the comparatively tolerable Connor 2, who’s explaining how he cleverly didn’t say he wanted power and just networked like hell and at last, through careful planning, Starkey has inserted himself in the right place at the right time to gain Connor ’s favor without him ever knowing that it was all part of Starkey’s long-term plan.

It looks a hell of a lot like random chance. Yes, he was sucking up, but unless he actually sabotaged the refrigerators, which there’s no sign of, this seems overstated. And a good planner is someone who has a reasonable grasp of their own limits and how much chance will play a part.

Now it’s on to Stage Two, wandering into other people’s areas to find out how stuff works. He heads to Hayden’s radio thing.

“I’m not the tech geek everyone makes me out to be,” Hayden tells him. “I’m just very good at taking credit for other people’s work. I think I get it from my father—he was uniquely skilled at stomping on fingers as he climbed the corporate ladder.” Hayden studies Starkey for a moment, and Starkey just smiles back.
“Something wrong?”
“No,” Hayden says. “I was just wondering if you’re thinking of stealing my position. Not that I care. I wouldn’t mind working food service for a while, but it would help me to know what your intentions are.”

So it seems like people actually do find him a lot more suspicious than he thinks, but everyone talks weirdly in this book so it’s hard to say for sure.

Then he opens his explanation with: “I have an ethnically diverse team here,” Hayden tells him proudly, going around the room. “Tad is Japanese, Hailey is umber, Jeevan is Indian—and Esme is half-Hispanic. I think her other half must be extraterrestrial, because she’s too damn smart to be all human.” Esme preens proudly for a moment, then gets back to work cracking coded communications. “We have Nasim, who’s Muslim, working side by side with Lizbeth, who’s Jewish, and guess what? They’re in love.”

Why is this here? I don’t know. Maybe it’s the author trying to make a point that everyone unwinds their kids?

All this diversity emphasis just reminds me that while every religion and ethnicity may be here, there’s still zero gay kids.

Hayden points out the various monitoring consoles. “There’s a communications monitoring program running on this one. It can pull keywords out of anything from e-mails to phone conversations. It can warn us if the Juvey-cops are up to something major. Kind of an early warning system originally developed to fight terrorism, but isn’t it nice to know we can now use it for civilian purposes?”

I wonder exactly what he means here.

It sure sounds like this is one of those things that fights terrorism by spying on all citizens, so I think “for civilian purposes” may mean “by civilians” as opposed to “on civilians”. But as I said last post, it’s obvious that there’s an enormous amount of surveillance currently and no one seems to even think of it, and there’s no sign they have a concept of terrorism, just clappers who attack at random and have no goals.

The real reason is probably that the first book was published in 1997 and this one is 2012. Terrorism is the catch-all explanation now for anything the government does, so it’s showing up here in the same way.

Connor 2 continues his brilliant plan of being sweet and non-suspicious by telling Hayden his broadcasting thing is stupid because it’s short range and Hayden’s like no shit it’s not supposed to get picked up by outside radios.

“And second,” Hayden says, not denying it, “it’s preparing me for a career in broadcasting, which I plan to pursue once I turn seventeen and get out of this place.”
“Not hanging around to help Connor, huh?”
“My loyalty has the half-life of unpasteurized milk,” Hayden tells him. “I’d take a bullet for Connor, and he knows it. But only until I’m seventeen.” It all seems pretty straightforward until Esme says, “I thought you already were seventeen.”
Hayden shifts his shoulders uncomfortably. “Last year didn’t count.”

Connor 2 doesn’t even try to tell us what he thinks it means because there really is no answer. The author thought up a clever speech and by god he was going to use it.

Then he sees the list of kids about to get unwound, and Connor 2 noticed zero of the kids they plan to rescue are storked kids.

Hayden looks genuinely perplexed and takes the list to look at it. “Hmm, I hadn’t noticed. Anyway, it’s not part of our criteria. We look for only-children in dimly lit suburban neighborhoods. It means fewer people to squeal on us, and less of a chance of being seen. See, brothers and sisters can’t keep their mouths shut, no matter what we threaten them with. I guess mothers who stork babies mostly give them to people who are parents already. Hard to find a storked only child.”

Because Connor 2 is all STORK PRIDE he says they should change how they pick, and Hayden’s all eh whatevs.

It doesn’t occur to either of them that parents sign the orders months in advance, so their stupid-ass charges into people’s homes a day before pickup aren’t the only way to do it.

It’s annoying that we still don’t know if there’s any prejudice against storked kids. This seems to be pointing to it being all in his head, but at the same time – seriously, none of them? Even if storked kids always have older siblings, which is weird when that never seemed a factor last time and our representative storked character was the first kid in his family, but assuming it’s almost always true, there should be plenty of kids whose older siblings have left already. If you’re sixteen and your older sibling is eighteen, they’re away at college.

When there are two kids on the same day they could both get, do they tend to pick the one with the birthday? That’s the kind of prejudice I could see people having but not being aware of – it might not even be a universal thing, just that sometimes, the person picking does that and no one else notices.

Anyway, even though there is an answer and he seems to be asking for special treatment for storks, at the same time when this propels him to decide to build a storked power base from the other disenfranchised kids it works, so, I don’t know, maybe it’s supposed to be an actual sign of prejudice?

It’s not an easy task, because most storks want to keep their storking a shameful secret. Starkey, however, makes no secret of his own doorstep arrival, and soon the storked kids begin to seek him out, seeing him as their champion.

Okay but last book this was the state home kids. What happened with that? There are a legitimate divide there.

1/4 of all the kids were storked. We don’t get numbers on the state home ones. We also don’t get any comparison between the percent in the camp vs the lists of kids slated for unwinding. Are there a lot of storked kids because their parents pick murdering all the time or because they’re more likely to suspect their parents and run for it.

Former food head turns out to be one of those storks, because Connor 2 can only manage all this on an endless string of favorable coincidences and is willing to support him because he says if she’s patient she’ll get revenge on Connor Prime.

Connor 2 then goes to visit Prime working on an engine and chatters with him until he’s annoyed, then strikes:

“Listen, I’ve been thinking . . . you know I was storked, right? And well, you know, it’s nothing big, but I thought it might be nice to make some special reserved time just for storked kids at the Rec Jet. Just to show them they won’t be discriminated against anymore.”
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Connor says, as he stares at the engine, happy to be ending the conversation. He never even realizes what he’s just given away.

This is a pretty good play. It’s a little wonky because it’s still unclear if it’s accepted that there’s a prejudice against storks or not – if not, that should’ve confused Prime enough to make him start to think about what Connor 2 just said.

The problem is that it’s so incredibly obvious what a bad idea it is. Totally plausible one person not paying attention wouldn’t notice the problem, but it should cause immediate complaints.

Starkey calls his little group the Stork Club and stakes out the hour between seven and eight every evening. While everyone’s looking somewhere else, a new class distinction rises within the Graveyard. The Stork Club is the only minority with special members-only time at the Rec Jet. It’s a taste of privilege that these kids have never had before—and Starkey wants them to gobble it up. He wants them to get used to it. He wants them all to expect it—and to know that Starkey can deliver.

BUT HOW ARE THE OTHER KIDS NOT NOTICING THIS?

The secret clubhouse thing only works if other people don’t see it happening. If kids are trying to show up to the rec room, which, you know, the only place to hang out at all, and they’re getting turned away, they’re going to go crying to Connor Prime about it as well as everybody else.

Now, if he’d asked if he could set up a private area and then began diverting everything good to his special club, that might work.

Since Starkey runs food services, members of the Stork Club start replacing others in serving positions, and dole out larger servings to other storks with a wink. In the Holy of Whollies, the only ones who seem wise to these little creeping alliances are Ashley, whose job it is to root out social flare points, and that obnoxious Sherman kid who replaced John as head of waste and sanitation. It turns out Ralphy was easily bribed to look the other way, and as for Ashley, Starkey pretty much has it under control.
“What if giving storks special treatment creates resentment in the general population?” Ashley asks him as he supervises dinner one night.
“Well,” Starkey tells her with a mildly seductive smile, “the general population can kiss my ass.”
It makes Ashley blush just a little bit. “Just try to keep a low profile, okay?”
Still beaming charm, he says, “It’s what I do best,” and serves her a nice heaping portion, all the while calculating how she might secretly play into his plans.

Now, I know the author has kids, somehow. Did he not raise them? Was that entirely Mommy’s job so he has no idea children notice and then never stop complaining about unfair treatment? And this when they’re running low on food and everyone is going hungry. He’s not privately giving out treats, which would be a great way of currying favor. He is, in plain sight of everyone else in line, giving extra food to some of the kids while winking. While the non-stork workers are watching, and also getting pushed out.

It doesn’t matter if Connor 2 would blow off any complaints, this book’s first Connor Prime chapter was about how he doesn’t delegate and every time anyone’s unhappy about anything they whine to him immediately.

But no, somehow his incredibly obvious favoritism is so clever and sneaky, so he does more clever and sneaky: he not very stealth badmouths Connor Prime during the special stork time at the rec center.

“I think Connor ’s done a good job for a guy who’s not all that smart,” he tells them offhandedly. Or, “I really like Connor. He’s not much of a leader, but isn’t he a great guy?”

And the book insists all the kids are too dumb to think anything of this and only notice what he’s saying subliminally, and how definitely none of them would ever think he wanted power and they’ll think it was all their own idea.