Last time, Miracolina’s chapter was so incredibly long and terrible I split it into two. Today, the other terrible half.

Her school is a huge one, so even though tithes aren’t common in her neighborhood, there are four others, all dressed in white like her.

Knowing what “huge” actually was sure would be helpful here, especially when “neighborhood” is such a small number.

Neighborhood size is actually not any official thing, but I just checked and found an LA study on people’s opinions that more or less matches my own general sense so I’m guessing this is rather standard:

Your neighborhood definitely is the street block you’re on and almost certainly the surrounding streets. It possibly encompasses everything in a short walk around.

That’s not a lot of families, and not all families even have kids (you might think “but storking” to which I remind you that somehow, there was a young couple who wanted a baby and didn’t have one to take Risa’s foundling) so for tithing to be merely “not common” rather than “unheard of” actually makes it sound like it’s still happening at a reasonable rate. And yet somehow her “huge” school has only four kids – six previously, but two are gone.

And really, how is she to have any idea what a “huge” middle school is? How many has she been to? What are the standards for size in Unwindverse, where everyone seems to have siblings and everyone adult seems to hate kids and presumably also the taxes to give them reasonably sized schools?

Oddly, they’re all from different backgrounds and faiths. Each is a member of a splinter sect of their particular religion—a sect that takes its commitment to self-sacrifice very seriously.

Except also it’s a rich people thing.

It’s really not that odd that the kids would be from different faiths. That’s like saying it’s super weird people can share opinions about gun control or medicare across religions. The religions aren’t founded around those subjects. They exist, and then a new subject comes up, and different people come to different opinions on it, and you get sects.

Now yes, as an atheist I do think it’d be easier to keep track of if you just have religions take various positions and then people decide which religion based on what their own positions are, but as a person who isn’t insane, I can understand that you aren’t going to switch from believing Jesus was the son of God who died for our sins and there can be no heaven but through him to believing that this is the fifth world created when the humble Nanahuatzin sacrificed himself upon a pyre to become the most recent sun, and without human sacrifice the sun will stop in the sky and sear us all just because they share your thoughts on gun control.

Really, the idea that child sacrifice would be a splinter of each sect is the most reasonable reaction we’ve seen in a world where people otherwise appear to uniformly adopt all sorts of nonsense. The only oddness is that they’d all call it tithing, but perhaps it’s that the first group to do it referred to it like that so that became the standard term. Or hell, maybe they don’t all call it tithing, though they do seem to all share the white robes thing.

Funny, Miracolina thinks, how these same religions fought over their differences for thousands of years, and yet in tithing, they all come together as one.

As Miracolina is undoubtedly ignorant of the fact that opposing religions banding together is a thing that starts happening about as soon as the concept of distinct religions does, this is a reasonable thing for her to think. It is a dumb thing for the author to think because it’s a lazy cliche that just serves to brush aside the fact religions work together against common enemies all the damn time and our persistent confusion about this point leads to yet more problems.

Her friend says it’s all about being charitable and selfless. “If technology allows us a new way to give, how could it be wrong?” which just brings up the gaping plot hole of if adult organ donations even exist. You’d think sects based around selflessness would have adults wanting to do this too on occasion. Obviously you can’t order your parent/sibling/spouse unwound, but can you offer yourself? Did they do away with even standard issue organ donor cards?

(This might explain there being no matches for Miracolina’s brother – if there’s no adults getting tested for bone marrow, and the only stuff is what’s in the bones of the kids after being slaughtered but before being transplanted, America’s pool of possible donors would be remarkably shallow. But that’s just yet another reason why it’d have made sense to stay in Rome. And if they wanted to take advantage of a dubious regime’s side benefits, what, are you telling me China’s cleaned up its act that much?)

Except there are people who do say that it’s wrong. More and more people these days.

This reminds me that there’s still a big hole in what we know about tithes. All tithes appear to be happy little suicides. What about kids who are scared? The tithes appear to be raised to be extremely well behaved and generally angelic (bit unclear how everyone knows how to do this, but it sure seems true), which results in everyone around them loving them, which should lead to a good chunk of that everyone being willing to listen to the kid say they don’t actually want to die. And we know from Lev that the tithing doesn’t seem to have any legal basis because a big point is made that the decision to unwind can’t be undone but Lev can just never show up and no one notices or cares, which means that a family that decides not to kill their kid can.

There’s even that ex-tithe out there—the one who became a clapper, who people hold up as an example. Well, how stable can he be? After all, he became a clapper, for goodness’ sake. The way Miracolina sees it, if someone would rather blow themselves up than be tithed, well, that’s like stealing from the collection plate, isn’t it? It’s just plain wrong.

I think this is supposed to sound dumb from how it’s worded, but yeah, deliberately destroying something meant for God is generally regarded as a sort of blasphemy. And it’s not like Lev was blowing himself up as part of any coherent ideology, since the author keeps insisting clappers are just, like, chaos, man. So it was a kid who’d escaped unwinding and got a chance to live turning around and saying he was still going to die, he just wanted to make sure to spit in God’s eye about it.

At home, she’s “surprised” to see her brother has shown up for her final day because his school’s really far off. This is obviously meant to keep emphasizing that she doesn’t get what a big deal this is, but also everyone knew well in advance about this and her brother would probably just have said that he’d be there. Given it’s his little sister’s last day alive, it shouldn’t even have been too hard to convince his professors to give him the whole week off. As it is, he’s only going to get one hour with her before she leaves.

Her parents just sob and so her brother tries to talk about nice stuff, like how they went back to Rome to a museum and she runs off and look, Rome doesn’t do unwinding and no reasonable country should be okay with it, shouldn’t people stealing the kids of Americans be a big deal? I mean, America tries to run off with people’s children practically any time a disaster happens. Surely other countries would be reasonably motivated by us literally committing child sacrifice.

(Or at the least, ask the kids if they’re tithed then steal those. It may be terribly rare, but it must also look like the very most horrific of the horrible things we do, and this is taking place at a religious center which must be extra appalled by the blasphemy of saying it’s done in God’s name.)

Missing isn’t the word for it, though. You don’t go missing in a museum—you just get temporarily absorbed by the walls. She remembers moving through the crowds of the Vatican, until she found herself standing in the middle of the Sistine Chapel, gazing up toward Michelangelo’s masterpiece, which covered the walls and ceiling. And there in the center was the divine link between heaven and earth. So close was Adam’s hand to the hand of God, both straining to touch each other, but the impossible weight of gravity kept Adam from truly touching the heavens.
She stood there, looking up, forgetting that she was supposed to be hiding, for who could hide in a place that was all about revealed mystery? And that’s exactly where her family found her; amid hundreds of tourists, staring up at the greatest work of art ever created by the hand of man—humanity’s grandest attempt to touch perfection.

Hey look, a moment of pleasant writing! Enjoy.

She was only six, but even then, the images of the chapel spoke to her, although she had no idea what they said. All she knew was that she herself was just like this beautiful place, and if someone could go inside her, they would see glorious frescoes painted on the walls of her soul.

As I said at the start of the previous post, she really is an improvement as a character compared to Lev. You can feel how religion just resonates with her. And it’s an unexamined, instinctive resonance. She doesn’t seem to know anything of the actual theology – I’m sure she learns it, but the fact she doesn’t use any of its arguments makes it clear that’s not part of her reasoning. She sees beauty and she wants to make her life part of that.

When it’s time to leave her parents just cry more and more and she gets annoyed with them and tells them she’s not upset so respect her choice to be okay with it, which may possibly be some really convoluted snipe at the prochoice camp. More likely it doesn’t have any deeper meaning.

“The only reason you’re at peace with it,” her father tells her, “is because we made you feel that way. It’s our fault. It’s all our fault.”

It’d really help if we knew when they changed their mind.

Miracolina looks at them and shrugs. “So change your mind, then,” she suggests. “Break your pact with God and don’t tithe me.”
They look back at her like she’s giving them a glorious gift, a reprieve from hell. Even Matteo is hopeful.
“Yes, that’s what we’ll do!” her mother says. “We haven’t signed the final papers yet. We can still change our minds!”
“Fine,” says Miracolina. “Are you sure that’s what you want?”
“Yes,” says her father with intense relief. “Yes, we’re sure.”

This is not hard to understand. Adults are useless idiots who are sobbing over their terrible idea of killing their daughter but too stupid to realize not killing is an option until it’s pointed out.

This would make a trifle more sense if the papers were signed but she offered to run away and they began to swear they’d do everything to help.

“Good, now you can be guilt free.” Miracolina picks up her suitcase. “But regardless of what you choose, I’m going anyway. That’s my choice.”

I do like how decisive she is.

I wonder what happens if a kid wants to volunteer for unwinding. With the amount of teens who get depressed and suicidal, this should be appealing to at least a segment. We even know that the kid Risa meets near the beginning on the bus is looking forward to unwinding and being (partly) part of someone better.

Think about it. Your life and all its unbearable pains end, but you don’t have to actually die to accomplish it. You may be a worthless screwup, but your parts have value and everyone who gets a piece of you will thank you for it as you finally do something right for once. And with the idea you somehow remain and experience through those people, you can finally live the life of all those other, happy people.

Oh, you know what’d be an interesting snippet? Imagine a situation where, like Connor, a kid stumbles across the unwind papers and tells their friends and one friend decides to try to swap places- perhaps expecting that they’d be let go again but their friend would have time to escape or perhaps just thinking they could do good with their death, and how would everyone else react? Would they be gotten back from the unwind camp, making them the only kid ever to have an idea what happens there? Would the government just shrug and let it happen? Or maybe say that they’ll exchange the kid if anyone can dig up the kid who’s supposed to be there, otherwise death? What would the media reaction be? How would the saved kid feel?

Then she hugs her mother, father, and brother and leaves without looking back—without even saying good-bye, because good-byes imply an end, and more than anything else in this life, Miracolina Roselli wants to believe that her tithing is a beginning.

This is where Miracolina’s character is shakiest. She believes a whole mess of things but the writing keeps pushing certain ones as primary when it doesn’t really make sense. I wonder if it’s because Lev was so crappy that now she has to shoulder extra tithe character options.

Miracolina doesn’t need to believe this is a beginning, because she has the option of backing out. The idea she has to go through with this was floated once earlier, with her saying that you can’t go back on a promise to God, but she also constantly talks about how happy she is to be a tithe and how it’s given meaning to her life and made her soul like a painted chapel.

If what motivated her was fear of disobeying God, clinging to the idea this won’t be the end would make sense, but that works at cross purposes with the idea she likes what tithing has done to her life.

We then get another advertisement. I’m not wholly sure what to make of these – they’re really clumsily inserted, but on the other hand, at least they are a pure batch of “show”.

“When Billy’s behavior became too much for us to bear, and we began to fear for our own safety, we did the only humane thing. We sent him to harvest camp, so he could find fulfillment in a divided state. But now, with an age restriction preventing seventeen-year-olds from being unwound, we wouldn’t have had that choice. Just last week a seventeen-year-old girl in our neighborhood got drunk, crashed her car, and killed two innocent people. Would it still have happened if her parents could have chosen to send her to harvest camp? You tell me.”
VOTE YES ON PROP 46! End the Cap-17 law, and lift the ban on late-teen unwinding!

Not good show, but, you know, something.

This highlights how little it makes sense to ban seventeen-year-old unwinding rather than twelve-year-old. The only reason for doing it the way it went down was to avoid the question of how to handle the kids (would the little kids go back to their families who can choose to unwind them again in a year? to state orphanages that…unwind basically everybody as soon as they can?) and the in-universe concerns about that likely pale before the concerns about releasing nearly adult angry teens when supposedly the secret real reason for unwinding was angry teens.

But I do like the tiny glimpse we see into the world. There actually are older teens who are dangerous enough for their parents to be afraid. They’re vanishingly rare, but it does happen, and there’s a very slight parallel in that once they’re officially adult, their parents can lose the ability to do stuff like put them in institutions. In Unwind’s world, you have the option of just killing them. It’s an awful option, but there are be situations where people would take the awful option, and removing a year would be a big deal to those people. A sixteen year old boy might still be manageable even as the violent outbursts get worse, but now his parents can’t wait to see if things stabilize, they have to decide now if they’re going to kill him.

The problem is it’s turned to farce with the bit about drunk driving. There should be a seventeen-year-old kid who killed his family. An already unstable (and possibly abused) kid whose family decided they were sick of dealing with him and decided they should murder him gets let back out? There’s got to be one people can point to given how many kids there are and that the kids at the harvest camps are already far more likely to have other problems.

The drunk driving one should be a separate bit about how it used to be that kids who drove drunk were unwound but now they’re going to be back on the streets to kill again, oh no!

But back to Miracolina, who is now in a van with a strange man being driven away from her house. But it’s a fancy leather seated van and she says the man looks kind of like Santa, so it’s okay.

“Excited for your big day?” Chauffeur-Claus asks as they drive away from Miracolina’s home and family. “Did you have a big tithing party?”
“Yes, and no,” she says. “I’m excited, but no party.”
“Aww . . . that’s too bad. Why not?”
“Because tithing shouldn’t be about me.”
“Oh,” is all Chauffeur-Claus can say to that. Miracolina’s response is the perfect conversation killer, which is fine.

Here, I think, we’re seeing something similar to the nice-socks. This really isn’t something that’d kill conversation. This guy should’ve had plenty of freaky tithe kids to talk to, so he should be great at this, and even someone on their first trip should be able to handle a softball like that. You respond by saying you’re so impressed with her maturity or something.

The last thing she wants is to recap her life for this man, no matter how jolly he is.

Really, her being a sacrifice that’s willing to kill herself for you to avoid angering God would be pretty fun, but it’s not what we got, so having her be snippy at the last second is just meh.

“One more pickup this afternoon,” Chauffeur-Claus tells her. “Tuesdays are lean, so it’s just this stop.

Pretty sure tithed kids go on their birthdays in which case there shouldn’t be a particular weekday that’s lean.

Anyway, they head to a gated community to a huge house for the one other kids, because for some reason that’s still unclear this is a rich person thing despite also being something done by various sects across religions.

a boy with straight dark hair, perfectly trimmed, bright blue eyes, and skin as pale as bone china—as if he had been kept out of the sun all his life to keep his skin pure as a baby’s bottom for his tithing.

Soooo….is that a way things work? Are tithed kids often kept literally sheltered and inside, or is that just how this kid looks? If tithed kids generally get perfect childhoods, this could mean that he’s a really timid kid and his family never pushed him to do anything. But it could also be that tithed kids can do lots of stuff as long as there’s no risk of injury. Or anything really because like everything we don’t know much about how this works.

What we do know is that His tithing whites are shiny satin and trimmed in fine gold brocade. This boy’s parents spared no expense. Miracolina’s tithing whites, on the other hand, are simple raw silk, unbleached so their whiteness won’t be so blinding that it draws attention to itself. Compared to hers, this boy’s whites are like a neon advertisement. which suggests his family absolutely did like to parade him around.

The kid’s name is Timothy, and he’s obviously scared.

As insulted as she is by his lavish whites and exclusive neighborhood, Miracolina begins to feel sorry for him. His fear hangs in the air around them like a web full of black widows. No one should journey to their tithing in terror.

More on Miracolina’s resentment for standard tithes would also have been nice. To what degree is she feigning acceptance with pious excuses? Does she wish she could’ve had a huge party and blinding white robes? Or is part of her offense because she feels God is offended by this and her own sacrifice cheapened?

“So, the ride is like three hours, or something?” Timothy asks, his voice shaky.
“Yes,” says Chauffeur-Claus brightly. “There’s an entertainment system with hundreds of preprogrammed movies to pass the time. Help yourselves!”

Which makes me think that I don’t think there’s been one mention of videogames. That’d probably do a lot more to distract kids than a movie.

“They say tithes get treated really well at harvest camp. You think it’s true? They say it’s lots of fun, and we’re with tons of other kids just like us.”

Another thing you’d expect is for there to be some documentary/propaganda piece of this by now. Even the main harvest camp sounds like it looks outwardly pretty nice on first glance – it’s just a bunch of kids having fun with sports! You can include a few shots of that going on in the background while talking to the much nicer tithes.

He clears his throat. “They say we even get to choose the day when we . . . when we . . . well, you know . . .”
Miracolina smiles at him warmly. Usually tithes like Timothy go to harvest camp in a limo—but she knows why Timothy didn’t, without having to ask. He didn’t want to make the journey alone. Well, if fate has brought them together on this momentous day, she will be the friend he needs. “I’m sure harvest camp will be just the experience you want it to be,” she tells him, “and when you choose your date, you’ll choose it because you’re ready. That’s why they let us choose. So it’s our decision, no one else’s.”

We’re actually getting a whole bunch of choice stuff here. Maybe it is intended?

She says she’s a scared, But when you trust that it will all be okay, you can enjoy the fear. You can use it to help you instead of letting it hurt you.”

In a few minutes, they’re on the interstate making good time. Timothy contents himself with video games to keep his mind from going to dark places

Oh hey, they do exist! And…hm. What happens to the stuff the kid takes with them? We go on to learn that Miracolina has a “iChip” with 2,129 songs. Does that get sent home, or is it one of the many perks of working at the place?

“We should call for help,” says Miracolina—but no one brings a phone to harvest camp, so neither she nor Timothy has one.

And the driver lacks a radio? Come on. There needs to be some way for him to stay in contact with his organization, plus there’s all sorts of innocent things that could go wrong, like the van just breaking down for some reason.

People in ski masks then shoot the driver with a knockout dart, then try to drag the kids out, then finally shoot Miracolina when she won’t stop struggling, all silently for no reason.

Her fear, which had been so well under control, explodes from her now, because this violation of her journey is a far greater unknown than harvest camp.

Definitely a lot of choice stuff tied into her.

The next ad is about some guy who got accepted to Harvard but also diagnosed with liver cancer and there’s a shortage of organs like livers and he’s waited three whole months and still no liver and worse possible choice for this, author, the liver is undifferentiated tissue so you can hack it up and shove chunks into people.

If we’re being super charitable we could say this is all manufacted and the author picked livers precisely because it shows that, but you can’t use the mechanism of deliberate error if your story is already jammed full of actual mistakes so even the best case doesn’t work.

“And now the same people who lowered the age restriction on unwinding want to have a six-month waiting period once parents sign an unwind order, in case they change their minds.

This just does not make sense at all because there’s already a nonsense delay on unwinding, it’s just it can’t be undone. People would just be advocating that parents should have the right to rescind the order if they change their minds.

But back to Miracolina, who wakes up feeling violated:

With consciousness comes a splitting headache, a terrible taste in one’s mouth, and the disturbing feeling that something has been stolen from you.

Also, Timothy is awake and sobbing and begging, and they’re blindfolded and tied to chairs.

“Okay,” says the voice of a boy in front of them. “You can take off their blindfolds.”
Her blindfold is pulled off, and although the light around her is not bright, it’s still painful to keep her eyes open. She squints, slowly letting her eyes adjust and focus.
They’re in some sort of grand, high-ceilinged ballroom. Crystal chandeliers, artwork on the walls —it looks like the kind of place where French royalty would have entertained high society before getting themselves beheaded. Except that this place is falling apart. There are holes in the ceiling through which pigeons freely fly in and out of the daylight. The paintings are peeling with weather damage, and the rank smell of mildew fills the air. There’s no telling how far they’ve been taken from their destination.
“I’m really sorry we had to do it this way,” the boy sitting in front of them says.

You’re really not, because this was all stupid.

The reason for this is just the author wants suspense, but the very reason he doesn’t want them to know what’s going on, to make it all seem scarier, is precisely why they’d be told what was going on immediately.

As always with terrible writing, the worst part is the stupid way wasn’t even necessary for this to play out like this. She would still have fought them because she wants to be tithed and they’d have knocked her out and she’d wake up for the full explanation. The main conflict remains. All you lose is a couple paragraphs of fakeout.

It’s Lev, explaining they’ve been rescued.

And all at once, Miracolina knows who this is. A wave of rage and nausea courses through her. Of all the unfair things to happen to her, why did she have to face this? Why did she have to be captured by him? She feels the kind of anger, the kind of hatred she knows is not good for her soul, especially this close to her tithing—but try as she might, she can’t purge herself of the bitterness.

Remember how Miracolina has never mentioned trying to be kind and good so she has the best quality soul? Consistency, dammit. This should’ve been at play in her previous behavior. This chapter was enormous and so little of her character was really set down properly, because she’s really functioning as more of a caricature than a person – every time something happens, the author ties her response into tithing but doesn’t see the need for things to have more in common than just that. And even still, she’s so much better than Lev, so dragging him in means I expect things to get much worse.