New character! Her name is Risa and she’s getting ready for a piano recital.
She knows she could play the sonata in her sleep—in fact, she often does. So many nights she would wake up to feel her fingers playing on the bed sheets. She would hear the music in her head, and it would still play for a few moments after she awoke, but then it would dissolve into the night, leaving nothing but her fingers drumming against the covers.
She has to know the sonata. It has to come to her as easily as breathing.
Huh. That was some good writing – it starts off telling us about how prepared she is, then jumps tracks at the last second into utter desperation.
“It’s not a competition,” Mr. Durkin always tells her. “There are no winners or losers at a recital.”
She doesn’t believe this, though.
Mr. Durkin is her piano teacher.
He’s the closest thing Risa has to a parent. She’s lucky. Not every kid at Ohio State Home 23 has a teacher they can say that about. Most StaHo kids hate their teachers, because they see them as jailers.
On the one hand I can really see abortion causing a lot of abandoned kids. On the other hand, if even half of what they say about the existing treatment of kids is true, this is practically rosy.
She goes out to play and doesn’t do it perfectly.
“Relax,” Mr. Durkin would tell her. “No one is judging you.”
Perhaps he truly believes that—but then, he can afford to believe it. He’s not fifteen, and he’s never been a ward of the state.
No, but he’s teaching fifteen year old wards of the state and seems to be close enough to the kids that he’s giving her a pep talk about not trying too hard, so he should be relatively aware of what they face.
Anyway, he thinks she did a great job because the piece she played is so difficult even professionals make mistakes and one day she’ll be playing professionally because she’s awesome.
One week later she’s called into the headmaster’s office.
There are three people there. A tribunal, thinks Risa. Three adults sitting in judgment, like the three monkeys: hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil.
Risa has a pretty weird narration. She was earlier saying that the piano was as dark and as long as night. I guess it’s to make her seem more arty? It’s just not what I’d associate with hellhole state home childhood.
Anyway, this is really bad.
The woman to the headmaster’s left identifies herself as the social worker assigned to Risa’s “case.” Until that moment, Risa didn’t know she had a case.
This all seems very weird. If it’s never been a factor, why would they bother assigning someone now? And she sure seems to think she’s got a case when she assumes everything she does is being strictly judged.
“Let’s see . . . you’ve been a ward of the state from birth. It looks like your behavior has been exemplary. Your grades have been respectable, but not excellent.” Then the social worker looks up and smiles. “I saw your performance the other night. You were very good.”
Good, thinks Risa, but not excellent.
This all seems like it’s a matter of Risa being extremely paranoid and hard on herself, but since the book is about kids being unwound, we can assume she’s right.
She says that it’s all perfunctory and she can tell they’ve already made their decision, but that just begs the question of why this is happening in the first place.
“We feel you’ve reached your potential here,” she says.
There we go, pretty ominous.
The third guy is a lawyer.
“Just procedure,” Headmaster Thomas tells her. He puts a finger into his collar, stretching it, as if his tie has suddenly become a noose. “It’s school policy to have a lawyer present at these kinds of proceedings.”
Why, though? We know it’s not required to even tell the kids about your decision, and it doesn’t seem like the kids have any rights, so what’s the lawyer’s purpose? It seems to just be that lawyers are scary.
“You must know that space in state homes are at a premium these days, and with budget cuts, every StaHo is impacted—ours included.”
Risa holds cold eye contact with her. “Wards of the state are guaranteed a place in state homes.”
“Very true—but the guarantee only holds until thirteen.”
This doesn’t make any sense. If Risa didn’t already know this, if this wasn’t exactly what she was so scared of with her recital, then what was?
Furthermore, if this is standard policy, how on earth could her teacher not know? I guess he could have been humoring her, but you’d think he’d be more concerned about trying to push her hard enough that she wouldn’t die in the first place.
I guess, if they have a set number to cull, he might think it’s better just to be decent to the kids because pushing one kid harder just means another would die. Which actually would be a big improvement over stuff like CINNA THE BESTEST MOST WONDERFULEST, so let’s hope that’s it and it’s not more of the characters forgetting the setting they’re in.
“The money only stretches so far,” says the headmaster.
“Educational standards could be compromised,” says the lawyer.
“We only want what’s best for you, and all the other children here,” says the social worker.
And back and forth it goes like a three-way Ping-Pong match. Risa says nothing, only listens.
“You’re a good musician, but . . .”
“As I said, you’ve reached your potential.”
“As far as you can go.”
“Perhaps if you had chosen a less competitive course of study.”
Okay, so they mean they’re killing her because they don’t think she can improve further? If that’s the issue, why do kids even go into things like music in the first place instead of making sure to pick something that takes a long time to teach?
I mean, I could see people thinking that discouraging kids from going into the arts was actually a benefit because they want them to be useful as cannon fodder soldiers or whatever, but are the kids totally unaware of this? Why even bother with musical education?
“Well, that’s all water under the bridge.”
“Our hands are tied.”
I get what the book’s going for here, but it really doesn’t make sense. They get to pick which kid to kill and they picked her, and also this seems to be something that isn’t that big of a deal to the adults.
“There are unwanted babies born every day—and not all of them get storked.”
Adopted? There’s no reason to have a special word for adopted, but that hasn’t stopped books before, so maybe. Or maybe it’s thrown out a window, as overstressed mothers do at times to unwanted children. Too many babies, not enough infanticide to make up the difference.
“We’re obliged to take the ones that don’t.”
“We have to make room for every new ward.”
“Which means cutting 5 percent of our teenage population.”
This right here sums up why this makes no sense from a policy standpoint. You take someone you’ve spent thirteen years feeding, clothing and educating, and you kill them right as they reach the point you can start making them do work, in order to free up space to take in a useless infant you’ll have to raise up another thirteen years just to get it to the same point – at which point you may well end up killing that one as well!
If killing kids is standard policy, they shouldn’t be so concerned with educating the kids in the first place. There should be no beautiful pianos or musical instruments of any kind. They can’t keep them in an absolute hellhole or the organ quality will suffer, but there’s no need to waste time on developing their brains.
And with that in mind – why stop at five percent? Why not do it to all the kids you get? Maybe let the obviously talented live, but otherwise, just cull them all and take their sweet, sweet adolescent livers for yourself.
It’s also ridiculous to think that Risa would be in the bottom five percent. I mean, take fetal alcohol syndrome. That’s about one percent of the total child population in the current US, presumably much, much higher among abandoned kids. Now imagine how much higher it’d be in a world where rape victims have to carry the pregnancy to term. That alone should prevent any healthy kid in the upper 95%. Or consider the many genetic disorders that currently will make most women chose to abort, like Down Syndrome.
Now, the thing is, some of those kids wouldn’t be the best choices for organ transplants. You want the healthy ones. But that factor doesn’t seem to be at play here.
(Also, I’m surprised none of the kids have decided to beat the odds by fucking someone with HIV. You want horrible organ-related horror? Kids getting incurable fatal STDs because it’ll mean they’ll live a little longer.)
“It’s all right to be frightened. Change is always scary.”
“Change?” yells Risa, “What do you mean ‘change’? Dying is a little bit more than a ‘change.”‘
The headmaster’s tie turns into a noose again, preventing blood from getting to his face. The lawyer opens his briefcase. “Please, Miss Ward. It’s not dying, and I’m sure everyone here would be more comfortable if you didn’t suggest something so blatantly inflammatory. The fact is, 100 percent of you will still be alive, just in a divided state.”
What the fuck. No one believes this! You can’t say this is future America where they decided to do it if their decision actually revolves around nonsense beliefs. What does this even have to do with the compromise? If it’s just a matter of keeping the tissue alive they could have just compromised over using fetal parts-
Oh fuck me it’s stem cells, isn’t it? That’s the metaphor. The prolife good guys don’t want to kill babies, but the godless prochoicers want to harvest their stem cells for their equally godless medical treatments, so they compromise by sacrificing sinful teens instead of pure innocent babies for their bloody harvests.
Also bullshit. Some parts are more important than others. If they’re slaughtering the kids, they’re going to end up with piles of bits no one wants. Of course, given this seems to be pure insanity, maybe when they do transplants they also yank off extra bits from the person to use up their surplus. You go in to get a new heart, you come out with a third arm and five dicks. It’s sort of like when you buy a whole turkey at the supermarket and the bag of organs has a half dozen giblets in it.
And what about kids whose organs aren’t in the best shape? Like those Down Syndrome kids I mentioned, some of their organs would be usable and some wouldn’t, especially when you’ve got such a surplus of parts. Or what happens if a transplant is rejected and dies, where does that fit in?
Furthermore…if this is the official dogma, they should have beaten it into Risa’s head. Even if she doesn’t feel quite as fine with it as the adults, she’s acting here like she’s never heard of the idea.
Then he reaches into his briefcase and hands her a colorful pamphlet. “This is a brochure from Twin Lakes Harvest Camp.”
“It’s a fine place,” the headmaster says. “It’s our facility of choice for all our Unwinds. In fact, my own nephew was unwound there.”
So just no, you can’t do this outside of really black satire. I mean, seriously, eating-Irish-kids would be a more plausible dystopia. It’s ludicrously terrible, I totally give it that, and it’s possible to embrace the fact people are acting insane as part of the horror, but as an actual setting I can’t take it seriously.
Also what on earth is the mortality rate here? From the sounds of it the state house has a lower rate than the average kid with parents.
“Change,” repeated the social worker, “that’s all. The way ice becomes water, the way water becomes clouds. You will live, Risa. Only in a different form.”
And a setting where people actually believed this might be pretty cool. But no one does. The adults are making excuses and won’t even say the word until Risa says it first, and only then does it shift over to how actually, they believe it’s totally fine and not murder at all.
Risa offers to do something else.
Headmaster Thomas sadly shakes his head. “Too late for that, I’m afraid.”
That doesn’t seem like the issue. He says they have a quota, so they have no reason to let her switch because they’ve got to kill somebody. It’s like the author originally meant it to be that they kill any kid they don’t think will be a good enough return on their investment.
“No, it’s not. I could work out. I could become a boeuf. The military always needs more boeufs!”
The lawyer sighs in exasperation and looks at his watch. The social worker leans forward. “Risa, please,” she says. “It takes a certain body type for a girl to be an Army boeuf, and many years of physical training.”
No idea what that is and google just brings me to a page on Unwind terminology, so I guess it’s invented. Anyway, if this is true, why was she trying to be a pianist? She appears to have known it was a really risky choice and hasn’t said anything to the effect of picking it despite that because she just loved music so much.
“Don’t I have a choice in this?” But when she looks behind her, the answer is clear. There are two guards waiting to make sure that she has no choice at all.
How is this in any way a surprise? If anything, she seems to have more in the way of rights than a regular kid, who can just be killed at will by their parents. Here, they had to give a reason, they told her to her face and, theoretically, it seems possible to have talked them out of it.
Risa does not reflect on this and thinks instead that maybe one day her teacher will see her hands playing on someone else’s body. That probably makes more sense given the bullshit muscle memory. Maybe that’s why they educate the kids, so that lazy people can get pianist hand transplants.
That’d actually be really creepy and go well with their bit about her hitting her full potential. Raise the kids up like a crop and harvest them when they ripen.
She’s sent away immediately, probably because kids cause trouble otherwise. So far, there’s been no mention of it, but you’ve got to expect at least someone has decided to protest by committing suicide. I know that was in a short story I read, and it seems even more likely when it’s teenagers.
Her friends sneak down to say goodbye, but not her teacher and she’s really hurt. Maybe he just doesn’t know? It seems like it’d be good policy to not tell anyone who could make waves. And she spends the night in a temporary room.
The bus she gets on is for all the kids getting transferred, not just the unwinds. That doesn’t seem like a good idea for morale, but maybe it’s more a scared straight thing where they figure the rest of the kids will stay behaved now.
Across the aisle, a fairly nice-looking boy—a military boeuf by the look of him—gives her a smile. “Hey,” he says, flirting in a way only boeufs can.
By smiling and saying hey?
He asks where she’s going and her claims of a nice future are quickly shut down by another kid saying she’s getting unwound. The boy quickly retreats.
Risa’s mad. Her tattletale says he’s getting unwound too.
“So, what did you do to get yourself unwound?” Risa asks.
“It’s not what I did, it’s what I didn’t do.”
“What didn’t you do?”
“Anything,” Samson answers.
It makes sense to Risa. Not doing anything is an easy path to unwinding.
“I was never going to amount to much anyway,” Samson says, “but now, statistically speaking, there’s a better chance that some part of me will go on to greatness somewhere in the world. I’d rather be partly great than entirely useless.”
So you’re recycling your own quotes. Not impressed, book.
I do think the idea of this could be pretty cool, but the indoctrination needs to be shown. Having a side character think this when the main character acts like they have the same beliefs as the reader is cheating.
Also, the bullshit muscle memory thing seems to fly in the face of this. If he’s an organ donor enthusiast, he should’ve been trying to train himself up to be useful. It’s like going vegan because you want to be the tastiest meat or something.
The fact that his twisted logic almost makes sense just makes her angrier.
How is it his logic? Why don’t the adults teach exactly that so there’s fewer disgruntled organ sacks?
She’s mad, so she switches seats.
Then she explains that actually, the unwinds do get a separate bus, everyone does. Right now she’s getting shipped to the central busing area, and they’ll be sorted there.
She had already considered the possibility of sneaking onto another bus, but the bar codes on their waistbands make that an impossibility. It’s all perfectly organized, and foolproof.
I don’t know, everything sounds chaotic enough that I’d think you could make a break for it in the confusion. I’ve never seen an orderly bus terminal. But considering Connor demonstrated that their organ-harvest cops are super competent, I guess presumably they know how to lock a place down.
Anyway, while she’s pondering, two kids run into the traffic (specifically, Connor appears to be dragging the other boy) and the driver swerves.
It’s off the road, in a ditch. The windshield is smashed, and it’s covered with blood.
So…there’s a good chance the guy is dead. He wasn’t even the guy who drove the unwind kids to murdercamp, and he’s dying because he tried not to run over two kids. That’s really terrible.
Risa takes stock of the situation and notes the kids are all okay, but seems untouched by the driver’s fate, then realizes this is her chance to run for it. I’d have liked this much better if it wasn’t for the look-around bit – she’s going to get killed, so running rather than thinking about the driver I can see. But she has the presence of mind to take stock of everything and the kids around her, which makes it seem like she’s calm and just doesn’t care about what’s happened. The characters being generally flat looks like it’ll be an issue throughout this.
Still. Risa’s a good character so far. Not as terribly unlikable as Connor, and although the details of it are ridiculous, the idea of the state killing kids if they don’t seem promising enough is good. Plus she’s actually taking some initiative in her escape here.
This whole premise is so fucking stupid. There is literally no level it makes sense on. It’s being played too straight to be satire, but it’s too batshit to possibly take seriously. It’s just completely and utterly mind-numbingly dumb.
So far, two characters and both have the issue of reacting to their own world like they’re from ours. This does not bode well. My guess is kids who display this kind of rebellion would be disappeared pretty quickly in EvilChildMurderLand.
I’m wondering why the headmaster was all (painfully stereotypically) uncomfortable — he has this conversation all the time, right? And why bother with the unnecessary meeting at all? It’s not like Risa had to consent. The guards could have just yanked her out of bed. Plus I’m annoyed the author chose a lawyer and a social worker to flank the headmaster, as though to make sure we’re aware that all the adults in this dramatic future are equally warped.
And the facility is obligated to take the unwanted babies that don’t get “storked” (wtf). There are unwanted babies born every day. Why? Did contraception get outlawed along with abortion? And illegal abortion doesn’t exist? It seems ridiculously unlikely that people would stop trying to prevent unwanted pregnancy simply because there was someplace to drop off the baby once it arrived.
I think it’s meant to be showing how the adults pretend everything’s good but secretly know it’s evil, like how evil social worker lady is all upset she says it’s murder. Also, that the government social services are evil, because social workers and lawyers who work for underfunded government agencies are just in it for the evulz.
In fairness, there are plenty of unwanted babies as it is, and they seem to be spending way more on these kids than our current crappy state care does, so maybe that’s why there’s such a crunch. Also, since everyone thinks childmurder is cool, it probably doesn’t take much to decide to cull a chunk of their population.
Yeahbut yeahbut yeahbut…. …. ….. All my arguments dissolve into the same conclusion: people simply wouldn’t do this. The book doesn’t deserve an application of logic or even reasonableness. To read it, we have to believe that people are willing to act in a way completely contrary to the way we’re wired to behave. Given that, who am I supposed to align with? Maybe the teenagers, because teenangst means all adults are bad&stupid anyway? That’s weak, book.
“Maybe that’s why they educate the kids, so that lazy people can get pianist hand transplants.” might possibly be my favorite line of anything ever. Also most disappointing dystopia ever y/n?
I don’t know, I’m still pretty mad at Wither.
Yeah, it’s not the worst until “America accidentally the whole world” becomes canon.
Or until Farla finds an interview where the author implies that, actually, unwinding totally ISN’T murder!
Of course it is. The unwindeds’ souls go to heaven, just like all those aborted babies.
Unwounds*
Farla, since you like future slang: UNSTRUNG takes place on an Indian reservation. In the Unwind world, the
new politically-correct term for Native Americans is “People of
Chance,” or “Chancefolk.” We were playing with the idea of Indian
casinos, and how, in future years, it will have subtly shaped those
cultures. The “Rez” is far less dystopian than the outside world.
They’ve resisted unwinding, and have managed to find a balance between
tradition, and the modern world.
“People of Chance”
Are you fucking serious.
or chancefolk…
Yes, because Native Americans are a variety of fairy!
Nah, aborted babies haven’t had a chance to accept Jesus as their personal lord and savior, so they go straight to Hell!
(I was actually riffing on the Wither thing, but this is fun too.)
To clarify, I know most of those people seem to think there’s a special exemption for kids under a certain age, but really that just raises the question of why it’s bad to kill them before they have a chance to damn themselves. If Hell really exists, the ethical weight of someone ending up there should outweigh every other possible consideration.
Cognitive dissonance? They want to believe in a nice god, but why would a benevolent entity send unborn babies or little kids to hell? After all, they heathen godless mothers killed them before they were born, or -gasp- didn’t bringed them up a specifct sect of christianism.
They want to believe in a nice god, but why would a benevolent entity send unborn babies or little kids to hell?
This all makes so much more sense once you run across the phrase “god-fearing”. There have been vast stretches of time when you worshiped God because terrible things happened otherwise. You say he’s good in the same way you say the king is good, and also so handsome and clever and wise and pleasepleasedon’tkillme.
Have you ever watched people trying to fanwank that phrase? Let’s just say that it generally does not leave me with a very favorable impression of their interpersonal skills.
I am lucky enough that I don’t live around those people. I think the happyreligious relatives might include that in their beliefs, but it’s a topic I avoid.
Nah, aborted babies haven’t had a chance to accept Jesus as their personal lord and savior, so they go straight to Hell!
That’s Catholics! Protestants mostly have this whole weird thing about babies getting sin around puberty out of the aether. If I ever get back to my Left Behind fic, one of the things they’ll have to deal with is a) people believing this means it’s right to murder babies and b)it being true.
Actually I’m pretty sure Catholics got rid of Limbo a couple popes ago, though I’m not sure what the official word is now re: unsaved children.
I think the official word was always that there wasn’t any limbo, but it’s like werewolves and demonic possession and miracles, the Catholic church may not like it but the Catholics themselves do.
The official word is awful, though, it’s “yeah they totally go to hell but I dunno god maybe doesn’t for some reason cuz that’d be kind of mean and stuff.”
My mom once showed me an old booklet about how God loved baptised babies mostest but unbaptized babies second most. http://todayilearned.co.uk/2011/08/07/draw-a-circle-around-the-one-god-loves-the-most/ is exactly it. (That was pre-reading years so I wasn’t able to understand why Mom was all “be outraged, tiny child!”) So even icky heathen babies are understood to be precious to Jesus, it’s just he likes them even better if they’re baptized.
OMG it’s like something from Mind Over Baptist only it’s real.
The official word is that, but what you are taught in church varies wildly. In my church I was taught by the priests that all children, baptized or not, heathen or not, go to heaven because they are too young to understand sin and therefore cant actually sin. To them, part of what made the sin a sin was the knowledge that you were doing wrong, and then willingly doing it anyway. My cousin in Ireland was taught something similar, but it said that unbaptized children went to purgatory for a certain amount of time, then went to heaven. The church’s official word seems to be if you aren’t baptized you’re fucked, even if you are a baby.
I’ve never heard of anyone actually teaching unbaptized=enjoy hell, sucker, so ironically, I think that’s limited to the official word and not an inch further.
It’s a thorny issue since on the one hand original sin is basically supposed to be why there’s the need for a church in the first place, but on the other hand, babies going to hell because the priest didn’t manage to splash water on them fast enough doesn’t seem particularly reasonable.
Oh, my prophetic soul!
If this book weren’t so very terrible and about this abortion/stem cell research metaphor, it might actually be interesting for it to be a fundamentalist dystopia. If instead of “abortion is the same as teen-murder”, the author was purposefully making a statement like “Those pro-lifers say they want to save babies, but actually if they were completely in charge, it would be bad. There are these groups who believe children are the property of their parents, who should be able to do whatever with them, and in not giving enough/any resources for all those children who would be born without abortion whose parents won’t/can’t care for them, and poor people (and babies) can just die without health care because they’re poor once they’re born.” This book keeps showing a lot of the nastiest ideas of the more cultish parts of the pro-life subculture, if exaggerated in nonsensical ways, much more than anything liberals believe, and that could make for good dystopian premise in a totally different book.
It would be so great and that’s probably exactly why it isn’t published. That book would get in trouble for being mean to the fundies, while this book gets accolades for how balanced it portrays things.
I’m reminded of “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood
“boeuf” means a male castrated cow in french
Ooooooooh they’re oxen! That totally fits except for the idea that Americans, and ones in the army no less, would be using a French term for anything, let alone one where we have a perfectly good word in English.
Right, oxen, that’s the word (sorry, english is not my first language).It is true that hard physical work is not one of the first things that come to mind when you think about France.
Generally, you would expect more something along the lines of food to be in gratuitous french.For example,”boeuf” is the origin of the word “beef”…wait!,what if those “military boeuf” are actually for the soldiers to eat? You have them carry your stuff on campaign , and then you eat them once they have outlived their usefulness
If this was back in the 20th century, Americans using gratuitous French for food would work, but in the post 9/11 world with its freedom fries and surrender monkeys wouldn’t even tolerate that. Plus, they’d probably have enraged us again by not copying our brilliant ban abortion and murder teens compromise.
The only way I can see it is if it’s some sort of hidden slur against the French. Like, the kids are known for being shitty, unmotivated fighters or something. Which honestly you’d kind of expect since it’s apparently the choice you take if you want to avoid getting unwind-style murdered, so you’re probably the sort of person who’s not into getting killed in more standard ways.
“It’s also ridiculous to think that Risa would be in the bottom five percent. I mean, take fetal alcohol syndrome. That’s about one percent of the total child population in the current US, presumably much, much higher among abandoned kids. Now imagine how much higher it’d be in a world where rape victims have to carry the pregnancy to term. That alone should prevent any healthy kid in the upper 95%. Or consider the many genetic disorders that currently will make most women chose to abort, like Down Syndrome.
Now, the thing is, some of those kids wouldn’t be the best choices for organ transplants. You want the healthy ones. But that factor doesn’t seem to be at play here.”
Even if her year was already culled, there is no way that Risa would be in the bottom five percent. Academically, her grades are decent and she is a talented musician. Her behaviour is described as ‘exemplary’, which one would think would make the staff at the state home more likely to want to keep her over a less well-behaved kid. Also, she worked with the babies, which should logically have made her an asset they’d want to hold onto, given that they have fifty babies to one nurse. You don’t get rid of any halfway competent helper if you’re so stretched for staff. Her work with the babies should have been a major point in favour of her being kept on, regardless of grades or how well she played the piano.
We later find out that organs and other parts come with a price tag, depending on quality, and that muscle memory is apparently allows limbs to retain the skills of the unwound kid.
Given how pressed for resources the state homes are, I’d buy it if there was a black market for parts, with the home getting a kickback, or a case where kids with desirable skills or parts are sent off for unwinding on request, with the recipient of their organs/limbs making a “donation” to the state home. Given that Risa wears a formal dress for her recital and plays a Steinway, it seems highly unlikely that the audience is composed entirely of staff and kids of the state home. Why go to so much trouble to impress them? Maybe the recitals could be used to let wealthy outsiders see the level of skill of the kids, and “you’ve reached your potential” could be code for “we have a buyer lined up”.
The specialised training might even be sponsored by prospective buyers. As long as they make sure that enough kids survive the training, they can be left with the impression that only those who aren’t good enough will be at risk of unwinding, when it’s really the best of them who have to watch out.
Maybe the recitals could be used to let wealthy outsiders see the level of skill of the kids, and “you’ve reached your potential” could be code for “we have a buyer lined up”.
That sounds really, really plausible. Risa didn’t say anything about there being a bunch of other kids who were all outdoing her at music, and why else would they have such great teachers and equipment when they apparently don’t even think that’s a valid profession.
Risa thinks the military tracked kids are safe, but they’re tracked out of the program around her age to go to separate institutions and referred to as “beef” – I’d bet they’re raised up to 17.9 for maximum muscle growth, then most of them are slaughtered. So everyone knows those kids always survive the yearly culls, but it’s only because you don’t kill your cattle until they’ve put on enough muscle to be worth it.
Mr. Durkin’s words are quite a red flag. I’d find it odd for somebody to be told that a person was looking forward to seeing their hands playing at Carnegie Hall rather than seeing them play in our world. It’s much creepier, not to mention threatening, in a world where it is entirely possible for Risa’s hands to wind up playing in Carnegie Hall without the rest of her attached to them. Mr. Durkin doesn’t even say “your hands”, he says “those hands”.
Risa, at 15, is described as making a few mistakes on a very difficult piece that professional pianists make mistakes on. Who would truly believe her incapable of further improvement as a musician?
Given that parents can send biological, adopted or storked kids to be unwound for leaving dirty socks on the floor or having acne or getting an A-minus, if they so choose, the presence of a social worker Risa has never known of until now and a lawyer when she is told of her fate must be for the state home’s protection, in case awkward questions are ever asked about the number of talented kids sent for unwinding. Sending troublemakers or low achievers to be unwound would presumably be seen as not only acceptable but expected while sending a bright, very well behaved kid with a remarkable gift for music could be questioned. This way, they can swear that their procedures are fair and that kids have a chance to argue their case. Maybe they even intentionally let a few kids talk their way out of unwinding to support their claim that their procedures are fair.
I’d lay odds that the best of the bouefs suddenly start having behavioural problems, at least as far as their records are concerned, as they near 18.
the presence of a social worker Risa has never known of until now and a lawyer when she is told of her fate must be for the state home’s protection, in case awkward questions are ever asked about the number of talented kids sent for unwinding.
That’s a very good point.
I wonder if what we’re really seeing here is a transition point.
I think it’s in the next book that brings up the idea of taking the brain tissue of kids who studied a subject to give that knowledge to someone else, while this book claims that you’re supposed to use generic brain spackle for brain damage and it took a lot of bribes to get a semi-intact brain chunk instead. And we keep hearing about a black market for parts too…
So…the unwinding started off as being about child murder, with the replacement hearts and stuff being the bribe for putting up with it, but as time went on people realized there were more valuable resources at play. Initially, that’s the black market, where they kidnap talented well-behaved children for those traits while the official stance is that only the fuckups get recycled. As time goes on, the official harvest camps start taking notes and ranking parts, initially stuff like oh, these lungs have allergies, sell them at a discount, but also marking the choice bits. The government gets the money from the sale, and the government needs money to fund the state orphanages…so you start tying the funding they get to the amount of money they make.
A pianist is not really valuable as a person. People would much rather be able to play piano than have someone else do so, plus you can then sell the rest of the bits too! (This would also explain why they even bother training kids in such niche subjects.)
But officially, you’re not yet allowed to murder the best and brightest of the kids, so in Risa’s time, you still have the fig leaf of a social worker signing off on these things, but they no longer do anything else, and pretty soon they won’t even have that.