Part Three
Transit

So we’re one-fourth done in terms of “parts” although they don’t seem to be even sections. In total length, we’re edging toward halfway done.

This one opens with a BBC article about a Ukrainian hospital that was accused of taking babies and cutting them up for organs, with speculation that they might also have been interested in stem cells. I can’t find any followup on it, only that everyone ran with the stem cells thing despite (or likely because of) Ukraine using fetal tissue for stem cells and so not needing them from newborns, while they obviously did want the organs.

Why is it here? Because everyone knows abortion is really about murdering babies for science.

On to the chapter. It’s Lev.

“Ain’t no one gonna tell you what’s in your heart,” he tells Lev. “You gotta find that out for yourself.”
Lev and his new travel companion walk along train tracks, surrounded by thick, brushy terrain.
“You got it in your heart to run from unwinding, ain’t no one can tell you it’s the wrong thing to do, even if it is against the law. The good Lord wouldn’t have put it in your heart if it wasn’t right. You listenin’, Fry? ‘Cause this here is wisdom. Wisdom you can take to the grave, then dig it up again when you need some solace. Solace—that means ‘comfort.'”

It’s time for the author to remind us that he can only write identical characters or really annoying ones.

Annoying fucker is named Cyrus Finch but he goes by CyFi because he is quirky! Love him, dammit. He also named Lev “Fry” because he is quirky! And he talks like this because he is quirky! FUCKING BOOK.

CyFi is umber. “They used to call us black—can you imagine? Then there was this artist dude— mixed-race himself, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. He got famous, though, for painting people of African ancestry in the Deep South. The color he used most was umber. People liked that a whole lot better, so it stuck. Bet you didn’t know where the word came from, did you, Fry? Following right along, they started calling so-called white people “sienna,”

There’s really nothing more to say about this.

Also, to double up on minorities, he’s also got gay dads.

Annoying boy is another runaway but doesn’t give his reason so presumably not an unwind. He also claims he’s trying to get somewhere particular, but won’t say where.

Destination implies a future. If this umberskinned boy can lend Lev that much, it’s worth it to travel with him.

Tell me more about how not racist you are, book.

Lev then gives us our backstory. He actually does pretty well. He ends up a a food court where he realizes people walk off leaving their food behind.

Those were the ones Lev went after—because he might have been hungry enough to eat table scraps, but he was still too proud to rifle through the trash.

That’s a pride thing? The trash is just generally less safe to be eating out of. Also, doing that will be a lot more noticeable, and being noticeable is a good way to get reported to the police as a homeless kid who’s presumably a runaway unwind.

While he was doing this, he heard a voice!

“You ain’t gotta be eatin’ other folks’ garbage, foo’!”

I’m going to just stop quoting him all the time, but I just want you to understand the suffering I have to go through for you.

He explains that a better trick to get food is to flirt with one of the people who works there and then they’ll let you take home food at the end of the day. Also, lying.

See that girl I was talkin’ to? She likes me. I told her I worked at Shirt Bonanza, downstairs, and could get her some overstock maybe.”

Eating food that’d otherwise be thrown right in the trash: wrong.
Lying to a girl to get what you want: right.

“Stick with me,” CyFi had said, putting his fist in the air, “and as God is my witness, you will never go hungry again.” Then he added, “That’s from Gone with the Wind.”

I lied. What the fuck is this even.

Lev is also subdued because he’s pretty sure Risa and Connor are unwound by now.

All because of him. Does that make him an accomplice to murder? How could it, when Unwinds aren’t really dead?

Then why the fuck would you think it was murder? Why wouldn’t you just feel a general sense of guilt rather than specifically thinking murder?

The terrain around them hasn’t changed much since they left town. Eye-high shrubs and a
smattering of trees. Some of the growth is evergreen, some of it yellow, turning brown.

Okay, so it’s cold enough there’s plenty of evergreen trees, but also none of the deciduous trees appear to be adapted to cold. Hm. Well, shrubs and a smattering of trees suggest recent growth, and pines in particular are fast growers. So, clearly, the climate shift happened before Lev’s time but was still relatively recent.

Lev finally gets annoyed with how unspeakably annoying boy talks.
“You got a problem with the way I talk? You got a problem with an Old World Umber patois?”
“I do when it’s fake.”
“Whachoo talkin’ about, foo’!”
“It’s obvious. I’ll bet people never even said things like ‘foo,’ except on dumb prewar TV shows and stuff. You’re speaking wrong on purpose.”
“Wrong? What makes it wrong? It’s classic, just like those TV shows—and I ain’t appreciating you disrespecting my patois.

this is so so horribly stupid

why is this happening

Then Lev says “ain’t” and annoying boy raves about how Old World Umber is contagious. It’s dominant. and then goes on to add But I gotta respect my ancestors an’ all they went through so I could be here. Yeah, your ancestors sure are proud of your little minstrel show.

We go on to learn his dads are “lily-sienna” just like Lev because blond blue eyed guys will still totally be the majority in the future and popping up everywhere and also Lev finally realizes he’s talking about two gay guys.

Of course, he’s heard of male parenting—or “yin families,” as they’re currently called

Why the fuck would they be called yin unless it’s some sort of overly complex attempt to slur gay guys by saying they’re women?

Annoying kid goes on to brag about his awesome IQ which then got a bit less awesome because of the horrible brain damage followed by brain transplant by a kid who wasn’t quite as clever as he was.

Lev knows about that. His sister Cara has epilepsy, so they replaced a small part of her brain with a hundred tiny brain bits. It took care of the problem, and she didn’t seem any worse for it. It had never occurred to Lev where those tiny pieces of brain tissue might have come from.

Yes, it damn well did. He may not have realized quite what was behind it, but he’d have understood human brain bits come from human brains because how the fuck could you not? This isn’t even like how we have lots of different words for bits of pig, they’re replacing brain with brain!

I mean, my dad got some surgery in his gums and they were using chunks of corpse gums to fill it in, but they went through a lot of trouble not to say that, so it took a bit to figure out. If they had some sort of euphemism Lev might understandably only now realize that hey, brain bits, but this is idiotic. Lev should have always known. For that matter, he was a happy tithe, they should have been pointing at his sister as an example of all the people he’d be helping.

brain bits work okay, but they don’t work great,” CyFi explains. “It’s like puttin’ spackle over a hole in a wall. No matter how well you do it, that wall ain’t never gonna be as good. So my dads made sure I got an entire temporal lobe from a single donor.

Okay, we don’t really do brain transplants, but actually, it’s probably the other way around. Brains are all wired differently. If you pat down some brain mush, I can believe the various cells might start organizing themselves to be useful and fill in for something missing and end up developing into an okay copy of what you lost. But stick a fully functioning brain chunk in, and it’s going to want to keep working the way it already does, which means you’d likely just not be able to access chunks of it.

Also, he explains that this knocked his IQ down twenty points to a mere 130, and I’m betting the spackle solution would’ve allowed his brain’s existing structure to guide the change rather than relying on someone else’s apparently pretty badly wired brain chunk.

My parents don’t believe in intelligence scans. It’s kind of a religious thing.

a) Test. Intelligence TEST.
b) You’re going to get used for parts and apparently whole chunks work better than brain goo, so presumably they should be taking chunks from the smarter kids and grinding up the dumber ones.

“I’m a tithe.”
CyFi looks at him with eyes all wide, like Lev just told him he was God himself.
“Damn! So you all holy and stuff?”

Where do people get this? He’s a sacrifice and it’s not even a decision he made. There should be rebellious tithes, asshole tithes, boring tithes.

We also learn Lev’s stolen his jacket. “Stealing’s for lowlifes,” Cy had said. “If you got class, you don’t steal what you need, you get other people to give it to you of their own free will— just like I did back at that Chinese place. So basically, the problem is Lev didn’t lie enough. Note also that annoying kid did not actually tell Lev not to do it, and nor has he procured Lev a non-stolen jacket. Shut up, annoying kid.

They’re traveling on railroad tracks so Lev figures out they can use the animals splattered by the trains. First, they mark existing dead animals, then they check for new corpses after the train comes by.

They build a small fire beside the switch house and dine on roast rabbit and armadillo

This is all so very clever I actually feel bad pointing out it’s stupid.

Animals do get hit by trains, but it’s not exactly common, and small animals are better at getting out of the way. A cow might just stand and refuse to move, but a rabbit runs. There’s also no mention of how they managed to clean the meat when its organs likely exploded from the force, or of how they butchered it when there’s been no mention of so much as a pocket knife. The book also avoids discussing what any of this actually tastes like.

The book is pretty boring is what I’m getting at here.

That night annoying kid tells about how he was a storked kid but his gay dads wanted a family (and for some reason didn’t adopt, same problem as last chapter) so they were thrilled and got married.

“But . . . after the Heartland War, didn’t they make it illegal for men to get married?”

For christ’s sake did we get anything out of this compromise? We gave up gay marriage, contraception, coffee…

Anyway seems all annoying kid meant was that they said they’d get married and stay together. No mention of the actual legal reasons why marriage is an important right, including trouble with exactly the issue of adopted children!

Also, annoying kid quickly assures us he is totally straight because we can’t have a gay person actually on camera or anything and besides they’re all indiscriminate rapists so you can’t have one traveling with another male character.

Lev then talks about his family.

“My parents,” he begins, “do everything they’re supposed to. They pay their taxes. They go to church. They vote the way their friends expect them to vote, and think what they’re supposed to think

So…why did you believe they also bribed the entire police force to murder a pair of kids?

I can only assume in the future being part of the mafia is so normalized Lev thinks it falls under “what you’re supposed to do”. It would be the most reasonable stretch of imagination in the book so far.

Lev goes on to say that his parents loved God more than they loved me which seems to still be going on the idea that tithing is about god and not one-upping the Joneses.

We finally learn where this is taking place! It’s in Indiana.

Okay, new theory! Tomorrow or so, entire area there gets nuked or something, and simultaneously global temperatures skyrocket. Maybe because we also nuke the whole world, I don’t know. We replant Indiana with trees appropriate to its new warmer climate. Then temperatures stabilize again sometime before the book begins, explaining why it’s cold and the trees are losing their leaves but those leaves come only in dying yellow and dead brown.

(Confusing side fact! Author was raised in New York, so I don’t know, maybe he has selective amnesia.)

Then annoying kid starts acting weird. Part of that is he’s now speaking like the rest of the cast, so I’ll take it.

Lev is also finally told their actual destination, which is down in Missouri. Weird-acting kid is really moving things along!

Anyway, currently not so annoying kid heads into town and goes into a Christmasy store and acts weirder and weirder, stealing a shiny ornament, then runs off. Lev finds him and he shouts about how he didn’t steal it, then he smashes it. He tells Lev to look in his coat’s pockets.

Jeweled earrings, watches, a gold necklace, a diamond bracelet— things that shimmer and shine even in the dim daylight.

…that doesn’t make much sense. He seemed to just be grabbing for the shiny a second ago, why wouldn’t it be full of junk? I mean, maybe some valuable stuff mixed in, but it shouldn’t be mostly gold and jewels.

He raves more about how he didn’t do it and tells Lev to get rid of it, because yeah, that’s sure a productive solution. Sure whoever lost the stuff really appreciates it getting thrown away.

Then Lev heads off to steal him some bandages because he cut his hand on the bulb, then sneaks him into an unattended motel room/

Finding it wasn’t all that hard to do— he scouted out a rundown motel without many cars out front. Then it was just a matter of finding an unlocked bathroom window in an unoccupied room. As long as they kept the curtains drawn and the lights off, no one would know they were there.

Lev knows about this kind off stuff how, again?

Lev then pulls out a diamond bracelet that he didn’t get rid of and freaks his companion out until he promises to explain what’s up. Lev’s already figure it out anyway, the brain chunk is taking him over because you can totally get possessed via brain chunk, even chunks that don’t technically involve motor control or reasoning.

“It’s a he,” Cy says. “I don’t know his name. He musta kept his name in another part of his brain. All I got was his right temporal lobe.

The temporal lobe governs language comprehension, so let me be the first to call bullshit on that. The part of your brain in charge of processing sound into meaningful units? Your name would be everywhere in there.

“It’s kind of like what happened to my brother Ray,” says Lev. “He went to this government auction thing—ended up with ten acres on a lake, and it cost next to nothing. Then he finds out that the land came with a bunker full of toxic chemicals seeping into the ground. Now he owned it, so now it was his problem. Cost him almost ten times the cost of the land to clean up the chemicals.”

So basically this country is the bastard child of libertarians and fundamentalists.

Annoying kid goes on about how the brain chunk he got was from some kleptomaniac who likes shiny stuff. And apparently has a very discerning eye for it given almost everything he got was actually valuable. While in another setting you might think it makes sense that the kids you’re getting brain chunks from have issues, in this one it doesn’t because this is the first time we’ve seen any kid with actual mental problems. Connor and his sueish bad decisions don’t seem bad enough to actually impact anyone with his brain chunk, and while the book clearly intends Roland to be messed up he’s just seeming like an ordinary asshole. The only real violent action he took was completely understandable and justified. The odds of getting a kid who actually had anything wrong with them seems extremely low, and that’s even before we get into the fact they normally grind up the brains into an all-purpose slurry, so it’s not like there’s even any competition for the functional brains. Even assuming they don’t bother recording this information about the kids, all they had to do was get the brain chunk from a tithe and they could be relatively sure it came from a regular kid.

There’s people out there—like that lady in the Christmas store—they see an umber kid like me and they automatically assume I’m up to no good. And now, thanks to this kid in my head, they’re right. And you wanna know what’s funny? This kid was lilysienna, like you. Blond hair, blue eyes.”

Can the book please stop doing race now it’s actually painful.

We also learn that he hasn’t told his parents about this because they’d feel bad. No, they’d just go get you some fresh brain surgery. It’s not like there’s any lack of brain chunks, and even if there is, they can just pop out your current chunk and throw it in the vat to make up the difference.

Anyway I think I heard some reference to an unwind possessing someone so I assume this will get more ridiculous and less plausible as we progress in the plotline.

And this kid—he doesn’t even understand he’s a part of me,” Cy says. “It’s like those ghosts that don’t know they’re dead. He keeps trying to be him, and can’t understand why the rest of him ain’t there.”

Nearly as creepy as it is implausible. Book, if you wanted to be fantasy, you should’ve just done it. Fantasy is a great genre that lets you do stuff without worrying about science. Ghosts possessing people through their organs would work great there.

The fact is, the consciousness of the human brain, the thing we think is “us” and that we talk to when we talk to other people and makes us go on about souls and stuff? It’s just a tiny and very delicate construct of the upper-level machinery of the rest of the brain. It is amazing that brains work well enough that we only rarely see the machinery holding it up, but as soon as you start actually messing with the brain, it becomes very, very obvious.

There is no kid there. There’s a pile of images and impulses, but there isn’t anything there to miss the rest of it and wonder where that is.

For more on the subject of holy shit my brain what now? the classic book is The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. I found the guy doing the case studies to be very irritating when I read it, though, and much preferred the book I found next to it, Defending the Cavewoman. Go read either/both instead of this terrible book.