Another giant chapter, and look who it’s about.

The day after Connor explained to me why I should sympathize with his parents getting rid of him, the adults he didn’t bother getting to help Risa wake them up early and rush out.

“Leave your things! Go! Move it! Move it!”
To his right, a cranky kid pushes a Fatigue for tearing away his blanket. The Fatigue hits him on the shoulder with the butt of his rifle—not enough to seriously wound him, but enough to make it clear to the kid, and everyone else, that they mean business.

Has the author given any interviews explaining what the fuck he was trying to say with this book? Even my prior theorizing about why the adults are getting portrayed so badly has failed me here. This is obviously a deliberate choice but I can’t figure out what he’s trying to do with it.

“Take it easy,” Connor says. “Don’t make it worse.”
The kid pulls out of Connor’s grip. “Get off me! I don’t need your stinkin’ help.” The kid storms away. Connor shakes his head. Was he ever that belligerent?

“The kid”. Connor doesn’t know this kid’s name, although they’ve likely been there for quite a while. He does loftily look down on him for being upset, even though a few chapters ago Risa was saying Connor was getting into fights all the time, and his own description of what sets him off sounded like it wasn’t simply a matter of belligerence and also, this kid actually has a legitimate reason for being upset.

But hey, the author’s tired of pretending Connor has flaws, even flaws that never actually cause him trouble, so he’s over his whole fighting issue.

The kids discover they’re going to be stuck in crates and flown.

Now everyone begins to scramble around, trying to team up with their preferred travel companions, but the Fatigues have neither patience nor time for it.

Because the book needs to remind us they don’t really care about the kids, because somehow this is really important.

But apparently they do have enough time/patience for Roland to move over to Connor so they’ll end up crated together.

He should have prepared his own weapon, like the one Roland certainly has concealed on him now.

Or he could’ve just told, oh, ANYONE that Roland has a weapon. Or was trying to rape a girl in the bathroom. Either of those would’ve gotten the adult’s attention. I have absolutely no idea how they would deal with a problem like that (beyond that the knife would definitely be gone), but they must have a way to because I’m sure it’s come up before now. But since he preferred the plan of leaving Risa to be raped, it seems fitting to get stabbed to death now instead.

Connor deals with this with punches! Because plot fuckery, he punches one of the other kids (who he says is Roland’s henchmen but come on, Connor doesn’t seem to know who anyone is but Risa and Roland) instead of Roland himself, which might’ve gotten Roland to pull the knife and get caught by the adults since he doesn’t seem like he’s actually the brightest bulb himself.

a Fatigue grabs Connor and smashes him back against the concrete wall. The Fatigue doesn’t know it, but this is exactly what Connor wanted.
“You picked the wrong day to do that, kid!” says the Fatigue, holding him against the wall with his rifle.
“What are you gonna do, kill me? I thought you were trying to save us.”
That gives the Fatigue a moment’s pause.

So the book is acting like this adult was going to kill Connor for doing that. Because otherwise being told killing is wrong shouldn’t have had any impact. I have no clue what was actually intended here, but that’s what it’s actually saying. It also illustrates the adults are perfectly willing and able to deal with problems among the kids, so my plan of JUST TELL THEM YOU STUPID FUCKER is totally right.

Anyway, another adult just grabs a different kid and keeps things going in the crating, so Connor has successfully avoided Roland and his mysterious vendetta against the guy who’s made it clear he won’t do anything to stop whatever Roland does.

They don’t even care about the one kid’s bleeding nose.

Yes, you’ve thoroughly covered that they don’t really care about the kids. Maybe you could start explaining why you feel this is so important rather than just repeating it.

The Fatigue holding Connor against the wall sneers at him. “The sooner you’re in a box, the sooner you’re somebody else’s problem.”

No? Just want to keep repeating the adults are inexplicably evil. Okay then.

Connor nice-socks him because that’s such a burn.

So he’s shoved in some other crate. Coincidentally, Connor knows all these kids, despite not knowing anyone before now. One Emby who likes to read an actual paper comic book (basically this book should have taken place in an AU of the 1970s, that’s obviously when the author actually pictures it) and which the book mostly refers to as Mouth Breather, one’s Hayden, because coincidences are great, and the last is Diego, who doesn’t talk much and has an accent, presumably because Diego is a Spanish name and Mexicans are scary foreigners who will never speak English right, even a hundred years in the future.

Now, obviously he has an accent because people with foreign names have them, but in the hypothetical world where accents have to do with your surroundings, that would mean that Diego is a moderately recent immigrant – and he’s got a deep voice, so presumably post-puberty. So, there’s a pretty good chance Diego’s family moved into America when he was thirteen or older, . Assuming other countries don’t murder their kids, which I don’t think is too much of a stretch, I wonder how he felt about them moving. Did he just believe that his family was different, that they’d still act like adults in his home country even once they had the choice of legally killing him?

I wonder if some countries try to make rules about not allowing people to go to America if they have kids of unwindable age?

Anyway. Emby is scared they’re going to be killed – that they’ve been crated just to hide the evidence. Because he has a stuffy nose that makes him breathe through his mouth and bad breath (that Connor can somehow smell after not bathing in weeks), he is scum and deserves abuse.

“Shut up, Emby, or I swear I’m going to take off my sock, shove it in your stinky mouth, and you’ll finally have to figure out a way to breathe through your nose!”

Prompting Hayden to chime in that he’ll donate a sock to this endeavor. Forget Roland, it’s Hayden who seems eager to ingratiate himself with the power players.

Also, Connor’s outburst is explained by being bothered by the whining, because that reminds him too much of his younger brother. The one his parents chose to keep. Maybe they wanted to keep your little brother because he isn’t a vicious little monster.

I’d like to add that given it’s a younger brother, I’d be concerned he was next. Because I feel emotions other than malice. Earlier I was wondering how his younger brother might feel knowing his parents were willing to murder a kid, but the longer we spend with Connor, the more it seems understandable. He hasn’t actually done anything yet that makes me think he deserves to die, but there’s more and more of these horrible little flashes. And this in a story where he’s being treated as the hero. What sort of things is he actually capable of? What did he actually do that made his parents decide to unwind him?

Maybe the reason he doesn’t know isn’t because he didn’t do anything big. It’s just he can’t even understand that what he did was horrible.

The crate moves and Connor intuits everything. There’s a forklift moving them onto a plane being driven by someone who doesn’t even know what’s in them.

The thought of it makes him think about the rest of his family and their trip to the Bahamas—the one they’d planned to take once Connor was unwound. He wonders if they went—would they still take their vacation, even after Connor had kicked-AWOL? Sure they would. They were planning to take it once he got unwound, so why would his escape stop them?

Er…yes, why would your escape be worse than your death? With my growing sympathy for your family, I’d bet they probably found it a relief they could get rid of you without actually having to kill you.

Emby is worried they’ll suffocate, especially him since he has asthma. Why are the crates airtight in the first place? I mean, I guess it’s muffling the kids who won’t shut up, but being airtight alone won’t do all that much. They’d be much better served to give the kids airholes and just have someone in on it move the crates.

“Good,” says Connor. “One less person breathing the air.”
That shuts Emby up, but Connor feels bad having said it.

Inexplicably remorse! Why here and not all the other times?

The box is like a coffin. The box is like a womb.

Given that a hard crate is pretty unwomblike, I think we can now say for certain that the author has mother issues.

Time to discuss if it’s better to die than be unwound. Diego goes with unwound. While I’d like to think this is the author actually engaging with the fact these kids have been raised on the dogma that unwinding isn’t actual death, the total inability to write characters gives me a sinking feeling that this debate is happening only because the author himself thinks unwinding is not death.

Emby says it’s better to die and go to heaven.

Heaven? thinks Connor. More likely they’d go to the other place. Because if their own parents didn’t care enough about them to keep them, who would want them in Heaven?

Is there some sort of rule about the author not being allowed to say Hell? Also, Connor really seems to have zero grasp of theology. I can’t decide if this is the author being weird or if it’s just that Connor-angst must be maximized at all times.

Diego asks why unwinds wouldn’t go to heaven, and Emby says that, well, you’re not dead. Which really seems to have all sorts of implications, like if a smoker gets your lungs, ruins them in ten years and replaces them, is he killing kids? All the old people getting replacement parts and then dying of something else, is there some rule about what proportion of your parts have to go to young otherwise healthy people to avoid “you” fully dying in a couple years?

Then Hayden asks the question. Not a question, the question. Asking it is the great taboo among those marked for unwinding. It’s what everyone thinks about, but no one ever dares to ask out loud.
“So, then,” says Hayden, “if every part of you is alive but inside someone else . . . are you alive or are you dead?”

The basic premise of the conversation is unwinding or death, so you all agree that there’s some distinction. If you would like to challenge that premise, godspeed, but you’re the idiot who asked the question first. I don’t see why you only care when there’s souls involved. Me, I think once you drop my brain in a blender to turn it into cerebral spackle, I’m pretty damn dead. Addressing that elephant in the room would be nice.

But no one answers it. No one challenges the basic premise, because the author’s whole idea for this is that there’s a distinction and, like Risa’s question earlier about if it’s better to have unwanted babies dying of neglect instead of abortions, he doesn’t think there’s an answer.

Emby then decides to be interesting!

“I don’t think unwinding is bad,” he says. “I just don’t want it to happen to me.”

Finally! I’ve wanted to hear about this since we first met the trucker with the kid’s arm. Unwinding has amazing benefits for everyone else. That, not this bullshit about “are you really alive if your lungs still are?” is the question. Is the suffering of the few worth the happiness of the many? And remember that unwinding can only happen to people below the voting age, so it’s state-sanctioned murder that specifically targets second-class citizens.

“Yeah?” says Connor. “Well, why don’t you go ask all the pieces of Humphrey Dunfee how painless it was?”

I don’t know why they keep bringing up this story. The author seems to think it’s some sort of horror story to an unwind, as opposed to a horror story to everyone who profits off unwinding.

“Just because there are stories like that, doesn’t mean unwinding is all bad,” says Emby. “It helps people.”
“You sound like a tithe,” says Diego.
Connor finds himself personally insulted by that. “No, he doesn’t. I know a tithe. His ideas might have been a little bit out there, but he wasn’t stupid.”

Jesus-retcon complete. Lev wouldn’t even have qualified his statement about how great unwinding is. He was a brainwashed idiot. Emby, in contrast, is raising actual points. Free organs is really awesome as long as they’re not coming out of you.

The other kids insult him more.

“When I was little, I was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis. Both my lungs were shutting down. I was gonna die. So they took out both my dying lungs and gave me a single lung from an Unwind. The only reason I’m alive is because that kid got unwound.”

Almost no children have pulmonary fibrosis. I’m not sure if he mixed it up with cystic fibrosis, which wouldn’t really be a much better option.

But anyway, point is organs save lives become an organ donor today.

“So,” says Connor, “your life is more important than his?”

Connor, I know you’re basically a failure at everything I want from you, but can you not even do math? He got one lung. That doesn’t actually kill someone. The kid’s other lung may have went to another dying kid, then there’s his heart, his liver, two kidneys…

And yes, if you think about it, one person’s life is definitely less important than a bunch of people’s lives. This doesn’t actually mean it’s ethical to shoot people and carve out their guts, because obviously killing a thirteen year old to give a dozen old people an extra six months of life is a terrible idea. But if we’re just working in units of “lifes”, then yeah, one is less than a bunch.

Connor then goes into a rant: “If there wasn’t unwinding, there’d be fewer surgeons, and more doctors. If there wasn’t unwinding, they’d go back to trying to cure diseases instead of just replacing stuff with someone else’s.”

And where the fuck did this come from? Connor never had an opinion about unwinding until it happened to him, and when it did his opinion was that he should hang around his house fucking with his family to punish them. And given the author has him skipping class to stare at the inside of a bathroom stall all day, I can’t imagine he has much grasp of history, so he should barely even know what things used to be like.

suddenly the Mouth Breather’s voice rings out with a ferocity that catches Connor by surprise.
“Wait till you’re the one who’s dying and see how you feel about it!”
“I’d rather die than get a piece of an Unwind!” Connor yells back.

Yeah, that’s what he’s been called this whole time, Mouth Breather. Fucking book. Anyway, Connor doesn’t say where his morals come from, if he ever felt like this before now, if he ever objected or even thought anything of it, because the author’s exhausted himself just on this much worldbuilding.

Emby’s attempt to yell back triggers a vicious coughing fit and then no one knows what to say. So I guess this is another of those things where the author thinks it’s an impossible question to answer.

“Like I said, the lung’s got asthma. It was the best we could afford.”

Oh for christ’s sake, so the organs do go to the higher bidder. What the fuck did the prochoice people get out of their compromise?

And really, how are they chewing through organs so fast that the most a family could do for their kid with a fatal condition is to get one barely-functional lung? Even assuming every adult in the country is now smoking ten packs a day to celebrate their childmurder utopia, wouldn’t you give them the shitty lungs first?

There’s also the fact that the organ itself is only part of the price. You’re also paying for all the surgery to get it in there, so it’s not really that practical to buy the cheapest lung and risk having to pay a surgeon to do it over again when that inevitably gives out.

But I guess that’s the same issue as why, if you have so many brains, you pick the one that’s got theft problems for your transplant. Nothing here makes actual sense, they’re all just set pieces.

Hm. Since they do have to move the shitty organs because of the whole 100% thing, it’d make more sense to say that they pay people to take the undesirable ones. If the organ is bad, you get free surgery. If it’s really bad, you get paid to have the surgery. Of course, replacing one failing organ with another slightly more functional one isn’t very healthy, and neither is needing to go through yet another surgery later when the replacement craps out on you, so it’d be a weird inverse of the current argument about paying people to take their organs, where the poorest people are still trading their health for temporary cash.

Hayden asks why his parents are killing him then, because apparently a lung transplant to not die is considered a huge amount of effort to go through for a kid? The author has kids! How can he think this makes any sense?

Emby’s backstory is pretty horrifying, though –

“My dad died when I was little, and my mom died two months ago. That’s when my aunt took me in. The thing is, my mom left me some money, but my aunt’s got three kids of her own to put through college, so . . .”

So his aunt murdered him for the inheritance?

Except like everything it doesn’t make sense. In a world where people can do that, wouldn’t you pick a guardian a little more carefully? I remember my mom considering what’d happen to us if they both died, and we live in a world where none of my relatives can legally murder me at will. I figure parents would at least know better than to say their kid’s guardian is next in their will.

And if it really is just about money, surely if his aunt said she was killing him for his money, he’d have said he was very, very happy to just give it to her.

Unless it’s that she also doesn’t want to pay to care for him with the three other kids to consider, but I’m pretty sure it’d be more practical to just order the kid to start working some minimum wage job if she can’t afford him. That’s the problem with making the unwind age correlate so closely to the age you’re allowed to get a job, they’re killing them right as they gain the ability to do something useful. And she can always threaten to murder him if he doesn’t comply, so she should be able to force him to do it pretty easily. If she’s killing him for the money she gets for unwinding, that’d make sense but we’re halfway through the book and there’s still been no mention of people getting anything for sending their kids off to be killed. The fact Lev can just disappear means that “tithing” him doesn’t appear to affect the church’s coffers in any way.

Connor wonders if maybe the Fatigues miscalculated about how much air they had.

I really have no idea why they’re being kept in airtight crates. Even assuming it was necessary to get them on the plane, it seems pretty easy to have someone waiting to pop them open once they’re airborne.

Hayden decides to go back to his is-unwinding-death question.

“It depends,” says Diego. “Depends on where your soul is once you’re unwound.”

And so that’s the debate, what happens to your soul, because they all share the exact same religious frame of reference, which is to say the author’s.

Like I said, I think your brain being tossed into a blender answers this question. If they weren’t recycling the brains and just threw them in a big vat somewhere, I could sort of see the debate about what it’s like, if it’s death or better or worse, even if I don’t find it hard to answer myself. But you are your brain and your brain is you. When this point was first raised I thought it was suggesting the horror of being effectively killed but not even being able to reach the afterlife because your organs are kept running, but apparently no, it’s just that souls are the only thing that matters.

Hayden suggests maybe the soul gets stretched so it can connect to all the bits at once.

He imagines his spirit like a web strung between the thousand recipients of his hands, his eyes, the fragments of his brain—none of it under his control anymore, all absorbed by the bodies and wills of others. Could consciousness exist like that?

Author.

I know you hate science and yes, science hates you right back. But even you must understand that consciousness=brain. Damage the brain, you damage the consciousness. That guy Lev knocked unconscious? He did it with brain trauma, and no soul popped in to pick up the slack and be conscious for the rest of the parts. If there is a soul, it is doing something else entirely.

And if you believe there’s a soul, I really don’t understand how it’s harder to believe it could exist with you cut up than after you die and rot. It’s not even like your corpse is going to stay in the same spot forever. Eventually it’s going to be spread out, and in far more bits than unwinding does

Connor then seriously worries that unwinding shreds the soul. He does not consider if cremation does the same thing. Where the fuck is this all coming from? The whole point of a soul is it’s the thing that persists after death! How can you believe something can survive you getting thrown into a shredder but not your kidneys being in two separate people?

Whether or not souls exist Connor doesn’t know. But consciousness dues exist—that’s something he knows for sure. If every part of an Unwind is still alive, then that consciousness has to go somewhere, doesn’t it?

What I’m getting from this is that knocking someone out is temporary murder, and also that bacteria have souls, although the jury is out on viruses.

Hayden then talks about how he knew this girl

There was something about her that made you want to listen to the things she had to say. I don’t know whether she was really well-centered, or just psychotic.

I have no idea what this has to do with the rest, but I boggled at it a moment so here it is for you to boggle with me.

Anyway, the girl’s idea is that unwinds don’t have souls. She said God must know who’s going to be unwound, and he doesn’t give them souls.” despite that totally contradicting the central tenet about how unwinding is based around it not being killing people, and also the fact that throughout history people have never said this about anything bad happening to certain people, maybe because it is theologically insane.

I mean I can see some teenager saying it because teenagers like clever unique ideas to feel special and edgy, but it’s just so self-evidently stupid that I can’t believe the book expects me to give a fuck.

“She believed Unwinds are like the unborn.”
“Wait a second,” says Emby, finally breaking his silence. “The unborn have souls. They have souls from the moment they get made—the law says.”

Halfway through the book and we finally get confirmation they’re a theocracy! The author probably didn’t mean that, though. It might be related to the fact a substantial portion of Christianity believes everyone inherently knows they’re right but just don’t want to admit it, so there’s no actual problem with a law about souls because everyone knows they exist, the evil people just don’t want to admit that babies get them at conception because Satan or whatever.

Connor says that the law doesn’t make it true, and Emby says that doesn’t make it false and it means lots of people agreed about it. To hammer in that abortion-is-babymurder, Diego agrees because this is such a great point. Despite this law being a compromise which means lots of people must have disagreed.

See again the thing about Christianity assuming everyone secretly knows things to be true. Prochoicers know they’re babymurdering. They might say they’re not, but that’s just a lie to confuse other people about the fact they’re totally babymurdering. Not sure how that works when we all secretly know who’s right or wrong, but that’s how it goes. So obviously none of them would have any issue with admitting blastocysts really do have souls once they’d agreed to ban abortions, because they always knew it was true.

There’s a brief moment when the book pretends it’s not taking a side here by having Hayden ask if Emby only believes it because it’s a law and demands he find his own opinion.

“Unborn babies . . . they suck their thumbs sometimes, right? And they kick. Maybe before that they’re just like a bunch of cells or something, but once they kick and suck their thumbs—that’s when they’ve got a soul.”

Seriously just fuck this fucking book.

I have heard this before and it makes me want to strangle people. One of the things I remember being amazed by with my actual fully-developed newborn baby brother was that it was a sack of reflexes. You put something in the mouth, it tries to nurse. Touch the palms and the hand will clutch you not because the infant likes your finger but because once upon a time we were baby monkeys that needed to hold onto fur or we’d fall to our deaths. Poke the right spot on the legs, and it kicks. There was a brain in there, but it wasn’t behind what the body was doing. Even all the cutesy baby books admitted this without saying it outright, explaining that babies absolutely cannot do things until they develop to a certain point. A fetus is even less developed than that.

I would also like to point out for comparison that any animal that has anything leglike will kick its legs and I’m pretty sure any mammal capable of putting something in its mouth will suckle – chimps certainly do. Animals that do not have legs will move some other muscle.

Connor suggests that birth gives them a soul, and no book, the fact this is technically compatible with allowing abortion does not save you, because you fuckers are still talking about fucking souls as if this is relevant. Also, it is total nonsense and you portray it as such by giving Connor no damn reasons whatsoever to think this. You just needed someone to say something abortiony so Hayden could compare this to the heartland war (Emby is furious to hear this, while naturally no one is furious about the shit he’s spewing, because only prolifers can have strong emotions, the rest of us are just in it for the babymurder), and it just occurred to me that there is no way in hell that “Heartland War” is the prochoice side’s idea of a good name so let’s add that to the list of things the prolifers got.

Then Diego decides to just jump off the rails entirely and go for the Harry Potter school of thought, which is that you get a soul if you’re loved and if not you’re Voldemort, evil from babyhood. A kinder person might say this is the velveteen rabbit thing, but that would be wrong. See, the velveteen rabbit is suggesting even things that are soulless can gain one, but when you’re talking about human beings who are normally assumed to all have souls, proposing qualifiers means you’re really just looking for an excuse to say some people don’t have them. Some people aren’t people.

A person don’t got a soul until that person is loved. If a mother loves her baby—wants her baby—it’s got a soul from the moment she knows it’s there. The moment you’re loved, that’s when you got your soul.

So yeah, if your parents are dicks you’re soulless. If you’re lucky, someone else will fix you later. Until then, you’re not a real person. See also Roland – if abusive parents, then terrible person. This may also explain why there seem to be so few of those – we’ve had a lot of backstories but kids seem to mostly be getting killed over convenience, not abuse. The only exception is the one evil kid.

Also note how very much the father is not even in the picture here.

Note that throughout this, no one has actually mentioned what the fuck a soul is to them. Connor’s using it to mean consciousness, which would mean these people are exactly like regular people except no life after death, but they keep coming back to it as if it means something for the person during life and completely avoiding the afterlife issue.

Finally, Emby demands Hayden’s opinion, since all he’s done is ask everyone else’s.

Hayden says he has no idea, which, since he was insulting Emby’s intelligence for not giving his opinion a second ago does not go over well.

“Yes, it is an answer,” Connor says. “Maybe it’s the best answer of all. If more people could admit they really don’t know, maybe there never would have been a Heartland War.”

The book’s ultimate thesis. No one can know who’s right. Is unwinding worse than evil babymurder? Is unwinding the same thing as death? The book denies that there is an actual answer to these things.

And on top of that, the author’s a hypocrite about it all. He does have an answer to how to resolve such things, which is that we should go back to how things were done in the 1950s to avoid risking getting it wrong. He’s happy to take a stand on how stupid slut girls who dodge responsibility are evil and the fact abortions are wrong and that all prochoice people need in a compromise is the chance to kill older kids instead. He’s just as happy to warp reality to fit his beliefs, insisting that people live on in bits of muscle so unwinding really is dividing up consciousness instead of killing – to not only insist he knows the answer but lie to give it evidence.

At last the plane ride is over, and with it this chapter. There’s one last moment where they wonder if they’ve been betrayed and they’re arriving at a harvest camp, and they all talk about what they want their parts to go to – Hayden wants his eyes in a photographer who shoots supermodels, and so on.

Because as I said, the book insists that unwinding is not death. It is definitely terrible, but no one will admit it’s the same damn thing.