Yup, the viewpoint character for Ch37 is seriously “Emby and the Admiral”. Book, you have a simple format and you can’t even stick to it? It’s not like you’ve been shy in past chapters to just have a tiny couple-paragraph extra chapter for a different viewpoint character when you want to add something that wasn’t covered.
We’re told Emby just tries to keep his head down and not pay attention to the drama around him.
But keeping his head down does not keep him in the safe zone. Emby is, in fact, the central bumper on the pinball board, and every single ball in play is about to rebound off of him.
Okay. That’s kind of a good metaphor since he likes pinball, but this all seems pretty overwrought.
Okay, so the admiral calls him again and this time there’s two other people there. The author really loves his threes, doesn’t he?
Have a seat, Zachary.”
He forces his feet to move toward the chair across from the Admiral.
“Emby,” he says. “Everyone just calls me Emby.”
“Is that your choice, or theirs?” asks the Admiral.
“Well . . . theirs, mostly—but I got used to it.”
Oh. So that’s his name. When Connor mentioned his name originally it was phrased a bit weird like it was a nickname or something, but since mostly they were calling him Mouth Breather it didn’t make sense to me they’d have a secondary insulting nickname.
Not even sure what’s by about Emby in the first place or why he’s called it.
There’s a big file with his picture on it and Zachary wonders about this while the admiral explains he’s really special. And that’s why he’s leaving today.
“There’s someone who wants to meet you. In fact, it’s someone who has been looking for you for a very long time.”
“Really?”
“These men will take you there.”
“Who is it?” Emby has a longstanding fantasy that one of his parents is actually still alive. If not his mother, then his father. He has always dreamed that his father was actually a spy—that his death all those years ago was just the official story, and he’s been off in the untamed corners of the world fighting evil, like a real-life comic-book hero.
“It’s no one you know,” says the Admiral, dashing Emby’s hopes. “She’s a good woman, though. Actually, she’s my ex-wife.”
So he’s decided to give her a replacement kid?
Zachary’s nervousness triggers an asthma attack.
“My son had asthma—he responded very well to Xolair.” He looks up at one of the men behind Emby. “Please make sure you get some Xolair for that lung.”
“Yes, Admiral Dunfee.”
It takes a moment for this to bounce around on the pegs and pins in Emby’s mind before hitting his mental flippers.
“Dunfee? Your last name is Dunfee?”
What, the name is that makes him think that and not “the lung”?
Also god it’s stupid that their name actually fits the urban legend that’s not how urban legends work.
Anyway so the men drag the shaking Zachary out and why the fuck is the admiral doing everything he can to terrorize him? I mean really, this is just dickery for dickery’s sake right now.
He allows himself a brief moment of satisfaction, glancing over at the smiling picture of his son Harlan—better known as Humphrey in modern folklore
YES WE GOT IT THE FIRST TIME THANKS
Yes, the Admiral is redeeming himself, and setting things right, bit by bit by bit.
This is legitimately creepy, though. Earlier he said the same thing talking to Connor and now we realize he was talking about literal kid bits.
I’m not really sure how plan “find chunks of my kid in escaped unwinds” is working, though, since the proportion of kids who got the parts must be low and the proportion of kids who are going to be unwound and then escape and end up there must be so, so much smaller. You know what would be fun? If actually he wasn’t trying to get literally his son’s parts but assemble something out of equivalent parts. If Zackary’s lung doesn’t respond to the same medication as his kid’s, they just throw him in a ditch with the rest of the failures.
Next chapter, “Mob” because I guess there’s no viewpoint character even though there’s no reason not to show it through Connor or Risa’s eyes, explains that it takes a few days for anyone to even realize he’s gone, because apparently no one does headcounts or notices someone not showing up for work.
So everyone’s running around looking for him and of course, Roland is happy to capitalize on it. Because apparently admiral guy has absolutely no cover story for this stuff, because he’s an idiot. But I guess we know that just from the fact apparently there’s no headcounts or way of noticing someone isn’t showing up for work.
Meanwhile, Connor’s sure Roland killed him, and the admiral sees no problem with the kid he’s counting on to figure something out being fed false information.
In fact he thinks it’s great:
He decides to let Connor think that Roland did it —it would motivate Connor even more to find that crucial link connecting Roland to the murders. Because now the Admiral has come to believe in Roland’s guilt as well.
He’s a dictator, he doesn’t need proof. Roland is a problem so just get rid of him.
This is something that bugged me in the much better Discworld books. By the later books, the Patrician becomes reliant on other people proving someone’s committed an actual crime, because apparently so long as they’re screwing up his city in a legal manner his hands are tied. Even when popular opinion is unanimously that they wish the Patrician would throw them all in the scorpian pits with the mimes and he was see his support skyrocket above 100% should he get rid of them.
the Admiral sits alone, pondering the ins and outs of the situation. Things in the Graveyard have gotten dicey before, but dicey situations have always been the Admiral’s specialty.
Considering it’s been just one long string of fuckups, I refuse to believe that.
he gets an ache in his shoulder that spreads down to his arm. No doubt it’s another manifestation of his various war wounds.
See? He’s a fuckup in every single way. What sixty year old man gets a weird ache in his arm and doesn’t think “holy shit heart attack”?
He is going to deserve every bit of his inevitable death.
Then a quick check in with Roland. Hayden gives him a threatening message from Connor, because seriously, Connor is the true bad guy and Hayden is one of his lackeys. It’s vague and just says Connor knows and tells him to meet at a location for a deal.
The note sets Roland’s mind spinning. I know what you did. There are quite a lot of activities Connor could be talking about. He might know that Roland has been sabotaging the generators so he can blame the Admiral for outrageous living conditions. Or he might know about the bottle of ipecac he stole from the infirmary while pretending to flirt with Risa. He was planning to use the stuff to spike the drinks, create a puke-fest, and then blame the Admiral for giving them all food poisoning.
So I guess the other group did all the murdering. Also god, they don’t even do inventory? The generators aren’t guarded? The admiral deserves every damn thing he gets.
“So you’re Connor’s messenger boy now?”
“Hey,” says Hayden, “I’m Switzerland: neutral as can be, and also good with chocolate.”
Which, as we know, is a lie.
Roland doesn’t like the idea of bargaining but he’s okay with it.
after all, bargains and subterfuge are a way of life for him.
But why?!
Roland’s backstory is that he got in a lot of fights and one day he punched his stepfather for beating his mom and they decided to get rid of him. What about this means he’s super good at keeping his temper and being subtle?
he heads off toward the FedEx jet, making sure he takes a knife with him—in case there’s no deal to be made.
Considering who Connor is, this doesn’t sound as evil as the book presumably thinks it is. Connor is threatening Roland into coming to secret location. If he doesn’t mean to make a deal, he’s intending to attack Roland. Of course he should bring the knife.
Huh, so the guy who’s been acting as author’s mouthpiece is actually evil? Or, well, knowing Neal, he’d probably say “morally gray” since he’s only killing kids who are losers. Still, it’s the first thing to come out of this fucking book that’s unexpected and not in a “holy crap how can it possibly be THAT bad?” way.
Well, on the one hand, it’s murdering lots of kids, but on the other, it’s putting one back together? Somehow? I mean, the brain’s presumably been blended, but I guess muscle memory is what matters.
He’s the only adult so far who feels bad about anything, so he’s still more moral than the rest. This is a weird, weird book.
Do we really know that he’s going to kill them? I get that it seems that way, but remember it’s Neal we’re dealing with. I think he kills only kids Connor doesn’t like.
Oh, damn, you’re right! Well, Connor doesn’t like Emby, but he DOES like the Admiral, and I can’t see him being allowed character flaws as significant as “bad judge of character to the point of people dying because of it.” Plus, that would mean Roland’s right about something he’s wrong about. It’s probably just the Admiral being an intimidating jerk for the sake of ~suspense~.
Maybe the ex-wife is adopting them.
Or possibly setting them up with cool stuff from the so far unexplained foundation she runs.
You know what would be great? If actually Emby was an evil short adult pretending to be a kid to infiltrate the place and the whole conversation is code, where the humpty-dumpty story is actually a warped version of the fact there’s this guy who’s getting revenge on adults who use the transplant system by hacking them up for parts.
Ooh, that could be pretty cool! Unfortunately, the Clapper Chaos Cult thing makes it pretty clear that “revenge” is one of the many, many things that Shusterman does not understand because he is so completely out of touch with normal human emotions.
I’m honestly not even sure if that “reveal” would be a ripoff or not. I care so little for everyone involved.
So, all the nasty stuff Roland did on the base was to undermine the admiral’s authority and cause kids to distrust him. But the admiral IS a nasty piece of work who kills kids. Doesn’t this kind of justify Roland’s behavior on the base then? Hell, looking back Roland teased Emby that the admiral wants some part of Emby and it turns out he was dead on (wrong reasons/body parts but still, better then anything Connor’s done). Now the question is was that supposed to be intentional.
But he was just saying that to use the kid as a pawn in his power struggles, unlike Connor who was just arguing to use the kid as a pawn in his power struggles.
This book is so full of fuck fuck fuckery. Also, thing I realized about Emby. Emby=M.B.= Mouth Breather= NEAL JUST STOP TRYING ALREADY. Or start. Start trying.
I want him to start trying something that doesn’t involve writing.
Oh christ you’re right.
Mother. Fucker.
Wait, I am getting confused about the timescale now, if Zack has his kid’s lung, it can’t be that long ago, unless they really do keep the organs in storage for a long time.
Maybe they keep transplanting the organs? So someone else got the lung first, then traded up later for a better lung. A crappy lung like this might conceivably have bounced around for a while, being used when someone was rushed into a hospital needing a new lung immediately and it was all they could afford at the moment/all the hospital had left.
It’s just another instance of the setting not holding up to minimal scrutiny.
If the Admiral is in his 60s, you would expect his firstborn to be in his 40s. Maybe late 30s. It’s extremely unusual for a first child to come to parents later than that, but we can set the son’s minimum current age at late 20s just for arguments’ sake, meaning he was unwound at least 10 years ago (unless there was a special exception enabling him to be murdered at an older age than the law currently allows).
Now, storing organs outside a recipient only makes sense if there’s an excess, which has been explicitly overruled by the text (and in which case defective organs would be discarded). It’s also been made explicit that the only source for fresh organs is more unwinds. So, for a single organ to remain in circulation in this manner, it would have to keep getting placed in kids that were destined to be unwound. But there’s more – a fully-developed lung is large enough that there is not physically room in the chest cavity for it to be placed unless the recipient has finished growing. Which means the Admiral’s son’s lung has been repeatedly stuffed into a 15-17 year-old kid who has subsequently been unwound again within 2 years at most, meaning it’s been in *at least* 5 different kids, and more likely 15-20 (aside from the original it was taken from and the one it’s in now).
All this aside, they have the technology to harvest every single scrap of living tissue from a child, and keep it viable outside a complete body long enough to transplant it to someone else, and can completely eliminate the body’s rejection of said transplant, but asthma is still a thing?
I’m beginning to suspect that Shusterman was trying to make every single aspect of his setting a complete nonsensical clusterfuck, and all of his interviews and comments since then about this work are a masterpiece of trolling.
But what happens if someone gets a new lung and then dies of a heart attack? I’d expect they’d want to keep recycling the transplant parts or else they’re not true to their mandate of keeping the kid chunks alive.
Also, about timeline, Zachary only has a single lung, so he could probably have been a little kid at the time. If that happened before (I mean, if you actually cared about your kid you’d buy them a working lung) that could bridge more of the time gap.
You know what would be fun? If actually he wasn’t trying to get literally his son’s parts but assemble something out of equivalent parts. If Zackary’s lung doesn’t respond to the same medication as his kid’s, they just throw him in a ditch with the rest of the failures.
Hells yes! Chasing down the actual parts would be much, much too difficult. Can you imagine the Admiral giving the once-over to every new boy, looking for even the tiniest similar feature? And when he finds one, the kid is summoned to his plane, in the back of which his insane wife rocks in the dim, waiting for him to drag in a terrified kid and hold out, like, the boy’s hand and ask, “Is this his hand, Martha? Is this Harlan’s hand?!?”
It would also solve the problem of how they’re going to reassemble his shredded brain. Just pick out any kids who got brain bit transplants and remind you of your kid.
So, wait, how was there time enough for this to grow into an urban legend if it’s still going on?
I wondered that, but then set it aside as not particularly noteworthy when by this point it’s abundantly clear that Neal Shusterman does not understand how *anything* works. Not one thing.
We’re about to learn that the author thinks a group of kids is a magic rumor-dispersing machine. At a conservative estimate, he probably thinks it’d take a week after the kid died for there to be a detailed humpty dumpty mythology known to every kid in the US.
Seeing as it took them a few days just to notice he was missing, I’m not surprised.
Of course what’s really dumb about that is we’ve already established that the work programs are a perfect way of disappearing kids so that no one will notice ever.
I think the idea in the Discworld books is that Lord Vetinari actually cares more about the city than personal power. He became a dictator to enact the reforms he felt the city required and because that was the culture of the city, monarch or dictator. But now that he has an established and non-corrupt city watch and more responsible guilds, he’s trying to centralize power more. In the earlier books his power was based on the fact the city would fall apart without him. As he gets older and more aware of his mortality, he’s trying to make the city independent of him. This is good for the city, but bad for his dictator you-die-if-I-say-so powers, quia ego sic dico and all that. The end of Making Money hints that he’s been grooming Lipwig to succeed him, and Lipwig’s whole power rests on public opinion. So in the particular case of Vetinari and the Discworld books, it makes sense for him to not pull the dictator card every time. But most dictators aren’t Vetinari and most writers aren’t Terry Pratchett.
Um, sorry if that was too long.
Hm, I hadn’t considered the mortality aspect. But since he’s already running the place on a version of public opinion (the man in the street is pretty okay with his policies and his power is all based around everyone agreeing they’re better off with him in charge) it seems weird he’d need to shift things for his successor.
I mean, would imprisoning the people screwing up the clacks towers have really hurt public opinion? Somehow it’s supposed to hurt people’s willingness to start businesses there, but I can’t see how it would hurt more than them murdering every competitor already was, let alone adding in the fact they were screwing up every other business by obstructing communication. Using your powers just to take out people everyone hates is an abuse of power the average citizen would vote for.
I guess maybe he thinks he needs to run things by law in case someone down the line isn’t as concerned for things as he is, but still, he’s currently dictator, he should be able to lay down laws to deal with these things instead of struggling to get them on existing ones. The reason these things were (and are) big problems in our world is because we don’t have anyone at the top caring to stop them. But Vetinari doesn’t need to get antitrust laws through a house and senate full of corrupt assholes, he can put them in place.
It’s not clear how much power anyone else other than Vetinari has in lawmaking. Like, in Jingo we see the nobility pushing for a war he doesn’t want and almost getting it, and he has been giving power to the guilds, who would be very, very hostile if they thought he was going to privatize their businesses too.
Also, other than Moist, the character Vetinari is cultivating is Vimes. Now the city has a police force capable of enforcing rule of law, with a leader who won’t look the other way and will arrest Vetinari if proper procedure isn’t met, and Vetinari clearly is thrilled about this. I think he would make things more difficult for himself in the short term in order to keep the city running by rule of law in the long term, because he’s brilliant enough to still pull off gambits.
But see, he shouldn’t have had to privatize it! He just needed to arrest the head guys, whatever the usual way of handling stuff owned by imprisoned people could have kicked in.
And eh, I’m not too impressed by late-books Vimes. He talks a big talk about law but he really goes with what he thinks is right, and unlike Vetinari, I don’t trust him to actually be always right. Putting so much decisionmaking in his hands has seemed like a poor choice.
Here’s what got me about this: Why the fuck would you look for your kid’s parts IN A BUNCH OF UNWANTED KIDS. Who the fuck would get a kid they were going to childmurder a new part? All of Admiral Jr.’s parts should be in healthy adults! Why the fuck would they be in refugees and orphans?!?!?
People care if you murder adults and cut them up for parts, though.
It would make more sense if it was all psychosis, of course.
It would make more sense if the idea was that he was helping other kids escape as a sort of penance, and looking for parts of his son along the way.
this book is trash