Last time, love interest bullshit and Cassia’s scared about the poems.

Seems that stuff’s going on with other people too, because when she gets to her neighborhood something’s up.

People wait at the air-train stop with faces closed, not talking to each other. They climb on without the usual greetings to those of us climbing off.

I think this is the first time it’s been mentioned that we have more than one person waiting for the train. Also the train-riders normally chat with everyone! That’s surprisingly friendly for a society that doesn’t even let neighbors into their houses.

The cause of the unease is that the officials have come. In fact, they’ve come to her house in particular. She tells us it has blue shutters. Why? They hate color and modern shutters are just decorative. Were they too traditional to change that?

Hurrying down the metal stairs from the air-train stop, I look for more shifts in the pattern as I walk. The sidewalks tell me nothing. They are clean and white as always. The houses near mine, shut tight, tell me a little more—if this is a storm, it will be waited out behind closed doors.

Oh, and it’s an air-car, not a regular car, which means it has landing gear and it’s parked on the grass. Do they have roads at all, actually?

I hurry up the steps and hesitate at the door. Should I knock?

Shouldn’t she know the protocol? I mean, I empathize with her uncertainty, but this really seems like a society where officials show up at your house semi-regularly.

I tell myself to stay calm, stay clear. For some reason I picture the blue of Ky’s eyes and I can think better, realizing that reading the situation correctly is part of getting through it safely.

Arg.

She says they might be here for some completely innocent reason.

They could be checking the food distribution system, house to house. That happened once, in a Borough near here. I heard about it.

There’s something really weird about this – she can think of only one time, ever, that officials came and it wasn’t because anyone was in trouble? Elsewhere it’s seemed officials are all over the place. And when she met with the official a few chapters ago, it didn’t seem like the very sight of one made her assume she was in trouble.

For some reason, her first worry is that the officials are here to tell her family about the Ky error, and as I still have no idea why she’d care, it’s just kind of annoying. Second is knowing what Grandfather gave me except you already had the compact before this! If they didn’t know about the secret compartment before, they wouldn’t know now. Only last does she give the reasonable worry, which is that another person saw her reading as well. Considering Ky was able to sneak up on her and then still beat her to the top without her ever seeing him, that’s pretty plausible.

Also, she didn’t put the paper back in the compact, so it’s loose in her pocket. That’s quite a problem and you’d think she’d just be stressing over that and not giving a damn about some stupid card glitch.

I don’t know what happens when people break the rules, because people here in the Borough don’t break them.

So…I guess the officials really do never show up other than for something like that? I mean, I guess if there’s limited numbers of them they could have better things to do, but it just seems like a bad idea – this is a happy friendly dictatorship, not a scary oppressive one, you want people to view your officials as their friends.

We get a very vague breakdown of the citation/Infraction thing. Being late to school is, as we know, a citation (she says “minor citation” but it’s not clear if she means to distinguish between major ones or if she’s just trying to emphasize that citations are minor) while a large error or purposeful one is an Infraction. Possibly there’s some middle zone of lowercase infractions? God the capitalization thing is pissing me off.

I’m not going to knock. This is my house.

Is it? You don’t seem to have privacy and there’s been no mention of money, so it seems like everything is government-supplied. Also I’m pretty sure the government assigns people to where they live.

Plus the whole my-home-is-my-castle thing seems like it’d have been purged from society ages ago.

Inside is her brother, as well as the incineration tube. The what now? She says that if she does this the tube will know it’s different because for some reason they bothered putting sensors in the burny tubes and the thick paper is completely different from the paper goods—napkins, port printings, delivery envelopes—that we are allowed to dispose of in our residences. Sounds like this is their version of the garbage disposal. Ridiculously wasteful but kind of in theme for them as having a prim whitebread America view of how things should be run. Anyway, despite the fact they’ll know something’s wrong she figures that at least they won’t know what the words were. But before she can destroy the poems an official pops into the room.

It’s a biomedical official, so they have a lab coat because I guess you only get one uniform. She asks Bram what’s going on and he tells her their parents are in their own room and also, their dad’s getting searched. She wonders if by committing a crime everyone’s going to be in trouble, like how Ky is because his dad is. That raises a point, they wouldn’t want to be infracting a bunch of people for every single error, they’d end up with too much collateral damage. It also raises a problem – how come Cassia doesn’t know how her own society works? They seem to be extremely forgiving of even the top level anomalies, given they don’t kill them or anything, and it’s not like having kids is exactly a right in this case so it seems like being an aberration only has limited impact on your life choices (Ky’s crappy job aside) so why would she be completely ignorant of what it involves? It shouldn’t be an unknown boogieman.

She decides to put the poems back in the compact, finally, so she runs off to her own room.

“Did someone come in?” an Official in the hall asks Bram.
“My sister,” Bram says, sounding terrified.

This is really failing at being a happynice dystopia.

So she’s fumbling with the compact and can’t get the poems to go in right while the official heads for her room and opens the door despite being told by her brother that she’s changing clothes, so she yelps about that and the official just says to come out when she’s done. But why would he act so brazenly in a culture that seems to place a premium on not even going inside another person’s house normally?

That crisis dodged, she goes back outside in her other set of clothes. There, her brother tells her what’s up.

“Papa never turned in Grandfather’s tissue sample,” Bram says in a whisper once I come back into the foyer. “He lost it. That’s why they’re here.”

Wait, what? It’s been more than a week. We were told it had to be turned in within twenty-four hours. How the fuck did they not notice?

So she’s upset because they’ll get in trouble and also that means her grandfather is dead for real.

Okay, so, I can get the latter part as being in part an irrational thing about death, but…how often do people even get preserved? Would she expect she could also be preserved and brought back at the same time? Because otherwise he’s still gone as far as she’s concerned.

Suddenly I hope the Officials find something in our house after all.

But it won’t matter because there’s only a twenty-four hour window, remember?

One of the officials has a shiny device he’s waving around labeled Biological Detection Instrument. That sounds like it’s a DNA sensor. Cassia instead says it must be there because it’s
to detect the bar code engraved on the tube and I’m not sure which is more impossible.

Cassia then realizes that this means searching her dad personally is pointless.

But I guess they have to make their point: My father should have been more careful with something
so important.

Uh. That’s messed up and more importantly, doesn’t make sense. If they want to make a point, they can punish him along the official channels, surely. Why be petty and try to abuse their power in unofficial ways? All Cassia does is worry they might all be searched, but apparently only their dad is being punished.

She goes on to say their outfits make them look pure without, apparently, a trace of irony. It’s kind of annoying how the book keeps jumping between her being her society’s cheerleader and her being terrified of “the society” people.

Her parents reappear as well – her dad is subdued and her mom angry. Her dad gets yelled at more for losing the sample and she stops feeling so angry at him because she can see how upset he is.

“This may result in some sanctions for you at work,” one of the Officials says to my father, in a tone so mean I wonder if she will get cited herself. No one is supposed to speak this way. Even when an error occurs, things aren’t supposed to get personal.

Well, presumably no one is supposed to do (strip?) searches just to humiliate people but you’re apparently unsurprised by that.

This does raise again the question of where the oversight for everything is. Are coworkers expected to report misbehavior? Or is it that the port will record all this? If there’s recordings, then they wouldn’t need to search in the first place.

I’m wondering if the author has forgotten about I’m never really alone; the port hums in the background, keeping track, keeping watch. because it hasn’t come up again and Cassia’s been acting like she’s otherwise unobserved at home.

One of the other Officials says quietly, “You ruined the sample belonging to your own father. And then you didn’t report the loss.”
My father passes his hand over his eyes. “I was afraid,” he says.

See, this is why making officials into boogeymen is inefficient.

Cassia helpfully informs us that the body’s already cremated, since they do that within a few hours. I’m not sure why it really matters how fast they do it, since it’s been more than a week, remember? I’m wondering if this chapter was originally supposed to come right after the one where he dies, and the two intervening chapters where more than a week passed were added afterward.

She can see her mom is angry for how they’re badgering her dad. And then everyone just stands around silently hating each other until “dinner” arrives because luck may be an archaic and pointless term, but the word that can mean either lunch or supper depending on context is totally something you want to preserve.

Cassia’s mom stalks into the kitchen and then returns to say that sadly, the food truck didn’t bring any extra for the officials.

Is she trying to dismiss them? It’s hard to tell. Her face seems open, her tone regretful but firm. And she’s so lovely, blond hair winding down her back, flushed cheeks. None of that is supposed to matter. But somehow, it does.

You’d really think a society obsessed with statistics and personality analysis would have psych 101 on the curriculum to try to minimize this sort of thing.

But apparently also eating meals is srsbsns so they just stalk off with a last threat:

“We’ll report this,” the tallest one says. “I’m sure that a citation of the highest order will be issued, with the next error resulting in a complete Infraction.”

What, it wasn’t going to be reported either way? It’s like we’ve completely dropped the whole numbers and statistics focus and just gone into generic dictatorship.

my mother glances back at the kitchen, to remind them that the food is here and getting cold, possibly losing nutrients.

Okay, even being science cultists really doesn’t explain their complete ignorance of how nutrition works. It’s particularly galling given that because of how controlling they are about diet, their society can’t function at all unless they have a minimum amount of competence in the area.

Anyway, the officials finally leave. Her dad apologizes. Her mom says it’s fine.

She knows that my father now has a mistake logged against him in the permanent database. She knows that it means Grandfather is gone. But she loves my father. She loves him too much, I sometimes think.

See, I wonder if that’s an actual aspect of the matching system not working quite right. If it’s selecting for the smoothest functioning matches, you might end up with people always going along with their partner instead of moderating them at times.

…We’re a third into the book, and this is the closest we’ve gotten to any sign the matching system could be flawed at all.

Cassia thinks that one day she’ll be so close to Xander the way her mother is with her father. Then she thinks about her mother transplanting a baby tree and how its roots were tangled up with other roots. Then she thinks about how dirt remained in its roots and it brought that with it, and that reminds her of Ky.

Did he bring anything with him? It would have been difficult; they would have searched him so carefully, he had to adapt so quickly. Still, I don’t see how he couldn’t bring something. Secret, maybe, inside, intangible. Something to nourish him. Something of home.

Okay, so first, you’re assuming for no discernible reason that he wouldn’t be allowed to bring anything with him. If that’s how it works for orphans or the kids of infracted parents or anyone moving at all, you’ve got to say so, because otherwise there’s really no reason to assume that. What we currently know about their society is they place a high value on inheritance and particular keepsakes, passing certain old objects down and giving people cloth mementos of the matching banquet and card pictures after the death banquet. Nothing about not being able to take stuff with you there.

Second, all you know about his home is that it sucked. You know the outer provinces suck, and all he’s said about them is that they’re apparently even worse than you knew because people don’t live to be eighty there. Why are you assuming it’s so important to him, particularly when you’ve never been in the same position? Why wouldn’t you just assume that life is awesome in your province and great for him instead of acting like his life before is the source of everything good to him?

Third, stop obsessing about Ky.

We switch to her running on a treadmill, which for some reason is called a tracker – a machine named for the circular tracks where people used to compete. And named for what it does—tracking information about the person running on it. She says she’d like to run outside, which we already know is against the rules, and then once again doesn’t tell us what reason there is for that rule.

The reason for it keeping track is apparently not for any subtle thing like adjusting their daily calories or anything.

If you run too far, you might be a masochist, an anorexic, or another type, and you will have to see an Official of Psychology for diagnosis.

How the fuck can there be anorexics in this world?

There do seem to be other factors to anorexia than just self-image problems, but that’s really the primary one. There’s been no sign of popular media or really any clear beauty standards people are judged for, and your relationships are assigned, so competing for attention isn’t even much of a factor, and what cultural relationship they do have with food is that you eat what’s put in front of you because nutrition is a huge deal. More, anorexics would be easily identified by not eating the assigned food, and if they were eating the assigned food but just doing excessive running to burn it off (which is really not anorexia, that’s just a secondary component) it wouldn’t matter because they’d presumably just get bigger portions to cancel it out.

Anorexia is a culturally specific manifestation of a combination of self-harm and OCD. They should have something different going on.

If it’s determined that you are running hard because you genuinely like it then you can have an athletic permit.

Book, you realize that masochists genuinely enjoy it, right? That that’s kind of what masochism means? Probably not. I think it’s getting used to mean self-harm.

Cassia has one of those special athletic permits, which I guess mean that people stop bothering to check what the tracker says about you. So apparently as long as you start off as looking like you have a normal level of interest in exercise, you can turn into a masochist or anorexic all you like. It’s a shame this society doesn’t have some sort of interest in statistics and data that would show that plenty of disorders start off normal and only become disordered later on.

For some reason she thinks the hill is more fun than the fake incline she’s getting here, despite the fact she’s been raised with this kind of exercise and the other type should seem weird. I guess she just knows that fake stuff sucks.

She explains that exercise is super important to the society because they want everyone to stay healthy, which is really not what’s implied by needing a special permit just to enjoy running. Society makes sure to give them everything needed to live long lives. You know what’s shown to make people live extra long? Underfeeding. You’d think they’d be all over that.

Cancer, heart disease, and most debilitating illnesses are almost entirely eradicated. This is as close to perfect as any society has ever managed to get.

Cancer is really not a disease. Cancer is a whole mess of stuff. Also, bah. It’s already clear their society sucks, so can we move on? There’s no point in spending time on the good stuff when the book has set things up so there isn’t any.

She mentions her parents are upstairs, so in addition to having a room for everyone, there’s at least two stories. So this is definitely suburban. I’m picturing endless rows of completely identical houses except for which color the shutters are.

She goes to her room to find her brother hanging out there. He’s got their grandfather’s watch, which is now his artifact. Bram says he called the officials to ask if they could get a tissue sample from the watch. That’s a very ten year old thing to do. Nice characterization, book.

Hope shoots through my veins like adrenaline.

Holy shit these people are morons.

At least the actual people in charge managed to scape together enough brain cells to know this is stupid.

“They sent back a message saying it wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t work.”

Let’s just pretend that, in sharp contrast to how their society seems to function, they were being polite here and just not pointing out that also the watch is contaminated by other people’s hands and anyway, they can’t use samples over a day old, remember? Assuming he got it right before their grandfather died, and it may have been before that given I don’t recall it being passed on at the time, it’s more than a week old by this point.

Bram asks if he looks like their grandfather and Cassia says he does, then wonders if she’s anything like him, and thinks that yes, she shares the whole hiking and poetry thing. Then she thinks of her other set of grandparents, which naturally means thinking of Ky and the Outer Provinces and about all the things I do not know and places I will never see. and if you’re wondering what the connection between that and her starting point is, so am I. It’s like Ky’s just being stuffed into her thoughts at random points.

We learn that you’re not allowed to take artifacts to school and this is one of the rules about them, although it’s not explained in any way that lets us figure out what the underlying rule is, if it’s that you can take it with you except for areas it’s banned or it’s banned unless an area has an exception for it. He asks if he can keep the watch in her match box and she says sure.

Then at night she takes the poetry out of the compact again and puts it in her clothes for the next day with the intention of burning it somewhere. Would you stop it? The only reason you’ll be caught with it is because you can’t stop doing stuff like this. Leave it where it is.

Then time to consider the tablet container. She contemplates the green tablet.

Most people I know take the green tablet now and then. Before a big test. The night of the Match Banquet. Any time you might need calming. You can take it up to once a week without the Officials taking special note of it.

Hm, that sounds like it might be addictive. I wonder how they keep this under control? Just saying you’ll get a note really doesn’t seem like it’d stop people from getting dependent on it and ending up using it too much, and once they are dependent it seems it’d be a lot of trouble to wean them off it again, and they probably couldn’t be trusted with the green tablet again.

Anyway, Cassia is special because she’s never actually used it. Given how dumb she’s being about the poetry, it’s clearly not because she’s just naturally calm and levelheaded.

She explains her grandfather didn’t approve. We flashback to when she first got it and told him about it.

“Have you taken the green one yet?”
“Not yet,” I said. “But I have to give a presentation on one of the Hundred Paintings in my Culture class next week. I might take it then.

Being a teacher in this world must be a special kind of hell. It’s repetitive enough hearing kids do reports on the same basic subject matter year after year, imagine that in a world where there’s literally only a hundred of each type of thing to talk about, ever.

And wait, is her presentation even her own report? If she can’t even write a letter about how she’ll miss her grandfather on her own, I don’t think people are up for writing their own presentation. So presentations are presumably just kids reading the official writeup for each picture.

Flowers bloomed everywhere, in colors we were not allowed to wear: pinks, yellows, reds

So there are apparently flat out banned colors. Huh.

He tells her that she’s strong enough to handle herself without relying on a tablet, so she doesn’t. And now she decides again that she won’t because her grandfather believed she could do it. She does not consider that her grandfather also believed she could handle the poetry without freaking out and destroying it, though.

When I fall asleep, I dream that Grandfather has given me a bouquet of roses. “Take these instead of the tablet,” he tells me. So I do. I pull the petals off each rose. To my surprise each petal has a word written on it, a word from one of the poems. They’re not in the right order, and this puzzles me, but I put them in my mouth and taste them. They taste bitter, the way I imagine the green tablet would taste. But I know Grandfather is right; I have to keep the words inside if I want to keep them with me.
When I wake in the morning, the green tablet is still in my hand, and the words are still in my mouth.

This is pretty. But.

I feel like this would make more sense if it wasn’t coming after her misadventures trying to figure out how to destroy the poems. If, say, the poems weren’t written at all – what if her grandfather had passed them down in the sense of saying them aloud, and remembering them really was all she could do to preserve them? That would put a subtler edge to her nervousness. She’d know she has to forget it because she’s not supposed to know anything but the established hundred, it’s one of the beliefs of her society that knowing more than you need to causes bad things and also that they picked the best poems so there’s no need for any others. She’d be running around wondering if somehow the officials can just tell she knows something she shouldn’t. After all, they know everything. But she doesn’t want to forget it, both because it’s the last thing her grandfather gave her and because, despite what the society says, she does like the poem and wants to remember it. So she spends a while being torn and we finally end up here, with her deciding to side with her grandfather and remember the poems even if she’s worried.