Last time, hiking hiking hiking hiking and an almost kiss. Oh, also they’re at war and possibly losing.

They head back down yet again and this time they see officials hanging out with the officer in charge of hiking

I wonder again how he ended up with this assignment. Even supervising the marking of the big Hill seems like a waste of time for someone of his rank. As I turn away, I see all the lines that discipline has etched in his face and I realize again that he is not very young.

I swear this is the most frustrating thing about this book. Cassia regularly acts as if she knows things about her world but just won’t share with the reader.

What does she think about how the army works? Are people like this a big deal to people like her? Are people his age in the army rare, or is it that they mostly have higher positions? How common are regular army members?

Anyway, it’s the same officials as last sorting test. They’re just there to collect her for the next one.

She glances over at the Officer with a touch of deference in her look.

So are we to take this to mean that officers outrank officials? That’s the sort of setup you get when the military is paramount, but by all appearances the civilian end of the government is what’s in charge.

the other hikers look at me with interest but not concern; many of us await our final work positions and Officials always seem to be a part of that process

Like so much of this book, this is weirdly said. When you say stuff like always seem it means that their presence isn’t expected but just sort of happens. You wouldn’t say that a driving examiner seems to be a part of the process of getting your license, now would you? By all appearances, the officials decide work positions. They are part of the process in an obvious and well-understood way.

They end up on the same train Ky’s taking, into a work area.

Is this a trick? Are they watching us? That’s a stupid question, I think to myself. Of course they’re watching us.

Indeed.

This is probably going to culminate in something where she’s got to prove she isn’t still attached to Ky, but it’s stupid! They’re supposedly aiming for utopia here. They shouldn’t be trying to bully people into things and then test them to see how successfully they crushed the person. They should just remove the problem. Namely, Ky. They should have removed Ky from hiking instead of not only leaving him there but leaving him as her assigned hiking partner. Moved him to another city while they’re at it – he’s an unskilled worker, I’m sure they can swap him with someone else with little trouble. They don’t even need to tell Cassia why they’re doing it – after all, the official made it clear that they don’t have any issue with her wandering eye, just that Ky happened to be the wrong person for it. What they’re doing is just encouraging Cassia’s whole us against the world thing, while if Ky just left, she’d never have thought much about why.

For a moment, I think everything will be fine. The Officials and I will keep going, past these gray buildings, beyond the airport with its landing strips and bright red traffic flags whipping in the wind like kites

You guys still have kites? How the hell?

Kites take space, you know. Wide open areas arranged to channel wind. You only bother with balloons one day of all your life, why would people mess around with kites that take time to learn, are harder to make, and far more limited in use?

Anyway, they do not keep going. They get off with Ky and naturally end up going to his workplace, because the author is bored with the Giver and wants to dip into 1984 again.

Cassia’s flipping out but Ky is chill because Ky is a sue.

We want to see if you can help the Government improve function and efficiency.”

I guess this is why sorting’s always been so nebulously defined, it’s so the author has an excuse to just throw her in wherever.

When she enters, she finds out that they’ve been bringing people there for a while as the sorting test and relaxes a bit. That’s kind of an enormous coincidence, then.

“The new workers have been in a sterilization chamber to remove all outside contaminants,” the Official tells me conversationally.

Hello massive overkill. They’re not preparing food here or anything, they’re washing dirty dishes.

Anyway, it’s hellish.

Tubs and tubs of dirty containers stand next to small stations with sinks and recycling tubes. Through a large opening at the end of the building, the soiled foilware arrives in a never-ending stream, flowing from the recycling bins in our residences and meal halls. The workers wear clear protective gloves, but I don’t see how the plastic or latex doesn’t melt into their skin as they spray off the foilware containers with hot water. Then they put the clean foilware down into the recycling tubes.

It shouldn’t be that hard to make heatproof gloves, and why they need to be doing all this by hand is beyond me. The technology is nonsensical in this. Why not have people collecting and delivering things by hand as well, then? And what about the other side of things, are people making each meal by hand?

One of the workers raises his hand, and an Official comes down from his perch to confer with the worker. He gives a foilware container to the Official, who scans the bar code on the side of the container with his datapod. After a moment, he takes the foilware container with him and disappears into an office at the edge of the large open room.

There’s no explanation about what this means.

So, the official asks what she thinks and Cassia points out that if they want efficiency, machines are pretty damn obvious.

“That is not an option,” the Official says pleasantly. “Food preparation and distribution needs to be handled by personnel. Live personnel. It’s a rule. But we would like to free up more of the workers for other projects and vocations.”

Why is it a rule? What are the exact limits of that rule – why can’t it be slightly more mechanized than it is currently? Mechanization doesn’t mean removing people from the building entirely.

Cassia says the only other thing would just be longer hours, but…

The official said that’s already been decided – longer hours and no more leisure time. The conversation is tortured for the sake of exposition, there’s just no reason they would have asked her to look at how to make it more efficient and then later say that what they meant was they want her to sort the workers based on skill so they can remove some.

Enter the numbers of the workers you think are the most efficient, those who should be sent to work on an alternative project.”

God, every time I think this can’t be dumber. So the idea is that she picks the people best at this job to remove from the job.

This is like a sort on the screen; I’m supposed to watch for the faster patterns among the workers. They want to see if my mind will automatically register the workers who move the most quickly.

But how do you know they’re doing the job properly? See, there’s other variables here. The one who goes faster but cleans badly isn’t actually the most efficient worker.

“And Cassia,” the Official says from the metal stairs. I look down at her. “Your sort will hold. That’s part of the test. We want to see if you can make decisions well when you know they have actual results.”

Another statement that only makes sense if until now all she’s ever done is training and busywork.

“But what’s the other project? Will they have to leave the City?”

The Official looks shocked. “We can’t answer that. It’s not relevant to the sort.”

Cassia, you’re a fucking moron.

Here’s what you should have said: “But what’s the other project? I mean, what sort of skills should I look for?” or something. That gives you an excuse for asking. You know your society considers all information secret unless you actually need to know. You shouldn’t even be considering asking an irrelevant question and should be very used to having to justify anything you do ask. After blurting out your question, make up a reason instead of being useless.

She’s told the better workers will get a better job, because apparently they don’t have any concept of matching people to the best job for them because their human resource people are idiots.

Cassia imagines throwing a tantrum that by all appearances seems just based on not wanting to sort people rather than any moral objection. But then she gets to work by asking What Would Ky Do? Seriously waiting for him to transmute some wine.

The most disturbing part of the whole experience is that I am very, very good at it.

Yes can’t have you taking any pride in anything.

I see their red hands move amid the steam

No, you don’t. You said they’re wearing protective gloves.

When the three hours are almost over my sort is complete and I know it’s a good one. I know I’ve classified the best workers in the group by their numbers. But I can’t resist. I look at the number of the very middle worker, the one who is right in between the best and the worst of the group.

So in addition to the pile of idiocy the book’s already managed, she’s also just dividing them up equally, rather than being told how many they want her to sort out or her just ranking them all and letting them decide how many they want.

Anyway, so naturally the middle one is Ky because Ky can do anything.

So Cassia has a moment of crisis – does she sort him into the better group and possibly lose him, or the worse one and make him keep his horrible job? Oh, on top of that she says that objectively he belongs in the better group. In every way Cassia is made a worse person by Ky’s proximity. She only very belatedly considers Ky wants – he’s willing to risk getting sent to the apparently even worse outer provinces to stay with her, and also, he’s apparently spent the last seven years of his life in deliberate nonstop mediocrity to avoid getting picked for anything good, for whatever reason.

The official sees she’s checking out the middle workers.

She stands next to me, looking at the number and then out at the person on the floor. “The middle workers are always the most difficult to sort,” she says with sympathy in her voice. “It’s hard to know what to do.”
…
“Menial laborers like these don’t usually live to eighty,” she says. Her voice hushes. “Many of them are Aberration status, you know. The Society doesn’t worry as much about them reaching optimal age. Many die early. Not horribly early, of course. Not pre-Society early, or Outer Province early. But sixty, seventy. Lower-level vocations in nutrition disposal are particularly dangerous, even with all the precautions we take.”

Holy fuck HOW HARD IS IT TO NOT BLURT OUT CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION YOU WEREN’T EVEN ASKED YOU FUCKING MORONS.

So people in the outer provinces don’t make it to sixty. There have been virtually no points in human history where your maximum lifespan was under sixty. How are they fucking up this badly?

Cassia says that the info must be part of her sorting test: Coming across an unknown factor in the middle of an otherwise straightforward sort just when you thought you were done. Yes but there’s ways of doing that which don’t involve telling you secret information they obviously want to keep secret.

Anyway. Cassia suddenly uses all the intelligence she’s been stockpiling over the course of the book.

Why do the laborers die early?

Why couldn’t Grandfather share the food from his plate at the Final Banquet?

Why do so many Aberrations work in food cleanup?

They poison the food for the elderly.

I wasn’t aware that was a mystery.

I don’t just mean that any reader must have worked it out, I thought you already knew. You said the society decided that eighty was the proper age to die because if they stayed alive longer the quality of life decreased. That means they chose the time of death. How the fuck did you think they chose the time of death without that meaning that people are capable of living longer than that?

God, this is so badly written. If we’re supposed to be waiting for Cassia to figure it out, a much better way of doing it is for Cassia to believe the elderly require constant medical attention to stay healthy, and that they just stop that at age eighty so the person can have a good death. (And that still seems like splitting hairs.) Something like that could also explain why she isn’t surprised by the idea the outer provinces have shorter lives if those places are generally felt to be lacking and that’s just normal – she’d assume that they just couldn’t give treatment as long.

Anyway, this is all such complete bullshit. Even the workers who do nothing but process food from the elderlies’ last meal shouldn’t be poisoned by trace amounts of stuff they’re not eating, let alone ones getting a fractional amount. And it’d be child’s play to design the poison to degrade rapidly or to degrade in heat.

And they don’t let people share food normally, so it’s not like you need some big reason. For that matter, if this is supposed to be a huge secret, they should give everyone an individual plate with rules to never share so no one will think about it.

Our Society prides itself on never killing anyone, having done away with the death penalty, but what I see here and what I’ve heard about the Outer Provinces tells me that they have found another way to take care of things. The strong survive. Natural selection. With help from our Gods, of course—the Officials.

Uh, not sure where you’re getting the outer provinces thing. Anything that wipes out villages completely isn’t really a form of selection.

Anyway, I don’t get why this is a secret. Again, Cassia repeated the party line about how dying at eighty was the best thing for everyone, so why not be upfront about it? Why, if they’re science cultists running their society with natural selection, wouldn’t they be proud of what a great idea this is and tell everyone? There’s a big difference between retributive punishment, which is what the death penalty is, and killing people for practical societal reasons. I mean, current America still has the one while being horrified by the other, so it’s not like it has to be both or neither.

If I get to play God, or angel, then I have to do the best I can for Ky. I can’t let him die early and I can’t let him spend his life in this room. There has to be something better out there for him.

And you’re already over hearing that your society murders people left and right because Ky-chan. So she sorts him high.

“Tell me more about where you’re from,” I say to Ky on the Hill the next day, hoping he doesn’t hear the desperation in my voice, hoping he doesn’t ask about the sort. I have to know more about his story. I have to know if I did the right thing.

FUCKING ASK HIM

I GET THAT YOU COULDN’T VERY WELL GO ASK HIM AT THE TIME BUT THERE IS NO FUCKING REASON TO KEEP IT A SECRET NOW AND HE’D PROBABLY APPRECIATE THE FOREWARNING IF YOU DID PICK WRONG

WHY ARE ALL YA ROMANCES APPARENTLY DESIGNED TO MODEL THE WORST POSSIBLE BEHAVIOR FUCKING COMMUNICATE WITH YOUR FUCKING WORDS LIKE ADULTS WHY THE FUCK IS THIS SO IMPOSSIBLE FOR AUTHORS TO GRASP WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE

They start talking about colors. Cassia says green is the color of spring, and Ky disagrees and says it’s red.

He’s right, I realize. I think of the ruddy color of the tight new buds on the trees.

He is not right! The new spouts of plants coming up is white and green. Seeds cracking open can have yellow cotyledons at first. Trees are not the only plant.

The reason for this is to force a metaphor – the red of his hands the day before in the nutrition disposal center and the new beginning I hope I have given him. Stop forcing things, book.