We’ve reached the third part of this! There’s seven parts total.

Our opening quote for this section is a list of organ prices showing the disparity between how much it costs to buy the organ and how much you get for selling it.

While there’s a valid issue, the information presented here is presented in a horrible, manipulative way:

Average paid by kidney buyer: $150,000
Average paid to seller of kidney: $5,000
Kidney broker in Yemen: $60,000
Kidney broker in the Philippines: $1,000 to $1,500
Kidney buyer in Israel: $125,000 to $135,000
Kidney buyer in Moldova: $100,000 to $250,000
Kidney buyer in Singapore: $300,000
Kidney buyer in United States: $30,000
Kidney buyer in China: $87,000
Kidney buyer in Saudi Arabia: $16,000
Kidney seller in Bangladesh: $2,500
Kidney seller in China: $15,000
Kidney seller in Egypt: $2,000
Kidney seller in Kenya: $650
Kidney seller in Moldova: $2,500 to $3,000
Kidney seller in Peru: $5,000
Kidney seller in Ukraine: $200,000
Kidney seller in Vietnam: $2,410
Kidney seller in Yemen: $5,000
Kidney seller in the Philippines: $2,000 to $10,000
Liver buyer in China: $21,900
Liver seller in China: $3,660

Note only the bottom gives you the buyer/seller price in the same country next to each other, and many of these have no match. (If you go to the site itself, you’ll see it’s being intentionally manipulative: Illegal kidney brokers who arranged people from Yemen to sell their kidney for patients in Egypt received commission payments of up to $60,000 per kidney. Many contradict each other. Most seem to be citing a single incident. Some have human trafficking mixed in.)

The thing about selling an organ is that ownership itself isn’t what the person wants. It has to be removed, without harming it, and transferred, without harming it, to where the other person is, then inserted into them and hooked back up. It’s also, you know, illegal. Illegal things are going to cost more – the price generally correlates with risk.

In other words, if this required fewer skills or was less dangerous, more people would do it and the price would go down. We can see here that the number of people willing to sell their organs is high, and the price people are willing to pay is enormous, but the number of people willing and capable of being middlemen is limited. The very site this is coming from is mostly going off news articles about these people being arrested. Jobs where you end up in jail forever usually do pay very well.

Is it horrifying that donors end up getting paid so very little, especially given that the surgeries can cause permanent damage? Sure. Poverty is terrible and people should all have enough to survive on so they aren’t this desperate for money. But it’s ridiculous to be shocked that people doing an illegal thing that they go to jail for also charge enough to make a lot of money in a very short time. That’s how it works.

What this has to do with Unwind’s universe isn’t particularly clear, either. This is what happens when people are looking at the choice of paying money or finding out what fun stuff happens when you don’t have a liver. Expecting that to translate into people buying black market organs just because it’s cool is ridiculous, particularly when black market organ transplants can kill you.

Which brings us to our actual chapter, a kid who doesn’t get dignified with his name on the chapter. He smokes and therefore he is a fallen child.

See, his cigarette dealer got arrested and he didn’t know another dealer so he tried hanging around condemned buildings because He knew if he was ever going to score himself some smokes again, this was the place to do it. Even if it was just one or two from some skank nic addict, it would be worth it. Is that a legitimate term or just the fact the author hates women? Who knows, I’m not gonna bother googling. Moving on! The kid sees a mattress in one of the buildings with a pack of cigarettes and goes over and it’s a pit trap and somehow no one hears him scream for five days straight.

There had been a jug of water and a box of crackers at the bottom of the pit on the day he fell in, along with a ceramic pot to relieve himself in. Whoever set the trap didn’t want him to starve, but he did not do well with the rationing. The food and water was gone in three days

So that’d be either the default-he meaning the unknown whoever, or it’s saying it’s his fault he’s out of water. I honestly can’t tell because pretty sure the author hates this kid.

Someone finally comes by with water and a ladder, but of course it’s the guy who’s going to sell him for parts. Probably for fun, the guy draws it out to not make this obvious for a while. Also, he pricks the kid’s arm for blood to see if he’s in the Unwind database. We’ll see in a minute there’s no reason to do this.

The boy’s aunt is a diabetic, and she checks her blood sugar with something like it

Isn’t diabetes curable with enough transplants?

I mean, we can assume they mean type 2, but evidence is that new pancreases fix that up almost as well as they do type 1 (there’s concern that the organ may wear out, but just kill another kid for a fresh one!), and if it doesn’t, this is a world where you can just keep replacing stuff. If the rest of your body is a problem, replace that. Insulin swings made you blind? New eyes! Legs rotting off from poor circulation? New legs! At some point you won’t have any insulin-resistant cells left in your body. Problem solved!

“Oh, I get it. You’re a Juvey-cop!” He’s relieved, because a Juvey-cop is safe. A Juvey-cop will take him home to his parents, who must be worried sick.

This just serves to remind me that yeah, how exactly did he go unnoticed so far? They’re so good at tracking unwinds. Does he not have a cellphone? Does no one think to search the local area? Empty buildings sound like a great location for kids actually running away from their state-sanctioned murder to try to hide, wouldn’t the police check these places for that reason alone?

But the most startling thing about him are his eyes. There’s a strange disconnected intensity about them that doesn’t match the rest of him. In fact, the eyes don’t even match each other. Two different shades of blue. It’s unnerving.

See what I mean about evil being having parts that don’t match? Connor is good because he has a transplant eye but it matches. The guy in the first chapter is terrible because his lips are too puffy and must be GIRL LIPS!!!

The guy then gloats about selling the kid.

“Aside from that nasty ankle, you’re a top-notch specimen.

And the tar in the lungs and the nicotine addition, which I’m assuming now permeates every inch of his flesh because “muscle memory”.

And the black market harvesters don’t care whether you’re an official Unwind or not—they pay just the same.”

See? So why even bother checking?

He then decides to torment the kid by telling him that if he can run to the outside in ten seconds despite his broken ankle, he can live. Of course, he actually just shoots once the kid is near the door. We end with him saying he’ll get the kid’s eyes.

And with that, it’s on to the next chapter, now from the sadistic guy’s POV!

J. T. Nelson knows he’ll never get rich selling careless kids to black market harvesters. Even back when his catches were legitimate, there was no real money in it

Okay, remember what we just saw? It was how everybody but the person with the organs literally in their body gets lots of money. The author appears to have gotten confused by the word “seller” and assumes it’s meaning “the person selling an organ regardless of if its their own” as opposed to “the original owner of the organ”. People who work for black market dealers are doing it to get rich. It is really, really rare that you can find a situation where the illegal version of a job pays less than the legal one.

He explains that he used to like his legal job because of the salary and pension – haha, pensions, you can really tell this isn’t our future – but then Connor escaped and he got blamed and fired and also his wife left him so now he does this just because he hates children.

Much depth. So character.

How can we character harder?

The way they look at him. Those fearful, pleading expressions, always hopeful down to the last second, as if he might have a change of heart. Those eyes plague him in his dreams. They’re windows of the soul, aren’t they? But in those early days as a parts pirate, when he looked at his own eyes in the mirror, he didn’t see what he saw in theirs.
…
After that first operation, when he looked at himself in the mirror, he would see in that eye a shred of humanity, and for a little while, he’d be high on hope. It would remind him of the idealistic young man he had once been many years before. One problem, however: Now he had one blue eye and one brown. That wouldn’t do.
So he claimed another, but that eye didn’t quite match the first. So he claimed another, and another, and with each operation he felt a sliver of innocence return to him. He knows that someday soon he’ll find the eyes that will make him perfect, and then he can finally rest . . . because by seeing the world through other’s eyes, Nelson is bit by bit becoming whole.

That sure was a thing. Moving on!

The guy he sells to is “Divan” who wears great clothes. Is this some sort of slur against gay guys? Who knows!

He meets Nelson in Sarnia, a Canadian town just across the bridge from Port Huron, Michigan. Divan cannot step on American soil. There are numerous warrants out for his arrest. But the Canadians, bless them, have been far more tolerant.

Is that some sort of slur against Canada? Definitely. Why isn’t this happening in Mexico? The fact we keep getting half or maybe-part Hispanic kids while everybody else is a full ethnicity makes me think Mexico is nuked and/or underwater, so I guess it’s Canada or nothing? Or the author just hates Canada. It’s hard to say.

Divan says that he’s glad Nelson is still catching lots of kids because Now that the Juvenile Authority is offering rewards for AWOL Unwinds, I find fewer come my way.” so I guess previously you didn’t get any money and had no incentive to turn kids in, except that the cops totally did get a reward, but I guess it was just them. And the guy says he’s concerned that people are slipping back to its old, less civilized ways.” because do you get it they think this is good when actually it is very bad.

But! Then we get a snippet of real information:

He was just a child when the Unwind Accord was passed and the war ended—but it’s not the war that sticks in his mind from those days. It’s the fear of the ferals. With the failure of the public school system, the nation was overrun by teenagers out of work, out of school, and with nothing to do even before the war. In fact, that fear triggered the war more than anything else. One side claimed the ferals were created by the collapse of family values, while the other side claimed the ferals were a product of rigid beliefs that no longer met the world’s needs. Both sides were right. Both sides were wrong— but it didn’t matter when people were terrified to go into the streets at night from fear of their own kids.

Never happened, though. The author’s going off the scares of the last century, which were unfounded too. The things you’re afraid of in advance aren’t the ones that end up happening.

Of course, with the amount of control people evidently have over information, and saying this is his memories as a kid, it really doesn’t have to be true, does it?

And that would make sense given we’re told it was “the failure of the public school system” meaning kids are “out of school” (ie, no money for schools) yet people are sniping over about family values vs stop beating your kids for being gay being the cause. That means there wasn’t anything actually going on but there was an existing conflict and teens were being used as tokens to win it.

So what happened? Well, I’ve said the heartland America fuckers obviously won, so – the economy collapsed, rightwing demagogues said the teens were taking all the jobs and also not getting a damn job you dirty hippies, kind of like how immigrants are lazy moochers but also taking all the jobs. Now just have police brutalize people a few times and report it as the teens attacked the police. It’s not even hard, just take the existing articles papers have ready for black people and start using white kid names too, then wait for people to say you should crack down on the thugs, then go crack more heads open and get more articles about how they attacked first.

“Unwinding didn’t just end the war,” Nelson points out to Divan. “It ripped out the weeds. Kept them from choking the rest of us out.

Or in other words, when resources become limited reduce the population any way you can.

He then says what he’d like:

I’m experiencing a shortage of girls. Ones with red hair in particular. Also umbers—either gender. And, of course, I’ll always pay a high price for ‘People of Chance.’ ”

Okay, so why? It seems pretty clear that you don’t need to get organs from the same sex – maybe some few people are willing to pay extra, but now we’re talking about a subset of the subset interested in red hair transplants (which is in turn a subset of those who want red hair, since it’s not like dyeing it is that hard). How many could that possibly be? And since when are black people super popular to mine for parts?

…actually looking at this, it seems like he’s more likely running a brothel using the kids.

He’d yet to capture a Native American kid, but one of these days those so-called “People of Chance” would bust and leave Nelson with not just a winning hand, but an entire winning body.

This also suggests that the only surviving Native Americans are those on reservations.

Hm… This might also explain the “people of chance” thing. The non-casino tribes haven’t done so well. Their kids probably made up a big chunk of those jobless uneducated teens that unwinding wiped out, and the adults in those places generally die young. It’s not clear how much power parents have over unwinding, but the admiral guy said his options for his kid were military school or unwinding, and what if he was being literal? What if judges could just say that these are your options and the fact you don’t have money for one of them is your problem?

The few people who aren’t killed off initially then end up getting picked off by people looking for exotic parts, and the police don’t give a fuck because the police don’t give a fuck.

That’s why the people we see in Unstrung are living in what amounts to a giant gated community, everyone else is dead. Now their hatred for Lev makes sense.

Anyway, Nelson then rambles to himself about how much he loves the job of removing society’s scum in the form of children and how his new job lets him do even more and blah blah he’s evil.