Our third character. If Miracolina was Lev 2: Actually Resembling A Character This Time, Cam is to this book as Lev was to the last one, a character who’s unusual and there to show something about the setting, as well as to be very wrong about whatever part he’s highlighting.

Cam, who is not yet Cam, has a gimmick.

“I was wondering when you’d wake up.”
She wears dark pants and a blouse. Pattern of the blouse too blurry to make out. And the color. The color. He can’t put a finger on the color.
“ROY-G-BIV,” he says, searching. “Yellow. Blue. No.” He grunts. His throat hurts when he speaks, and the words come out raspy. “Grass. Trees. Devil puke.”
“Green,” the woman says. “That’s the word you’re looking for, isn’t it? My blouse is green.”

We’ll find out what Cam is in a second, but the idea is that he initially doesn’t know words directly and has to talk his way through actions and nouns to find them.

There are two problems with this, and the first is being highlighted right here – he can’t say green, fair enough – but he can say yellow and blue? Because those are exactly the same as far as brain storage goes. If it was just straight up missing words, he should be able to say some words and not others, but in practice whatever word he needs he doesn’t have. It’s pretty forced.

It is, however, clever. It makes his dialogue into an optional puzzle – if you don’t like playing, you can read the next line for the translation, if you do like playing, you pause and consider. It’s a good idea that’s just not getting implemented cleanly enough.

The next batch goes better:

“Hand on stove. Belt buckle—no, Mom, no! Falling from bike. Broken arm. Knife. He stabbed me with a knife!”
“Pain,” says the cross-legged woman calmly.

He’s injured and tied down in some way, and his memories are a jumble. The woman sits quietly while he tries to work out what the pattern on her shirt is called and eventually arrives at the right word.

Now that his thoughts are beginning to settle, he realizes that he does recognize the woman, but has no idea from where.
“Who?” he asks. “Who? Where? When?”
“How, what, and why,” she adds with a smirk. “Your question words have all returned.”
“Who?” he demands again, not appreciating the joke at his expense.
She sighs. “Who am I? You can say I’m your touchstone, your connection to the world—and in a sense your translator, because I can understand you, where few others can. I’m an expert in metalinguistics.”
“Meta . . . meta.”
“It’s the nature of the language you speak. Metaphoric associations.

Now, here’s the second problem – there’s no clear reason why this would be true. It’s not impossible that’s how it’d shake out for him, because this is pretty untested ground, but being able to know in advance and have someone there already is ridiculous.

It’d make a hell of a lot more sense for her to be know a lot about language and the different ways brain-damaged people might communicate and then identify his particular issue as being associations, rather than that they found the person who specialized in this first and it just happened they were right. (To further confuse things, she seems to be in charge, which makes it even more of a coincidence she’s the perfect fit)

Her name is Roberta, and she explains this is new info because he’s seen her many times but never been told who she is. He chugs through and gets that this is a riddle.

She’s pretty, in a motherly sort of way. Blond hair with a hint of brown roots, and just a little makeup. Her eyes seem younger than the rest of her face. But that blouse . . .
“Medusa,” he says. “Crone. Witch. Crooked, rotten teeth.”
She stiffens a bit. “You think I’m ugly?”
“Uuuugly!” he says, savoring the word. “No, not you! Ugly green paisley ugly.”
Roberta laughs, relieved, and glances down at her blouse. “Well, I guess there’s no accounting for taste, is there?”

This is perhaps the biggest narrative clue she’s evil. Women are not allowed to have opinions on their appearance. They are bad for being ugly, yes. But they are also bad for being concerned about not being ugly.

That this sequence is perfectly reasonable human behavior is perhaps the point. Women aren’t human and don’t get the same allowances.

Anyway, hearing accounting makes him remember his dad was an accountant, but thinking his dad makes him remember the guy was —a policeman. No—a factory worker. No—lawyer, construction worker, pharmacist, dentist, unemployed, dead.

Given none has more weight than any other, that’s nine, eight alive.

It’s an odd spread if you think about it, isn’t it? These aren’t the kind of jobs people in America mostly have, they’re the kind you get if you’re trying to think of jobs to list.

Factory worker may have come back in recent years, given we don’t seem to be hearing much about imported goods. Construction worker…I wonder if robotics technology was frozen at some point to keep jobs around. One of the things that can create generational stress is a lack of jobs for everyone, so that might be one of the things the government is using to keep things simmering rather than boiling over. Otherwise there are going to be even less construction jobs in the future. Pharmacists in our world are in a weird transition state – more and more of their original job can be computerized, but people are taking more drugs with more nasty side effects, so the need for them to keep a eye on things is also increasing. In Unwind’s world, they shouldn’t exist at all because everything is treated with transplants. Dentists probably just transplant teeth now, but I can see how they’d still be around.

And, of course, one unemployed. Ignoring the dead one, that’d mean an unemployment rate of 1/8, or 20%.


That would suggest things are worse off than they appear. America’s official unemployment rate is a pack of lies, but google tells me a more accurate one is only around 10%. Dammit math, it’s 12% so basically same level of shittiness as currently, I guess Unwind is the dystopia we get if we fix nothing and keep plodding along.

This is a small sample, of course (and of course none of this is meant to matter like this) but still. Also interesting is none of the listed jobs are unskilled labor, which teens seem to have locked up. Either adults won’t take those jobs or they can’t get them because labor laws say you can pay under-eighteens less so that’s what everyone does.

(Also, although the book is progressive enough to decide gay people exist and are unremarkable, this is still a world where the concept of having more than one father is immediately identified as a bizarre impossibility. There isn’t a split second of thinking that Dad 1 is an accountant and Dad 2 a policeman.)

Roberta raises her eyebrows in understanding. “Oh. Who are you?”
He waits anxiously for an answer.
“Well, that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? Who are you?” She taps her fingertips on her chin, considering it. “The committee could not agree on a name. Of course, everyone has an opinion, the pompous buffoons. So, while they’re dickering about it, perhaps you can choose one for yourself.”
“Choose?” But why must he choose a name? Shouldn’t he already have one? He runs a series of names through his mind: Matthew, Johnny, Eric, José, Chris, Alex, Spencer—and although some of them seem more likely than others, none of them hold the sense of identity that a true name should have.

While the point here is for the reader to be figuring things out, another point that may get unnoticed, that he’s made solely of guys. We know they can transplant anything into anybody, to the point that you can jam a girl cougar’s heart into an old guy’s body, but we also know that the best way of insulting someone for getting parts is to say they look like they came from a girl.

And so we end up with a character who’s supposed to be a perfectly fusion of everyone be solely made out of boys. It’s totally okay for boys to like boys, but god help them if they think they’re a girl.

Later he gets to try walking. Oddly, he just has regular sick person struggles with this and not a pile of phantom limb problems, probably because muscle memory and he’s an octopus. We also learn the other people refer to him as “sir” but he doesn’t know why.

They sit facing each other with the food between them and the guards at the ready, should he need their help, or should he try to hurl himself off the balcony to the jagged rocks below. There are soldiers with dark, heavy weapons positioned strategically on those rocks—there for his protection, Roberta tells him.

This is all set up very ominously but is actually totally true – he is someone that plenty of other people would try to kill simply because he exists. I’m not sure if this is meant as a fakeout like with Miracolina or if the fact these traits can be bad even though in this case they’re not is still supposed to mark them as evil.

He takes a bite of cookie. Chocolate chip. Suddenly the intensity of the flavor drags more memories out of hibernation. He thinks of his mother. Then another mother.

While in general I hate the author and think he’s an awful person for writing this, this issue is one done by well-meaning people all the time.

Nothing is wrong with people who are outside the norm. They just pretty much don’t exist, and so when the character thinks Dad he thinks of a bunch of jobs and when he thinks cookie he thinks of mothers cooking him them. There’s been no sign the author actually thinks women need to stay in the kitchen. It just doesn’t occur to him that maybe dads could cook cookies sometimes.

She asks him his name, but he’s distracted trying to figure out what a camera and milk are called.

Cow juice. Starts with an M. Electric eye. “Cam!” Cow juice. “Moo!”
Roberta looks at him strangely.
“Cam . . . Moo . . . ,” he says again.
Her eyes sparkle, and she says, “Camus?”
“Cam. Moo.”
“Camus! What a splendid name. You’ve outdone yourself.”
“Camera!” he finally says. “Milk!” But Roberta isn’t listening anymore. He has sent her to a more exotic place.
“Camus, the existential philosopher! ‘Live to the point of tears.’ Kudos to you, my friend! Kudos!”

There’s really this uncanny valley feeling throughout this chapter with her character.

You know, I was reading some people complaining about that really awful bit in Jurassic World where the woman dies a horrible and drawn-out death. And I wasn’t precisely surprised when it happened – it’s just I was expecting one scene to happen first.

Nothing she did was ever wrong, but there were all those little bits throughout the movie that you would see next to female characters who would be bashed, so I spent the movie waiting for the scene that would prove she was evil followed by something nasty happening to her. The scene didn’t happen and I realized all those little bits were actually meant to be inherently evil.

Anyway, that’s the sense I get with her. Roberta is set up as slightly independant. She has her own feelings about what people say to her and is capable of misunderstanding, rather than just being a person-shaped plot device moving in accordance with their thoughts.

There’s another ad, this one claiming giving you a new heart will help you exercise so you’ll lose weight. Somehow, this is Sponsored by the International Society of Nanosurgeons. because it’s done by nanosurgury and also apparently unwinding is international?

We jump ahead a bit to Cam doing lots of physical therapy.

“Comprehension is the first step toward clear communication, Cam.” Roberta hesitates for a second, then says, “Comprends-tu maintenant?”
“Oui, parfaitement,” says Cam, not knowing that something was different about it until the words came out of his mouth.

Now, the fact this works, along with the muscle memory and everything else, does raise an issue-

If we were in a world where magic let you steal people’s abilities by grafting them on, what would happen?

I think we’d cannibalize the elderly, myself. There’s been many, many studies showing in a variety of ways that the elderly have past information mostly , they just struggle to add new stuff. Grafted into a younger brain with fresh cells still capable of learning, you could probably use it as a scaffold without any problems. You’d probably get weird effects when the core cells finally died and all the younger cells were of additional skills built on top, but hey, that just makes it more fun!

Anyway, Cam does more exercises and grows more frustrated with not knowing what’s going on.

“The kitchen sink!” he tells Roberta at dinner one day. It’s just the two of them. It’s always just the two of them. “The kitchen sink! Now!”
She doesn’t even have to probe to figure out what he means. “In time you’ll know everything there is to know about yourself. Now is not that time.”
“Yes, it is!”
“Cam, this conversation is over.”
Cam feels the anger well in him and doesn’t know what to do with it, and he can’t put enough words together to take it away.
Instead it goes to his hands, and before he knows what he’s doing, he’s hurling a plate across the room, then another, then another. Roberta has to duck, and now the whole world is flying dishes and silverware and glass.

This is like having the kleptomaniac kid be the one chosen to have a chunk dropped in unaltered. Were they really unable to sort out the kids with rage issues? This is getting presented like it’s just that of course if someone is upset to a certain degree, they start smashing everything.

Anyway, he gets strapped to his bed and eventually calms down and feels bad, especially when he sees Roberta’s bleeding from getting hit.

“Well, at least we know you’re every bit as strong as we thought you’d be. They weren’t kidding when they said you were a baseball pitcher.”
Immediately Cam’s mind scans his memory for the sport. Had he played it? His mind might be disjointed and fragmented, so finding what it contains is always difficult, but it’s easy to know what memories don’t exist at all.
“Never a pitcher,” he says. “Never.”
“Of course not,” she says calmly. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

That’s right, muscle memory!

We continue with this for a bit:

“You’re strong, but your muscle groups don’t work and play well with others.”
Cam knew it was just an offhand joke, but there was a truth to it that stuck in Cam’s craw, the way food often did. The way his throat didn’t always agree to swallow what his tongue was pushing its way.
“Eventually your body will learn the alliances it has to make with itself,” Kenny had said—as if Cam was a factory full of strike-prone workers, or worse, a clutch of slaves forced into unwanted labor.

Now, what would be actually going on, biologically, is that wiring was a mess. Everyone’s brain is wired a little different, so bits of his brain should be fighting over who gets what and his internal map of where his limbs are should also be off.

Finally, he puts the pieces together. He sees how he’s all scarred up and how his body has perfectly sculpted abs and how he doesn’t know what his face is because there’s no mirrors, so he demands one.

“No!” He touches his face with his fingers, this time hard enough that it begins to hurt. “It’s Dauger in the iron mask, not Narcissus at the pool! Seeing will lighten the load, not break the camel’s back!”

Why is all future stuff always full of such extremely old references? These ones don’t even work right.

The shape of his body is beautiful; he is perfectly proportioned, muscular and trim. For a moment he thinks maybe he is Narcissus after all, absorbed in vanity—but as he steps closer and more into the light, he can see the scars. He knew they were there, but to see them all at once is overwhelming. They are ugly, and they’re everywhere—but nowhere are they more pronounced than on his face.
That face is a nightmare.
Strips of flesh, all different shades, like a living quilt stretched across the bone, muscle and cartilage beneath. Even his head—clean-shaven when he awoke, but now filling in with peach-fuzz hair—has different colors and textures sprouting like uneven fields of clashing crops.

“Monster!” he says. That word comes from so many different bits of memory, he needs no help finding it. “Frankenstein!”
“No,” Roberta says sharply. “Never think that! That monster was made from dead flesh, but you are made of the living! That creature was a violation of all things natural, but you, Cam, you are a new world wonder!”

I’m not sure to what degree this is supposed to be total bullshit. On the one hand, Roberta is totally evil – we’ll be getting extra confirmation in a sec – but on the other, the series from the start has insisted there’s some difference between unwinding and death, that cutting kids up alive for parts is somehow not the same thing. Insisting there actually is any distinction between using dead bodies and live ones seems in line with that.

“Your legs belonged to a varsity runner,” she tells him, “and your heart to a boy who could have been an Olympic swimmer, had he not been unwound. Your arms and shoulders once belonged to the best baseball player any harvest camp had ever seen, and your hands? They played guitar with rare and glorious talent!” Then she smiles and catches his gaze in the mirror. “As for your eyes, they came from a boy who could melt a girl’s heart with a single glance.”

So the important part where is that guitar kid is a magical leprechaun we met in 1.5 but the really outstanding part is the idea that the boy’s heart-melting glances were somehow literally powered by his eyeballs. Nothing to do with the expression on his face or anything, just literally the balls of goo.

“Your left frontal lobe holds the analytical and computational skills of seven kids who tested at the genius level in math and science. Your right frontal lobe combines the creative cores of almost a dozen poets, artists, and musicians. Your occipital lobe holds neuron bundles from countless Unwinds with photographic memories, and your language center is an international hub of nine languages, all waiting to be reawakened.”

There’s a lot of ways this is a dumb idea but some that jump out immediately are:

People who are genius level in something usually do it by coopting extra bits of their brain. The reason a kid is super great at math is because their math ability isn’t confined to the “math” brain section, so cutting out only that won’t provide you with their same ability. If anything, it’s more likely the designated math chunk might not even have it, or have something that doesn’t work without the other bit. And much of science is knowledge, so it’s memories scattered all over.

Creativity actually does correlate with mental illness. There are plenty of creative people who are perfectly normal, but you absolutely would not want to jam multiple max-creative people into a single spot. Also, people who are good artists often think visually, which is a different mental language than the standard verbal one, so now you’ve got those two things fighting it out.

Which brings us merrily to the issue of knowing multiple languages, which should mean he can’t say anything. Bilingual and up, your brain learns how to handle multiple languages. Current thought is that those people don’t think in a given language, they have some third internal one, while monolingual people do think in their own language (with exceptions). So, if they decided to go for max proficiency in each language and jammed the monolingual together, the brain bits can’t understand each other. If they used bilingual people, it should work better except that those people probably had different internal languages.

Finally, we don’t even need to speculate on what jamming in photographic memory would do, because we already know it’s inherently bad and research right now is more on the issue of why that is.

Also true photographic memory doesn’t exist and eidetic memory is found in very young children but rapidly fades over time so that it’s extremely rare by age six and almost unheard of in adults.

In conclusion, I get that the point is for him to be a hodgepodge but it’d make more sense to grab one kid who was super good at languages and use him for the language center, one kid who was super good at math, etc.

Roberta explains she was standing there creepily at every unwinding and while you might think there’s an obvious reason that’s a mistake, she’s right and somehow being seen by every single one of them while they’re terrified doesn’t seem to have transferred any associations beyond “hey, I sorta recognize that person!”

“Those poor kids were too dysfunctional to know how to use the gifts they were given—but now, even divided, they can finally be complete through you!”

Now, the guitar bit confirms that he’s got at least one kid in there who were just flat out stolen, and that does explain how they were able to find so many genius kids. It’s somewhat understandable that kids who were great at a sport might still be unwound, but being smart is more universally assumed to mean you’ll do well as an adult.

It’s their minds.
All of them.
Crying out.
Please, please make this stop,
until there is no voice to beg,
no mind to scream.
At that singular moment
When “I am” becomes “I’m not . . .”
He takes a deep, shuddering breath. Those final memories are a part of him now, spliced together,
like the skin of his face. The memories are impossible to bear, and yet he bears them.

This is always horrible writing and don’t do it.

Only now does he realize how strong he truly must be to hold the memory of a hundred unwindings without crumbling to nothing.

Only now does the author realize he doesn’t know how to actually write this and so goes fuck it and moves on.

Roberta explains that the reason everything is super fancy is because he’s got super powerful backers who he shouldn’t ask more about. What matters is he’s going to be so pretty! The skin grafts were meant to make him a beautiful mosaic.

“It was a choice we made to give you a piece of every ethnicity. From the palest sienna-Caucasian,
to the darkest umber tones of unspoiled Africa, and everything in between. Hispanic, Asian, Islander,
Native, Australoid, Indian, Semitic

Here as usual, Aborigines get the worst of a a bad lot. “So we’re not supposed to use mongoloid any more, it’s okay to use words with the same derivation, right???””

You are everyman, Cam, and the truth of it is evident in your face. I promise you, when those scars heal, you will be the new definition of handsome! You will be a shining beacon, the greatest hope for the human race. You will show them that, Cam! By the mere virtue of your existence, you will show them!”

I’m not sure if there’s actually some plan of what this is supposed to accomplish or if it’s just assumed that sometimes rich people just do stuff that doesn’t make sense.

As he thinks of this, his heart accelerates, pounding powerfully in his chest. He imagines all the races this heart of his has won—and although he has no memory of being a star swimmer, his heart knows what his mind does not. It longs to be in the pool once more, just as his legs long for the track.

Apparently every brain they picked was really suggestible.

We then get a really helpful worldbuilding announcement:

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So we finally get it almost confirmed that families get money for doing this.

You know, if the real reason for unwinding isn’t parts, and they have to give big payouts to parents, that would explain why it still costs so much money to get parts. The government would be setting the prices on the useful organs to pay for having to unwind and store all the other parts.

Anyway, Cam keeps working on getting his brain and body functional. The pictures he looks at get more complex or he’s asked to make up stories about them.

Then, amid the pictures strewn across the computer tabletop, Cam sees an image of a girl that catches his attention. Roberta follows his eyes to the image, and she immediately tries to wipe the image away, but Cam grabs her hand and stops her.
“No. Let me see.”

Can you guess how bad this will be?

He can tell the picture was not taken with the girl’s permission. It’s framed at an odd angle. Perhaps taken secretly. A memory flashes. This same girl. On a bus.

…

Cam can’t quite tell where the picture was taken. It’s outdoors. Dusty. The girl plays a piano under something dark and metallic that shades her. The girl is beautiful.
“Clipped wings. Broken heaven.” Cam closes his eyes, remembering Roberta’s order that he find the proper words before he speaks. “She’s like . . . an angel damaged when she fell to earth. She plays music to heal herself, but nothing can heal her brokenness.”

God this is awful.

Roberta keeps trying to get him to stop looking and move on and he keeps insisting.

“I will meet her.”
Roberta chuckles bitterly. “Very unlikely.”
“We’ll see.”

So yep, more terribleness to come for Risa.