Continuing our adventures in Connor is a terrible person and also a sue the book insists we should love, Connor’s invited into the admiral’s quarters to fix something because sue.

it’s not nearly as luxurious as Connor had expected. The leather seats have tears, the carpet is almost worn through. It looks more like an old motor home than Air Force One.

So presumably the book at least has enough sense to understand that housing unwinds is not, monetarily, a winning move. That, or it just feels like portraying a character who doesn’t bother with fancy stuff.

The admiral comes out holding a gun.

“Just cleaning it,” says the Admiral. Connor wonders why he would still have a clip in a gun he was cleaning

So something’s definitely up.

The guy says he wants his coffeemaker fixed and Connor doesn’t get why he doesn’t get one from another plane and maybe because the broken one would just be sent off to fix anyway so this is less trouble? Why is this so weird to you?

Also because obviously the admiral wants to talk to Connor personally to say everyone’s talking about him.

“First, for the things you repair. Then for the fighting.”
Connor senses a reprimand on the way. Yes, he’s had fewer fights here than usual, but the Admiral is a man of zero tolerance. “Sorry about the fighting.”
“Don’t be. Oh, there’s no question that you’re a loose cannon, but more often than not you’re aimed in the right direction.”

So zero tolerance unless it’s Connor!

“From what I can see, each fight you’ve engaged in has resolved one problem or another. Even the fights you lose. So, even then, you’re fixing things.”

Jesus christ even fanfic doesn’t usually pull shit like this.

Connor discovers the coffeemaker is just unplugged and realizes it’s all an excuse to chat and freaks the hell out.

Connor wants to bolt, but Risa’s voice is in his head again, telling him
to scan his options. Sure, he can run. Chances are, he can get to the hatch before
the Admiral can stop him—but opening the hatch won’t be easy. He could hit the
Admiral with one of his tools. That might give him enough time to get away.

Yeah, I don’t think Risa’s down with plan “smash a screwdriver into an old man’s head” in the first place.

Anyway, Connor narrowly avoids violently assaulting an old man by remembering that outside is just lots of desert so there’s nowhere to run and decides to try this “talking” business he’s heard of.

Admiral guy points out that Connor doesn’t much like him and wants to know why. He points out that if selling kids was so great, why the hell is he living in this stupid desert all year?

“You do it because of the power. You do it because it lets you keep hundreds of helpless kids in the palm of your hand. And you do it because you can pick and choose who gets unwound—and which parts you’ll get.”

This shocks admiral guy, who, because plot fuckery, gets upset and threateny instead of just pointing out this is bullshit. Only after suspending it up a bit does he respond halfway sanely.

“And my teeth are the proof.”
“Yes!”
“Then you can have them!”
Then the Admiral does something beyond imagining. He reaches into his mouth, grabs onto his own jaw, and rips the teeth out of his mouth. His eyes blazing at Connor, he hurls the hard pink clump in his hand down on the table, where it clatters in two horrible pieces.

Connor screams.

When he’s done freaking out the guy explains they’re a magical thing called dentures.

“They used to be common in the days before unwinding. But who wants false teeth when, for half the price, you can get real ones straight from a healthy Unwind? I had to get these made in Thailand— no one does it here anymore.”

So…organ prices continue to make no sense. Lung prices are practically impossible to meet, but teeth are super cheap despite people needing new ones all the time.

Furthermore…while it’s possible to transplant teeth, the real issue is that the root is easily damaged. I just had to get a root canal because I’d jarred a tooth falling a while ago and somehow that ended up getting the root infected. So teeth transplants shouldn’t really work for the whole “unwinding is not death” bit – it doesn’t matter that they have magic transplant technology, just putting them in would be enough trauma that a lot of them would end up infected.

(Plus, there’s also dental implants, which are basically jamming metal into your jaw instead, usually to hold onto the false teeth, and if they can transplant teeth they can certainly manage those easily. Traditional dentures are pretty shitty.)

Also hey, Thailand doesn’t unwind! Because even places that are the goto destination for underage prostitution have more standards than we do.

Hm, I wonder what happens if an unwind runs into an embassy and asks for asylum? And why doesn’t anyone go toward Canada or Mexico if we didn’t nuke the world?

He explains that the picture on his desk is of his son.

His teeth looked very much like my own at that age, so they designed my dentures using his dental records.”

Why not just your own? Seriously. The similarity thing was already covered by him being your son without it literally being true that you copied your teeth off him.

Then he does on to explain that he spends the money (that he totally gets!) from selling the kids to pay for the ones who stay and also the safe houses and also the airplanes they buy and also anything left is given to the eighteen year olds when they leave, because this apparently is super lucrative despite that not making much sense?

Whatever, I’ll accept stupid details if it means the subplot is done with.

Oh, also Connor doesn’t mention the whole Roland issue, not even that he heard the teeth thing from him.

Anyway, so the admiral wants Connor because some secret important thing.

Beneath the starboard wing of the FedEx jet are five mounds of dirt marked by crude headstones. These are the five who suffocated in transit. Their presence here makes this truly a graveyard.

So…no one else has ever died before now?

Then he tells Connor to do in and check a crates and won’t say why or go in with him. It’s because there’s five new dead kids in one, and they’re the seventeen year olds who keep being mentioned as practically running the place because the admiral likes them. He explains that yup, same crate as the first five died in.

So, the admiral says someone’s attacking his command, and apparently those five seventeen year olds were the only ones he trusted because obviously there’s no need to train up new replacements for people who’ll be gone in a year, so he’s tapped Connor to replace them because Connor-sue. It has to be kept secret because their only way to trace what happened is wait for someone to talk, and in the meantime they’ll say the five left to do stuff. I guess the book forgot about the cameras everywhere.

“Why me?” Connor has to ask.
The Admiral gives him his white-dentured smile. “Because you, my friend,
are the least of all evils.”

Or, it’s kids muttering they hope Connor takes over redux.

He waits for Roland to gloat but he doesn’t. Roland is busy becoming helicopter king.

Over the past weeks Roland has learned to fly the helicopter like a pro

I’m pretty sure you need a bit more time to learn that.

and when Cleaver isn’t around he offers free rides to those kids he feels deserve it. He says Cleaver doesn’t care, but more likely he just doesn’t know.

SO TELL SOMEONE YOU STUPID ASSHOLE

Connor had assumed that Roland would offer rides to his own inner circle of kids, but that’s not the case. Roland rewards work well done—even by kids he doesn’t know. He rewards loyalty to one’s team. He lets other kids vote on who should get a chance to do a flyby of the yard in the helicopter.

How evil.

He also constantly badmouths the admiral behind the guy’s back. Do they seriously have no way to handle malcontents? Ship him off to chop trees or whatever.

And in groups of kids he’s already won over, he whispers his theories about the Admiral’s teeth, and his scars, and his diabolical plans for all of them. He spreads fear and distrust, using it to unite as many kids as he can.

Why doesn’t the admiral just show off his teeth?

Seriously, this is the first and perhaps only person in the book that’s actually walking the damn walk, you’d think it’d be a point of pride for him. And he even knows no young person even knows what dentures are, so he should know they’d be confused, plus it’d be a great illustration that there’s other options than unwinding.

But no, all that Connor says is that he doesn’t dare say anything because Roland will find it weird. No need to warn the guy you work for!

Instead, Connor’s brilliant plan is to install a mister in the recreation area to make things cooler and nicer there.

Connor figures the project will allow him to be a fly on the wall, hearing conversations, cataloguing cliques, and performing general espionage. The problem is, Connor is never a fly on the all. Instead, his work becomes the center of attention. Kids offer to help him like he’s Tom Sawyer painting a fence. They all keep seeing him as a leader when all he wants is to be ignored.

God I hate Connor so, so much.

He then goes on to congratulate himself for keeping it secret he’s the legendary juvey-cop inconveniences.

While he’s working on this Roland moseys over to discuss Connor’s impressive work ethic, then about how he sure seems to be the admiral’s favorite.

Hayden speaks up to bullshit, claiming all sorts of kids go there! and I hear he’s taken an interest in a certain mouth breather we all know and love.”

Yup, Hayden is throwing Emby under the bus for Connor.

I’d like to point out that if one of Roland’s cronies was deflecting for Roland, Connor or Risa would be ranting about now about how this further proves his evil.

All eyes turn toward Emby, who has become a fixture at the pinball machine since he arrived. “What?”
“You’ve been up to the Admiral’s, haven’t you,” Hayden says. “Don’t deny it!”

Everyone in this book is terrible and they are terrible in every possible way.

Emby says the admiral just says that the admiral wants to know about his family and stuff. Connor wonders

Perhaps the Admiral’s looking for someone else to help him ferret out the killer. True, Emby’s much less visible than Connor, but a fly on the wall shouldn’t actually be a fly on the wall.

Everyone is terrible but Connor is the most terrible.

“I know what it is,” says Roland. “He wants your hair.”
“Does not!”
“Yeah—his own hair is thinning, right? You got yourself a nice mop up there. The old man wants to scalp you, and send the rest of you to be unwound!”
“Shut up!”
Most of the kids laugh. Sure, it’s a joke, but Connor wonders how many think Roland might be right. Emby must suspect it himself, because he looks kind of sick. It makes Connor furious.
“That’s right, pick on Emby,” says Connor. “Show everyone just how low you are.”

Right! That’s Connor (and his friends’) punching bag! He dibsed it, dammit. How dare you try to poach another man’s buttmonkey, Roland.

Incidentally, the correct response here that actually fights the problem would be something like “Come on, Roland, you’re still hung up on that? The guy could get a fresh scalp every year if he wanted and never have thinning hair. Why are you always crying about the big scary admiral? You figure if you scare the younger kids you won’t look like such a coward for peeing your pants around him?

There: counters the organ-stealing bit and ties it to Roland looking weak. Would it actually work? Well, Roland seems pretty savvy, he might think it’s weird for Connor to do anything but bitch about the guy, but on the other hand Connor is spiteful enough it’s believable he’d start arguing just because Roland’s saying it. And who knows how the other kids shake out. But it’d work more than pretending to give a shit about Emby.

That night Connor and the Admiral have a secret meeting in his quarters, drinking coffee made by a machine rumored to be broken. They speak of Roland and Connor’s suspicions about him, but the Admiral is not satisfied.
“I don’t want suspicion, I want proof. I don’t want your feelings, I want evidence.”

Holy shit why is everyone so stupid.

So either Connor didn’t give any of his reasons for suspecting Roland (attempted rape, control freak, wormed his way into a prime post, using it to build a power base, whisper campaign to convince the kids the admiral’s stealing their organs…) and is just saying he hates Roland’s stupid face so he must have done it, or the admiral is too fucking stupid to view any of that as relevant.

Also why are they drinking coffee at night? Because the cool kids do?

He pours Connor a second cup of coffee, which will surely keep him up all night

Just don’t drink it then, moron.

The admiral wants Connor to be his private confession booth suddenly and says that no one else knows this stuff but suddenly he wants to tell him “Because it serves my purposes for you to know.” and god just get on with it!

The guy explains his scars are from the Heartland War, a grenade, and not transplants. Of course, as far as we’ve heard so far, transplants don’t leave scars in the first place. Connor just wants to know whose side he was on.

“It was the last chapter in our history textbook, but we had state testing, so we never got to it.”

This is the only realistic thing in the book.

Admiral guy says that it doesn’t matter because the textbooks softball the whole thing, because remember, both sides are equally culpable and it definitely wasn’t the prolifers winning and getting everything they wanted.

The truth is, there were three sides in the war, not two. There was the Life Army, the Choice Brigade, and the remains of the American military, whose job it was to keep the other two sides from killing each other.

How the fuck would people not know this.

Seriously. What the fuck.

Also, hey, author? We know what side the military was be on, and also, fuck you.

You see, a conflict always begins with an issue—a difference of opinion, an argument. But by the time it turns into a war, the issue doesn’t matter anymore, because now it’s about one thing and one thing only: how much each side hates the other.”

No, I’m really pretty sure I hate you because of the issue.

Anyway yeah, guess we don’t need the interview because he directly states it using his mouthpiece here.

But now we’re going to get background on the war, and going to hear him fair and balancing this shit up.

“There were dark days leading up to the war. Everything that we think defines right and wrong was being turned upside down. On one side, people were murdering abortion doctors to protect the right to life, while on the other side people were getting pregnant just to sell their fetal tissue.

That’s right! Shooting doctors is exactly as evil as stem cells. The book doesn’t even fucking get the irony of the sentence, does it?

Anyway, this leads to the military splitting up, because our military works that way all of a sudden, and they’re the two armies. Which does fit with it being a landslide victory for prolifers.

“I was right there in the room when they came up with the idea that a pregnancy could be terminated retroactively once a child reaches the age of reason,” says the Admiral. “At first it was a joke—no one intended it to be taken seriously.

Except apparently the only reason it was a joke was because it was impossible, not because murdering kids has nothing to do with if it’s right to force a woman to die from a pregnancy.

“With the war getting worse,” says the Admiral, “we brokered a peace by bringing both sides to the table. Then we proposed the idea of unwinding, which would terminate unwanteds without actually ending their lives. We thought it would shock both sides into seeing reason—that they would stare at each other across the table and someone would blink. But nobody blinked. The choice to terminate without ending life—it satisfied the needs of both sides.

Some of the author’s kids are teenage girls.

The admiral explains that all that really mattered was that people wanted parts, and it was easier to make a law about murdering kids than just make organ donation mandatory. This is where the opening quote about how the war wouldn’t have happened if only there’d been more organ donors. It’s like the author can believe mass murdering kids is something the government can do, but not ordering harvesting from corpses.

It didn’t take long for ethics to be crushed by greed.

The military having such a great ethical stance here originally, with the outright banning of abortion and all.

But hey so he murders his kid because the kid was caught stealing, exactly as he did at that age!

“As one of the fathers of the Unwind Accord, I was expected to set an example.”

Not required, mind you. This was entirely a choice. And we’ve just been through how unwinding turned out to be what everyone wanted, so it’s not like there was any resistance. But while every other time, it’s been the adults just being evil scumbags for “having no budget to pay for you” or “you regularly have violent destructive fits you can’t explain” or “you have a serious mental illness we can’t handle”, people thinking you should do stuff is obviously way too hard to fight back against because this is the author’s mouthpiece here, isn’t he so great with his tragic backstory it’s super tragic you guys.

“We signed the order, then changed our minds. But it was already too late. They had taken Harlan right out of school to the harvest camp, and rushed him through. It had already been done.”

Which as we know isn’t how it works, but I guess saying he signed the order and sat around for a couple months then realized he made a mistake wouldn’t sound so great.

Also, the author is completely oblivious to the insane amount of power this guy had. Connor told us unwind orders can’t be taken back. And the other options the guy had, like sending his kid to military school, are costly themselves. But he’s rich, so even though he could have done anything he wanted, it’s a tragedy. The poorer families who had fewer options? Evil. Every last one.

“I’m sorry,” Connor says, and means it.

Of course you do, you only like other terrible people.

Anyway that’s why he’s doing this now. Also apparently his wife set up a foundation for their dead kid, but no mention of what it actually does and now the chapter’s done thank fucking god.