THAT MORNING I wake up to the buzz of an electric razor.

The showers only work for five minutes, but you have electricity to spare, but the lights have to be turned off at night to conserve electricity, but also there’s solar cars, but there’s a combination wind/solar/water power plant nearby, but the lake and rivers are dried up (so where is the water coming from), and there’s rough hewn planks for the walls but modern bathrooms. It’s all just a grabbag of random elements that do not interact on any level, even though they really need to.

I am reluctant to leave, but I am supposed to work in the laundry rooms, and I don’t want the Amity to say I’m not fulfilling my part of the deal they offered us.

She didn’t have to do anything all day yesterday (I presume, since she followed Marcus in the morning then skipped straight to her nightmare that night) so it seems like Amity is being pretty lax on the whole chores thing, which is a minor request to begin with, and still she whines about it? I could maybe read this as a stress reaction (“Ugh, I just want to mourn my parents while curled up in bed, c’mon people!”) except this isn’t the first time she’s complained about it and there’s always this air of unfairness about it. It may be stressful to your unique circumstances, but it’s not unfair in general.

She goes back to her room and finds Peter standing there. Lord knows how long he’s been just…standing there, waiting.

Peter is there because he wants to know what else is on the hard drive because he thinks there’s more than just the simulation on it. Why he thinks that, I have no idea. There’s really no reason to assume that.

Hell, Tobias didn’t exactly make a ceremony out of giving it to her to hang on to, so how does Peter even know this hard drive exists at all, much less suspect that there’s something extra on it?

This whole “new information” thing is feeling very shoved-in. There was no reason to suspect that there was any impetus beyond “Erudite is evil and wants to control shit” last book, but now that there’s “information” suddenly everyone knows about it? Or at least suspects about it.

They argue for a bit about emotional stuff, and then Tris notices that Peter already has the harddrive in his pocket. Why did he hang around in her room afterwards, then? Did Tris just have very good timing and didn’t notice/report on him being nervous or jumping away from the dresser?

When Peter refuses to give it back, they get in a fistfight. A bunch of people pull them apart, and when Tobias shows up he takes the hard drive from Peter and makes vague threats at him.

I scowl. The Amity man with his hand on my arm starts to pull me down the hallway. I try to wrench my body out of his grasp.

That doesn’t seem very uber-passivism…

Amity takes her to a “conflict room” which is just a small room with a large window and a…therapist-ish dude who wants her to talk about the fight. While I do understand what they’re trying to get at, immediately after the fight is not really an optimal time for this. Also, is this just that guy’s job? Sit in that room and wait for someone to have a conflict? Is this a consistent enough problem in Amity that they’d have someone in there full time? Which seems reasonable, but then, was it just luck that the room was open exactly when Tris needed it?

So many problems which could have been answered by having a counselor just arrive after Tris, maybe with her having a few minutes to stare out the window and calm down first.

Oh. Sorry. There is to be not talking here. Instead they talk for like five seconds and when Tris doesn’t immediately acquiesce, they stab her in the neck with more ‘serum.’ Apparently this is ‘happy serum’ because it just makes Tris loopy with smiles.

“Can you tell me where to find Tobias?” I say. When I imagine his face, affection for him bubbles up inside me, and all I want to do is kiss him. “Four, I mean. He’s handsome, isn’t he? I don’t really know why he likes me so much. I’m not very nice, am I?”

[…]

I laugh a little. “The fight. What a silly thing …”

And it does seem like a silly thing, slamming your fist into someone else’s body. Like a caress, but too hard. A caress is much nicer. Maybe I should have run my hand along Peter’s arm instead. That would have felt better to both of us. My knuckles wouldn’t ache right now.

And I do mean loopy.

So, this is one of the worst things Amity could do for conflict resolution. Not the worst, but certainly up there. Why? NOTHING IS ACTUALLY RESOLVED. If all you do is demand obedience or jab with serums, then the situation never gets addressed. The reasons for the fight don’t get addressed, the interpersonal problems stay there, and the conflict is just going to come back. It’s going to happen again, and you’re going to have to stab with happy juice again, and then the fight will happen again, and then stabby again, and then fight again, ad nauseum.

Not to mention being loopy doesn’t exactly make you effective the rest of the day.

“Four!” I call out. Why am I calling out a number? Oh yes. Because that’s his name.

See? She’s not going to be doing any higher brain functions until this wears off.

The touch sends a shock through my body, and all my insides burn like his fingers ignited them. I pull closer to him, pressing my body against his, and lift my head to kiss him.

Amity just turned super creepy in general.

Tobias agrees with me and does not give in to kissy times and instead wants to find out why Tris is acting…well, drugged. He takes her to see Johanna, who says that they must have given her too much of the serum because she’s so small and they didn’t take that into account.

Okay, how small is Tris? Because I refuse to believe that a group that administers happy juice for every conflict doesn’t know how to adjust for size, including short people, so unless she is unusually tiny, this makes no sense. I had the sense through the first book that she was merely an average amount of slight, which means there should be plenty of Amity people getting a similar sized dose.

Or does the book think that only large people ever get into fights, and Tris is just so very special for being short and short tempered?

Tobias objects to the use of the serum, partly for the reasons I did above (ish, he did only have one line) and asks if Johanna dumps it all in the water so everyone gets a dose.

“But whatever we agree to do here, we do together, as a faction. If I could give the serum to everyone in this city, I would. You would certainly not be in the situation you are in now if I had.”

Um…so why don’t you? You don’t really give an answer. Does it have to be injected to work? Do you not have enough? Is it because different sized people react so vastly different to a certain dose?

Further, I really doubt that everyone actually agrees when their option is to be drugged at the first sign of conflict. It sounds like Amity is not peaceful at all, they’re just incredibly repressed and all dissenting opinions are quashed under (implied or implicit) threat of injection.

Or even threat of expulsion, since Johanna says that the fight means they’ll have to leave. Wow, kicking them out after one fight and zero attempts at reconciliation. I wonder if fights do happen in Amity, just in secret out in the orchard where the idiots on charge can’t see.

Tobias and Johanna get mad at each other over the whole “you’re so anti-conflict that you left us to die” and “we’re being peaceful for peace and shit.”

“Peace.” Tobias almost spits the word. “Yes, I’m sure it will be very peaceful when we are all either dead or cowering in submission under the threat of mind control or stuck in an endless simulation.”

You know, the kind of threat all of Amity is under now! Maybe that’s why they don’t see Erudite’s take-over as that much of a threat. It’s business as usual for them.

Tobias says they’re going to leave in two days and Amity will have to deal with Peter because he isn’t coming along. Good, he’s kind of useless anyway.

Oh-ho, Johanna strongly implies that there are low doses of serum in the bread, not dumped into the water supply. Well, since they provide all the foodstuffs, why don’t they do that to the entire city? I mean, sure, it’s unethical as shit, but they don’t seem very big on ethics to begin with.

What are the rules in this world about factions interfering with other factions? They’ve all got different opinions about what is the best route to peace is. The other factions can’t necessarily enforce their methods on other factions without actual force, but Amity has this handy “makes everyone happy” juice that they could lace into everything, which means they can impose their way a lot easier than everyone else can. Is there some sort of taboo against that? Safeguards or rules? Anything?