How It All Goes Down
- Tobias is trying to mentally adapt to the fact that Amar is alive while Tris examines the photo of her mother that Zoe gave her.
- The scenery zips by: trees, birds, pavement. Tobias observes: "This is a wild world." Oh baby, baby, it is a wild world.
- The truck takes the gang through a few fences and into the Bureau of Genetic Welfare, which is in what used to be O'Hare Airport.
- Zoe explains what an airport was: a place where travelers waited an interminable amount of time for constantly delayed airplanes, which were a form of air travel that would be fast and efficient if the airlines would just get their stuff together and be honest about basic things like airfares and travel times.
- Actually, Zoe says it's "safe, fast, and amazing" (14.38), leaving out a few critical details…
- The airport is now used to "monitor the experiments" (14.42) from a distance. And by "experiments," Zoe means all the people, like Tris and her family and friends, who live inside the city.
- The people at the Bureau actually still use the scanners, and everyone has to go through them.
- After submitting to a full-body scan, everyone follows Zoe into a huge control room, where a man named David appears and says, "This […] is what we've waited for since the very beginning" (14.71). What? Frequent flyer miles with no blackout dates?