I blame my depression/anxiety on top of current events, but lately I’ve had the urge to reread something-punk dystopian hellscapes. The Windup Girl, specifically.

When I first picked up the novel years ago, it took me some determination to get through the (what I thought was at the time) dense writing. I did not have much trouble, this time. It probably helped that I was familiar with the book.

(There’s going to be spoilers ahead.)

This would be the part where I would draw parallels to the present-day COVID-ravaged landscape and look, I’m in the United States; compared to literally everywhere else in the world we’re not doing so hot. While in the book there was a potential new pandemic brewing in some factory, but that was quickly overshadowed by several things: riots between two political factions, white corporate neo-colonizing, man-made pandemics that kill human and crop alike, irresponsible scientists, and invisible cats. And Emiko.

You know, the girl in the title.

She’s the one I remembered the most. An android/artificial human/neo-person abandoned in a climate that did not favor her, picked up by a pimp, and abused nightly because they think she’s a synthetic human-shaped toy with no soul, no rights, and no will of her own because she was born from a test tube. The poor girl went through so much and when she finally snapped, I remember cheering her on as she snatched the throats out of her abusers. Literally.

But what I forgot was how she achieved the strength and speed to do it. She always had it, but she needed the thought processes to get there. To break out of her conditioning to habitually shrink herself and serve others, that obedience instilled in her since childhood by her sensei. An expositional conversation revealed that “it would take an extraordinary stimulus to do so.”

Imagine being seen as Less Than and strung along with false hope for years- with the threat of being unceremoniously killed should she ever slip up.

That would qualify as an Extraordinary Stimulus, wouldn’t it?

What would you have done, if you were her? If you have ever been Othered, treated as Less Than, constantly fed lies to maintain compliance, told to obey (or get unceremoniously killed), kept at the bottom… hell, even if you were blessed with an existence lacking such, if you had any empathy at all you may understand Emiko at that point.

Rereading that chapter was difficult. But when she reached her epiphany and reacted in the most human way I know, I cheered for her again. Who doesn’t daydream of inflicting retribution on those that wronged you? And just how often do you witness terrible people receiving exactly what they fucking deserve?

And for the finishing move, she’s the one with the Happy Ending where others were haunted, dead, or fate simply unknown: not only did she live, but she thrived in that drowned city.

The plagues and calorie wars didn’t mean as much to me as Emiko did.