DEADLINE open thread. Have a party.

I thought Shaun's responses throughout the book rang very true. I was surprised that I wasn't shocked at their relationship - I guess you planted the foreshadowing cues very well, then!

DEADLINE moved slower in a narrative sense than FEED did, although that didn't stop me from tearing through it.

I think George is smarter than Shaun, who spends a bit of time flailing about. And how annoying that he has to go back to the same people for more tidbits.

I find myself thinking that even if Shaun were to reveal what he suspects, it would get "lost" in the news of the Southern storm and aftermath.

The big reveal at the end? Made me simultaneously overjoyed and furious. I cried so hard at the end of FEED over her, that bringing her back made me angry, like I'd been suckered - except I'm so damn glad she's alive. The teasers about cloning and ethics throughout were quite well done, in that you well-established the tech, and prohibitions, and willingness of the CDC to break their own rules if the experiment looked good enough, yet those last pages were such a surprise!

The memory transfer will be an interesting explanation, I am sure. I am eagerly awaiting BLACKOUT.

And I still totally think this series should be optioned to be movies.

Anger? Anger? And here I was describing it to people as, "It's like suddenly the best Christmas present, EVER. Only you know it's going to turn out to be a foot. In a stocking."

Mm... I'm mildly annoyed that Georgia was one of the 2 in 10,000.

Correction: I'm provisionally mildly annoyed about that. I'm not at all sure there isn't more going on that will make me go "Right, that makes so much more sense." It happened with the original "she would have gotten better" line.

But, even if there isn't more, okay, everything else holds up, and this falls into the range of things I will accept because it makes the plot engine run. As long as there aren't too many of these, I'm good.

But the clone doesn't bother me. You planted that Chekhov's Gun on the mantel, very clearly:

1. The CDC does cloning
2. The CDC had Georgia's body
3. Therefore, it is at least possible...

QED.

a) makes sense. I'm not sure I follow b). That is, what other figures might one presume? I just don't understand the processes involved in figuring out the numbers.

Okay, so the 2 in 10,000 figure is only looking at known cases where someone a) has a reservoir condition and b) has gone into amplification and either come out of it or not. Is that correct? No, wait, that's not it. b) gone far enough into amplification that, whether or not the person was shot, whether or not the person became a zombie, whether or not the person recovered, there were enough antibodies to test the blood, and the blood was, in fact, tested. Is that correct?

I don't think George is smarter than Shaun. He just doesn't parse information the same way she did.

Because all of the CrazyBrainRoommate!Georgia dialogue was coming out of Shaun's backbrain.

Because all of the CrazyBrainRoommate!Georgia dialogue was coming out of Shaun's backbrain.

I'm not entirely certain that's the case here.

This.

At one point, CrazyBrainRoommate!Georgia flat out tells Shaun in so many words she doesn't know anything he doesn't know because she's a figment of his sanity slippage.


ICON LOVE!

So she's from the backbrain, and clone!George is from the lab.

Just because brainpan!Georgia says she doesn't know anything he doesn't know doesn't mean it's not, in a way, fundamentally Georgia. If he doesn't hear or see something, she can't know it. But she processes information in an entirely different way.

What with the transferred-immunity thing, and the "mob intelligence" among the zombies, my personal theory is that there was a subconscious - hell, maybe even below subconscious somehow - connection between the two of them when they were together and alive, like there is between zombies, because of KA and science somehow. Not like proper telepathy, but just... a knowing of each other. They know each other almost better than they knew themselves. Which, in turn, led me to think that maybe a bit of that "George's Way Of Processing Information" is just sort of remembered by part of Shaun's brain. Which would make crazybrainroommate!Georgia... both part of Shaun's backbrain and not at the same time. He doesn't have the ability to think like she does, but part of his brain remembers how she did and so when he's delusional and remembering her, it accesses that, somehow. Which I can't explain any better, but there's my epileptic tree theory of the day.

Of course, there's also the point where both VisualHallucination!George and Clone!George are free of retinal KA, and I do not for a second believe in coincidences like that in this series.

AUGH IS IT NEXT YEAR YET?

See, it seems to me like Georgia knows a lot of stuff Shaun doesn't. I don't just mean "she processes differently" or "she notices Becks likes Shaun while Shaun is oblivious" stuff either. There were a lot of drastic moments where I thought, "that is George, that is not Shaun's version of George." I'm gonna have to go reread to nail down examples, but it was enough to make me think, "Dude, YOU ARE A GHOST, I DON'T CARE IF YOU SAY OTHERWISE AND THIS IS A SCIENCE SERIES AND NOT THE GHOST GIRL ONE." 'Cause if she's not a ghost, I want an explanation for how that's working.

I like to thnk that he's just compartmentalized things so much that brain-Georgia is in effect the manifestation of the "hunches" that we all have, while out subconscious is working on stuff we're not conscious of. Sean's not stupid, but he thinks in very different ways - but he spent so long with George that the "analytical" part of his brain just sounds an awful lot like her. Plus, he's nuts.

Well... I dunno, it sounds at least partially ghost-y to me. I know Mira Grant isn't going to be doing ghosts in a science series, but it seemed to me like this went beyond Shaun making up what Georgia would do in her head.

Also, I am doing a research project on daemons and other than the part where George existed as a real person before she died, this is pretty much how they operate. Like a separate intelligence in your head that isn't your usual daily consciousness, the part that knows the answers already.