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Nightmare Fuel / Unwind

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  • The whole concept of parents signing over kids to be "unwound". Being unwound amounts to having all of your organs harvested, which is essentially a death sentence. Between the ages of 13 and 18, a teenager's parents are allowed to sign them over to be unwound at any time for any reason, no questions asked, and they have absolutely no say at all about what's going to happen to them.
    • It's not even just organs. It's also your arms, legs, hands, feet, face, bones, and brain. You're fully conscious the whole time, and it's the last thing you remember when chunks of your brain get placed in another person. Your brain still remembers your pre-unwound life, and some parts of your brain don't even remember you're essentially dead. Talk about And I Must Scream.
    • Some of the parents' reasons for consigning their kids to be unwound are terrifying, too. Connor's parents did it because he was a troublemaker. Emby's parents died and his aunt sent him to be unwound because if she raised him, she wouldn't have enough money to send her own three children to college. Mai was the youngest of four daughters in her traditional Chinese family, and her parents decided to get rid of her after finally getting the son they wanted. Hayden's parents were going through a bitter divorce and hated each other so much they decided they'd both rather have him unwound than let the other have custody of him. Even kids without parents aren't safe; Risa is an orphan who is chosen to be unwound simply because of budget cuts at the state home where she lives.
    • Even kids whose parents who would never sign their kid to be unwound aren't safe. There are parts pirates hunting kids and they don't care if they're AWOL or not.
    • "Tithes" are children of religious families who are specially chosen to be unwound as sacrifices, and they're excited to have it happen to them.
    • The legend of Humphrey Dunfee. He was a teenager who fell in with the wrong group of friends and got in trouble. The first two times, his father got him off, but the third time, he didn't. Since his father was one of the writers of the Unwind Accord, he was expected to set an example, so he and his wife had Humphrey sent to a harvest camp. They changed their minds after realizing what they'd done, but it was too late—Humphrey had already been unwound. According to the stories, his father hacked into the National Unwind Database and got a list of every single person who received a piece of Humphrey, and he and his wife went traveling around the world to track down and kill all those people one by one so they could piece their son back together.
      Connor: That's why people call him Humphrey. 'Cause 'all the king's horses and all the king's men...couldn't put Humphrey together again.
  • Roland's threatened rape of Risa, just to screw with Connor. Especially since she Hates Being Touched.
  • CyFi is a boy who received part of a brain from an Unwind named Tyler. He gets random urges to do things that he wouldn't do but Tyler would, such as compulsively steal things or pet a dog across the street. And that part of Tyler's brain, to some extent, still thinks it's Tyler and doesn't know what it's doing in this foreign body.
    CyFi: And this kid—he doesn't even understand he's a part of me. It's like those ghosts that don't know they're dead. He keeps trying to be him, and can't understand why the rest of him ain't there.
    • Tyler (or more accurately the part of Tyler's brain in CyFi) begging his parents not to unwind him, with no ability to understand that it's already happened.
  • The unwinding scene with Roland. Yeesh.
  • Starkey attempts to rescue/kidnap a storked kid named Jesus marked for unwinding, but when Jesus tries to attack him, one of Starkey's comrades bludgeons him with a football trophy in a panic and accidentally kills him. Furious, Starkey decides to blow up the house to show the world what he'll do to parents who unwind their storks.
  • The So Called "Terror Generation" and "Feral Teens". Imagine the people in power potentially messing up your present and future so badly you'll have no choice but to labor in poverty on a broken planet for a corrupt and money hungry government for decades if it can be fixed at all. Finally you take matters into your own hands, trying to make someone fix things so you can have a decent life. But they just keep arguing over what is or isn't alive, giving nothing to the people who are already here. Then the people meant to protect you, your parents, the police, your government shoot you down in the streets, throw you in jail, and finally condemn you to a Fate Worse than Death.
  • The eventual fate of Nelson in UnDivided. Being unwound without anesthesia.
  • Black market parts dealer Divan Umarov owns an artwork he obtained from a Brazilian artist called the Organic Organ, an organ with eighty-eight living disembodied heads instead of pipes. When a key is pressed, one of the heads calls out that note. Divan "reassures" Risa that the brains aren't in there, probably helping rich Brazilian children to think better. Although the eyes open from time to time, which he calls "disconcerting".
    • In Unknown Quantity, from Un Bound, Divan's sister Dagmara proceeds to play it, performing a complex and haunting piece that just furthers the Nightmare Fuel.
    • In Undivided, Divan shows his guest and Unwind supplier, Nelson, his garden where he has four large porcelain jars, in which are imprisoned four assassins that were sent to kill him. The neck of a jar is narrow enough not to allow any movement save for that of the prisoner's head, which pokes out of the top. In this fashion, they are incapable of moving or doing anything, even speaking, except to open their mouths to eat nutritional chews fed to them by Divan. Nelson wonders to himself if they had their vocal cords removed, or (paraphrased) "they don't speak because there's not much to talk about when you've been made into a living houseplant."
    • Even worse is how Divan decides to kill his sister in response to her attempt to poison him: He kills the pilot and copilot of the Lady Lucrezia and connects the organ to the autopilot, meaning the only way to keep the plane from crashing is to play the organ until it runs out of gas. Dagmara is forced to play the organ while Divan and Argent escape with the only available parachutes. The plane eventually crashes.

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