Maximum Ride Chapters 19 & 20

So we start off with nonsense, which is always a great way to kick off a chapter. I’ll just quote it so I can get right to deconstruction.

Despite my growing anxiety, it was glorious up here. Not many birds flew this high—some falcons, hawks, other raptors. Every once in a while some of them would come check us out, probably thinking, Man, those are some dang ugly birds.

Hey Jimmy? Are you sure you want to say only raptors fly that high? Like, really sure? Because there are geese that fly over the Himalaya’s during migration and the highest recorded altitude of a bird was set by a Ruppell’s griffon vulture at thirty seven thousand feet. Are you saying Max is above, say, twenty thousand feet? That seems to be the ceiling where most long migrating birds will stop at.

You know what, Jimmy? I’ll let you have that one and ignore how much energy it’d take to get and then maintain that altitude. I’ll ignore how much it’d take to maintain that altitude when humans, winged or not, aren’t especially aerodynamic so there’d be a lot of drag to fight. I’ll even ignore that shapes that large and flying so close they can talk would probably show up on radar and draw unwanted attention from the FAA. Nope, Max and crew are flying above twenty thousand feet on their way to rescue Angel.

But, as late night product hucksters are prone to say, wait, there’s more. Max looks down and spots some “earthbound” kids.

Just before, Max explains how focusing on things make her vision “ratchet”, read zoom, in. Apparently they, being those evil scientists, tried to “improve” Iggy’s vision and left him blind. What? That doesn’t even make any sense, Jimmy. So you’re telling me that these scientists looked at these kids ability to see things perfectly from over twenty thousand feet and figured they could improve on it? Just who the hell is in charge of this project? Tim Allen? ‘They need more power! Rowhohoho. Get me the drill.’

Yes, apparently their vision is better than modern camera technology. While flying above Max spots some kids and it looks like they’re bullying another kid. Oh, and the bigger kids were boys threatening a girl. This gives Jimmy a chance to go all girl power on us.

Don’t even get me started about the whole Y chromosome thing. I live with three guys, remember? They’re three of the good ones, and they’re still obnoxious as all get-out.

Wow, that’s just so full of stupidity you could cut that sentence out and sell it as concentrate. How and why do these kids have problems with sexism? For one, they grew up in a lab and I would think they whole evil torturing “scientists” would have pushed aside any thoughts of inequality being as none of them receive preferential treatment based on their sex.

Secondly, they all defer to Max without question. Even Iggy, who’s close to her in age doesn’t argue with her. Sure he whined about it but he waited until she was gone to do it. That’s the kind of thing impotent employees do when their manager give them a crappy job. I don’t see any sexism among them but then again Jimmy would much prefer to tell us rather than show.

Max looks at Fang who says no. Then she whines how most people think her snap decisions are stupid and how ungrateful they are for that. Gee, can’t imagine why. It’s like snap decisions made without any thought are stupid or something.

So Max tells Fang to wait for her near Lake Mead while she goes down and does the superhero thing. Which is fine except I thought that Angel was suffering a fate worse than death? I guess it’s not really quite as urgent as Max said. Sure, it’s important to get to her but there’s no rush. There’s time to stop, rescue somebody, maybe buy a hotdog and take in a movie before Angel’s in any real trouble.

Then we’re back with Iggy and the other dumb kid. They’re busy building a time bomb. Which makes little sense as a time bomb works best when you have a target in mind like the werewolf base. I’d think a remote detonator would be far more valuable to them, what with their supervision.

So Iggy’s power is apparently just knowing how to fix things. He apparently fixed their PC and then downloaded some bomb schematics. Which is pretty impressive considering he’s blind. Later I’m sure we’re going to learn he’s got some sort of echolocation vision going like Daredevil. Of course Jimmy offers a brilliant nugget of stupidity.

The Gasman consulted the schematics he had downloaded off the Internet. This morning Iggy had unfrozen the compressor fan inside the CPU, so the computer now worked without shutting down in hysteria every ten minutes. He had just fixed the computer, presto change-o.

That’s pretty impressive as most people don’t own computers with phase-change cooling systems. Most home computers come with the basic heat sink and fan combo especially considering the year this was written in.

So Iggy tells Gasman to keep track of the yellow wire and not to mix it up with the red one. Because there’s always a red wire. Then Iggy says he needs the timing device and tells Gasman to go get Max’s alarm clock. And that’s the end of that chapter. I can really see you’re pedigree showing through Jimmy.