How It All Goes Down
- Tris recognizes David from the photograph she has of her mother. No, David isn't her mom, but David is the guy who is with her mom. A younger, fitter, hotter David, that is.
- David's the leader of the Bureau of Genetic Welfare, which is an offshoot of what used to be the United States government.
- What is this United States government thing, you ask? It was a large governing body that failed completely. Supply your own joke here, folks: it's just too easy for us.
- Evidently, the U.S. government had started doing genetic testing to weed out "cowardice, dishonesty, [and] low intelligence" (15.15) from its citizens.
- That backfired, we guess, when everyone in government wiped themselves out…
- Er, well, actually, the problem in this book is that the experiments went wrong, and people with damaged genes waged war against those with pure genes in something call the Purity War.
- David shows the gang a slide depicting how the population of the country was decimated during the conflict. ("This is your country… this is your country on the Purity War. Any questions?")
- Once the smoke cleared, people decided to cram all the genetically damaged people into cities and watch them breed until they produced "genetically healed humans" (15.30), a.k.a. the Divergent.
- The non-Divergent among these people try to come to terms with the fact that is they're not Divergent, which means that they're basically damaged.
- Tris tries to come to terms with the fact that the Bureau has been watching them this whole time.
- Tris finds a moment to yell at David for not helping her mother before she goes to her bedroom.
- In the hotel, Cara wonders what the point of the Allegiant even is, if they're all just some big social experiment in the end.
- That night, Tris and Tobias try to process everything (has their whole life been a lie?), and they push their cots together.