The Chain

“She feels sick, nauseated, untethered. Like on the treatment days when she allowed them to poison her and burn her in the hope that it would make her better.”

Rachel repeatedly compares the trauma of Kylie’s kidnapping to her experience with chemotherapy. Both were traumatic, and produced emotional sensations as well as physical ones. While others find Rachel’s survival from breast cancer inspiring, the kidnapping only compounds her pain.

“Is Rachel the bad apple?

It doesn’t really matter if she is. As Olly is always saying, The Chain is largely a self-regulating mechanism that repairs its own broken DNA with only a little nudging from the outside.”

The Chain leader Ginger views her crime ring as a hivemind made up of an unknown number of individuals. Although she and Olly started The Chain, it’s become self-sustaining due in part to Olly’s programming skills.

“There are a breathtaking number of people whose profiles and posts are public and can be viewed by anyone. George Orwell was wrong, she thinks. In the future, it won’t be the state that keeps tabs on everyone by extensive use of surveillance; it will be the people. They’ll do the state’s work for it by constantly uploading their locations, interests, food preferences, restaurant choices, political ideas, and hobbies to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites. We are our own secret police.”

In this quote, Rachel challenges George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. Ginger and Olly monitor links and give orders, but other than this, the links do all the work, with the twins gleaning all the benefits. In other words, The Chain exploits free labor for the financial benefit of its corrupt owners.

“If she ever gets out of this, she’ll have to learn some survival skills like that. Self-defense, handcuff-lock picking.”

During her captivity, Kylie mentally prepares for future emergencies. This foreshadows how, even once Kylie returns home, she and her mother will still be at the mercy of The Chain. She does learn to pick handcuff locks, which proves useful later.

“Marty and she had thought they’d be safe out here. Safer than Boston. Safe—what a joke. Nobody’s safe. Why were they naive enough to think that you could live anywhere in America and be safe?”

Rachel reflects on her two assumptions about safety in the US. She once believed the suburbs were safer than the big city, and that the North was safer than the South. However, both assumptions prove false in the novel, as danger has no limits.

“Three uninteresting levels and a very interesting basement with brick walls and a concrete floor and nothing in it but a washing machine, a dryer, and a boiler. The house is held up by a series of concrete pillars and she could, she thinks in disgust, chain someone to one of those pillars. She checks out the little window above the dryer. She’ll cover that with a board she’ll get from the hardware store in town.

Rachel shivers with a mixture of fascination and revulsion. How can she think about this sort of thing so glibly? Is that what trauma does to you?

Yes.

It reminds her again of the chemo days. The numbness. The feeling of plunging into the abyss and falling, falling, falling forever.”

Rachel’s quick shift into a “monster,” the type of person capable of kidnapping a child, illustrates How Love and Parenthood Complicate Morality and Rationality. Again, she compares her current situation to her past trauma with chemotherapy—showing The Persistent and Compounding Effects of Trauma.

“This morning when she woke up, she had been a completely different person. As J. G. Ballard pointed out, civilization is just a thin, fragile veneer over the law of the jungle: Better you than me. Better your kid than my kid.”

As expected of her new position as a philosophy lecturer, Rachel frequently recalls philosophical quotes and applies them to her current situation. Although she never consciously prepared for the events of The Chain, she uses her past knowledge to help her make sense of Kylie’s kidnapping.

“Pete’s mind goes back to the class he had been forced to take on ethics at Quantico. The Israeli IDF guest lecturer had given them a presentation on why it was ethical to disobey an illegal order. Morality entered into the equation even in the military. And what Rachel is contemplating now is not only illegal but absolutely morally wrong. Morally wrong from every conceivable angle. The ethically right play would be to go to the FBI immediately. Find the nearest FBI field office and tell them the whole story.

But that will get Kylie killed. Rachel believes that, and he believes her. And Kylie’s safe return is the only thing Pete cares about.

The decision’s been made. If they have to kidnap someone to get her back, he’ll do it. If he has to kill someone to get her back, he’ll do it. If he gets her back and they stick him in a cage for fifty years, it will be easy time, easy because Kylie will be safe.”

Pete is not a philosopher like Rachel, but has experience with an ethics class and knows collaborating with The Chain is morally wrong. He isn’t Kylie’s father, but he is her uncle, and loves her—making Kylie’s safety more important than upholding ethics or laws. In his case, familial love complicates morality just as much as Rachel’s parental love.

“There was an incident when we took Kylie, something terrible. Nothing happened to her, she’s fine. But I had to do something awful, and the old me would be in agony about what I did back there. But you know what I feel? I feel nothing. Nothing but relief. I did what I had to do and I got my son back. And that’s all there is to it.”

Heather Porter, the woman who kidnapped Kylie, made the same moral compromise as Rachel and Pete. She was willing to ignore morality to ensure her son’s survival. Ironically, this type of love (which is generally seen as a human emotion) is the mechanism through which The Chain turns people into “monsters.”

“You’ve never experienced fear until something or someone puts your child in danger. Dying is not the worst thing that can happen to you. The worst thing that can happen to you is for something to happen to your kid. Having a child instantly turns you into a grown-up. Absurdity is the ontological mismatch between the desire for meaning and the inability to find meaning in this world. Absurdity is a luxury parents of missing children can’t afford.”

As a philosopher, Rachel heavily weighs her moral choices and worldview. But as a parent, once Kylie is kidnapped, her purpose (at least, for the moment) is clarified and her decisions require less thought than usual because the only thing she cares about is getting Kylie back alive.

“She thinks about the first unknown caller. That voice on the phone. That thing they said about the living being only a species of the dead. It was the kind of thing she’d said to her friends when she was a freshman. A young person’s idea of depth. As if whoever was behind The Chain was pretending to be a wise fifty-year-old but was really about her own age or younger.

Rachel would have thought it would take someone a lifetime to get this evil, but no. And what about you yourself, Rachel? A kidnapper, a torturer of children, an incompetent mom. All of the above. And you know in your heart that you would have let Amelia die. The intent was there and that’s what counts in moral philosophy, in law, and in life.

Your fall has been vertiginous and swift. You’re in the cage plummeting to hell. And it’s going to get worse. It always gets worse. First comes the cancer, then the divorce, then your daughter gets kidnapped, then you become the monster.”

Rachel intuits that The Chain leader Ginger is young because she says pseudo-profound things. At first, she’s surprised that someone so young could be so evil, but reflects on her own turn to crime for the sake of Kylie. It did not take time to turn evil, just the right circumstances, which in Rachel’s case, happened in less than a day.

“It’s not about Marshmallow. It’s about what you’ve done. How could you kidnap someone, Mom?”

When Kylie returns home safe and Rachel tries to give her a stuffed animal for comfort, she realizes the horrors of The Chain are far from over. Both of them will carry their shared trauma for the rest of their lives because they’re forbidden from talking about it; furthermore, The Chain could come back for them at any point. Kylie also views her mother differently because she committed the same crime that Kylie herself survived.

“Did this make them smile? Forcing virtuous people to do terrible things? Every human being walking this earth can be forced to violate his or her deepest beliefs and principles. Isn’t that hilarious?”

Rachel again points out that The Chain ironically requires its new links to have “virtue,” and then corrupts this virtue. Perhaps because Rachel was distracted by The Chain’s claim that “it’s not about the money,” she searches for a more “profound” reason someone would start The Chain. However, like Ginger herself, if there is another reason besides greed for money and power, she ultimately doesn’t know what it is.

“That night at the Appenzellers’, Kylie had gone down to little Amelia. The girl had woken up and Kylie had comforted her and told her that everything was going to be all right. But that isn’t the point. The point is that she went down there. She was part of the apparatus keeping Amelia prisoner. Thus Kylie had been both victim and abuser. Like all of them. Victims and accomplices. That’s what The Chain does to you. It tortures you and makes you complicit in the torture of others.”

Even though Kylie tries to comfort Amelia, from Amelia’s perspective, Kylie probably seems like another kidnapper. Kylie takes on a role similar to her male kidnapper, Jared, who feebly attempted to comfort her. Although Kylie seems to succeed more than Jared, she is still complicit in the kidnapping—and will likely carry guilt forever.

“Every child of every parent is a hostage to fortune, but not every parent has been reminded of this so vividly.”

The Chain emphasizes how “easy” it is for each new link to stalk and kidnap. Children in the novel are kidnapped during basic routines that have been approved by their parents, like waiting for the school bus or walking a few blocks home from sports practice. The new links are not seasoned criminals, but still manage to find victims via Facebook and kidnap them. This process makes it seem like people are potentially in danger at all times, even while doing “safe” activities they do every day.

“‘We’re out. We escaped by the skin of our teeth. We were lucky. This thing nearly got all of us,’ Pete says.

[…]

‘It’s not a thing, Pete. The Chain isn’t mythology. It isn’t self-perpetuating. It’s human. It’s made up of humans. It’s fallible, vulnerable, just like we all are. What we do is find the human heart at the center of it and break it.’”

For a while, Rachel believes The Chain is self-perpetuating and unbeatable. However, she has a change of heart when she sees how much Kylie is suffering and decides to end The Chain. She reasons that whoever runs the crime ring wants it to appear scarier than it is. But to end it, Rachel only has to end the creators because nobody else wanted to be part of it in the first place.

“Every new person introduced to The Chain adds a geometric level of instability. The thing has been teetering on the verge of collapse for a long time. It’s just figuring out a way to harness the data points into a shape.”

Former link Erik reasons that the people behind The Chain want it to appear scarier than it is, and like it’s been around longer than it has. However, because it becomes more unstable the longer it gets, it probably isn’t that old.

“Ginger slowly rising up the chain of command.

Sometimes she wonders if she’s doing this for herself or to please her grandfather or maybe to one-up her father. Is Ginger’s life a result of or a reaction to her relationship with her dad?

She takes classes at the Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, where they have all sorts of shrinks and investigators who can help her explore these questions if she wants. One of her instructors quotes the German poet Novalis: ‘Inward goes the way full of mystery.’ She likes that and she’d like to someday go on that inward journey to get at the root of why she’s the way she is, but it’s a journey she’ll make by herself. She’ll never trust any shrink with her past history and the thoughts in her head.”

After murdering her father Tom and following in his footsteps career-wise, Ginger wonders if there’s a reason for her behavior but never bothers to figure it out. Instead, she shifts her focus to using The Chain to amass as much money and power as possible before someone kills her.

“Ideally, the business and the personal should never mix, but with human beings there’s always going to be some blurring of the lines.

[…] Sex is the joker that keeps mammalian DNA forever changing and one step ahead of all the viruses and pathogens that are trying to wipe the species out. Olly understands this on a scientific and mathematical level. But sex is a wild card, and love—God forbid—is an even wilder card.”

Of The Chain’s two creators, Olly is the more logical one in that he wants to end the crime ring to prevent getting caught. He warns Ginger against using The Chain for personal vendettas and romantic endeavors. However, Ginger embodies a common trope in crime and thriller novels, a character who can’t resist the urge to risk her endeavor, even after she has plenty of money.

“‘It’s all my handiwork. It wasn’t you. It was me. I can do what I like with it.’

Olly closes his eyes and sighs. All good things have to come to an end eventually, he supposes. He is surprised that it has lasted this long, actually. The models all said The Chain would probably last only about three years before it collapsed. You could intimidate so many folks for only so long. The number of people involved grows almost exponentially, and no conspiracy can survive exponential growth. It’s a typical stochastic fast-slow system and when the breaking point comes, it will break spectacularly.

[…]

Olly isn’t a true predator like her. A true predator kills even when it isn’t hungry. ‘Wasn’t it us against the world? Remember?’ she says.”

Before Ginger and Olly started The Chain, they prioritized each other—having killed the rest of their family (except their grandfather) to protect themselves. But after starting The Chain, the twins drift apart because Ginger starts to think of it as her creation rather than their creation. However, both Olly and former link Erik know the truth: The crime ring can’t last forever, so its destruction (and the twins’ deaths) is inevitable.

“She’s up for this. It’s the moment she’s been subconsciously training for all her life. The radiation, the chemo, those hard days in Guatemala, those long shifts waitressing at the diner, the midnight Uber runs to Logan. All of it was preparation for this. She’s ready. It’s all for family, isn’t it? Everything is for family. Even an imbecile knows you don’t get between a grizzly-bear mama and her cub.”

Previously, the trauma of Kylie’s kidnapping exacerbated Rachel’s trauma from chemotherapy and other experiences. Now, she channels her emotions, her frustration and pain, and views them as “preparation” for her rescue of Kylie.

“Fear is coursing through her, but fear is a liberation too. Fear releases power and is the precursor to action.”

Like her use of past trauma to navigate present trauma, Rachel channels fear for her rescue mission. She also draws on her philosophical wisdom, theorizing about the nature of fear in order to give herself strength.

“The Chain is a cruel method of exploiting the most important human emotion—the capacity for love—to make money. It wouldn’t work in a world where there was no filial or sibling or romantic love, and only a sociopath who is without love or who doesn’t understand love could use it for her ends.”

As Rachel gains clarity on The Chain and why it exists, she also gains the strength to kill Ginger. This demonstrates her philosophical wisdom applied to real life. Once she realizes The Chain exploits people’s love for others for financial gain, she successfully ends the crime ring despite her previous disgust at having to commit crimes.