In the ark we grew up knowing that, back in Earth (before the whole apocalyptic situation), soulmates where just an idea, a way to describe what you felt when the four-letter word just wasn't enough. But in the ark, soulmates became a much more real phenomenon.
You see, with the limited supplies and the pressing need to ensure the survival of the species, it was considered a waste of resources and space for people to not have the one child a couple was supposed to have. So back in the early days, the council had an idea that -with some help from the genetic engineers in the ark- made soulmates a realistic expectation.
By altering the genetic code of every child while they were still in their mother's womb, they implanted soulmates into the system randomly. These children, sometime after turning eighteen, would receive a mark somewhere in their skin, sometimes large, sometimes almost imperceptible, but always the perfect match to someone else's.
The presence of a chip determined which mark you got, since the random pairing of teenagers with reproductive purposes was considered useless and chaotic, and it was necessary for the couple to be compatible in every sense of the word. This chip, implanted in the unborn baby, started gathering genetic and behavioral information from birth. When the carrier turned eighteen, the chip would start to search for someone with characteristics deemed 'compatible'. This way it would assign a partner -a soulmate- taking into consideration properties such as age, character, hobbies or sexual orientation.
It was the government's way to create a system that would ensure no odd numbers and would certify that the number of children born each generation was exactly half of the children born in the previous generation, and so on until the Earth became, once again, survivable. Of course, one immediately notices that if the population keeps halving, someday there will be no one left to go back 'home', but the plan was never meant to last forever, just like the Ark's supplies where not inexhaustible. This system was perfect, flawless, unbreakable - or so they thought.
The thing about making technology take any form of human thinking is that it does so without the actual humanity that is supposed to go into these actions. Initially, the chip presented– once again- perfect results, where every pairing turned out to be compatible physically and emotionally. My mom's generation was the first to try it. She met my dad through some other privileged kid- this is mostly the way we met people in the ark- and instantly liked him. She was seventeen at the time, and even though he was nineteen, he didn't have any mark yet, as if waiting for his soulmate to find him.
They started dating, unsure of whether they would turn out to be 'the one' to each other, but too enamored to refuse trying. I've always believed that they would have stayed together had they not been each other's soulmates, but knowing Abby as I do know, I know she is too fond of rules (I mean she got him floated after all) to refuse to follow them. Anyway, the very same day my mom turned eighteen, they both discovered a coin-sized circle on the back of the other's neck and decided to get married only a month after that.
I guess they (being one of the first soulmate couples to ever be created) were also one of the exceptions, because soon everything went to hell.
It was soon proved that the chips that had been our hope of survival were, in fact, imperfect and flawed, as they started pairing unlikely couples that were much too different to work.
Most of the participants of these ''broken-chip relationships'' became miserable, since the unwavering belief in science they possessed forced them into relationships -marriage- with people they didn't feel that connection with.
Some of this couples suffered though years of trying to fix unfixable relationships, and soon the chips were deemed unsuccessful, and therefore after four years since the first kids implanted became eighteen, the council decided to stop implanting them. That is the reason why I, Clarke Griffin, born eight years after my parents got married (when my mom was twenty-seven), never got one.
Twenty years after the first baby was born with no implant again, it was discovered that even without the chips, the genetic alteration remained in some of the children born from chip-implanted parents, after a recently turned eighteen-year-old got a large mark in her face that streched from her temple to her chin. Marks like this were not uncommon, since children had been implanted for the better part of twenty-two years, meaning a large variety of marks had been seen in obvious places like hands, arms, faces or necks, where they were visible for anyone to see. At first these people had it easy, since finding their soulmates was just a matter of a light search of someone's features, but as soon as the chips were deemed inaccurate these marks were hard to hide when you didn't want whoever shared it to find you in fear of feeling that unwanted pressure of conformity. But people managed.
Well, that was until the council decided to send 100 of us "young delinquents" down to Earth.