Chapter Title: and look out below
Prompt: tingle
Summary: Life on the Ark continues, even as the hundred are sent to test one last desperate hope for survival.
If anyone's curious about how my associations got from prompt to this fic, (I sometimes look back and wonder how the hell I got from a to b) it was something along the lines of the way the comics draw the indication for spidey senses going off (I always imagine it going ting) and exactly how did a dropship dropping not get noticed? Just off the top of my head, there was the force to detach and maneuver to a safe distance to avoid collision, with equal and opposite reactions and all that jazz, getting a hundred people from lockup to wherever the dropship was docked, people running about all over the place ...
The day the Ark lets go of a significant proportion of its children, life for the majority continues on as it normally does. An unusual number of technicians are clustered behind closed doors with members of the Council, but that, if not a frequent occurrence, is a known happenstance. The last time a commensurate number gathered in such secrecy, it was announce three weeks later during shift change that had the ceaseless work of their engineers had achieved a three per cent increase in efficiency of water reclamation. The time before, dwindling supply of certain drugs that the Ark no longer had resources to produce. Life goes on.
The ordinary masses don't see the launch. They have no reason to, so they are kept from the spectacle of the Arks first launch in decades both intentionally and by the sheer force of generations of habit. Staring out at space leads to madness, after all, and they all have more important work to do than jockeying for the chance to see the same void that has held them in living memory.
The carefully timed window of opportunity and key sections cleared and closed off for emergency repair of life support systems see to it that the population's obliviousness continues. Fear is the enemy of thought, and thought is in constant demand to ensure humanity's continued survival. Mass panic in a contained structure with its fragile balance of population costs and genetic diversity is to be avoided at all cost.
And, even with the guard occupied, civilians know better than to sneak into the areas marked off limits. Over a hundred years in a tin can floating through space can improve even a lemming's instincts, given large enough initial population to work from.
Even those with relatives or neighbors incarcerated hardly give the Skyblock a thought between their waking and sleeping moments. It's part of the Ark that is avoided as much mentally as it is physically, a deterrent almost worse than the airlocks. At least everyone knows being floated is quick. Everyone knows that there isn't any mercy to be found at the eighteen year review. The line they all walk is stretched too thing for there to be any hope of that. It's delayed, but it's a death sentence all the same. Better to consider them already gone.
The masses don't see launch, but they do feel it. Everyone does. You'd have to be unconscious to miss it. The linked superstructure vibrates as separation occurs, the Ark's steady orbit shifts its balance and is corrected by the firing of thrusters in groups of two and three.
The Council keeps its silence. Life goes on.