Disclaimer: Terra Nova is not mine.
Maddy Shannon always left early for school.
Her brother teased her about it (half-heartedly the way that he did nearly everything these days except for his music). Her mother had asked her several times if she was sure that it was acceptable for her to arrive at the school that far in advance. Maddy never directly answered either of them. Josh just continued to roll his eyes. Her mother never out and out forbade her from going. She never bothered to mention that the fact that she left early for school didn't mean that she was going to school early. In fact, she usually ducked into class at the last possible second before the tardy bell rang. Her family didn't need to know that.
She always hurried home after school to help with Zoe and the things that someone had to do to keep the house running. Late afternoons and evenings (and even the middle of the night if her mother got the opportunity to add a few more hours to one of her shifts) were her times to be responsible for her little sister and run things in the kitchen. She didn't mind that so long as the mornings before school fell to Josh.
She didn't need to go there every day before school (in fact, there wasn't really any practical point), but she still did it. She didn't think she could explain why to someone else. That was part of why she never told anyone where she was going. It wasn't a short trip to the edge of the cordoned off area, but it was worth it to her. She could have seen the same thing on her plex (there were viewing cams set up around after all), but that wasn't the same as being there. It was different in person even if you still weren't getting very close.
There was always a crowd in Hope Plaza, and she liked to watch it to start off her day. The processing center only functioned for 10 hours each day, but the lines started early and wound around outside of the building in a manner that left those waiting for entrance open to perusal. The transports containing international allotment quotas disgorged their passengers throughout the night meaning that Maddy had never seen the line less than three quarters full in all of the time she had been coming (if she ever came in the late afternoon, she knew it would be different). It was busy in the morning. The lines were full of people leaving to start new lives. Sometimes, she would play at giving stories to the people she was watching. In her head, their stories were full of happily ever after new beginnings.
Maddy remembered going once actually into Hope Plaza back before Zoe had been born on a school field trip to the museum that was attached to the periphery of the complex. That had been in the early years before they had realized that they had not simply found one random opening in the fabric of the universe. It had been back before they knew that portal led to portal and each world led into another in a series that had (thus far) neither ended nor circled back on itself. They hadn't minded the extra traffic then of groups of small children making their way through an outbuilding while preparations for the next trip through had been going on several hundred feet away. That had been back when Pilgrimages were an event with a single digit number attached to them rather than the steady flow of traffic that the traveling had become.
There were no tours now. The museum had been closed down completely rather than simply moved to another location. It was busy enough in the Plaza without a constant stream of tourists trying to insert something along the lines of hope into their daily lives by walking through the displays. She still came and watched. She just did it from a distance. Hope Plaza was real. She could see it even if she couldn't go inside. The people in the lines with their created stories tumbling around the back of her head were real (even if the stories she gave them might not be). People really did get to go. Families really did get to start over. The lines moved forward. They kept going. Hope really was a thing - even on the days when it felt like it wasn't.
She didn't know how other countries handled their selection process - most of them were super secretive. She had a head full of facts and a pretty useful imagination, but the way that other places held tight to the information about how they filled their quotas was beyond her. The only satisfactory explanation she had ever come up with was that they were all just being insistent that how they ran things was no one else's business. She supposed that they might also be trying to avoid system comparisons, but she couldn't fathom that there were too many practical methods that the different places could be using in the first place. She figured everywhere was pretty similar in the basics (unless there were some places where out and out bribes were the order of the day).
The system in the United States was fairly straight forward. There was a random lottery system in place for a certain number of daily transfer slots. If you were chosen for one of those places, then you selected your three dependents to bring with you (the former restriction to immediate family had been waived after a series of protests and lawsuits that claimed discrimination against those without immediate families). You had two weeks (the amount of time the lottery ran ahead) to say goodbye to your life as you knew it. The lottery did not depend on any effort on your part. You were automatically entered as of your eighteenth birthday. One hundred "winners" were announced in a press release each evening (the lottery office sent personal notifications out in the middle of the afternoon). Their three hundred chosen individuals would have their status confirmed by noon of the following day. Either your name got chosen or it did not. It was all chance.
The other slots for those departing daily were filled as needed via a prioritization list. There was one way physical traffic between each portal, but communication could be sent in both directions (the physics of that were extremely convoluted and had once comprised a summer research project on Maddy's part). The initial team that traveled through each new portal as it was located had a standard composition of people with certain skillsets. Depending on the conditions of each new world, requests for other skills or backgrounds would be sent back through the chain. New needs and issues arose all of the time all along the string and losses had to be compensated for whenever they occurred. Sometimes, a lottery winner happened to be a good fit for a particular need as it arose. The rest of the time the powers that be went to the list.
Her mother had held a respectable slot on that list before population control had found Zoe. Trauma surgeons with a background in virology were not an everyday combination, and Maddy had felt certain that their family would be called as a match from the prioritization list sooner rather than later when the details of the newly implemented system had been made public. When Zoe had come along, it had complicated matters. Her parents, however, had always assured her that it would work out if the call ever came. She had been young, Zoe had been little, and population control had been an abstract threat back then (not the reality of her sobbing little sister being torn out of her mother's arms while her father was dragged away in handcuffs that it later became).
That respectable spot on the list was from before. Part of her mother's punishment had been a one year removal from the list (as well as the lottery) with a bottom of list reentry point in both of her fields when she was reinstated. She could only be considered in each of her fields separately instead of as a person who could fill multiple roles simultaneously. Maddy didn't think it was her personal bias that made her view that as a double edged sword for the recruiters. It didn't just punish her mother; it also punished some colony out there that could have used her mother to check multiple needs off of their lists instead of waiting a longer time to fill them each individually as it came their turn to make requests.
Her father had been given the standard penalty for all felonies (of which assault of a population control officer was most definitely one) - removal from the lottery list and a permanent revocation from being considered for skillsets. This was in addition to the prison time that he had received and the population violation fines that he and her mother had both been assessed (ones for which they still garnished her mother's wages). When he finished serving his sentence (she never allowed herself to use the word if the way that Josh did), he would come home to them as someone who could never earn his own spot through Hope Plaza. He could only be taken as a dependent.
One thousand US citizens went through Hope Plaza daily, and her family's best hope now was for the list to run out of other virologists. She knew all of the numbers and recalculated their odds on a weekly basis. She watched the line move each morning that she visited and wondered if the call would ever come. Then, she made her way to school and spent the trip thinking about how even if the odds worked out for them, it wouldn't be enough. There were still five of them rather than the standard four. They were still in violation of the rules. For another couple of years, her father was going to be incarcerated and ineligible to even be a dependent. What would they do if the invitation ever did come?
She couldn't hope that they would make an exception - such things were not things that were done. The situation had never arisen, but she thought it likely they would make a show of demanding that Zoe be left behind. It would be the sort of point that they would want to make for the public. If her parents did accept such an offer (which they would not), then they would use it as propaganda to show the fundamental "selfishness" of those who did not adhere to the population laws. They would be made an example. She was very sure of that.
Her family was backed into a corner at the very least. They might even be permanently stuck. She still came to the Plaza. She still made a pilgrimage of her own to watch the lines. They were stuck for now, but there was always hope. She kept reminding herself of that. The people in the lines helped her remember. They were always moving forward, and her family would as well.