Notifications and Applications

"Honey, you should come take a look at this."

Deanna Holmes pulled off her headphones and looked over at her husband, Thomas. They sat in the small office room of their apartment, desks set up against two walls perpendicular to each other. The other two walls were lined with bookshelves filled with books on topics ranging from professional to personal interests. Deanna and Thomas had come to spend more and more time in the office as they had increasingly been forced into temporary gig work over the past few years. Deanna stood and moved behind her husband's shoulder. She ran her fingers through his black hair and looked at the screen.

"What is it?"

"I got a notification from Orbit Pro, one of the colonial matchmakers we signed up for. It seems like the system had a match for us." Thomas said as he leaned into the head rub. Deanna nodded silently as she was brought up to speed. Competition for slots on colonial expeditions was fierce but the real challenge was finding out who was recruiting in the first place. They, like so many other young couples attempting to leave the Sol System, relied on the growing number of matchmaking startups which attempted to match expeditions with applicants that met their standards and criteria. As a result, the Holmes spent almost 20% of their income on subscribing to the top 50 matchmaking sites.

"I assume the match is a good one, since you're letting me know about it." Over the past few years the Holmes had been notified of many likely matches, but most had resulted in dead ends. They had learned to temper their enthusiasm.

"Yeah, I've actually been reading over it the last half hour." Thomas replied, "It's at 92% funding right now, and it looks like their Ark is already under construction. Orbit Pro is showing us at a 80% match based off of our backgrounds. Seems they only went public about a month ago" 

Deanna read the words on the screen, her eyebrows raising higher the further she went. "The Desereti Colonial Expedition? Are they referencing Deseret? Wasn't that the-"

Thomas nodded. "Yup, the original name of Utah. Seems like the whole thing is managed by members of the church. We got pinged because we self identified as LDS." Thomas and Deanna looked at each other, remembering how they had wrestled with listing in their profiles their membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or LDS for short. Though most of the time there was no way to be sure, they both felt that they probably had been passed over by some expeditions on account of it. 

In the end they had chosen to leave it in, under the belief that any expedition that chose to exclude them on that criteria wasn't one they wanted to join anyway.  Besides that sort of thing was common nowadays.  In the last few weeks Thomas had seen expeditions that wanted all their people to have Mayan ancestry, fluency in Mongolian, or requiring applicants to be Sunni Muslims.  There seemed to be a colonial expedition for every conceivable community someone wanted to claim.

"I feel good about this one," Thomas said, "but I wanted to talk to you before submitting our applications. What do you think?" Deanna didn't respond, leaning over him to start scrolling over the expedition overview and summary. Thomas leaned back, rubbing Deanna's arm softly, before a movement in the corner of his eye caught his attention. Apparently Deanna had been watching the news before he called her over, her screen still streaming current events.

"Anything interesting?", Thomas asked, pointing to the screen. Deanna looked back, grimacing. Reaching over she unplugged the headphones from her computer and turned up the volume.

"-of Mexico officially declared a hypoxic zone. This means that the ocean, from Florida to the Yucatan, is no longer capable of supporting underwater life. Coming up we have interviews with Carrina Patterson, representing the American Farm Bureau Federation. In the meantime let's go now to Ramon Graves, reporting to us live from-"

At the bottom of the screen the ticker carried a running list of current events. A terrorist bombing in the Martian Free Cities. A report on the last 500 ethnic Uyghurs living in Xinjiang. Fatalities at the labor strikes in the Confederated Belt Colonies.

After a few minutes of watching the news Thomas turned around and quietly submitted their applications.

Draft Outline

• Look at this
• Character intro
• What is it?
• Colonial websites
• Intro to the Desereti Colonial Expedition
• Should we submit
• Snippet of news
• Let's submit