On such an important day, Karen Anderson was wearing, of all things, an orange frock. Also on such an important day, she was taking a walk among the sycamore trees. Eden, the forest was called, and it was her little domain aboard the [i]Vitae[/i], the massive ship designed to ferry ten thousand people and a logistically staggering five hundred thousand cold, but not dead, bodies. Karen, thankfully, did not have to worry about the nightmares of freezing five hundred thousand people alive (and then unfreezing them alive and healthy some infinitely arbitrary time later). Instead, she had the more actively demanding task, and far less predictable one, of keeping a tiny ecosystem alive, healthy, balanced, and, worst of all, capable of being trampled by up to approximately two thousand people a day who had literally nowhere else to go where they could witness nature. At all. 

She had a sneaking suspicion that her work would go underappreciated.

	Instead, what had netted her the privilege of surviving the destruction of the Earth, and almost all multicellular life upon it, was her experience in Xenobiology. The study of alien life, as it was, had very few "experts" in the field and, despite apparently warranting the top twelve (one for each Ark), Karen felt woefully under prepared to answer any questions about the Devastators that could be conceived as useful to a military officer. Where does one even [i]start[/i] when trying to explain the most likely and prominent hypotheses of how plasma is propelled at terminal velocity from what essentially is a geometric space whale covered by a complete seal of what she had once heard phrased as "chitin on steroids." 

	Chitin was, of course, wildly inaccurate since these things did not use glucose for energy storage at the molecular level. 

	Karen's reflections and internal rantings were cut off by the voice of the Admiral. Even half a kilometer away from the Hub itself, in the deepest part of Eden, there were speakers tucked away to make critical announcements, and a stand in the center of it all, surrounded by metal benches, where a cylindrical screen could be used by the bridge or Noah could present themselves. There were cameras too, but those were truly everywhere, at least so far as she had ever had clearance for. That's how she was in Eden now. Since she essentially ran the place, she had the uncommon privilege of unlimited access. Well, technically she was working, but unlike most of the others, her work did not require her to attentively stand guard or actively clean litter and the like. 

	The announcement was over now, with Karen having accidentally tuned out most of it. "Shoot, ten minutes or five? Ten or five? Ten... Or five..." She muttered to herself, trying to recall what the Admiral had just said. With a sigh, she started moving out towards her quarters. Anyone not needed for a launching function was supposed to be in the quarters between liftoff and finishing transit via the Eye of Theia. Besides that, Karen, who had never actually been into space, ironically for a xenobiologist, was nervous that even young tree branches such as these my crack, snap, and cause serious injury. Thankfully her quarters weren't too far. Directly adjacent to the Hub, in fact, since that was "closest" to her workplace. 

	Karen Anderson tried to convince herself that the terrible feeling in her gut was just in anticipation of future noise complaints she may have living so close to the commercial center.