Another thought crossed her mind, and she pulled up a list of EKG readings for all the sleepers in the facility. She realized she was holding her breath in fear of what she might find and deliberately took a deep breath, forcing herself into calm. She was greatly relieved to see that only nine units were showing no sign of cardiac activity. Nine out of over ten thousand seemed a remarkably good percentage. She pulled up a list of names of the possible fatalities and scanned through the data. Most recently added onto the list was her name. This made sense; the EKG electrodes were obviously recording no activity because she'd removed them well over an hour ago. There were two people listed in Main Sleep Chamber One and three in Main Sleep Chamber Two. The final three names on the list were Kelly Meyers, Dale Carter, and Joseph Fitzpatrick.

RJ's frustration increased, nothing was going the way it should have. She stared at the computer for a minute and then thought about Fitzpatrick. He was on the list of people to be awakened in the event of any problem arising. Forty-two years had passed, had anyone else been woken to deal with complications during that time?

Again, she worked on the computer. She opened the log containing all information about computer generated wake-up sequences. There were three entries. First was today's event, for which she'd been awakened, and there were two other events listed. They had occurred twelve hours apart, almost thirty years ago when there'd been a failure in the reactor cooling system.

The computer had activated both the backup and reserve cooling systems, but the problem had remained. Consequently, an automatic wakeup sequence command was sent to the nuclear engineer on call which was Joseph Fitzpatrick. He'd been awakened thirty years ago and after twelve hours without Fitzpatrick logging into the system and responding to the alarm, the computer woke the second on-call person, Carter. By this time, the reactor problem was nearing critical.

RJ stared at the screen, trying to make sense of this information. If nothing else, it seemed as if the auto wake-up sequence had worked perfectly.

At some point, Carter and/or Fitzpatrick had apparently dealt with a problem, but now both of their EKGs were showing no cardiac activity in their capsules. Had there been a malfunction when they re-entered the sleep capsules?

Amy had once said they'd neglected to test re-sleeping a subject and had no idea of the effect of returning to sleep.