“That's most of it, but I just learned something interesting. I looked at the equipment status, and almost everything is operating on primary systems. Very few things are on backup, and nothing is running on emergency reserve. I thought it was interesting especially when you consider Fitzpatrick and Carter were awakened for a critical failure in a cooling system that Carter repaired. At the time when Carter was awakened, many primary systems had failed over to their backup systems and a few nonessential systems had gone offline. All of those are fully functional now and operating on primary systems. For the last thirty years, it would seem Carter has been maintaining all the systems.”

“That might explain why he stayed awake,” Brad said. “We need to talk to him.”

“That might be a problem. For the first eight years or so that he was awake, he kept meticulous repair notes. After that, the notes were there, but much less complete. This change seems to have happened gradually over several years. Then all his notes started appearing in a language that I don't recognize, but I think it might be German. For the past three years, there are almost none and what notes there are, make no sense at all.”

“Do you think he went nuts?” Brad asked.

“I think so, but nobody would be surprised; trapped alone for twenty years with no one to talk to and you can't even go outside. The disturbing part is that just before the change in his record keeping, there's a comment in the notes. It says, 'I'm sorry, I didn't mean to kill her, I just needed someone to talk to'.”

“Do you think he's talking about Kelly Meyers?” Brad asked.

“I suspect so – if you don't know what you're doing and you depressurize a capsule too quickly, you'll kill the occupant. After years alone, he became so desperate he was willing to wake someone, and he accidentally killed her. I suspect that finally pushed him over the edge.” As RJ spoke the two technicians, Abby and Nick entered the command center, using each other for support.

“Good morning,” RJ said cheerfully. “The good news is I've been awake for six hours and I'm feeling almost normal. The bad news is that the first two hours are terrible.”

“Thanks,” they responded, almost in unison.

“Take a seat and relax for a little while. When you're feeling up to it, I need one of you to finish checking all the internal systems. I've completed all the sleep chambers except for the animal chamber, and I need the other of you to begin checking all external sensors. Learn everything you can about outside conditions and graph out what the computers have been tracking outside while we've been asleep. Also, start monitoring for radio communications and see if you can hit any of the five satellites they put up there for us. I'm not too optimistic about them but see what happens.”