“That feeling is normal, it should pass soon,” explained the physician.

Tasha slowly turned her head and noticed Cowan. “You got a little gray in the last five years, Cowan,” she said weakly, and with a slight smile.

Her gaze slipped across to the dismantled remains of Capsule Three and the smile vanished, replaced with a mix of confusion and fear. Her blonde hair half covered her face when she quickly turned back to Cowan, the obvious question in her eyes. Cowan closed his own eyes and slowly shook his head, answering the question. Tasha squeezed her eyes tightly shut and Cowan watched as she was wheeled to the infirmary.

“So far so good,” Cowan announced, drawing himself back to the present once Tasha was out of the room. “Let's move on to Capsule Two.”

The team gathered around the conference table, seated almost in the same arrangement as they'd been the day before. Colonel Fitch stood at the head of the room, with Cowan at his side.

“As most of you are aware, things have gone as well as can be expected today. I just heard that Number Twelve has been out of bed and walking a little,” Cowan began.

“We only had two issues today, and both were minor. There was a capsule door mechanism failure on Capsule Eight, but we were able to gain access rapidly using the manual release. This brings up the point that in the future, we'll have to design a release on the inside of the capsule,” There were nods of agreement and Cowan continued. “The other incident involved Subject Four, who did vomit. Fortunately, Captain Travers was quick and sacrificed her dress uniform in order to help contain the rather unpleasant five-year-old stomach contents.” Loud laughter erupted in the room and some embarrassment was evident on Travers' face, sitting at the table in generic medical scrubs instead of the uniform everyone was accustomed to seeing.

“The good news,” he continued, “is Number Four was the only one to experience vomiting, which means we've come a long way with the SF016 formula. It wasn't that long ago when they all vomited repeatedly. Also, they're all up and on their feet. This is by far the fastest recovery we've seen, even though the experiment lasted five times longer than ever before. I believe this relates directly to the combination of medications we're giving them at the beginning of the wake-up process. Now, Colonel Fitch has a comment about some of the problems we faced,” Cowan concluded.