I felt air blow on my face, and heard the woosh as the door opened. My mind was still foggy from the hibernation, but I could think clear enough to know it was time. For the first time ever, humanity was about to colonize another solar system. I stepped out of the pod, and looked around. Out of the dozen pods in this room, mine was the first to open. I took a quick glance at the other pods starting their regeneration cycle before waking up, and then headed to the door. My joints were stiff from being suspended for years, but I managed to get to the door just fine.

The hallway on the other side had windows all along one side. I tried to look out, but my eyes were blurry from the hibernation. I couldn't even see the stars, but I wished I was on the side of the ship that the planet was on. I stumbled down the hall, forcing my legs to move to the conference room. A door opened to my right, and an old man stumbled out of it, with excitement on his face.

We hugged out of pure joy, and then went to the hall together. There was already several people waiting, but when I looked at them I paused. They all appeared over the age of 60, even though there was only supposed to be a few people that old on this ship. After all, old people aren't very helpful when it comes to manual labor for setting up a colony.

The lights flickered, distracting me. I headed over to a screen on the wall, and brought up a readout of the ship. The results that came up made my jaw drop. The ship was barely limping along, the main reactor was offline and the backup reactor was outputting minimum power. Two of the three engines were down. Life support was working fine, but everything else had at least one error message. I sent a message to the AI in charge of the ship, but got an error in response. I tried again, and same results. I was about to try a third time when I heard a voice croak from behind me.

"John?"

I turned around, to see an old woman standing there. She smiled at me, and then I recognized her. This was Debbie, but she had somehow aged 50 years while in suspended animation. Her pod must have malfunctioned, since humans did age in them, but at most only a couple of years. Realization dawned on me as I looked around at the room of seniors around me. I turned back to the screen, and manually started a sensor sweep of the area.

The results came back almost instantly. No planet, no stars, nothing around for at least half a light year. I checked the date, and my heart dropped when I saw 12/15/502894. Somehow, this 50 year trip had lasted over 500,000 years! We must have been knocked off course, and the AI had kept us in stasis as long as possible. But with the reactor failing, there was not enough power to keep us in stasis, so the pods started the regeneration cycle automatically.

I turned back to Debbie, realizing the slowness in my joints wasn't from hibernation sickness. I opened my mouth, and managed to croak out to her:

"How old am I?"