<

Wake Up!

Awh fuck!
Jack exclaims in pain as he wakes up. He has a terrible headache. While moving his hands up to hold his head, he realizes that his entire body hurts.
Owowowww... Ouch!
An automated voice comes on: Emergency defrost complete. Entering low power mode.
He thinks: Get it together, Jack! You knew this could happen. You have trained for this. Where are the meds again? ...

Waiting for the painkillers to kick in, he stays in his preservation chamber until he is fully awake. As he stands there, looking out of the small window in the door, he notices something off. The bunker looks different from yesterday - not yesterday! That was years ago, probably decades... Besides the point. It looks different. Not just things have moved around different, it gives off the vibe of a full-on lost place. Unexpected, but he brushes the thought aside for the moment...

The pressurized air hisses in the lines as the door of the preservation chamber swings aside. Jack steps out into the bunker, breathes the musty air, and looks around. The light shining out of his chamber reveals a dirty floor. The table and chairs in front of him as well as the kitchen area across the room are covered in dust and all exposed bits of metal are rusty. The paint is starting to flake off of the walls. Red night lights on the ceiling are dimly illuminating the rest of the bunker. He looks to the left: The wall is lined with other preservation chambers, all but one of them being powered down. In the corner is the minicomputer controlling the bunker, a half-height rack filled to the brim with devices, and next to it a teleprinter, a computer-controlled typewriter. Along the rear wall are desks holding a radio and a terminal (a device comprised of a keyboard and monitor), and on the wall above them is a phone; nothing out of the ordinary here – apart from a few paint crumbs sprinkled on everything. He looks to the right: More preservation chambers. Instead of a wall, there's the bunker door – door is a bit of an understatement, it's a massive gate. A small slither of light passes under it.
These fucking idiots... They didn't reseal it properly.

He walks over to the door's control panel. The paint is flaking off revealing the rust underneath. Jack attempts to press a couple buttons but they get stuck and nothing happens. A bunch of expletives and some banging on the panel later, he turns back to the inside of the bunker, looking for tools, contemplating the tradeoff between waking up a couple years too soon and getting slowly poisoned by the air, and being locked inside a bunker due to a bunch of apparent troglodytes being unable to close a door properly... Doesn't matter now, too late.

As he passes each of the preservation chambers, he looks into them. Empty, empty, empty - nothing unexpected here. The others would have been woken up over time. His own chamber... He presses a few buttons to fully shut it down. The lamp in its ceiling turns off, the door closes, the status lights turn off. After passing two other empty preservaton chambers, he reaches the one that remains active.
Hello Michelle, he says more to himself than to the frozen person inside.
He checks the status lights of her chamber.
Looks good to me — I think I'm gonna leave you in there until I find a way out...
He continues past the remaining empty chambers to the back of the bunker.

Jack opens the cabinets under each of the desks while talking to himself: Where is that fucking toolbox?
Well, it isn't there. He continues with the kitchen area. Still nothing. He enters the bathroom through a door next to the kitchen area. Nope, not here either.
Welp, time to improvise.

Jack returns to the kitchen area and rummages through the drawers to find anything useful. He grabs a fork.
Works as a screwdriver, I guess...
He proceeds to jam the handle into a screw on one of the kitchen cabinets to see if it will turn. It does – barely. Using a slightly rusty sharpening rod he begins the long and arduous process of grinding the fork handle flat, dragging it across the rod over and over and over again. After a while, he stops to inspect his work.
Meh, could work.
He tests it on the cabinet again.

His newly gained screwdriver in hand, Jack walks back to the control panel for the door and unscrews it. After a bit of fiddling with it, the panel lifts out of its niche in the wall, pulling cables out of the box under it. He grabs the fork by the handle and bends the inner prongs out of the way. Then, he bridges the switch contacts using the two outer prongs. Nothing happens.
Of course it wasn't gonna be that easy.
He starts to dig into the wires, attempting to find what's wrong, but realizes after a moment that the wiring is more complex than expected and he has no idea what he's doing.
Guess I need the manual for this thing...

Jack walks over to the desk with the terminal and flips the switch on the desk lamp. It flickers for a moment before turning off again. He flips the switch back and leans over the terminal to turn it on – Bonk! At least this seems to work. While waiting for the picture tube to warm up, he walks over to the rack and sits down on the floor in front of it. He inspects the status lights on the various devices, thinking aloud:
CPU is idle, serials are idle, one active preservation chamber – all good. Primary hard drive is up, second hard drive is ... powered off? Let's change that...
He pushes the power button and hears the fans blow air through the drive. The spin-up button starts blinking. He waits for a moment to let the fans blow away any dust that may have settled inside the drive, then he pushes it. The button lights up solid and the motor inside kicks on. There is some intermittent rattling from the drive, probably a shot bearing, he thinks. He hears the spindle inside accelerating unusually slowly. Impatiently sitting there, he waits for the drive to be ready. Clicking from inside the drive followed by a ringing scratching noise.
Of course!
He quickly presses the power button again. The scratching stops and the motor turns off, the spindle still rattling occasionally as it spins down.
That's gonna be an ugly head crash. No manuals for me, I guess...

He gets up and returns to the terminal, thinking there might be something useful, maybe even a backup, on the primary drive. He pulls a nearby chair in front of it and sits down.

EARTH-53 INUX v8.4 SMP

Login: █

Jack logs on and issues a command:

EARTH-53 INUX v8.4 SMP

Login: jack
Password:

Welcome to INUX!
Last login Wed, 1994-07-20 11:34:08

$ date
Tue, 2106-06-01 18:01:55
$ █

So it's been over a hundred years... Hm.
He goes through the files but nothing useful turns up. He does, however, find a note from 2030 saying that the inhabitants of the dome city have proven to be unhelpful when asked for assistance. Too bad they are the ones that have a full backup of everything – assuming there is anyone still living there.

He gets up and reaches for the phone. It lifts off the cradle with a quiet click. Jack holds it to his ear and starts dialing but there is no dial tone.
Welp, that's that.