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The Doctor awoke very suddenly, and shivered in the cold of his sleep pod. Was the mission, his lifelong dream, over?
He felt around for the catches to open his pod from inside, and marveled at the difficulty of even that simple movement; he had never imagined that awakening from the computer-monitored cryogenic sleep would be so hard. It took a conscious effort, an act of will, just for the Doctor to move his gloved hands...
But then, he thought, it had taken much greater acts of will to simply make this mission happen. To marry the Kearney-Fuchida jump drive with cryogenic sleeper technology, and TRULY go where no man has gone before. Computers could do it. This ship could do it. All solid state, very few moving parts. The Doctor had designed it all himself. The computers managed the sleep, and the automated charging and jumping cycle that drove the ship across the void of intergalactic space to the Large Magellanic Cloud. The first humans to see another galaxy; HE would be the first.
Oh, they had called him crazy, of course, but his will had made it happen. His will had driven the design of the ship, was woven into every part of its construction and its mission. The Doctor had fought through every obstacle imaginable...financial, political, mechanical and otherwise, to make his dream happen. He wished he could see the look on their faces when his message of arrival was beamed back, across the void.
Finally, the latches came open under the Dcotor's protesting fingers, and he pushed the lid open and sat up. He felt all stiff and creaky...only natural, he supposed, after so long of lying in the pod. The journey would have taken how long...nothing. A blink of time in cryogenic sleep.
Then the haze of awakening suddenly cleared, and he realized that something was wrong. It was dark, and quiet. The only lights were the feeble emergency lamps. The other pods too, his family and assistants and others who had chosen to come with him, were dark. It took him a moment to realize what that meant, and then he was scrambling, pulling his protesting body out of his pod to float in zero G.
Somehow, the power had failed. The pods were off. The others would be awakening too, too soon...IF they awakened. He shoved that thought to the back of his mind, and began to go find the problem, but the thought of his wife stopped him. That was her pod, on the left. He should at least check on her. Perhaps she was awakening too, for the first time in years. An embrace, for the first time in years...
The Doctor opened the pod, then slammed it shut, HELD it shut, his eyes squeezed tight to block out what he had seen. He shook as if with a seizure, and his grip on her pod was all that kept his floating body under control. A cold, detached part of his mind told him that her pod had failed. Something had gone wrong, was going wrong. His dream spun around him...and then he was off, bouncing from wall to wall in zero G as he pulled himself erratically down the passage towards Engineering.
As the Doctor went, his mind ticked over the possibilities, and the solutions. This ship was his ship. If anyone could fix it, could save his dream, it was him. Part of it was dead, mummified and rotten in his wife's pod. Her pod had lost power, an isolated failure, and she had died somewhere along the way. Then the main power went out, and that failure had awakened him. Yes, he could fix it, could save the rest of his dream. His will urged him on, and he noted that at least the atmosphere had held; he seemed to have no trouble breathing.
The Doctor noted too, in his scientist's way, that he caught an occasional glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye. It was something like what he had seen in his wife's pod, leering and winking from the shadows for an instant as he passed. He closed his own eyes and pushed onward. Of course, her death was giving him these visions. They weren't real. The ship under his hands, built with his hands, was real.
The Doctor reached Engineering, and quickly found the main panels. Yes, he was right! The main power had failed. A cyclic failure, no doubt, a surge during the charging process. He found the schematics, made an adjustment. It would not happen again. He closed the connections, and the ship came to life once more. Power would be flowing back to the jump drive, back to the pods. He could return to sleep, if these confounded visions of death that flitted around him at every corner would let him. His wife's death was affecting him badly, and a vision of her face in life hovered briefly before him. He followed it back up the passage, forward to the pods...
They were still dark.
The Doctor hovered in silence for a long time, then slowly pulled himself over to check the primary power for the pods. It was off, HAD BEEN off, for God knows how long. The Doctor looked at his own pod, and saw that shadow of death leering and winking at him again. This time, he engaged it with his eyes, and it did not fade. He stared it down as he approached, floating over to see its source: his own reflection, in a piece of polished metal. Just as he had seen up and down the passageways. The reflection of a dead man, and a dead dream.
And with that, the Doctor simply began to laugh, as a hum rose through the ship. He continued to laugh, laughing as his ship vanished in a blink of space time, taking his dream with it as its automated jump drive took it ever farther across the void...
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Happy Halloween.
_________________ Be careful what you wish for. I might let you have it. 
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