Rei's Disorientation

In Rome's Revolution, when Rei was first awakened by the Vuduri, he was extremely disoriented. It seems natural. After all he was frozen for 14 centuries. That's a long time. But is it? Especially from Rei's point of view?

Remember, he fell in love with Rome within 24 hours of his awakening. But from his perspective, he had just seen Sally Reynolds, the former love of his life, six weeks earlier. At that time he claimed he would never love again.

When you go back and do the math, things changed fundamentally for Rei even though his subjective time was not very long. The day after he said goodbye to his parents and Sally, he flew to Houston and spent 30 days in quarantine to make sure he was not harboring any diseases or noxious germs. He then spent two weeks enduring the grueling dehydration protocol prior to being placed in cryo-hibernation.

The fact that 14 centuries passed would mean nothing to him. The reality was, he was in his world, he spent six weeks in isolation and then he was thrust in the 35th century world of the Vuduri. He had to come to grips not with the unfathomable passage of time but with the radical change in human nature.

You want him to feel like the passage of time is enormous but the reality is, it was just a number. What was enormous was how much the world and Rei's view of the universe had to change.