Rei's unending disorientation

It is hard to imagine, being in that Rei was frozen for nearly 14 centuries, that from a subjective standpoint, it was only hours from when he was given the drugs that sedated him, being frozen and later thawed.

I agree that the process was painful but when Rei was thawed, although there was still a large amount of drugs in his system, subjectively, he was frozen just minutes (hours at most) from when he was re-awakened.

Why was he so disoriented when he was awakened then? Well, the drugs, of course. But secondly, he was expecting the Ark program to proceed according to plan. That meant the Captain and the pilot and co-pilot would be awakened first. They would guide the Ark II down to a soft landing on Tau Ceti and begin the reanimation process in an orderly fashion.

If nothing else is clear from this series, it should be that nothing ever goes according to plan. So while Rei was expecting to be reanimated by his compatriots, instead, he was reanimated by bipedal creatures, dressed all in white, who were most definitely not his crew.

Now Rei was a big fan of science fiction when he was growing up so naturally he assumed they were monsters or aliens who caused him to awaken. What he did not realize was that one of the "aliens" was Rome, the love of his life. She was chosen because a) she was the most expendable of the crew and b) she had the best language skills and could interpret Rei's reactions most cogently.

How Rome was selected to be the person reanimating Rei will be the subject of a short story in the upcoming anthology entitled The Vuduri Companion which should be out next spring.