thinking about my human rocky eridian grace au scenario and i think there's actually something really compelling about rocky not trying to wake the whole crew at once.
He starts with just the engineering team. His friends. The people he misses the most and who'd probably forgive him for doing it. When the entire team turns out to be dead, though, he stops.
he waits.
some part of him has the inkling of- this is a long, long journey. he doesn't know the others as well. he'd be waking them up not only to a very long, boring trip, but now also to the confusion and grief of three dead crewmembers. so he waits. as long as he can manage, he holds out, maybe makes it a few months. maybe a full year. finally gives in, wakes someone else up, and they're dead too.
okay. he waits again. he's starting to really worry- it can't be all of them. It can't be. He's fine, how can he be okay and nobody else? that makes no sense. There are 18 people left for him to wake up, and 11 more years left of travel. He decides he'll try and only wake up one person a year. He never actually manages waiting that long, but still. He makes it the full 11 years holding out some hope that surely the next person will be okay. He won't be alone anymore.
He has a system for it too. He started with the engineers, but after that he tries to be reasonable. He tries waking up the members of crew who'd understand the stasis systems best, maybe they'd know what went wrong; when they're all dead, he tries the pilot- she was trained on so many details of the hail mary ship, maybe she'd know what the issue is? he works his way through the list with increasing desperation.
The group he saves last is the specialists in astrophage. Maybe he should've tried them before some of the others, in terms of practical knowledge for whatever was happening, but...the mission needs the biologists. It doesn't matter if they have a pilot and a head engineer if they don't have a biologist who can actually figure out what's going on at Tau Ceti. Rocky needs this mission to mean something, he needs this to work. So he puts off the deaths that he knows would break him for as long as possible. The very last person Rocky tries to wake up, three months before he arrives at Tau Ceti (three months before he meets Grace) is the head scientist of the program. He was, like everyone else, very dead.
