He awoke to a static beeping sound.   It was so annoying, grating on his nerves more than a badly tuned alarm clock.  He lifted his heavy eyelids to out of focus images.  His vision slowly clearing, he realized he was inside a coffin like enclosure.

He reached up with his sluggish arms; they seem to be dead weights feeling as if all blood circulation had gone from them.  Frantically shaking them awake he began to gain control of his arms pushing as hard as he could against what must be the "coffin lid" just in front of him.

He became quickly exhausted even after very little exertion letting his arms collapse lightly down to their sides in defeat.  Frustrated he wasn’t going to be able to push himself out of this thing.  Not noticing any sort of latches or release switches, he forced himself to calm down.

His brain began to think rationally overriding his immediate panic.  How was he going to get out of here?  What was he doing inside?  What was out there?  Did he really want out?  Maybe there was no air outside, maybe it was a space vacuum and he would die if he escaped.  Maybe that’s why this coffin thing wouldn’t open for him, it was protecting him some how.  But if it never opened it would become his coffin, how sadly ironic was his useless circular logic.

Now he noticed he was naked, and then he suddenly realized he didn’t know who he was or even his own name.  He couldn’t remember anything about the past, but he was somehow sure he had one.  That’s when he realized that he was in much bigger trouble than being trapped inside a coffin like prison with no clothes in a space vacuum.

Now he noticed there was additional light coming through the walls of the coffin in sections to the right and left of his head with a curved square information display panel directly in front of his face.  He touched the translucent sections to the right and left both coldly painful to touch, they felt like glass.  These sections were fogged over so that any imagery he could see outside was distorted and blurry.  He could barely make out a pattern of white ceiling lights some ways above.

His coffin prison was obviously in a large room, maybe a morgue for all he knew.  Now he was just being morbid, he thought to himself.  It was definitely very cold outside, and although the gravity felt light, there was some gravity, so he wasn’t floating in the vacuum of space, or on a non-rotating spacecraft, but that’s all he could really surmise of his present situation.

That’s when the static beeping sound abruptly stopped, a blip appeared on the display panel in front of him.  It read, “Zane”, then faded to black.  Again, “Zane, that is your name”.  He new it was the truth.  That was his name, he was absolutely sure of it.

The text again faded to black.  Then, “Your memories will come to you in time, be patient, there is no need for worry”.  The last message was spoken as well as written, a soft male voice coming through the speaker grills embedded inside the captive coffin walls.  This obvious attempt to ease his fear seemed to work.  He recognized that voice, but couldn’t place it in his absent memories.  “Who are you?  Where am I?” he spoke the questions, his voice crackling like a damaged speaker, throat dry and all clogged up.

“Take it easy.  Don’t strain your vocal cords.  My name is Junkman, an Artificial Intelligence and I’m your friend.  You are waking from a long journey and I’m working to get the outside environmental conditions satisfactory for your emergence from the resurrection chamber.”

Now he was confused, “Resurrection chamber?  Was I injured in an accident?”  Possibly even killed, thinking that would have explained a lot about his missing memories.  Maybe his brain had been severely damaged.  If so, he realized depressingly that this would be a very long and difficult recovery.

At least he was getting help.  “Not precisely, and not to confuse you, but technically you were never alive my friend, myself as well.  This is essentially our first birth.  I guess I had better do some explaining, since it will take some time to get all the external support environmentals up and running.  This place has been dormant for an extremely long time and I need to run some diagnostics first.  I would have done it sooner, but you see I just arrived here myself, traveling in on a beam of light down a fiber optic cable into the central neural simulation computer for this facility.  That computer just bootstrapped my AI persona.”

“Junkman, not only can I not remember anything, I’m very confused by what you are saying.  Maybe you should just start explaining from the beginning, assume nothing, and I will let you know if my memory returns”, he suggested, playing the role of the practical amnesiac.

“Okay, well here goes .  .  .  Lay back and let me tell you a whopper of a tale.  We are now buried deep beneath the moon’s surface in a Lunar Ark, or what is really a human species resurrection facility.  Humanity has completely destroyed itself in an all out Nanowar over three thousand years ago.  Alien beings traveling to our solar system have discovered our extinct remains.  These beings are nano life forms themselves, which used our original DNA found within this dormant facility to create a computer simulated universe for reviving the human race.  Follow me so far?” asked Junkman, wondering if he might be going a little too fast.

“No, not too fast.  Does that mean I’m in a simulation?”, wondering if he could believe or even trust this Junkman character and his wild story.  “No, you’re real this time.  Originally you were a simulation, trapped inside a kind of virtual reality bottle.  Playing out various life senarios so that your personality template could be constructed and finalized for your physical revival.  Now, with the help of another more advance galactic alien, Dr. Xanoplatu, who is a kind of preying mantis anthropologist, we have both been able to escape.”

“So there are more aliens involved?  How did we escape our simulation?”, admittedly this was beginning to sound even more unbelievable to him.

“This is a little difficult to explain, first let me start with some basics.  The Fermi Paradox and Drake’s equation”, said Junkman.

"I understand those.  The Fermi Paradox is about why we humans have not recieved any communications from aliens in deep space even when the  possibility of intelligent alien life is almost certain, and if what your telling me is true, it is.  Drake's equation is a formula for estimating the number of  intelligent alien civilizations in the universe, correct?"

"Right," Junkman’s voice seemed satisfied with itself.  “Now assume that alien species go extinct before they can communicate with each other, or develop the technological ability to factor out the time dimension.  That is, be able to time dilate or time travel, without incurring causality paradoxes.  Say maybe one could use this technology to establish a way to communicate with us all, irrelevant of whether we were extinct or had yet to even evolve technology.”

“So one set of aliens, The Nanos, revived us in a simulation, and another more advanced alien, Dr. Xanoplatu helped us to escape that simulation. This resurrection facility, or Lunar Ark, was from before the original Nanowar that destroyed all of the original humanity, and it has brought me back to life?"

"Yes, you were grown from a DNA template and you memories transfered from a simulation as your brain was developing.  Simple and very clever you see?” summed up Junkman.  “Looks like your environmental is up now, let’s get you out of that coffin.  Oh and Happy Birthday Zane!"

"Thanks Junkman."