Donald wakes abruptly from cryosleep, disoriented, weak, and unable to remember going to sleep. As attendants help him drink, remove medical lines, and lift him into a wheelchair, Donald realizes this is a familiar pattern: he remembers being awakened before, and he associates these wake-ups with trouble.

The attendants explain that they were following instructions and protocol. When one of them says, "We lost one," Donald immediately assumes a silo has failed and instinctively guesses Silo 18 from his last remembered shift. The attendants confirm that Silo 18 is the problem: they lost contact after one of its cleaners made it over the hill and out of sight.

At first, Donald's foggy mind connects the report to Helen, the wife he remembers losing over a hill, but he soon understands they mean a cleaner from a silo, not Helen. He tries to slow the men down and ask why he was awakened, because their deference and careful treatment suggest that he now holds unusual authority.

Looking at the steaming pod he has just left, Donald notices the name displayed on its screen is not his own. That sight triggers his memory of a prior conversation with a doctor who argued that names mean little when memories and identities are unstable. When Donald asks who he is, the attendants tell him he ordered them to wake "Mr. Thurman."

As he is wheeled away to be medically cleared for duty, Donald confronts the implication that identities in this system are interchangeable, and perhaps deliberately so. The chapter ends with Donald grasping that anyone can be made to be anybody, and that one name may be as good as another when power and duty are being assigned.