The first thing Leo saw when he opened his eyes was a smile.  In fact, the whole featureless room was filled with smiling people, all wearing simple white robes and bearing looks of divine ecstasy.

“Leonard Finnick.  You are awakened.”

The speaker was a young lady with beautifully sculpted hair and thin grey eyebrows, so Leo did not feel the need to be sarcastic about her obvious statement.  The outfits gave him a twinge of relief.  Nobody from 1998 would have been caught dead in robes like that, so his suspended animation had lasted long enough to avoid dealing with the year-long cluster that his software company had faced with Y2K upcoming.  It did [i]not[/i] look like he had been awakened five years later as he had requested, though.

“You undoubtedly want to see the new world that has sprang into being during your slumber,” said the young lady.  She extended one hand and waited for Leo to sit up, who was thankfully dressed similar to the rest of his smiling entourage.  “We have evolved much since your time, shepherded by the very machines that you created.  Come to the balcony.  There are many who wish to gaze upon your presence.”

“Thank you,” said Leo out of reflex.  The entire room of people let out a gasp, and fell to their knees in one motion as if he had somehow performed a miracle worthy of a Greek god.  The young lady held his hand as he stepped down from the cryobed, which looked oddly archaic as a device of stainless steel and aged plastic in the bare white-on-white color scheme of the room.  The lady was most certainly modern, from the faint glitter in her eyes that bespoke of some sort of implant, to the smooth metal of a bracelet that flexed with her motions as she helped Leo take the few steps to the nearest featureless wall.

“Portal,” she commanded, and the wall split open to reveal a huge courtyard far below, with [i]thousands[/i] of people in white robes packed densely across the ground and hundreds more hanging out of open windows of smooth, elegant buildings extending in all directions.  The moment they sighted Leo, they all began to cheer wildly, waving and flinging glitter in all directions until the whole area swam in a sparkling fog under the glow of the thankfully unchanged sun.  The resulting cheers deafened them for several minutes until they quieted enough for him to hear the young lady again.

“They want a speech,” said the young lady.  “I doubt we have time before you begin to work, but if you wish…”

“Work?” asked Leo in a daze.  “How far into the future did I travel?”

“Almost exactly eight thousand years,” said the young woman.  “Not counting the Great Confluence, and Eternity Week, of course.”

“Eight thou—”  Leo’s voice choked up despite his best efforts, and the young lady continued.

“The software of your cryo capsule was faulty, and placed you into a state which could not be revived easily.  Several centuries passed before the physician’s skills had even a chance of bringing about your revival, and by that time… Well, you had become famous, and they did not want even the smallest chance of failing.  Finally, when our civilization reached this level of perfection, your fame had reached such stellar heights that it was nearly unspeakable to consider you in the flesh instead of the abstract.”

“But I’m here,” said Leo, giving a sideways glance out into the teeming crowds and deciding against a casual wave.  

“We would not have revived you except we face a time of dire need, a disaster of epic proportions that our philosophy and science cannot solve on their own.  You see, although we have progressed far in the sciences of the mind and body, the very roots of our technology were repeatedly built on the technology which came before it.”

“no,” said Leo in a very small voice as she continued.

“The perfect machines which control civilization’s many worlds have run without needing the touch of a human for centuries.  They repair themselves, replace themselves, and build new units when needed, but their very core programming is repeatedly layered upon older code, which they cannot alter by themselves.”

“You can’t mean—” started Leo without the ability to continue.  The lady did in his place.

“Unless they are reprogrammed, we fear the machines will all fail when the year reaches 10,000.  Do you know COBOL?”