[quote=@Expendable] Let's make the asset pre-contact. After they were recovered by their parent agency, it was decided to put them in storage with other frozen assets in a high security orbital lab - it wasn't adversely affected by power outages on the surface. When the refugee ships left, the lab got raided for fuel by the refugees and they wound up bringing a few of the assets with them, mistaking them for fuel containers. Or perhaps they brought them along as a hedge to ensure genetic diversity. It's the same nanites, the translator nanites were build on top of an existing design - this happens a lot in electronics. But because they're labeled "translator nanites" nobody uses them for the treatment of brain trauma. The people doing the reanimation aren't aware what the nanites are doing, they're just injecting them so the revived can understand them. As a suggestion - when people go into cryogenic suspension, it feels like they're being boiled alive because of paradoxical undressing - constriction of blood vessels on the surface, etc. Oddly enough, that memory is lost on revival, and they think they're sweating because of the rewarming process. [/quote] Can you define what you mean by first contact? Do you mean before humanity met aliens in general? In this setting that would be like 2 millenia ago. There is some lore in this setting regarding how this happened and that freezing prior to contact wouldn't fit into it (basically humans get uplifted from dicking around on the one planet to full FTL in the 21st century). The cryosleep in this setting is a dark-age technology that has been developed to try to replace the stasis pods that were used in the Federation days, but it isn't as good. So I'm fine with the cryo-lobotomy concept. It's just they wouldn't have been frozen prior to about the 29th century. As for the nanites - in setting they were developed by alien races (the Berdikons/Gorialax - but that isn't important for this thread), specifically for the purpose of communicating with each other. There may or may not have been other variants of these nanites, but they no longer exist and haven't for 1000 years so there might be a hope/expectation that the person in a cryopod would recover but nanites wouldn't be considered as a potential source of that recovery.