im so fucked up. theres a scene in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (the sequel to hitchhikers guide) where zaphod is rummaging through the ruins of a long-destroyed city on a lifeless, abandoned planet, looking for a way off, and he stumbles upon the crumbling remains of a spaceport, and miraculously one of the crafts is still intact, and there's still a quiet hum of power going into it from a connected cable, and it's making a quiet noise. so he rigs up a makeshift stethoscope and listens, and there's a PA system saying something like "we are very sorry for the delay. we are currently waiting for a restocking on lemon-soaked towlettes, for your hygienic and culinary pleasure. in the meantime, we will be serving coffee and biscuits on the deck." and he finds the remains of the arrivals/deparetures board, translates the dates and does a little math, and discovers the delay has been 900 years. spooky, yeah? but he goes on the ship, hoping he can get it flying, and it's perfectly well-functioning and an android flight attendant comes out and tries to force him to sit in the seating area, continuing to apologize for the delay. and when he gets to the seating area, every seat has a person in it. long-haired, long-nailed, and completely silent, but very much alive. and another android comes out with a tray of coffee and cookies, and all of the people wake up and start screaming in agony as she gives them their snacks. zaphod is terrified, so he runs to the control deck and locks the door behind him, and he finds the autopilot computer, which repeatedly tells him to return to the seating area, and he eventually convinces it to talk to him. "have you seen the planet?" he says, or something to that general effect. "there's no civilization! you're not GETTING a lemon-soaked napkin shipment!" and the autopilot says "the most likely path to us receiving our shipment is to wait until another civilization develops on the planet and they can deliver it. so we have put the passengers in suspended animation, and we wake them up once a year for coffee." and then? and then zaphod's friend who he was looking for shows up and the plot carries on and they don't say another word about the ship (at least, as far as i know from my place a couple chapters later). thats it. some classic Space Horror Of Grand Proportions, a doctor who plot, a twilight zone plot, an scp article, an asimov short story— that, when a ship ran out of a luxury amenity and didn't get it fulfilled quickly, the autopilot ai decided that, regardless of plentiful fuel and safety, the ideal way to deal with the situation is to suspend the lives of all of the passengers, waking them up once a year, until a new civilization could evolve around them to produce napkins— and it takes up about two pages total before being put aside completely!
