Here’s the latest story idea. A group of people awaken in a sci-fi setting out of pods. They’re unaware of where they are, who they were. It will turn out they’re onboard an orbital space station. What they don’t know is they were put there by the people on the planet below because they were sick and couldn’t be cured. So the healthy gathered up the sick and froze them on a ship until they could be cured. It will end up that it wasn’t a disease but just a phase of sickness caused by external factors (solar radiation) that only affected some people.
At some point they’ll figure out they’re on the orbital space station and eventually make it down to the planet (where they’ll be outcast as diseased even though they appear to be ‘cured’) and learn the truth of their exile. But at first, they’ll have problems on board the ship. See, some people were detected by the monitoring computers as “healed” earlier than others and released. A side effect of the condition is loss of memory. Trapped in the ship with no knowledge on how to work it or where they were, some went mad and became anarchic, destructive. The latest group that awakens seems to have more sense about them and the quickly have to unite together and protect themselves from these barbarians. Without knowing anyone, they have to have faith and trust in each other and work to bring order to the station.
I’m thinking the problem that caused it all was somehow related to where people lived: poor areas. Perhaps radiation from toxic waste, etc. Most of the people on board are uneducated, poor, and lived rough lives and revert to such lives. Some (the ones who awaken most recently) are people from other walks of life who were there because they were social workers or other reasons. It would give the story an embedded message about social inequality and trying to sweep away and forget problems. When they make it back to the planet and get shunned, they’ll eventually find people who knew them, memories will return, and they’ll figure out what the source of the problem was and confront the society on why they didn’t own up to the problem and help them rather than exile them.