Mike Delesko was exhausted. After steering the Fortress of Glory into orbit, he had put it into autopilot and went to have the first real sleep he had had in a while.
Perhaps it was the overwork, but Mike had an extremely strange dream. He was walking around the space station, looking for some food, when he entered the gym and found all the girls in the staff sitting on a bench in the middle of the gym. Apparently, the toilets had broken. Yes, all forty-two of them. Anyway, Mike approached one of the girls and she asked him to fix the toilet.
"Ha!" he had replied. "Use that cup of coffee over there!"
All the girls had stared at the cup of coffee in the corner of the room until the door banged open and a man in a top hat and coat had entered. He had approached one of the girls, who asked the man for a toilet. The man pulled a whip from his coat, and then…
Mike rubbed his eyes. He couldn't remember what had happened next. He yawned and walked over to the kitchen. He should get some more sleep, he thought to himself. This dream was extremely strange.
When he reached the kitchen, the cook greeted him.
"Hi, Mike!" the cook said.
"Hello, John," Mike said, yawning.
"Did you have a nice sleep?"
"No. I had a strange dream."
Mike walked to the fridge and got some strawberries from the top shelf. He was really hungry, but just for something light. He didn't feel as if he could handle anything else.
After eating his strawberries, he went to the gym. It was called a gym, but it was really just a large room containing some benches and a basketball hoop. Most of the female members of the staff were seated on the bench. Mike groaned.
"What?" one of the girls asked.
"Nothing, Monica," Mike said. "This just mirrors a dream I just had."
"Oh?" Monica asked. "What happened in the dream?"
Mike described the strange dream.
"And then, a man in a top hat came in, and pulled a whip out of his coat."
Monica thought for a while.
"What happened next?" she asked.
Mike gave an exasperated sigh. "That's the thing! I just don't remember!"
"Hmmm…" Monica was thinking again.
"I think he fixed the toilets," Mike said slowly, his eyes closed.
"Hmmm…" Monica said again.
"I'm going back to bed," Mike said, and moved off to his room.
"Poor guy," Monica said to her friend Allison.
"Mmmn…" Allison voiced her assent.
"He's been working too hard."