The chiming of the bells gradually fluxed to a beeping alarm as the
holographic bliss faded and Elos became once again aware of being in a
simulation pod.  The electric stimulation had faded, the sights and sounds
generated in his mind via a perfect closed feedback loop with the
computer now existed only as hypnogogic after-images as his atrophied
body returned to the corporeal world.  His flesh was numb.

So he had been selected for the repair.  It was a task that no person
enjoyed, being ripped from the mental ecstasy of the reality simulator
to perform some mundane duty, but it was the price they all paid for
synaesthetic bliss.  The robots, of course, took care of most of the
repairs, but occassionally a human was necessary to fix some part of
the great machine beyond the robots' capabilities.  Before all had
locked themselves in the pods, who knows how long ago, some scientists
proposed creating a next generation of robots to lengthen the
estimated time to failure.  But the world of perfect dreams, bathed in
sublime sensation given by electronic-reinforced neural optimization,
was too perfect to postpone.  Now, however, when any were woken from their
perfect worlds, the deprivation was awful.

The fortified glucose drip had already ceased.  Elos pulled the tube
from his arm and removed the electro-neural cap.  Though throughout
the technologic torpor his muscles were mechanically stimulated and
massaged, he found himself on unsteady legs as he righted himself,
like perching on two alien sticks which were no more him than the
metal of the chamber walls.

Some scientists had wondered if, after a prolonged perfect dreamstate,
any could survive the shock of falling back to the real world.  Elos
now knew what they had meant.  His body was cold.  Sights and colors
were dimmed, and the whir of the machinery was dreadful compared to
the dream music that danced perpetually in his mind in the
simulation.  In a reflective surface, he saw himself:  a man, covered
with flawed skin, the descendant of monkeys.  He cried at the ugliness
of it.

The only thing to do was to complete the repair and return to
synthetic bliss as soon as possible.  Drearily, Elos went to the
computer screen.  A cable had failed, somewhere in one of the
connecting conduits where the robots couldn't get to it.  The computer
displayed verbose, easy to follow instructions as to what to do.  The
necessity of it bothered Elos.  Reality had been reduced to an
instruction list, to be followed without creativity or expression.  He
recalled the splendour of unfolding worlds pulled from his mind, each
detail etched by the ineffable paintbrushes of his mind, the canvas
pulsating in pleasure waves, each thought and expression, a
meditation, a prayer and homage to existance, to the alpha state of
civilization strived for by humanity and achieved in their enlightened
boxes.  To compare the creation of worlds to the idiocy of the business at
hand, however necessary, was a disparity divided by the infinite
abyss.  Elos hated it.  He reflected he had forgotten hate, long lost
on the other side when humans were children of the universe and not creators.

Elos put on his space suit and activated it.  A rover had already
docked at the airlock.  All of the necessary equipment would be
inside. He opened the airlock and entered, waited a moment for the
pressure to equilibrize, then entered the vehicle.  The transparent
dome of the rover was open to the stars, pinpricks of light in naked
space.  The sun could not be seen so it must have been night.  Elos
had forgotten the variation of color in the stars, from the blue of
Sirius to the red of Betelgeuse.  Elos sat for a moment, taking in the
vastness around him.  The universe stretching before him, separated
from him only by the thin space suit and the glass of the rover, made
him shudder in its vastness.

Elos set the rover in motion, the directions to the site of the broken
connection already programmed into the vehicle's computer.  The rover
glided magnetically over the station's surface.  Elos was struck by
the empty silence during the rover's slow traversal.  It was different
from the emptiness of sleep.  There, the space between moments wherein
dipped conciousness was full only of serenity and entered only when
the thoughts were all flown.  This deprivation -- waiting for the
traversal of distance -- was different, tense with expectation, the
brain flitting off into distractions and clunkily coming back to the
antipation of goals.

Elos at first took the station as lifeless, the unfolding of
geometries the only perceptual change in the landscape.  But as his
eyes flitted reflexively in those casual moments, here and there,
where he saw the activity of the robots:  drones rolling about the surface in
patrol and repair mode, a gathering of legged and wheeled bots near a
conduit junction coordinating a repair, and a lone wheeled unit
arc-welding some tear in the surface, the sparks flying blue and
drifting conceptually into the stars above.  On the edge of sight,
Elos beheld another rover like his own.  He wondered if it were
manned?  He found the unit's telemetry and attempted contact with it,
but his messages went unanswered.  The thought came to him that he
might never know the answer.  In dreams, all became illuminated upon
enough time riding the thoughts.  In waking, knowledge could be occluded.

The rover's speaker beeped, and the screen signaled that the
destination was reached. The pod rolled to a halt.  Here he was.
Sighing, Elos took the toolkit and studied the computer's readout to
see what needed to be done.  A cable identified by a long hash, buried
in many others, had been damaged.  The cause of the damage, be it a
micrometeorite or thermal fatigue, was unknown.  Nor did it matter.
Elos hit the keys to exit the rover, the hatch opening to a small
set of metal steps to the surface below.  The suit's magnetic boots
holding him to the ground, Elos gingerly walked down the narrow
stairs.

Elos walked away from the rover, the sky opening even more as the thin
plate of glass before his eyes the only interuption of photons'
pathlines where their light-years' journey terminated to
fall upon his pupils and stimulating that spark of perception.  He had
to stand there for a few moments to take it all in.  The universe was
before him, how vacant and strange, and even in his dreaming pod he was wrapped
up in it.  Thoughts and physics merged.  Robots whirred on the edge of
sight.  He could touch them, would touch them were it not for their distance.

Elos made his way to the conduit junction, a display lighting on the
rectangular box as he neared.  He thought in passing at the
inconsiderate condescension of the programmer at such a welcome to the
woken traveler.  The display echoed the instructions seen on the screen
in the rover.  Using his tools, Elos removed the panel to expose the
mass of wires.  Any robot could have done this, but they lacked either
the strength or the dexterity for the next step.  What was thousands,
perhaps millions, of wires ran intertwined in a tangled tube.  Fixing
in his brain the useless ID of the wire he sought, Elos began combing
through the twisted cables with his fingers.  The precise tensile
manufacture of the cables made the work difficult, as was the
memorization of the meaningless nonce of the faulty cable.  He thought
of the old machines he had seen a lifetime away, back in school, when
engineers did not have the resources of having their wires labeled.  
While their machines were simple compared to the grand achievement of
the station, he imagined their frustration at debugging such archaic
electronics.

Elos realized he had drifted off and had been forgetting to look at
the wires' labels.  He hughed and fought to get his brain out of dream-mode,
to focus on this task.  Carefully, he began to again examine each
wire. A few minutes had passed, he at last found the cable he sought.  Elos ran
his finger along it, daring not to lose it, until he found the
problem.   The join between two lengths of cable was not properly
made.  It had probably worked intermittently since the station's
genesis and only now had entropy caused a malfunction that the
computer would register. Elos freed the segment of cable.  He pressed
the interlock to close the connection, but the joint would not close.
A manufacturing defect. Elos frowned.  Out of another's laziness now
would he be deprived of the dream-state to deal with this.  Securing
himself as best could be done in microgravity, Elos pressed the
segments together hard, hoping to force the connection and get back to
his pod.

His hands slipped and the connection broke entirely.  The sharp end of
one of the interior wires punctured his space suit, embedding itself in his
left palm.  Paniced, Elos cried out and removed the barb, the space
suit fabric closing about the narrow hole.  He looked at the suit's
diagnostics.  Integrity complete.  He breathed a sigh of relief.  The
loose ends of the cable flayed about in space with the momentum
imparted to them, the broken fragments of the connector slowly moving
away from the station.  Taking his arm from the sleeve, Elos examined
his wound.  He was bleeding, leaking from that chemical plumbing of
his circuilatory system.  He recalled being in wonder as a boy when he
reflected at the marvel that such could evolve from an unconcious
universe through billion of years of ersosion of inept genes and
explosion of innovative sequences.

Elos stood there, on the surface of the station under a cosmos of
stars, staring at the trickle of red down his palm.  There was no
serious damage, but the pain was intense.  Elos found it fascinating,
to think of the connection between his corporeal form and that knot of
nerves wherein arose what he called conciousness.  There was no point
where he could say his conciousness ended and his vessel began.  How
strange...to be a thing.  How very real and frightening now seemed his
cessation.  He had not much thought about it, had accepted the reality
of his death and that, perhaps his memories, recorded in the computer,
would be found and relived by alien archaeologists.  But he reflected
for the first time that the memories would not be him, just a
recording of synthetic projections.  He was glad his thoughts were not
being recorded since he shed the neural cap.  He wanted to share these
moments with the universe alone.

Elos went to the tool kit and retrieved a connector and a cable
splicer.  He would seal the joint himself.  He had never done this
before, but he wanted to try.  Elos recovered the ends of cable.  He
tethered one to his suit then, with intricate awareness, secured the
splicer to the cable. He made the cut: a perfect slice.  Swapping
cables, he did the same to the second.  He joined the ends with the
connector.  A bell sounded inside his suit and the display read that
the repair was complete.  He threaded the cable back with the others
and closed the panel.  Only one instruction remained highlighted:
return to pod in rover.

He didn't want to go back.  Elos missed the sheer perfection of his
thoughts reflecting upon themselves with electronic enhancement.  He
remembered the first time he had tried the dream machine.  He swore he
never wanted to leave.  Now, after years of nothing but perfect bliss,
he didn't want to go back.  He knew then that he would never go back.
This solid world was painful, naked, and breft of that neural
perfection.  But it was real, wonderous, and strange beyond any of his
imaginings.  He would have languished in the machine forever, to rejoin the
universe only in that distant moment when his life form ceased. 

He thought of awakening someone from their sleep, of introducing this
world of solidity as an explosive element of their dreaming patterns.
But Elos remembered how he had been, and of the profound desire to do
nothing more than returning to those synthetic dreams.  There was only
one thing to do.

Elos returned to the rover.  But he did not acknowledge the one
highlighted key that would return him to the dream machine.  Instead,
he overrode the programming, wondering if anyone would ever review the
logs to see what he had done.  He set the rover on a course to one of
the escape pods.  Knowing the long sleep coming, he looked out
longingly at the duties of the robots buzzing on the station under
starlight. 

The rover reached the escape pod and docked itself at the airlock.  Passing
through the airlock, Elos entered the pod.  It was similar to his own
dream pod, but had an additional station for navigation.  He sat
there and laid in a course.  He had slept for years.  When last awake,
there were rumors of a station still on Titan.  If they did not hear
the automated signal he programmed the craft to emit, then to Alpha
Centauri, and perhaps beyond.

Elos keyed in the launch sequence for the pod.  Who could know if any
would find him, if any others survived the coldness of space and would
see the little radio blip of his craft.  The pod pushed off of the
station with a whoosh, the electronic hum of the ion drive a
comforting white noise which Elos wondered if he would hear even in
hibernation.  He lay down in the simulation bay, hooked the glucose
drip to his arm, and affixed the neural cap to his head.  Checking the
circuitry one last time, Elos activated the electrical stimulation
which would leave him falling back to that abyss of synasethetic
conciousness.  Before his thoughts were undertaken by that subconcious
tide, he wondered if he were a human falling into dreams, or if the
dream was a human, briefly awoken to fix some incidental failure, who
threw himself naked to the void.  A smile affected his space as his
eyes closed.