Butcher, Baker and Replicant Maker, Page 2

  Chapter 2 – Butcher, Baker and Replicant Maker...

  The replicant maker tossed through the night. In a world where everyone's dreams were realized, the replicant maker could not sleep.

  Once more, Nigel Hightower, the replicant maker so cherished by the new city's children, threw aside his blankets and navigated his apartment's darkness to find his workbench.

  He preferred a small, antique lamp scavenged from the old world's trash over the apartment's installed, and harsher, lighting. Nigel stretched his fingers and cracked his knuckles before turning his attention to the scattered gathering of gears and springs he hoped to assemble into his most wonderful achievement. He often wondered what he might have done had it not been for the children. He realized that in a world filled with the machine's illusions, a world in which each woman and man felt every pleasure of their dreams, that Nigel Hightower, who could no longer surrender himself to the comfort of that other reality, was utterly alone. None of his peers would smile upon whatever mechanism he might make. To them, each wind-up toy could not glitter no matter if it was made of silver or gold. Only the children, whose minds remained too young to merge with the machine, cared for Nigel Hightower and his whirling, buzzing creations. The children saved Nigel Hightower from the worst kind of isolation – that of a man whose sleep brought only nightmares in a world whose only promise was the manifestation of any kind of a dream.

  The children gave Nigel Hightower purpose.

  In his own golden youth, before the machine had betrayed him and replaced his pleasure with pain, the replicant maker possessed a picture book brimming with the lost animals of the old world painted in a rainbow of watercolors. Such books had been saved by the new world for the sake of its children, for such antiques helped soothe the imagination of children until their minds developed into the organ capable of linking with the machine.

  Thus Nigel Hightower's parents gave no concern to how intently their boy stared upon his picture book's pages filled with the old world's creatures. Nigel's young mind thrilled at the painted jaguar's speed. His imagination whirled at the thought of a condor's flight. The pictures of bounding dogs made him smile. In his mind, young Nigel rode as a king upon elephants through the new city's white walls. He slept and ate with lions. He swam with both the dolphins and the sharks. The hyenas visited him in his dull, plastic room and laughed at the sound of the frogs and cicadas that Nigel imagined drifting in the air.

  After Nigel Hightower suffered the shock that separated him from the machine, his fractured soul pined for that book that brimmed with painted animals.

  But the book could not be found. It was no longer one of Nigel's possessions. It had moved on to help other children until they found solace in the machine. Nigel had no way to discover what girl or boy turned its pages to marvel at the giraffe and octopus. Nigel Hightower was supposed to have grown beyond the need of such childish wants as pages filled with watercolor animals.

  Nonetheless, Nigel's soul remained fractured.

  Nigel summoned the memory of that book's pages. His mind returned faded, blurred images of that menagerie. His memory was not a precise duplicate. Nigel's fingers twitched. His imagination brewed, and soon after that shock that banished him from the new world's dreams, Nigel Hightower crafted the the first creature in a practice that would transform him into the childrens' beloved replicant maker.

  Nigel began with little skill, and his first efforts were hardly impressive, especially if compared to what dreams an adult mind could summon when connected to the machine. He taped sketches of hand-traced turkeys to his small apartment's plastic, white walls. He sliced plastic plates into lion masks. He scavenged old paper clips and linked them together to form his first, simple semblances of serpents and snakes He roamed outside the new city to collect stones which he painted into the images of toads and frogs. Nigel trained his eye to recognize the lost wilderness in the piles of refuse which remained of the old world. Nigel assembled springs and beads into tall, thin pelicans. He pasted mothballs together into the shapes of rabbits and wolves. He one day pulled a handsaw out from a teetering trash pile and immediately employed its rusting teeth to the task of sawing bear and buffalo shapes from discarded, wooden panels.

  Nigel's crafted menagerie soon spilled from his apartment's door. None of the new city's adults paid any notice. They would not allow a collection of painted stones to give them pause as they commuted to their appointments with the dream-granting machine.

  The children, however, did pause.

  The new city's plastic, white walls held little to stimulate the minds of the young, whose neural development forced them to wait before finding the dreams contained in the machine's embrace. Boys and girls found what entertainment they might in whatever books and toys they managed to scavenge from the old world. Yet the childrens' minds hungered for more. The simple creatures they came upon outside of the replicant maker's apartment door tasted sweet to their imaginations. The children who passed by the replicant maker's apartment stopped to count the animals that appeared each morning in that curious hall. Nigel Hightower had not intended to do so, but he provided a feast for those young minds who yearned to find sustenance for their dreams outside the new world's machine.

  The children soon gathered each morning to watch Nigel Hightower place another new creature creation outside his door. They asked questions about each animal Nigel presented to them, and Nigel did the best he could to describe how the original animals lived in the lost old world's wilderness. One morning, Nigel carved an owl from a bar of soap while those children watched. The children laughed, and to Nigel Hightower, their applause and delight filled an emptiness that had festered within him since the machine had betrayed and rejected his dreams.

  More presentations of new creature creations followed. Each new animal was more complex than its predecessor. Soon, wind-up mice scurried down the hall. Nigel presented the growing crowd with helium-filled balloons shaped like fish, whose ribbons fluttered as they floated along the ceiling. He made alarm clocks in rooster shapes. Nigel studied the systems of motors and gears and learned to create mechanical, wooden horses the boys and girls rode down the hallway. He built musical bands composed of monkeys and bears, animals who beat a happy rhythm with their tambourines, cymbals and drums. The music sent the children running through the city in glee. The children called Nigel Hightower the replicant maker, and Nigel rediscovered the needed dreams to be sustained in the new world without the machine's embrace.

  Nigel prided himself that each creature creation he placed outside his apartment door was more complex than its predecessor. The small gears and springs Nigel examined beneath the soft light of his antique lamp would carry that tradition forward. Nigel had dreamed a creature like nothing the children had before seen. The mechanism he envisioned would require all that Nigel had learned of mechanics, chemistry, robotics and circuitry. It would be a creature that demanded the most subtle combination of power and grace. It had to be lightweight, yet it would also need to be strong. The parts heaped atop the replicant maker's workbench would appear impossible to fit together to anyone else but Nigel Hightower. Nigel's dreams paid little attention to possibility, and the replicant maker would happily attempt the impossible so that the children could smile, so that the replicant maker could sleep.

  So Nigel Hightower toiled through the night on a mechanical creature he had little right believing could be created. At the workbench, Nigel forgot his isolation in the new world. Whenever he watched the children smile, Nigel no longer resented that the machine had rejected him.