Chapter 6 – Nightmare and Revenge...
The machine's modifications brought nightmare to Nigel Hightower in those first weeks following their implementation.
He counted each child lost to the new world and its machine dreams. Nigel roamed the new, plastic halls and watched as teams of dark-suited administrators delivered their candies and dark spectacles to the apartments where children resided. He noticed as the administrators now left the spectacles rather than the candy behind following their visits. The updates proved a success. The machine embraced the childrens' minds.
Nigel watched the children move listlessly through the new city's dull, plastic and white walls and realized he was alone. One after another, the children chose the machine's electronic wonders over whatever creatures the replicant maker introduced to the halls. Murders of fluttering, electronic crows shared flight with the replicant maker's crane. Nigel denied himself rest to make the lemurs whose springs bounded their bodies upon the walls and somersaulted them over the heads of boys and girls who paid no notice. Nigel transformed rubber bands and balsa wood into hovering dragonflies. Robotic nightingales sang through the night, while furry, white pandas in red fezzes cranked hurdy-gurdy machines through the day. No one noticed the noise.
Craftsmen in even the lost, old world would have admired the skill the replicant maker developed. With his miniature gears and miniscule rivets, Nigel Hightower turned into a magician, a veritable wizard who resurrected the wasted, old world's wildlife with mediums as simple as plastic, wood, porcelain or clay.
Yet none of the children any longer cared.
Now, the children knew the machine.
Nigel cried when he watched a girl pass his apartment with her hair clipped short so as not to impede the surgical implant that appeared upon the back of her neck. For he thought of that girl who, not so long ago, had worn a hand-crafted, pink flamingo brooch upon her lapel. The halls were filled with children sporting closely-cropped haircuts. Nigel withdrew into his apartment's darkness and seldom opened his door.
Nigel Hightower was again alone, but he was not forgotten.
The knock upon his door did not surprise Nigel Hightower. Though he had brooded upon what course of action he would take when that knock reverberated through his chamber's darkness, Nigel still shivered in fear. He was torn between an impulse to peek into those spectacles he knew the administrators would offer and an instinct to flee from, or fight against, the new world those in the dark suits would offer. The back of his neck burned.
Mercifully, the administrators did not torture Mr. Hightower by knocking incessantly upon his door. They set the dark spectacles upon the ground outside of his apartment and retreated back down the same halls from which they had come. They would let Mr. Hightower answer the machine's newest invitation on his own time.
Butcher, Baker and Replicant Maker Page 8