“Just think of it, Mr. Hightower,” the short man smiled amid the gears and circuits littering the replicant maker's apartment floor. “To again be accepted in the machine.”
Nigel Hightower felt his heart on the brink of exploding. He was suddenly aware that breathing required effort. His fingers twitched. He eyes darted. He could not summon the courage to return neither the short nor tall man's gaze.
“So you see, Mr. Hightower,” added the tall man. “You have no reason to be left alone after the machine embraces the children. We have every confidence the updates will make the machine's dreams available to you as well, that you will again be able to realize your greatest dreams and pleasures.”
Nigel's hands and feet tingled. His head swooned. His breathing turned rapid. He felt his mind, exercised time and again by all of his creations, slip.
The short man squinted at Mr. Hightower. “Well, sir. Don't you have anything to say?”
Nigel's mouth opened, but no words marched through his mind.
“Give the man a little time,” the tall man told his shorter companion. “Mr. Hightower has much to digest. I would think the opportunity to return to the machine would be overwhelming. Such a reunion is the least we could hope to give Mr. Hightower, who has given so much to help ease the children's hurt before we found the way to bring them to the machine. We'll always be thankful for those efforts.”
A smile returned to short man's face. “Just think, sir. Back within the machine.”
The administrators smiled kindly before showing themselves out of Nigel's apartment.
Nigel Hightower could not think of it at all. He shivered in his chair after the administrators excused themselves from the apartment. The men in the suits failed to realize what they set before the replicant maker. They brought the worst news possible. He was an old man, with thinning hair, poor digestion and blurred vision from too many nights squinting at the workbench. In the new world's plastic city, those attached to the machine did not care if arthritis settled in the hips, or if osteoporosis curved the spine. Those ailments belonged to the world outside the machine. Mr. Hightower felt age's aches and pains. He knew the inevitable decline into the grave. He did not have the faith to believe that the machine's electric pleasure would let him forget such discomforts.
The apartment's lighting pained his head. Nigel turned off the lights and sat in darkness. He had no desire to consider the parts he had scavenged from outside the plastic city. He did not imagine the shapes of animals ascending from the rubble. He had already lived two lives – one life embraced by the machine, another as a lonely tinkerer betrayed by the machine, a tinkerer who found solace in creating animal copies. Nigel did not think he had the fortitude to learn a third life for the sake of a new round of updates and modifications to the machine.
And worst of all, those dark-suited administrators promised to bring the children to the machine.
Nigel Hightower cherished what the children had accomplished since he had presented his first creature creation to the boys and girls passing his apartment door. He had seen their minds blossom outside of the machine. He had recognized the power of a child's imagination. He had felt how it was the childrens' imagination that guided his hands at night when he stared at his workbench. The children were his muse. The children had taught him to see the world through new eyes. Through young eyes, Nigel saw how a beam of salvage, bent just so, could serve as an ostrich's neck. Through young eyes, Nigel recognized how polished, old marbles could again gleam as a pair of feline eyes. The children possessed minds of which the administrators and their machine could not dream. Nigel recalled how easily the children learned the skills of the lost old world the new world had judged trivial – reading, arithmetic, languages, sciences and the arts. The children flourished outside of the machine, and Nigel Hightower did not think himself arrogant to think his robotic creatures played a role in their development.
And now, those men in the dark suits promised to pull the children into the machine.
Nigel rubbed at the back of his neck. He had learned to forget the port there implanted. But now, that port burned. Hours passed. Nigel did not move in the dark. He feared what nightmares might visit his sleep. Nor did he have any desire to toil at his workbench.
So the replicant maker so loved by the new world's children sat in the dark in a strange kind of stupor as his mind searched frantically for a sanctuary outside of awareness and dream.
Memory and nightmare thus combined in that borderland to cruelly reward the replicant maker's efforts. Nigel sat in the dark to hide from the terrors he had heard in each word of the administrators. The terror found him regardless, and Nigel Hightower shivered as the trauma inflicted upon him, that had banished him from the machine, replayed like an old, haggard film in his apartment's shadows.