Brave New Worlds

eggs of all rainbow-colors every few hours. Niles sent the little kids out onto the street with the eggs to hide them where the tin men and Elderfolk wouldn't see.
    "The eggs will hatch and our Makes will come out alive, and the tin men can't do anything about it!" He said. His eyes were shiny. It made me ache a little, and I worried that maybe pretend-Making didn't count for arties. But Niles was always making me ache a little like that, especially when he left. It scared me, that maybe I was like little Boo and something wasn't right with me. Bum batch.
    Pretty soon, we started seeing the little animals around the City. They weren't good Makes, though. They stumbled into traffic sometimes and got splattered. They fell off of roofs, got tangled in wires and cooked like bad soytein on a hot plate. They weren't there in the head. And they starved. Not a lot of food out in the city just for the taking. They couldn't take chits and buy it.
    We were stumped. The tin men weren't doing anything, but our little Makes couldn't last on their own. I hated so much seeing them laying dead in gutters, in the street drains. Their little selves were all over, stinking and falling apart like wind-worn paints.
    "I have an idea," I said to Niles after thinking as hard as I could. "Go to the brainiacs and ask them for help. They will tell us what we can do right. "
    Niles thought for a moment and shook his head. "No. This is an arty problem. "
    "But arties are too stupid," I said, raising my voice so everyone could hear it.
    Niles bared his teeth at me, and I cried out, scrambling away from him. "Arties aren't stupid!" he shouted. "Arties aren't stupid!"
    But we are, I said to my own head. We are not smart like brainiacs. I ran away, back to my stupid Elderfolks, but even they were smarter than arties.

    I was drawing on the sidewalk, just to ease the ache, when Niles found me. I had stolen a little bit of charcoal from the crematorium and kept it in my pocket. I only used it when things were really bad, really really. And now I didn't know what to do.
    "Your repeating. . . patterns?" Niles said. "What do you call them?"
    I shrugged. "Can't think of words for it. Maybe your brainiac friends could guess. "
    He frowned. "they could, but who cares?" He sat beside me and took out a piece of old paper. It had shapes drawn on it like my patterns, only more random. I was fascinated.
    "Where did you get that?" I asked. I reached out to touch it, and he let me take it. I held it up to the light. The little bits were a faded green, like the moss-in-a-can.
    "Plants," he said. "they're called ‘plants. '"
    "Plants," I said. "Snazzy. "
    "A-yap," he said. "the old world was full of them. "
    "Who told you that?" I asked.
    "The brainiacs," he said. I stood up and hugged him tight.
    "Make some plants with the factories," he said. "they'll be pretty. "
    So we did. This time, the eggs were smaller, and we hid everywhere in the city. Niles helped me to make them. He understood the rightness of the animal bits, but to me, plants made more sense. They didn't move, except to stretch for sun or rain. Wherever you put them, that's where they stayed, just like murals.
    The ache almost went all-away, for a while.

    The little plant-eggs hatched and grew quickly all around the city. We Made so much more of them, and they lasted good. the tin men noticed them. Everywhere, arties were seeing the tin men staring at the little plants growing bigger every day. They didn't know what to do, but all arties knew what happened then: the tin men asked the Elderfolk.
    While I Made plants, the other arties Made more little animals. Some that flew in the air, and some that could squeeze into tiny little cracks. This time, the little animals didn't die. They grew bigger too, like the plants had to come first for them to work. Niles said it was a secret why, and wouldn't tell me, which made me angry, but the ache was staying away so long as I made my plants, so I couldn't fight him over it.
    Boo spent more time with me, too, when I was Making plants. She loved their shapes and would smile and point and smile whenever we found another one growing up in the cracks out on the street. One night, I even woke up and saw her toying with one of the silver disks when she thought no one was watching. The shapes on the screen were colorful, but they had no coherence, no pattern.
    Sad, sad little Boo. She wanted to Make plants and animals too, but she was just a melodie and she couldn't