Magic Makers of Wondrous Items

710 words!!!

Geoff was a jolly fellow, very bright but not too wise. Still he did have a very good imagination and he had courage, sometimes too much courage. Like the time he decided to learn how to wrestle alligators by taking on the big black mean old bull down in Farmer Joe's back paddock. What surprised most people was that Geoff won in the end though with a few bruises.

Got to imagine it! That was what Geoff said when he spoke of self harvesting corn, flying dairies that delivered their own goods to town and even sodapop that came in ever changing but always delightful flavours. Geoff would look at something and come up with some wonderful idea that nobody ever agreed with.

Geoff went in for the odd little competitions that appeared in the same section of his favourite comic. Sometimes he even won like the time he got X-ray glasses that caused, well we won't go into it because it was rather embarrassing until his mother took the glasses away from him.

Geoff also liked to search through Grandfather Major's basement which nobody had gotten around to sorting out properly. Grandfather was a mad collector of the exotic from an inflatable elephant foot umbrella stands to a not moped quadcycle to a big box of black and white 19th Century postcards that caused Geoff some confusion; he wondered why all those young ladies would forget to put anything on.

Geoff won the competition on the very day he found the tiny glowing cylinder of a perpetual energy generator in the basement and then he was sitting with the two of them in his bedroom. The MTM or Magic Thing Maker, was a three piece set that made up a cube with a fancy console on one side, the words THIS SIDE UP on top and an alcove on another side. Trick was to use the small screen and various buttons to code in what one wanted and then it would appear in the alcove. The wondrous machine had only one limitation and that was electricity. It used lots of it and only small simple things could normally be made.

But Geoff had a spark go off in his whirlpool of a cluttered mind and he took that battery, that amazing glowing cylinder, and he tried to plug it in. At first it did not fit so he decided to ignore the silly instructions, even the bit about safety that was written in bright red. Geoff wasn't much into heeding warnings like that anyway, not when he had a really good idea.

Geoff cut, jiggled and hammered at the cube bits. Then the little glowing cylinder fitted, it slipped in, it clicked. Mind rushing ahead and failing to think things through as usual, he went to the console and he giggled madly. Then he began to program something wonderful, something that perhaps only his mind could have thought of. A couple of minutes later the first small Magic Maker Robot, or MMR, came floating gently out of the alcove looking to be no threat.

The MMRs would not only make wondrous things they would make old things better.

Ten years later Geoff grumbled as he clambered up a loose hill made up of wonderful devices. The hill was surrounded by more mounds and in the distance was a decaying freeway. He climbed over a wondrous 50 function ergonomic couch, wriggled past a great box of everlasting cans of turkey stew, and the bonnet of a solar hovercar. As he moved his perfected new model electronic robotic body hummed softly. He didn't like being a cyborg much but he had to 'live' with it. Everybody had to for nobody had found a way to defeat the trillion plus MMRs.

The sky was thick with trails of MMRs moving through the air at different altitudes. They were building a spaceport and Geoff had no doubt the decaying freeway could be a source of material. Geoff looked around to see if any other ex-humans were about but guessed that the cyborgs had been recycled to become parts of the new starships. With a sigh he resigned himself to the truth that the MMRs would too soon be doing the same to him.