Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5)

by Dean C. Moore

  “No one in your family lacks for color, do they?” Robin said, regarding Ernestina, who had moved on to “feed” the ultra light that looked more like a paper dragon kite.

  “If you were near-sighted in your one good eye and lacked depth perception from an inability to see in stereo, they might appear like magical birds to you, too,” Drew said.

  “The way you cover for one another,” Robin said, “with rationalizations that’d make Plato envious… I suppose that’s part of the whole addict mystique.”

  “You’ve become vile and venomous.” Drew shaded his eyes with his hand to get a better look at the drama in the distance.

  “I do try to fit in,” Robin said.

  Drew rose from the chair in response to one of the ultra light pilots making a beeline for him, having given up on Ernestina, apparently, and the footman, who refused to break from character in assisting Ernestina with feeding the birds.

  “Hate to interrupt your beer and skittles, chap,” the leader of the ultra-light pack said.

  Robin laughed. “That’s a crack about our self-indulgent pleasure seeking,” she explained.

  “Thank you,” Drew said. “I’d forgotten what it’s like to speak proper English for twenty-five years.”

  “That crack was really for my benefit,” Robin explained to the ultra light pilot holding out the map in his hands for Drew to inspect. Suddenly, no Englishman was fit to interpret language without her. She was vaguely aware of the conceit, but unable to stop herself.

  “According to the map, we just fly in the direction of the front of the house, and we’ll be to the coast in no time,” Map Man said. “Sorry, Darby Gillis is the name.” He shook both their hands.

  “That’s the front of the house,” Drew explained, pointing to a different face of the palace.

  “And here I was thinking I was all belt and braces,” Darby said.

  “He means overly cautious,” Robin said.

  Darby gazed up from the map. “She’s rather fond of the English, isn’t she?”

  “Only in aggregate,” Drew said.

  Darby turned to address the rising din from the ultra light pilots, who didn’t appreciate getting wet bread crumbs thrown in their faces, and whose squawking sounded ironically birdlike. “Better be on my way before things are as black as Newgate’s knocker.”

  Robin laughed. “Newgate was an infamous prison,” she explained.

  “I see now why you Americans fancy King Kong so, with all his breast-beating,” Darby said.

  Picking up on the snide remark, Robin asked, “Are you an addict too?”

  Drew sighed. “Best be on your way, my good man, before she sets Anglo-American relations back another hundred years.”

  Darby nodded politely to both of them and was off.

  Drew and Robin watched the flock of ultra lights ascend into the sky with the same sense of magical charm as Ernestina. Who would have thought any of them would actually get off the ground?

  “He boxes clever, doesn’t he?” Drew said, eying the leader of the ultra-light pack out in front of the flock.

  “Fine; I’ll cool it with the Euro-speak,” Robin said. “I suppose my excitable self won’t cut it around you vultures used to picking over the dead remains of a once virile culture.”

  Drew’s cheeks dimpled, and the corners of his eyes wrinkled. “You go right on loving us English. Someone has to.” He sprawled on the patio chair suitable for a king. The staff was buzzing around again with refreshments, like bees returning to the hive to alert everyone where the flowers with the best yield were.

  Having devolved from earlier heights of accommodation, Robin was back to smiling at the staff with pained faces, which did nothing to hide her disdain for their servile behaviors. Her mind could only entertain so much posing-behavior at one time.

  “God damn it!” Drew shouted. He jumped off the chair and ran toward the lake. Robin looked up to see Ernestina, stripped naked, walking, hands spread wide, into the lake.

  “What now?” Drew asked, arriving at Aart’s side.

  “She sees God, sir. She’s walking toward the light,” Aart informed him.

  “If I had any sense at all, I wouldn’t fight it.”

  “Precisely the conclusion I came to, sir. Then again, I’m overdue for a break.”

  “Two-hour shifts from now on,” Drew said. “No more. Then you rotate with one of the other footmen. Any more, and any sane man will be praying for just this moment.”

  “Yes, sir.” He held out a champagne bottle from the picnic basket. “Perhaps you’d like a bracer before going after her.”

  “Is this her idea of breakfast? Or breakfast, lunch, and dinner?” Drew said, eying the bottle.

  “With a few appetizers thrown in for good measure, sir.”

  Drew took a nip from the bottle and handed it back. Then charged the water, swept Ernestina up in his arms. She started fighting and kicking him. “The devil’s claiming me! Jesus, don’t let him get me!”

  “At least you’re not seeing Jesus in oil slicks anymore. Was it you who started that fad?” Drew said, sounding as exasperated as he had to have felt, Robin thought.

  Drew handed Ernestina over to the relief staff awaiting him on the shoreline, all better dressed than he was, and so, hesitant to go any further than the lip of the water.

  When Drew made it back to Robin, she was ready, as always, in defiance of life, with life-transcending advice. “Stop playing the game. Or she’ll keep dragging you down to her level of eternal codependence where no one gets better, ever, and the whole point is to keep justifying one another’s sense of hopelessness, and reasons to drink.”

  “She’s not trying to control me with her Alzheimer’s, Robin.”

  “Isn’t she? Ernestina might be losing her higher brain functions, but you can bet the last of them to go will be the button-pushing behavior.”

  “I’ll take it under advisement,” Drew said, though what he really meant was, “Screw you.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  For years, Aala Freed, referred to by her own friends as “Coma Man’s wife,” felt stalked by a presence; some intangible force she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

  As she stepped off the curb on New Street, intending to cross to the other side, a red double-decker bus nearly splattered her across its windshield. The buses weren’t used outside of London. It shouldn’t have been there. Was she, too, in the wrong place at the wrong time?

  She stepped back onto the curb to catch her breath, and make sure the coast was clear.

  She had recognized the bus driver, Wilfred, and his Red Route, which she’d taken on many an occasion.

  A big one for signs, lickety-split, she ran the course through her head, in case there might be some ingredient for her husband’s time machine she was meant to find along it. Starting at Green Park underground and ending at Victoria Station, she’d be damned if she could think of anything along the entire Red Route concourse that related to her husband’s invention.

  Then she caught a whiff of the bus’s exhaust. And remembered.

  The Big Bus Company had gone green, switching to Cummins ISCe engines, which conformed to the environmentally-friendly Euro 3 Standard. Now, the Cummins plant might well have something she could use. She thanked her guardian spirits for the message from above, and once again, attempted to cross the street.

  This time, she was nearly guillotined by an unicyclist, catching her hair in the spokes of his wheel, which rose above her head. Maybe the hardware store her husband had sent her to wasn’t the one she was meant to hit. Then again, it was a busy time of day. New Street, going east from The Shambles, and Friar Street, which it turned into, heading southwards, were very scenic roads, which meant tourists, and nearly as much foot traffic as car traffic. If she wasn’t careful, she’d end up misreading the impedements of the midday crunch as yet another “sign.”

  The third time the charm, the flow of traffic arrested just long enough for Aala to squeeze between the islands
of stalled vehicles.

  Once on the other side, she made good time to Haley’s Hardware. Her pace slowed at the final moments only in hopes the mirage might fade. Blinking hard did not help. The reason for the stalled cars in the street was all so painfully apparent now. Some tourist, head down on the steering wheel, as if still consulting his map in a manner that might get him around his myopia, had crashed into the store. She was most definitely not meant to go to this hardware store today.

  “You used to be better at taking a hint, Aala,” she chastised herself, stomping back across the lanes of stalled traffic.

  She thought about what Robin had said to her husband. That signs of the Internet’s flickering consciousness could be made out in halos of protection and magnetism surrounding one. Had a team of code writers managed to put such a protective halo around Robin Wakefield? Or possibly her husband? Extending to anyone currently connected with them. Divining Aala’s intent and reaching down from computer-circuit heaven to intercede on her behalf? She knew that people in the underground railroad in England had been working assiduously to such ends to protect the rogue scientists from the men in black. But none of them had been bright enough to pull it off. She’d been out of touch with her own people for weeks now, however. Maybe. Even so, maybe reading the signs of the old gods was still the best protection for those souls not purified enough to earn the new gods’ good graces.

  Born a Romani, Aala didn’t know any other way to approach reality but to enmesh the physical world in the spiritual world. She had herbs and teas and incantations that facilitated communion between realms, which she was ready to accept as responsible for her husband awakening from a coma over any techno-wizards with their alchemy of self-evolving algorithms. Finding her way to the correct hardware store this morning, she preferred to believe, was still more in the hands of the spirits than in a sentient Internet. Admittedly, the gods of technology, only now coming into power, complicated the picture, maybe enough that only from the deepest of trance states, could she hope to sort out who was responsible for what goings-on in her life.

  ***

  Aala stepped inside Homebase, one of England’s largest do-it-yourself wholesalers, and blinked at the garish green and orange color scheme. Grabbing a cart, she pushed towards the nearest aisle of items. “After bad luck comes good fortune,” Aala mumbled under her breath, choosing from the long list of Romani proverbs lending structure and meaning to her life.

  When a shopper cut her off as she veered up an aisle, she sneered and uttered another Romani proverb, “Bad people don’t sing.” She immediately began whistling a lovely aria to calm herself, and pushed forward with the cart, feeling like an ox steering a heavy load. Even if the cart was empty, she was a pint-sized woman for who the world simply wasn’t built.

  Aala checked her list. The first item on it was “copper wire.”

  The store was huge. It was like looking for a needle in a needle factory that was an eighth of an inch shorter than all the others. She pushed on, refusing to ask any clerks for help, content the fates would guide her.

  Finally, after being lost in the labyrinth for what seemed like five eternities, an overly helpful clerk cornered her and insisted on lighting a path. “Copper wire?” Aala said. The clerk pointed to the back of the store, same aisle.

  Arriving at the far wall moments later to find no copper wire, Aala dealt with her frustration as she usually did, by uttering another proverb. “A Romani only tells the truth once in his life but he regrets it afterwards.”

  Five minutes more of wandering the store lost, and Aala dropped to her knees. Rather demonstratively, as was her style, she clenched her hands in prayer and stared heavenwards, leaning against the handlebar of the cart as she would a pew in church. She cried out in her native tongue. She pulled herself back to standing with a sigh. “Bury me on my feet; I’ve spent my entire life on my knees.” Scarcely a day went by without her having to utter that proverb at least three times.

  She drove her cart headlong into a discount bin featuring coil upon coil of wire. Half-off, the sign read. She gasped, “In the hour of your greatest success are sown the seeds of your own destruction.” She asked the clerk, “Why is this wire half-off?”

  He picked up a coil and ogled the curiosity. “After numerous customer complaints, we tested it. Impurities were found in this batch which no one can explain.” He set the coil back down. “The manufacturer refuses to take it back or to acknowledge they were responsible. The electronic paper trail was deleted. No one knows how. So there you have it, the deal of the century, for the right customer.”

  She shook her head. “Good horses can’t be of a bad color.”

  “It’s better to be the head of a mouse than the tail of a lion,” the clerk replied, betraying his own Romani ancestry. He was inferring she should use her own head rather than following the closest thing to scripture the gypsies had.

  “It’s easier to milk a cow that stands still,” she argued, referring to following good common sense, in this case, her own.

  “I have two masters: I work for the devil before lunch, and then I follow the Lord.” The clerk pointed to the clock on the wall: it was after one.

  Aala harrumphed, but her resistance was weakening. “What if it doesn’t serve my purpose?” she said.

  “May you have a lawsuit in which you know you are right,” the clerk answered in Romani-proverb-speak.

  Stuffing coil after coil into the cart, effectively clearing the table, she said, “One mad man makes many madmen: many madmen make madness.”

  Seeing she was still concerned about the wisdom of her willful participation in the store’s unloading of defective merchandise on her, the clerk sent her on her way with a shrug and this: “Sometimes you get the bear, and sometimes the bear gets you.”

  Content on getting in the last word, she mumbled, “The buyer needs a hundred eyes, the horse thief not one.”

  She moved on to the second item on her list.

  THIRTY MINUTES EARLIER

  TWENTY-SIX

  Thor, struggling to follow Aala, found his sight lines to her continually blocked. The impediments: passing trucks, delivery men unloading museum-sized paintings, a preponderance of humans that looked far too much like one another from a dog’s perspective, and a scent trail only a bloodhound could follow.

  No matter how much he picked up the pace, she kept receding from him, like in a running dream. He found himself being repeatedly redirected toward the park.

  The side panel of the latest stopped truck laid out the Morse code in full for him. He used it to translate the dog whistles coming from the park. They bleated in short and long bursts, forming the phrase, “Go to the park.” The phrase repeated four times.

  Thor quickly determined the number of dog walkers with whistles needed to convey the message: sixteen. No two words had been formed on the whistle of just one dog walker. His echo location confirmed the scattered deployment of the dog-whistlers throughout the park. If the force redirecting him were hostile as opposed to benign, sixteen assassins would have been a far better use of resources than sixteen dog-whistlers. Sixteen assassins would have been hard even for him to dodge.

  Factoring in the suspicious movement of traffic and human roadblocks put in his way, which crossed the threshold of coincidence some time back, he decided it was that much more evidence if the other side wanted him dead they would have accomplished that already. That left only a lingering curiosity as to what was behind all of this. He decided to stop fighting the forces arrayed against him.

  Thor received his marching orders when he arrived at the park. Left. Left. Right. Left. The dog whistles tweeted out the course-corrections for him, using the same Morse code as earlier.

  The directions stopped as he found himself before a man seated on a park bench reading a newspaper. He sprawled on the ground beside him, as if the man were his master. The curious fellow threw him a questioning look, but quickly returned to his paper.

  Something was o
ff about this guy.

  “You’re to watch him from here on out. Closely.” The instructions were delivered by Morse code as before.

  Who was delivering the message? Thor noticed the dog whistlers he could see in the distance were all listening to iPods or similar devices via ear-buds. Internet radio also opened their minds to subliminal data feeds which could unconsciously reroute their minds to secondary tasks. So his mentor was Internet-based.

  Thor reviewed the events leading up to his arrival at the bench and decided that the coordination of intel between spy-cams, traffic, and humans, all in real time, could not have been pulled off by one man or even a consortium of humans, whose reaction and processing times, and ability to coordinate with one another, were just too primitive.

  The consciousness whose radar he’d gotten on to was of a synthetic nature. Speaking of which…

  It suddenly dawned on Thor what was so off about the man he was guarding.

  It was no man. It was a robot.

  Even scarier: he was smarter than any human. Thor knew that because he was struggling to establish a link with his mind. The waveforms being generated from the electrical activity in his head were particularly sophisticated. Thor would have to decode them, much as he did with the Morse code cipher.

  What was this guy up to?

  Thor signaled the other dogs, who informed him they had been retasked, as well. He advised them to accept their new missions for now, and to check in with him when they knew more.

  He telepathically alerted Santini that their paths would be diverging for a time. Santini took the news hard, but seemed to accept shifting loyalties as a sign of the times.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  After reviewing her options, the Cummins ISCe engine plants in Darlington and Daventry, or the generator plant in Stamford, Aala elected to pay the generator plant a visit. Her list had items on it found in low voltage AC generators. She tore the yellow sheet out of the phone book in the red booth.