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

by Dean C. Moore

  He passed the carders next. Carding combed the fibers to align and join them into a loose rope called a "sliver." Hand carders pulled the fibers between wire teeth set in boards. Machines did the same thing with rotating cylinders. Slivers (rhymes with divers) were then combined, twisted, and drawn out into "roving." Suzette, the prettiest carder of them all, was absent from her station. One of eight children, she worked even when sick to stave off homelessness. She could be home sick, but more likely she was dead. Cicero was angry at his unfair advantage. He had survived enough fatal illnesses that had ravaged his family of nine kids until he alone was left to suspect nothing could really harm him. That meant he, unlike so many, would survive this moment in history.

  The reflections off the shiny surfaces of the metal machines confirmed he hadn’t aged a day past twenty three. He had no reason to believe he’d age any more. But he would store up the horrors seen and felt across the ages; surely that would change his appearance for the worst, all the same. Maybe instead of growing older, he’d just grow uglier. Better that than feeling numb and immune to the suffering, which an angelic face could only attest to after enough time. Better that than feeling he was turning to black tar on the inside, holding on to all that suffering, his ageless face but the lure of a vampire, who could only hope to suck the life out of others to replace what could no longer come from inside him.

  He passed the row of spinners. Spinning twisted and drew out the roving and wound the resulting yarn on a bobbin. A spinning wheel operator drew out the cotton by hand. A series of rollers accomplished this on machines called "throstles" and "spinning mules." Five of the girls’ faces lit up at his presence like fireflies illuminating his trail through his dark night of the soul. He smiled back at them, tipped his hat. His hunger for them so great, even at this distance, he could feel himself sucking their vibrancy into his hollow interiors, leaving nothing but the dried out husks of their bodies to devour later. So much for avoiding the fate of a psychic vampire.

  Cicero arrived at the warping station, at last, where he worked. Warping gathered yarns from a number of bobbins and wound them close together on a reel or spool. From there, they were transferred to a warp beam, which was then mounted on a loom. Warp threads were those that ran lengthwise on the loom. Weaving was the final stage in making cloth. Crosswise woof threads were interwoven with warp threads on a loom. The power loom worked essentially like a hand loom, except that its actions were mechanized.

  As he took up his station, across from Melinda, he did what he didn’t do with the other girls—he averted his eyes. He couldn’t stand to look away from her; she was so pretty. Of all the girls, she was the apple of his eye. But he distracted her even more than she distracted him. Twice she’d nearly lost her head, and once her arms, to the movements of the machine because she was too busy paying attention to him and not minding the machine. This factory, and every single station in it, could be deadly for those unable to focus for long periods. Even without Cicero to distract her, avoiding nodding off at the machine from overwork, or letting her mind wander, would have been a challenge. He didn’t want to add fuel to the fire, even if he had to give up lusting after the most beautiful girl of them all.

  When she didn’t take the hint, he flirted with the only other male worker in the factory, who also happened to be at his station, figuring that might put her off. It did on days Totter worked; on days he didn’t, she was back at him. She was one of thirteen kids; at her age, her mother had already been on her third child. She was probably conditioned from a home environment like that to doggedly pursue him, guilt riding her harder than he ever could. She had to find a suitable mate soon so she could get on with repopulating the earth and giving praise to God in the best manner possible. Gotta love those Irish Catholics.

  ***

  Monday, July 13th, 1845.

  Emily had her hand chewed up by her carding machine.

  The women who rushed to her aid were chastised and ordered to get back to work. Emily’s hand was examined. She was deemed unfit to hold her position any longer, reckless, a danger to the factory floor, and dismissed. They just didn’t want to pay to fix her hand, or suffer the downtime holding her position for her. The gossip reached Cicero despite the din of the machines, which had left most workers nearly deaf.

  Tuesday, July 14th, 1845.

  Rebecca got her hair caught up in a flywheel. It ripped her face, neck, and scalp off, which dangled for the longest while overhead for all to see, her head hanging down from her long hair, like a scarecrow. She was an older woman with skin like parchment, which, apparently, ripped as easily.

  She ran about for a while, screaming, faceless, everything lying under the skin exposed. Those she grabbed hold of, already numb from the horror of seeing her face dangling overhead, stared at her blankly as she cried out to them for help.

  The ones with enough presence of mind to assist, walked her down the aisle, past the dumbstruck faces of everyone in the factory, the fury trapped beneath their eyes building to a boiling point.

  Why the place didn’t erupt in a riot that day, no one could say.

  Wednesday, July 15th, 1845.

  Cicero was back to flirting with Totter, who sprouted bemused expressions, either from enjoying Melinda’s torment, or from enjoying the extra attention, or both.

  “I know what you’re doing, Cicero Rex,” Melinda exclaimed. “You’re not fooling anybody. Pretend you like boys all you want, I have my mark on you, and when I have my mark on a man, it’s all over.”

  Try as he might, Cicero couldn’t resist. As he gazed up, his lips stretched into a gondola of a smile—her hair caught in the giant belt wheel.

  The belt tugged at her hair, which tugged at her head, which was squished between the belt and the wheel like a melon.

  Melinda left her mark on him, all right, from the blood she spattered across his face, to the line she sliced through his heart.

  As several of her sisters ran up screaming, the foreman was forced to pay attention. He stomped over, took one look at the scene, and said, “This kind of recklessness will not be permitted! These machines are too expensive to be breaking down on us. I’ve had it with all you Blackweathers. You’re fired, every last one of you. Now get out of here!” Cicero realized the foreman was using anger to guard against still more painful feelings of shock and horror and helplessness, of personal failure. The mask he wore on his face was fairly transparent. He was numbing himself to this debasing reality just like the rest of them to get through it. But it didn’t matter.

  The women attacked the foreman like starved wolves.

  When the manager marched down to the floor, they were back at their machines, the throng having dispersed in his wake.

  He beheld the dead foreman, scattered in pieces across the floor. “What happened here?” he demanded.

  Cicero explained, “When Melinda got caught up in the machine, he tried to help. It chewed him up and spit him out worse than it did her. He died a hero, sir.”

  “He died a fool,” the manager said, eying the girls afraid to look up from their machines. Cicero could tell the manager was stuffing emotions just like the foreman before him. Only the emotions he was concealing were different: frustration over the useless waste of precious resources, a good foreman, not the least among them; the loss of time and the cost of machine repair, not the most. He was also perturbed by what the professional distance he kept on his people was costing his soul. A concern he quickly submerged back into unconsciousness. Like many who didn’t work up close with people, he had never learned to avoid wearing his heart on his sleeve, however shriveled it might have been.

  ***

  “I know what you’re thinking,” T-Rex said, retreating from the past into the present moment. “It all seems a little too surreal, too dreamlike. Surely things couldn’t have gone exactly like I said. All it would take is to subtract an ounce of humanity from one of the overseers. Or add one too many fluke accidents that could never be repeated in a hund
red years and crowd them together in a smaller timeframe.

  “I myself am haunted wondering how shaped I’ve been by a harsh reality versus my own oversensitive reaction to it. Could countless unnoticeable re-editings of memory have constructed a myth worthy of my increasingly bellicose nature over time? Am I forever marooned in time because of these editorial revisions of history courtesy of a weak stomach, or the slightest of neurochemical imbalances in my brain?”

  T-Rex dabbed his mouth with the napkin, evaluated his audience. Seeing the gallery of humans turned to pillars of salt, hanging on his every word, he continued his storytelling. “I quit that job inside of six months. Like Odysseus, I went on a quest that took me nearly as far, from factory to factory across Europe. I smashed machines wherever I went, whenever the latest innovation threatened to put people out of jobs, or to make their lot worse in some way, make them work faster, harder, wear down their minds, bodies, and spirits like ever-grittier sandpaper.

  “The children… Always, they had it the worst. It broke your heart. They had to clean out the machines when the machines were still on. Sometimes they lost limbs, and muscles were stripped to the bone. It was a dangerous job. I suppose I could have stood back and done nothing, just focused on my own goals, which back then was just to make enough money to be free of it, to retire to some trade that hadn’t yet been mechanized. But it was harder to be quite so self-involved back then as it is in this day and age. Pity, it might have shielded me better from the vulgarities of a cruel cruel world.

  “Fast forward the clock a few decades, a few centuries, and well… old habits die hard.”

  When T-Rex surfaced from the deep well down which he’d thrown himself, he was greeted by a circle of expressionless faces, not the empathetic ones he expected to see; they were stunned speechless, mostly. The ensuing silence and delayed reactions were the most appropriate offerings they could make him, he felt, considering the nature of his tale. When someone finally spoke up, it was Sister Gretchen.

  “Has it occurred to you that we’re on the same side?” Gretchen said. “You’re fighting the right cause, just the wrong enemy.”

  T-Rex sat silently. He remained in a vulnerable state, his mind blown wide open by the emotional pain he’d subjected himself to in telling his life’s story. It was doubtful he was thinking clearly. All that seemed to be working in their favor. He didn’t have energy to throw up the world weary shield of, “I’ve heard it all before; all the arguments; spare me the rhetoric.”

  When T-Rex finally made his thoughts known, it was to pull the gun from the small of his back and set it on the table, facing them. “Yeah, it occurred to me.”

  He released the gun.

  Mort eyed the Luger in his lap, which he’d failed to draw in time, cursed himself for his delayed reactions, obviously as shocked as everyone else at the goings on at the table.

  “Seeing the amount of heart you put into your work,” T-Rex said, “it makes me realize how much I’ve let myself be taken over by hate. It blinds me. Worse, it’s a hungry monster with an insatiable appetite; it demands to be fed constantly.”

  He eyed his collection of knickknacks, which were like batteries helping him store up his hate.

  The raison d’etre for T-Rex’s existence collapsing, it opened a channel to Cicero, the lover of life, the part he’d split off from himself. Amid his tears, he felt the beginning of the annealing process, the two halves of himself coming together again.

  The overhad lights flickered.

  The shorting frayed wires, rebelling against the electrical overload, sparked.

  The sparks ignited flames.

  The kitchen was nearly an inferno before anyone could blink.

  Gretchen and Mort jumped up to attend the flames. “What’s going on?” Gretchen shouted.

  “They found us,” T-Rex said.

  “Who found us?” Santini said, although T-Rex could tell he was afraid he already knew the answer.

  T-Rex explained, “The men in black, using self-evolving algorithms. Looks like the bad guys aren’t beyond stealing a good idea.”

  “I refuse to believe that,” Mort said, “on the grounds that believing it compromises my faith in the natural order of things. Mankind has never needed any help doing one another in. The idea of putting computers to do it is unholy.”

  Mort was losing ground to the fire, as was Gretchen. They diverted the white powder sprayed from the pressurized canisters to one another in order to keep themselves from going up in flames.

  Santini remained seated at the opposite end of the table, defiantly staring T-Rex down. “How do you know about self-evolving algorithms?”

  “Robin Wakefield’s idea, actually. I had Coma Man’s flat bugged. I have an excellent nose for the kind of tech that will incite Rome to burn. It’s in the genes. My father invented countless modifications to the wool loom to make it easier on workers to weave it by hand, setting the world afire in his day.”

  “What’s our best course of action?” Santini said, eyes boring into T-Rex.

  “I’m afraid I’ll do better on my own, away from you. They won’t see me coming. They won’t expect it. I’m one of them, after all. As to giving odds on your survival—I wouldn’t.”

  T-Rex snapped to, and hurriedly stowed his collectibles into his throw bags. Still, Santini refused to budge from his chair, evidently expecting to control fate with a steel will and a clear mind, which left no room to entertain the fire.

  ***

  Gretchen did what she could to save T-Rex’s collectibles, fighting alongside him to keep the fire off them until he could stow the items. They exchanged looks like parting lovers angry at time for using the ticking clock to draw shackles around them with invisible threads and drag them away from one another. How many more reincarnations before she met up with T-Rex again? Angered, too, she must have been by the knickknacks that seemed to hold his attention, even now, more than she did.

  “You’d think they built this trailer to test how fast fire could burn,” Mort complained.

  Gretchen carted bags of goodies out behind T-Rex, threw them inside his 1960s VW Beetle, the vehicle an affectionate nod to his Nazi-wartime years, probably fondly remembered, Santini thought acidly.

  Gretchen and T-Rex squeezed one another tight, and stifled the air out of each other’s lungs with an embrace meant to hold them until the afterlife.

  And then T-Rex jumped in his car and was gone, driving through the halo of sparking, downed electrical lines, as content to set the entire mobile-home park on fire as T-Rex’s former abode, now abandoned like a hermit crab who’d decided to move on.

  He was right; so far, their ethereal stalker had made no effort to chase him down.

  “What’s the plan, boss?” Mort asked. “Besides a sudden determination to stare down fate with bold indifference?”

  Santini said, “Hope there’s something to Gretchen’s idea that the more of ourselves we reclaim from the past, the more we have to throw at whatever comes at us in this life.”

  “Yeah, that tired song has moved up a few slots in my favorites play list since five minutes ago,” Mort confessed.

  He grabbed Santini and threw him out the window.

  Santini had the sense to duck his head and roll, like a seasoned gymnast. With his arthritic hip he just wasn’t going to make it out of the way of the collapsing roof in time, or so must have went Mort’s logic, which was probably up for debate now that Santini was feeling a different kind of pain shooting through his body, and the roof continued to hold.

  Mort exited the trailer home dragging Milton and Fabio with him, who struggled to pick up the fallen pieces of the time machine they had been working on.

  They got out just in time. The trailer collapsed on itself like a poorly stacked house of cards. Cards used to gamble away their futures.

  Electrical wires from the downed telephone poles slithered toward them like the snakes on Medusa’s head. “For what it’s worth,” Mort said, looking at the testy li
nes, “I think shocking people with that much voltage is what they do to bring them back from the dead. Think of them as a kind of insurance policy.”

  Santini disengaged the neighbor’s F-350 from the trailer it was attached to, and hot-wired the engine, ducking surging electrical lines and outbreaks of fire the entire time, threatening to blow up the gas tank of the truck before he could get it underway.

  He eased away from the trailer to free up the truck’s bed.

  In the meantime, Fabio and Milton threw the pieces of their time machine in the bed of the pickup. Most of the apparatus had been mercifully left on the worktable outside.

  Aala continued to gather her precious herbs for her concoctions, the park going up in flames be damned. She had evidently figured that was her value-add to their fair enterprise—keeping them all going around the clock with energizing potions—and she was not about to be deterred from having true meaning in life.

  Once the engine started, Gretchen and Mort jumped in the front seat alongside Santini, with Fabio and Milton in the backseat. Milton screamed after his wife. “Get your ass in here, you mad woman!” Santini felt slightly superior for keeping such thoughts to himself. Aala finally relented, jumped in alongside her husband.

  “Where the hell is everybody?” Fabio asked. “Don’t tell me they’re sleeping through all this.”

  Aala explained, “I put a spell on them, chased them away hours ago. The spirits told me the AI was coming.”

  The AI, Santini thought. She meant the self-evolving algorithms, of course. Between her command of the spirit world, and Robin’s AI to the rescue, Santini should have felt quite assuaged. Yet it was all he could do to keep from losing his mind. “And you didn’t think to mention this?”

  “The herb that opened my mind to the future, also knocked me out a short while later. That’s how it goes with these things. I don’t know when I’ll be at a hundred percent again.”