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

by Dean C. Moore

  Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with Paul Newman and Robert Redford had been chosen as the in-flight movie, and they were at the part where they were holding up the train, blowing the big bad-guy-proof safe built just for them.

  Piper said, “That may have been the intent, but something got lost along the way.”

  “What, do you imagine?” Cliff took the rum on the rocks from the stewardess. “Thanks, sweetheart.”

  Piper thought about it. “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, you’re the profiler. I’m just not introverted enough.”

  “I guess that makes me Butch.” Piper thought about it some more as he nibbled on the popcorn and studied the two film characters. “You have to admit, our counterparts on film faced a far simpler world in which their own inner sophistication far outstripped everyone else around them. Our situation is the reverse.”

  “So? What does that mean?”

  Piper continued to let the film steer him to the truth, sucking the answers out of the character nuances and their tongue-in-cheek dialogue. “Maybe the only way to be more sophisticated than anyone around us, the only way to stay ahead of the pack mentality, is to let whatever is inside us that wants to come out, emerge, learn from it, and change our behavior accordingly.”

  “Theater improv as a window to the soul.”

  “The way writers say the characters take the story where they feel it should go, and the writer himself is just along for the ride.”

  “Huh.” Cliff was slient for a while. “So, by exposing our unconscious in these spontaneous acts, we can see the wounded people we are, and fix ourselves.”

  “They say seeing into the darker recesses of our own minds is the hardest thing. We should be happy we found a way to drill wormholes into our past, present, and future.”

  “You think our current personalities are just the tortured remnants of a destroyed childhood?” Cliff said.

  “Not necessarily.” Piper fed his brain on more popcorn. “What if, in tunneling into the unconscious—if you go too far—you end up in a past or future life, or another timeline entirely?”

  “So, what is this then?” Cliff asked. “Are we taking a carnival tour of all the characters we’ve enacted over the course of eternity?”

  “It’s just a theory.”

  They sat in silence. Finally, Cliff said, “If you’re right, the good news is they’ll never profile us. They can’t close in on what they can’t get their minds around.”

  “I don’t think we’re meant to witness what bubbles out of us without reflecting on it, and seeking to use the knowledge to be better people, not just in this lifetime, but in all lifetimes.”

  “How does that work?”

  “I’m not sure.” Piper chewed on the unpopped kernels at the bottom of the bucket. “Maybe if we meditate on sending these other versions of ourselves love and forgiveness, see into their pain and imagine them releasing it, we can steer our destiny across eternity from right here, right now.”

  Cliff worked on a kernel in his teeth. “What if the lifetimes we tap into have something to tell us about this lifetime? Like maybe if we don’t change our ways, this is what’s going to happen to us.”

  “We still have to decode the underlying meaning. Not every persona that pops out, what’s more, is going to be what became of us in another life. Might just be a more superficial layer of the unconscious we’re tapping, forcing us to address pain in this lifetime.”

  “I guess you said that already. Sorry, I’m just having trouble processing all this. Not sure I believe it.”

  Piper set down the empty bucket. “I’m not entirely convinced I’m not talking out my ass, either. I guess time will tell.”

  FORTY-ONE

  “What now?” Elmo sensed the tension in his voice getting ready to snap.

  “Just relax,” Iona coached.

  He regarded the intersecting beams of green light and wondered how he’d gotten himself into this situation. She was exciting, sure. He needed the money to redeem some really bad investments, moreover, or face bankruptcy, or worse, imprisonment. And maybe that’s what had led him here, in the final analysis. One thing for certain, if he cramped her style any further, he’d be heading to jail. So he took the free advice, breathed deep, and tried to calm down.

  He watched as Iona contorted freely in her sleek black leather outfit. She pulled down one hidden zipper, and pulled up another, as if toying with a Japanese puzzle box. The suit allegedly revealed everything, but it had more hidden pockets and bendable doodads tucked into it to make Houdini’s escape stunts look positively uninspired.

  The back of her suit changed texture, shimmered slightly, like liquid metal. It threw an energy cocoon around her made up of its own crisscrossing lines. She dove backward, hands pointed out ahead of her, as if she were an Olympian diving into a pool.

  She stretched out until she was perfectly parallel to the floor. Levitating about two feet above it, she passed snakelike through the intersecting security beams of the museum display room. The energy mesh around the suit kept her from breaching any of the green lines of the laser grid. The cocoon functioned like a sensor, course correcting her path to make sure she continued to snake through the increasingly narrow eyelets formed by the intersecting beams.

  The outfit also contracted and contorted her body for her, without her having to see where she was going. All she had to do was remain relaxed, and let the computer-guided soft exoskeleton get her to where she wanted to go. And there was never a more relaxed countenance on the planet, not even on the face of the Mona Lisa, which she was drifting by. She ignored the painting in favor of another art treasure that had caught her fancy.

  Elmo knew he was way out of his league with this woman, and that just the thought of this much excitement all at once could trigger a heart attack. He just didn’t handle stress well. Maybe opposites did attract, he thought, consoling himself, though she impressed him as the kind of spider that devoured her mate after it got done playing with him. He chucked the idea because it was making it impossible to breathe.

  He wondered what other zipper combinations on the suit did. Some zippers pulled sideways, some up and down, some diagonally. Slide any two or more in the right order, and it unleashed some new superpower.

  God, this woman was so cool. Who would even have the imagination to design such a suit?

  She was at her mark at last.

  The Faberge egg floated above her head, went through a series of gymnastics moves: pulled itself apart; rotated each part for the audience’s eyes; then reassembled itself. All courtesy of the complex magnetic fields in the room she was now making use of herself to float just above the floor—with the aid of the magnets in the suit, engaged by the pulling of just two zippers.

  The energy cocoon the suit emanated deflected the magnetic waves around her as if she just wasn’t there, or the Faberge egg would have dropped on her the instant she interrupted the lines of force emitted from the field generators. Her dive had been calculated with just enough force that her inertia had all but expired. Her drifting slowed to a crawl.

  But she hadn’t calculated perfectly, perhaps that was impossible with an unupgraded human nervous system. Though that could be the suit’s next iteration, an improvement that dialed the flexible body armor into her nervous system to adjust her athletic dive with computer assist to stop her just where she wanted to stop. Oh, I see, Elmo thought. This enhancement to the suit had already been procured. She stopped drifting and was hovering, apparently just where she wanted to be. Guess, that’s what he got for trying to outthink such an imaginative thief.

  She unzipped a pocket at her right shoulder, and squeezed out a tiny silver sphere the size of a ball bearing. It drifted into position and began to expand and shape itself into the Faberge egg she was stealing. The memory metal was obviously infused with nanotech, which meant this was quite literally not happening. Either Elmo was dreaming the whole thing, or she had gotten ahold of some of those rogue scient
ists drifting around Eastern Europe, currently unemployed, with no way to constructively channel their genius. No way, save for Iona.

  If he was right, that also suggested a vulnerability, a way she could be found out, through the handful of scientists in the world capable of procuring such technology ahead of time, with the proper funding and sponsorship. The cost of their upkeep might explain as much as anything why she needed to do these heists—to feed the monster; to continue her upgrades to stay ahead of the learning curve. The instant better tech fell into the hands of the good guys chasing after her, she was through. And there weren’t enough engineers and scientists of the first order to go around; they were in high demand. So they sold out at a premium.

  These days, the rogue scientists didn’t need governments or intelligence agencies within governments to hire them; there were plenty of the über-rich only too happy to have tech at their disposal that no one else had.

  Elmo wondered if she had another hold on the scientists besides money. Maybe it was the same hold she had on him—raw sex appeal, and the high EQ she evidently had at her disposal to play people like fiddles. Maybe they were all as in love with her as he was.

  The nano-enhanced memory metal finished shaping itself into the Faberge egg, expanded to hundreds of times its initial volume. Perhaps the nano was pulling the missing raw material out of thin air.

  Now that it had shaped itself correctly, it was coloring itself to suit, beyond its base metallic gray, the chameleon abilities lent to the memory metal courtesy of the nano. Elmo wondered how it could possibly be as heavy as the original. It was more optical illusion than raw mass. Maybe the energy fields holding the egg in place weren’t calibrated that sensitively. Maybe so long as the weight wasn’t too great for the energy fields to hold the item in place, that was all that mattered, and there was no trigger mechanism to alert someone that an object of lighter mass was now doubling for an object of greater mass. The other possibility was that the nano adjusted the memory metal by moving atoms and electrons around, essentially changing the weight and characteristics of the metals involved to heavier elements on the table of elements.

  The actual Faberge egg dropped into Iona’s hands, which she held close to her body, so the energy cocoon could continue to bend around both her and the stolen art object, keeping her off the security grid’s radar.

  Now there was just the problem of escaping from an inertia-dampened state, with no forward or backward momentum to ride this time, and no walls nearby to press off of, not without alerting the security system. Elmo was curious to see how she was going to get out of this one.

  Iona played with a hidden zipper running across her midsection, sliding it back and forth, just so far one way, just so far the other, like fiddling with a combination lock along a line instead of the circumference of a dial. Seven or so complicated adjustments and the suit’s latest transformation was complete. Apparently, some of the suit’s abilities were more important to her to hide than others, thus increasing the difficulty of the array she had stitched into the suit.

  Out the balls of her feet came an almost inaudible tuft of air. She was headed back his way as Elmo tried to translate what he was seeing. The body stocking, which extended over her feet, evidently had morphed in the region of the balls of her feet. But what had happened there? The only thing he could think of were microexplosions, coordinated by the same nanotech that infused the memory metal pellets he’d seen earlier. Maybe they were triggering conventional explosives, no more than a light dusting of power. They wouldn’t need much to propel her against the flexisuit’s Kevlar-like armoring. Too much, and it could well blast through the suit, harming her. But maybe conventional explosives, even microamounts of them painted across her feet in a single layer, thanks to nanotech, which alone could insure such a microfine film, was still out of the question. Maybe it would leave a trace detectible by current forensics. Unless the nano ensured complete combustion. Possibly, the solution was even more elegant: a matter-antimatter propulsion unit? Again, his speculation was running ahead of his scientific acumen.

  As she drifted headfirst into him, she planted a kiss on his lips. She was still upside down, of course, relative to him, which made the stunt that much more titillating. And she was evidently worked up sexually with the success of her theft. What was it with danger and some women? He had no right to condescend; he felt the same way after seeing his financial holdings rise unexpectedly, hell, even expectedly.

  She pushed down on his head to cue him to get lower so she could continue drifting forward and out of the tunnel of intersecting green security lasers. Accomplishing that, she arched her head down, and emerged out of her stance, floating parallel to the floor into a handstand. From the handstand, she sprang into an upright vertical position. It was like watching a backward flip in slow motion.

  She walked over to the wall in the grand hall and triggered the security mechanism.

  “What did you do that for?” Elmo shouted, his nerves rattled by the deafening sound of the alarm system.

  The metal cage doors descended, sealing off the rooms, and the metal curtains slid across the walls to protect the paintings in event of a fire.

  “No time to explain.” She grabbed him by the arm and ran him to their egress point. But Elmo had already figured out why she had done what she did. When they inspected the place and found nothing missing, they’d have to take the security system down for inspection, making her next heist all the easier, except for the fact she’d be doing it with security staff in the museum, running their checks. Cheeky, but certainly not out of character.

  “What about the cameras?” he said, feeling like a kite she was getting ready to launch in the wind when she’d picked up just enough speed. That flexible exoskeleton leant her a lot of strength, enough to work his body for him, even as it was precision tuning hers. A good thing, as fright had turned him to stone.

  “After the computers analyze which cameras offer even a partial view, the suit’s electromagnetic fields adjust automatically to blind the pertinent cameras in the vicinity, whether I’ve detected them or not.”

  “How far does that radius extend?” Elmo said, detecting cameras tucked away at various distances from them that may not offer the best angle or the best quality image because of their distance and location. Nonetheless, their images could certainly be enhanced with software to be telling enough.

  “It’ll take out a satellite camera if we’re outside and one happens to be aimed at us by firing a laser pulse with the encoded information to override the satellite’s computers.”

  “Fuck me.”

  “Not now, lover. First, we have to get out of here.”

  She led them through the maze of halls and floors, put her hands up to the doors and unlocked them simply by sending a pulse through the suit.

  Finally, she had him at the janitor’s closet. She opened it with her palm held flat against the body of the door. He had no sooner heard the lock pop, than he felt himself shoved inside.

  “What are you doing?” he said, as he fought to catch his breath.

  “If they ask, and they will ask, you were looking for the bathroom, when you opened the storage closet instead, only to collapse. You’re prone to narcolepsy, as these meds I’m shoving into your pocket now will indicate. And then, you woke up, and found yourself triggering the alarm system.”

  “But…”

  “I’m leaving you behind, Elmo. Just accept it. You can’t follow where I’m going. Relax. Besides, once exposed to your hyper-anxious nature, no one would think you had the chops to pull off a heist like this. They’ll wonder how you order a hamburger in the drive-through without keeling over.”

  “I have keeled over in the takeout line,” he confessed.

  She closed the door on him. “Oh God!” he gasped.

  “Breathe, Elmo.”

  Those were the last words he heard. He blacked out for real; the spike in anxiety was just too much for him.

  ***

&nb
sp; Iona jogged to the cooling vent she had used as an entry to the first floor of the art museum, which would now serve as her egress. She flexed just slightly at the knees, and let the exoskeleton do the rest for her, leaping more than thirty-two feet to the high ceiling above. On entry to the museum, the suit had absorbed the shock of the fall for her, as well.

  To crawl her way through the rectangular opening which had been sized deliberately to prevent humans going through it, she would have to break a few bones. She visualized what needed to be done, and let the suit do the rest. Her nano-infused body would allow the in-suit computers to orchestrate the precision breaks in her bones to minimize trauma. Legions of other nano would heal the wounds at an accelerated rate. She had foregone the option to get pain-reducing nano, however, not wanting the clues to what was going on in her body eliminated so that she wouldn’t misjudge what she was capable of when she really needed to know.

  Once through the vent’s eyelet, she cruised through the circular tubes, gaining speed, using the same magnetic levitation trick she’d earlier used to cross the museum floor. The suit calculated just how fast she could speed through the tube in her relaxed state, based on her flexibility and ability to wrap her body around the bends in the tubing.

  Once proximate to the fan, the suit adjusted her speed to slingshot her through the rotating fan blades with timing she could not handle on her own.

  After she shot through the roof’s ceiling fan, the grating having been removed on entry, she followed a parabolic descent into the lake below.

  The instant she was in the water, she swam using a dolphin-like motion, her hands out in front of her, gripping one another to improve her hydrodynamics. Her spine followed a whipping motion carried through to the balls of her feet. The suit accelerated her speed, adjusting her frictional coefficient on the fly. She stayed close to the surface so she could breach as needed, without interrupting her momentum. Anyone on the lake this late at night who happened to spy her would tell one hell of a mermaid story, but nothing that anyone would believe.