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

by Dean C. Moore

  She laughed freely. “I’m sure that’s not the worst of it. Go on, I thirst for tales of how the other half lives, the sordid sub-humans mistaking their worrying and fretting about their pathetic lot for actual consciousness.”

  It was Chaplin’s turn to laugh. He enjoyed trading barbs with her. She conveyed a quiet manliness beneath all her femininity that reminded him of Gretchen. Maybe this was Gretchen, and with a few more clues about her true nature, he could certify the suspicion as true. He was getting a feel for the way clusters of souls brought themselves together in a self-organizing universe, magnetized to one another like shards of metal, unable to help being drawn to each other, even before psycho-dynamic forces could be consciously sorted out.

  Listen to him talk. Chaplin had a little more flair for language and concepts than Mort did, explaining perhaps why he had a shot at Sister Gretchen in this lifetime. Decker, moreover, was distracted by a need to idolize himself in the form of younger firmer male bodies, recovering perhaps from an absentee father and a poorly formed self-image. If a psychology described by developmental delays didn’t explain even a small number of homosexuals, it explained Decker well enough. All of Sister Gretchen’s psychological acumen, applied to Mort’s understanding of Decker and Adriana, seemed “uplifted” further by running through the pipes of Chaplin’s brain by way of the extra twists and turns his labyrinthine psychology afforded him.

  Mort said, “I swim out at night on the River Thames and take my auger and screw holes into rich bitches’ yachts, just big enough so they take all night sinking.”

  Adriana howled.

  “The trick is to place the holes so there’s no hope of finding them before the ship is lost, and to make them big enough so the ship hasn’t the time to get to shore to save itself. It’s quite the art form. Please tell me you’ve lost some vessels of late. I’d hate to think our relationship was getting any less testy because the allure is wearing off.”

  Adriana confessed to having lost a very expensive frigate from her father’s line of personal recreational vessels. She would tell him furthermore how to guard himself in the future against seafaring attacks from beneath the waterline.

  Chaplin, who had made up the entire affair, felt nonetheless inspired by the idea.

  ***

  That night, when Chaplin got back to the hangar, he took to building submarines that could fire torpedoes into any vessel on the river and sink her, no matter how big the craft. It gave him an opportunity to work up close with the boys for the first time, who, until then, he had treated rather like the hired help, to be neither seen nor heard; worse, like yard dogs that only came out at night to patrol the hangar compound. It was the first time he’d really bonded with them.

  The first subs he built were really just for one man.

  As he and the boys started to get along, he made room for a second, and then a third, and even a fourth lad. As it turned out, few of them had had fathers who had stayed around, being either drunks or bastards happy to plant their seed and move on, or gamblers, or merely victims of the endless wars that was one downside of a steampunk era. Everyone wanted to test their gadgets and prove how much more effective they were at war-making than the other fellow’s contraptions. That led to a lot of fathers not being home either for long durations or permanently. And the ones that were around were in effect absentee fathers in their own right, lost to their all-night sessions in their basements and attics, working on the next big wartime invention that was going to make their families rich.

  No doubt, Mort would have to travel back to some other lifetime to find the explanation for his loathing of nobility, because neither he nor Chaplin had any memory of where this hate for the aristocracy came from. Beyond the lack of the usual fondness for people who love to lord it over you and have everything to your nothing, and stand in testimony to how unfair the world was. Beyond all that was a strange animosity eating away at him from which not even designing planes to fly over them and lob bombs on their heads, or manning submarines to come at them from below, entirely distracted him.

  The ship sinking campaign turned into a screaming success. A little too much so. It soon spurred a submarine craft industry, as his victims commissioned their own submarines and submariners to go after him. Soon, Chaplin had an entire industry to support as an extension of his social services. If he stopped warring on the rich, what were all these lost souls going to do for a job? Surely, even the nobility would take to warring against each other, one nobleman against another, by sea and by air, just to keep the economy going. Alas, beyond being slightly amused by all this, Chaplin was no social philosopher given to agonizing over the big picture implications of his actions any more than Mort had been. Maybe that would come in yet another lifetime.

  ***

  Mort sauntered with Adriana back to the bathroom of the working man’s pub, and boinked her to the comings and goings of other men, who fancied her a common tart, considering how torn her dress was and how smeared her makeup by Chaplin, who had morphed out of his Jekyll persona and into his Hyde demeanor en route to the men’s room. She didn’t seem to mind the rough treatment or the negative associations, though she didn’t favor getting soiled just to get it on with her animal. She preferred her cages clean, which Chaplin did his best not to accommodate, as his way of sticking it to her for all her demeaning remarks. He particularly enjoyed giving it to her in the servants’ quarters of her father’s manor house. And to keep the other servants quiet, he stuck it to them, too. That way, when they were found out by parties less amenable to their shenanigans, there wasn’t much to be said for fear of being called out by Chaplin’s loyalists who would accuse them of being liars and instigators.

  ***

  Decker didn’t mind Chaplin diverting himself with lesser order activities such as submarine design, because the sales of the submarines helped bring in money. Chaplin sold his outdated prototypes which helped pay for Decker’s ongoing research. Moreover, he seemed to always have more boys to make up for the ones Chaplin had stolen away from him, fresh meat as it were, to seduce and cajole and enamor to him.

  Finally, one night, after Chaplin had shut down operations for the day after working late into the night, the most unexpected thing happened.

  A fellow “traveler” materialized out of nothing right in front of him. Grabbed up the atomic engine Decker had been working on that had neared completion, supporting it with superhuman strength in his bare hands. Winked at Chaplin in a deliberately teasing manner. Then disappeared from their reality.

  Chaplin alone would not have known what to make of it. But Chaplin infested by Mort’s memories, did. Here was someone who was playing the same game Mort was playing, reagglutinating the fractured pieces of his psyche scattered throughout spacetime, putting Humpty Dumpty back together again after he had shattered into innumerable dimensions. He had acquired powers of mind that dwarfed Mort’s and the Mort/Chaplin hybrid. But what did he intend to do with them?

  Mort wondered how many more past and future lives, how many more alters he would have to assimilate into himself before he was made privy to even greater miracles of wonder.

  Maybe the jumpstart on the rest of humanity would continue to give him the edge he needed as competition for survival continued to grow more intense, partly owing to his own doings, and that of fellow “travelers” who complicated the timelines snaking through the Godhead like so many neurons and synapses, helping evolve the God consciousness with each twisting turn, making it more powerful, but upping the game on themselves at the same time.

  ***

  The next morning Decker awoke to find an empty space where his engine was the night before. “What happened?”

  Chaplin lied. It seemed the most expedient way to handle this. “A successful break in. I suppose it was bound to happen, despite our best efforts. I chased the man to the River Thames, watched him board the ship, and then sunk it with one of our submarines. I’m afraid the explosion was less than spectacular, perhaps an af
ter-effect of the atomic energy gobbling up the incendiary, feeding on itself and engulfing the flames as rapidly as they could be produced. The good news is, the Geiger counter detected little by way of fallout radiation. So our failsafe mechanisms worked.” Chaplin was speaking complete bullshit, but informed by Mort, it was convincing sounding bullshit, both from a scientific and political viewpoint.

  Decker rolled with the punches better than Chaplin figured. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve been working in parallel on a second engine for just this eventuality. It will not slow my work in the least. Though we should continue to beef up security around here.”

  “I agree. I’ll supervise the security projects from here on out, help the boys take their engineering efforts to the next level. Of course, I may need more of them.”

  The answer satisfied Decker, who absently waved him on. His mind had already moved on to more pressing matters. Stealing more lads away from Decker meant that many more souls Chaplin could rescue from fragile egos before they imploded, and it meant more new recruits for Decker at the same time. It was rather like plugging the hole in the Titanic, but, Chaplin supposed, in his own way, his social services agenda was evolving nicely in tandem with their technological breakthroughs.

  FOURTEEN

  Chaplin fetched his rat cage, the two big brutes trapped inside already turning on one another with savage intensity. The fights would just grow more frequent and more furious if he didn’t let them out. He snuck in some cheese to keep them occupied until he could release them in the park. His take on animal rights, he realized, probably wouldn’t pass muster with a lot of folks. As to the urban renewal people, he couldn’t imagine he’d be their darling, either. Leastways, his methods kept the factory free of vermin that had a nasty habit of chewing through wires and being a general menace. He bent down to inspect the wire leading up to the rat trap, noticed it had been nibbled on. “Looks like I got to you two lovelies in the nick of time. A chain’s only as strong as its weakest link, huh?”

  ***

  Chaplin threw an annoyed look over his shoulder at the factory lads stalking him, part of his security detail, for which he’d hardly asked. Maybe he should show some appreciation. Should someone try to kidnap him for his renowned inventiveness, intent on putting it to work for them, they could come in handy. He craned his head back to resting position, and attempted to put them out of his mind to better enjoy his stroll.

  He had developed yet another habit for letting off steam, that of walking the streets of London, and enjoying all the competition had to offer; the latest inventions. The world was remaking itself daily with the latest breakthroughs, and it made predicting progress rather a hopeless task, but the phenomenon lent itself to exhilarating morning constitutionals.

  Mort, along for the ride inside Chaplin’s head, made a note to himself: the Renaissance effect was spreading. The hub may have been the early twenty-first century, but it was clearly bleeding out into the nearby timelines, like a spreading tumor in the Godhead, and it was no longer affecting just the present. He was as yet unclear if this was a good or a bad thing. But it was certainly inevitable with more and more fellow “travelers” complicating the timelines, carrying the baggage of their ideas and inventions out of time.

  Chaplin was already contemplating the design of an analytical engine based on branching tree logic. He just had to powwow with Decker to help him clear the remaining mental hurdles, assuming he could steal time away from Decker’s pet project. Maybe when Chaplin slept, the bridge between his and Mort’s mind eroded further, assisting the transfer of more intel than Mort cared to impart to him.

  Chaplin’s attention was drawn to a screaming young child. She held a handful of balloons, unable to figure out why they were bursting. When Chaplin sauntered closer to investigate, he located the little mechanical insects another child was controlling with a radio-frequency emitter. Chaplin grabbed one of the stinging insects in his hand, examined it. It was large, slightly bigger than the largest saw palmetto bug he’d ever seen. It was surprisingly robust, and was powered off a miniature gasoline engine, the fuel stored in the thorax of the insect. The thrust the engine was capable of lent itself to the insects’ aggressive dive-bombing tactics, making them hard to make out until they were just hovering.

  So, the boy hadn’t figured out how to miniaturize a steam or diesel powered engine to power his dive-bombing insects. Thoughts of doing so began to spring up in Chaplin’s mind. They were soon crowded out by the even more immediate application of the insect machines as they were. With a small enough camera, they could be remotely piloted to spy on the competition. And the metal insects’ stingers could be retrofitted with venom that would kill the person being spied upon if they proved a threat. Could an audio recorder also be miniaturized enough and attached to the insects for even better surveillance? They didn’t exactly fly all that quietly. But they had the advantage of sounding like real insects, so they were easy to dismiss as such.

  Chaplin, to the boy’s fury, captured as many of the insects as he could, trapping them in the cage he kept for transporting rats back to the park as part of his catch-and-release program. The freed rats were causing a stir with some society ladies, who screamed and fainted at the sight of them running up their legs, to Mort’s amusement. Though Chaplin scarcely noticed; he was distracted by his “firefly” drama. With yet another modification, Chaplin thought, by placing lights where the bugs’ eyes should be, they would resemble fireflies at night, allowing them to spy surreptitiously on outdoor gatherings of which the rich and famous were given to this time of year.

  Chaplin decided to recruit the boy, despite the fact that the child’s impish nature didn’t exactly fit with the character profile they traditionally sought. He could easily go renegade, make off with designs and prototypes and make them available to their competitors. If Chaplin had to track him down and kill him, that might be another source of trauma Mort could well see having to come back to this life to heal, as the mere thought sent shivers up his spine.

  Chaplin nodded at a couple of the lads with their attention locked on him. Though it had become their habit to stalk him from the moment he left the factory, up until now he hadn’t let on that he was even aware of the security detail. With a gesture, he sent them after the juvenile who couldn’t be much older than nine or ten.

  The teens instinctively knew what to do with him. They fussed over him, congratulated him on his insects, and begged to play with the remotes. They soon had the mechanical bugs flying around them in a halo as they walked the child back to their lair at the airplane hangar. The imp turned out to be an easy mark, despite his bottled pissyness being his one demarking character trait. Being fussed over by the older, cooler teens was all it took for him to puff up and show off his brilliance for them as a way of earning more points.

  Chaplin made a mental note that the kid, who came from an upper middle class home, if not a wealthy home, and so could afford to accommodate his scientific inquiries into the nature of reality, had been left to stimulate himself in the absence of adult influence. That would best explain his unruly behavior and his taking to being doted on by the teens. That absence of parental influence had made him easy prey for Chaplin.

  ***

  Back at the factory, the imp, who turned out to be eleven years old, or so he said, and named Virgil, barked orders and supervised a pack of teens as well as any pit boss Chaplin had ever met. He had a knack for what order and organization could bring to wildly inspired and impulsive design. Given his own work and theme area to occupy him, and suggestions from Chaplin as to improvements on his insects—which were more taunts than anything, dares he couldn’t do it—the kid set to work with nary a concern as to what else was going on in the factory, convinced he had to be the star of the show, in any case.

  The teens, for their part, and even some of the older kids in their twenties, were happy to tackle a new project different from their usual traps and snares, but that would greatly augment security, ev
en here in the hangar. The bugs could be set about providing more vantage points on the complex interiors, with all sorts of places for intruders to hide undetected, all manner of blind corners and alleyways formed by the rows and rows of engine parts. Moreover, they felt they were getting another step closer to the truly grand projects Decker and Chaplin specialized in, eager to merge their own identities with their heroes. Virgil, for his part, imagined himself the center of their attentions and affections for no other reason than his own abiding charisma, and so never considered they might have ulterior motives. Alas, more proof he’d grown up in a privileged background and not on the streets, which might have muted some of that gullibility, if done nothing to address that big head of his.

  Chaplin, for his part, got so caught up in the hubbub the latest addition to their growing nursery of young souls created, that he all but forgot about his walks. It wasn’t long before his stiff body reminded him of the need for his constitutional.

  ***

  A few days later, after the back pain had become too much to bear, Chaplin undertook a stroll. He grabbed one of the kid’s remotes, which he figured might come in handy should he decide to “rescue” some more radio-controlled devices from their inventors. And he returned to the city to take in its sights, half hoping for another big “find,” although he knew he was just being greedy.

  ***

  At the park, Chaplin observed several pet lovers walking their mechanical dogs. One mutt worked rather like a Swiss watch, with exposed gears and levers that were remarkably well tooled and interrelated. They gave the animal a fairly realistic gate, a dog-like range of motion and abilities, including arching its back playfully and wagging its tale as if getting ready to pounce for a ball in its master’s hand. It could catch and chew the ball his master threw him, bark, and turn his head from side to side as it walked. None of that seemed to take away from the sense of mechanical spiritlessness. The animal just didn’t embody spontaneity, joy, or true playfulness. Though it seemed the best of the lot of automated hounds.