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

by Dean C. Moore

  The robots his lads were remote-piloting jumped down from the trees onto the shoulders of the giants, and yanked at the wires in their necks.

  For their efforts, they got thrown from the Goliaths to land badly.

  But they’d bought enough time with the wires they’d shorted to regroup, as the now lumbering giants moved toward them with less coordination, poorer tracking, wielding blows that missed their marks as often as they landed.

  The pinned robots, at most a third the size of the giants, finished pulling wires as they took a further beating, finally leaving their tormentors frozen into whatever position they were in when the last decisive wire was pulled. What remained of their attackers resembled the husks of spiders after the molting process was through.

  The robots controlled by the good guys continued their assault on the castle.

  Chaplin shouted, “All right, you kids stay here while I go see for myself if Weinermeyer’s finally out of the picture.” He jumped overboard and swam.

  Once ashore, Chaplin made his way to the fallen titans, and commenced his work, bringing them back on line, one at a time, this time fighting for the good guys. “Hate to break it to the kids that these self-piloting robots are the way to go. It’s going to take away all their fun.”

  He stuck his punch card in the slot at the base of the skull of the latest robot, waited for it to accept the instructions. When it was up on its feet and headed for the castle to assist with the excavations, he grimaced. “A bit like player pianos, admittedly. Strange, they seem more alive when the kids are wielding them.”

  Each robot added to the lineup meant that much more help pulling rubble out of the ground to clear a path to the basement.

  When Chaplin finally arrived, he was pleased to see the giant robots assisting with the boulders the smaller ones, even working in tandem, couldn’t move. Excavation was coming along nicely.

  He had just made one fatal mistake. Well, two, really. First, Weinermeyer was not buried under the rubble or trapped in an underground tunnel; he was coming up on him with a gun. Blood gushed from his forehead and his gait was shaky, but he managed to hold the gun steadily enough. Mistake number two was not programming the robots with enough sense to stop what they were doing and rush to his aid.

  “All this, and for what?” Weinermeyer wiped the blood from his forehead that was trickling into his eyes. “You set back my plans a couple of weeks at most. I’ll be up and running in a warehouse downtown long before then. The humbler working conditions probably will do me some good, keep me more focused on the end goal.”

  He leveled the gun. “Any last words?”

  “Yeah, if you ever came up for air long enough from all that hating, you’d see: love is all there is.”

  Weinermeyer chuckled madly as the kids, who Chaplin had insisted remain aboard the sub, swarmed him like bees. Their combined weight forced him to the ground. When the gun ultimately went off, it was Chaplin’s heart that stopped.

  He started peeling the kids off Weinermeyer to make sure one of them hadn’t been shot.

  Virgil, who’d made the mistake of landing at the bottom of the dog pile, needed to be lifted off, his body limp. Chaplin feared the worst.

  Dunstan kicked Weinermeyer’s body over. The hole in his gut oozed blood. Of course that didn’t mean the bullet hadn’t gone clear through him only to land in Virgil.

  Chaplin set the kid down and checked for a wound. Virgil came to before he could find one. “Ah, I was just faking.”

  Chaplin hugged him tight, his eyes watering.

  The kids tackled him much as they had Weinermeyer, only more affectionately. “Careful now. You can get too much of a good thing.”

  Chaplin noticed he felt better than usual. So did Mort, along for the ride inside his head. If this wasn’t what he’d come back for, it was a big part of it. Maybe he had let his romance with Adriana in this lifetime steal too much of his affections and his attention last time out. Maybe she was the missing piece that still needed to be filled in; one more example of love gone wrong.

  SIXTEEN

  “Mort! Mort!” Gretchen shook him harder, and then looked around for Santini. She didn’t have the kind of muscle necessary to wake this guy from the dead. She tried cuffing him. All that did was injure several points on her hand.

  She grabbed a horse’s water bucket and poured it over Mort next.

  “Have ye had a wee falling out with the lad, miss?” Distillery Man asked. He and Mort had become fast friends, Mort being more enthralled by his invention than anyone else in this fair land, Mort and his liver, that is.

  “I can’t wake him.”

  “Well, that’s easy enough, miss.” Distillery Man held out a bottle of his moonshine, waved it under Mort’s nose. He came to forthwith, spasming violently, waking up as if he’d been knocked out in the middle of a fight and was still determined to get in the last punch.

  His eyes not yet focused, he extended his hands at Gretchen, palms up, fingers splayed. Gretchen thought he aimed to rip her breasts off to make it easier for her to play one of the men on stage. She’d just come from acting in one of their stage productions, in fact. In a strange tribute to Shakespeare, they made sure all the parts were played by women. (In Shakespeare’s day, all the parts were played by men.)

  Gretchen didn’t get long to ponder the meaning of Mort’s gesture. He telekinetically sent her flying into the wall behind her, embossed her there like a stuffed animal mounted as a trophy. Were it not for the metal parts awaiting assembly into one cyberpunk device or another, she’d have nothing to blunt the impact of the wall. Though the metal shards didn’t exactly provide a soft landing, either.

  Mort’s eyes came into focus. He slowly thought to look up at the person he’d sent flying into the wall, and only then recognized his victim as Gretchen. “Dear God! Santini is going to take one look at this scene, and call forth The Judge.”

  He hoisted her off the rack on the wall filled with weapons’ parts. Regarded how busted up she was. Bones popped out of both a left forearm and a right thigh. Metal shards skewered her through and through as if a mad shish-kebab artist had decided to use her to store his masterpieces. “What have I done?” he wailed.

  “Save it,” Gretchen said. She telekinetically moved the bones back into place, ejected the heavy metal from her body. Mort watched, just as flabbergasted as her, as she healed until no signs of injury remained.

  “I gather you have a story to tell, as well.” He grabbed her by the arm and walked them out of there. “I guess this settles once and for all your notion of reclaiming our past so we have more psychic energy available in the present.”

  “I guess so,” she said feebly, still in shock.

  “Can’t wait to catch up.” Mort’s eyes roamed the terrain for Santini. “Considering everything happens in threes around here, I’m frightened to ask what Santini’s been up to, and what little surprises he returned with.”

  SOME HOURS EARLIER

  SEVENTEEN

  Gretchen gravitated to The Red Lion Theater featuring the plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe. Built of timber and plaster, the theater was square, with three tiers of seating facing towards an inner exposed courtyard. The thrust stage emanating from the side of the square dedicated to hosting the performance elevated the players a few feet above the ground.

  Joining the melee of players on stage grabbing up parts, Gretchen snatched herself a script. The throng quickly sorted through who was who for rehearsals, a feat vaguely reminiscent of a drunken brawl. Gretchen greedily agreed to play the role of the first witch in Macbeth, which, mercifully, no one else wanted. The day was turning blistering hot, and no one desired to be buried under the extra makeup.

  Gretchen couldn’t believe what an old pro she was at this. She attended to her makeover with no help from the others, who were too busy clamoring for what little support was to be had from assistants. No one wanted to be an assistant, or even a minor player. Not with so much fun to be had as a major play
er elsewhere in the Renaissance Faire, from a knight in shining armor battling it out on the killing field, to a jouster, to…

  Segueing smoothly from implement to implement without slowing her pace, she transformed a clown wig into the perfect gnarly witch fare with some spray-on color, a comb, and some other devices more suitable to a woodshop than a costume shop. She worked in no particular order, setting the face up at the same time she went to work on her hair, her wardrobe, making it that much harder to judge the finished effect until it materialized out of the fog of confused, jumbled actions.

  The shock of her makeover was so great, owing to how good it was, that she froze before the mirror, staring in disbelief.

  She wept freely, threatening to smear her handiwork, and forcing her to rush absorbent materials to her eyes; already-caked sponges, cloth, paper. Nothing seemed quite spongy enough. Now that she was in character, she realized what a cathartic release it was to escape her actual self. She had always been a dowdy, frumpy, wallflower of a woman, painfully shy, and not even her casting in the role of “brains” in her ménage aux trois with Santini and Mort had entirely freed her from a low self-image.

  Maybe acting and trance-channeling had been a recurring theme for her down through the lifetimes for just that reason.

  As she continued to relax into an altered state, she saw herself putting on a police uniform in another era. Donning the officer’s garb before a full length mirror, she could feel the same transformation of character with each attached accessory.

  ***

  Greta, as Gretchen was called in this lifetime, buttoned the tight thin collar around her neck, which didn’t restrain her movement so much as make her feel that much more bulletproof.

  Pressing down with her finger, the garment hardened the more pressure she applied, until, come time to stop a bullet, it was as metallic, and as impenetrable, as a tank. The thickness of the collar concealed still more smart fabric that would stretch over her face, extending the suit’s protection where and when she needed it most. Just by imagining it, the fabric reacted, covering her head. It retracted, responding to the same thought impulses. During emergencies, when her nervous system couldn’t perform fast enough, the suit would respond for her, reacting to her base adrenaline state.

  In the reflection of the mirror, Greta beheld her sterile apartment. Every surface shone, as reflective, and as polished, as the mirror into which she was looking. She felt like a pond-skipping insect skirting across the frozen lake of her own floor. How easy it was to imagine the reflections on the shellacked surface were life-forms imprisoned deep within the lake of ice. The occasional orchid punctuated the otherwise lifeless interiors. The hollow cavernous spaces erupted in a condensed form of life that seemed only possible thanks to the barren expanse which concentrated all its life force into the flowering orchids themselves.

  Greta jumped on her airbike, poised over the “ice lake” like another insect awaiting the first sign of life to pounce. It was just as polished and gleaming as the rest of the house thanks to its diamond coating, which forever insulated it from change.

  With a turn of the bike’s throttle, which started the engine, she blasted out a window that actually wasn’t a window so much as a pressurized airlock. The filtered interior atmosphere of her flat remained separate from the unfiltered air of the city outside thanks to a membranous energy shield that also killed insects. On its current setting, any lifeform with less than a hundred-sixty IQ would be zapped into oblivion just as testily, ruling out low functioning thieves, and leaving just the more interesting ones Greta wouldn’t mind chasing after on her spiffy forever-new bike.

  Its computer brain dialed into the Net, the bike drew her automatically to crimes in progress. Anyone could purchase such a bike, and even play detective, doing citizen’s arrests, which held up in court just as well, thanks to the bike’s ability to infuse and upgrade its rider with the necessary aptitudes and acumen. This it could do by coaching you via its connection to the bicycle rider’s helmet, or by doing a datadump to a mindchip. But few people jumped at the chance to chase down criminals forever more technologically endowed than the good guys. It was a game for suicide cases, and most of those were on medications by orders of the state. This meant that, even with the police entirely open to volunteers looking for glory to erase their pathetic anonymity and meaningless lives, there were always more crimes in progress than people available to chase after the guilty parties, even when you knew where they were, and what they were doing. They tried filling the gap with robots for a while, but they were too easily reprogrammed by the bad guys into bodyguards, becoming one more thing people like Greta had to contend with come time for a showdown.

  She thought about that “other woman” she’d left behind in her flat. She did nothing but sip oolong tea and perform protracted Japanese tea ceremonies in her geisha outfit. Awaiting a grateful Japanese husband that never came, she cooked, cleaned, bathed, all with the same ritualistic posturing and gesturing. Perfecting life through endless stage-rehearsal, she would always remain backstage; never really onstage. She was Chinese, not Japanese, but that hardly mattered. Her real self seemed just as costumed as Greta’s police persona. She lived in fear of ever exiting her flat, suffered from the worst kind of agoraphobia, and people, too, terrified her. She hoped that with enough daily-life rehearsals she could summon the courage for online dating, to find a man she could welcome into her flat, who could brave the outside world in an effort to get to her and rescue her from herself. But she kept finding excuses to put off such a day, saying she wasn’t ready yet. Her ritualistic movements, her practice with her geisha outfit, donning and removing it with the aid of a complement of house robots that disappeared back into the walls when they were no longer needed, wasn’t quite perfected yet.

  Gretchen, inside Greta’s head, was sensing a theme. Maybe it was why she kept reincarnating, to finally arrive at a lifetime when she might accept herself as she was, without having to take such desperate measures to escape herself.

  Greta completed her aerial descent, and gingerly lowered the bike to the ground, not wanting even the tuft of air to alert anyone as to her presence. It took but a few seconds to size up the situation. “Boys with toys: the three words that survive any timeline.”

  Beefy Boy causing all the trouble was duking it out with no less than five robots, all sent to the scene by heroes preferring the shadows to the limelight. They worked their radio transmitters from the sidelines, each desperate to prove they could go more than a few punches with Beefy Boy. Superhero-by-proxy had become all the rage for people not having the right psych profile to throw themselves in the ring. As to the mutant humanoid able to take on robots that could easily crush aircars in their bare hands, he was no doubt souped up on nano or a gene-altering cocktail, or both. He had to be fifteen feet tall; the robots, closer to twenty. One of his arms was easily as wide as Greta’s entire torso. She had as much desire to get in close as the ones operating the robots.

  Poor bastard. When he was sober, he probably slept on the skyscraper construction sites where he worked, much like the robots. For all she knew, this was a work related squabble. Beefy Boy not appreciating being downsized to the nexgen robots.

  The fact that five robot-wielding wannabe heroes had beat her to the scene, illustrated just where in the cosmic scheme of things this event rated. Beefy Boy was serving as one hell of a wrecking ball for this end of town. That made him a high value target worth taking out ahead of the other criminals in queue awaiting their turn with police and wannabes alike.

  The robot pieced together from junkyard scrap, and sounding as rusty and as arthritic as he looked, still packed a wallop, and sent Beefy Boy sailing into the air about as often as Beefy Boy returned the favor. But each punch Beefy Boy delivered left Junk Yard Robot more defective, slowly tilting the fight in Beefy Boy’s favor. Not that that mattered much this early into the game.

  Beefy Boy flew past Greta into the lobby of the same skyscraper for the th
ird time. This time he threatened to unseat its foundation, having weakened enough support pillars from his last crash landings.

  After Beefy Boy picked himself up and dusted himself off, he sent Junk Yard Robot careening into a dumptruck that was collecting the city’s garbage. The impact threw the truck over, and spilt its contents into the streets. Junk Yard Robot’s slowed reaction time, peeling himself off the side of the dumptruck, allowed another boxer to punch his way onto the stage.

  The second robot was considerably more high tech. After Beefy Boy sent it sailing into the air, it used laser-vision to burn holes in Beefy Boy from a distance, which healed at a disconcerting speed, confirming the presence of nano. Hi-Tech Robot next ejected missiles that Beefy Boy caught, and sent into the adjacent skyscrapers, which shed their solemn tears in the form of glass shards.

  The Jujitsu robot, on the other hand, was quick to lock Beefy Boy up in wrestling clinches. His painful holds got Beefy Boy to scream, as if he was taking opera lessons.

  Kung Fu Robot favored a kickboxing style, fast and furious, and about ten times as impacting as Greta would imagine a lithe robot capable.

  The final robot shapeshifted, but not between humanoid forms. Every time it got battered out of shape, it flew in as another kind of mechanical insect, looking interchangeably, from one attack sortie to the next, like a wasp; a grasshopper; a spider; a swarm of jumping spiders (as it received a really good punch and got shattered into so many bits.) He was hard to dissuade, growing even more irritating the smaller and more dispersed he got, until he was little more than a cloud of stinging insects no bigger than bees.

  As much as Greta was enjoying the show, she had a job to do, and the faster she did it, the sooner she got to the next job, and the more money she could make. That meant it was time to do her David versus Goliath number. Maybe like with the Japanese tea ceremony she partook of at home, these Jungian archetypes informed human dramas across all timelines for a reason; they provided the psychological foundations necessary to survive the strongest of antagonistic forces.