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

by Dean C. Moore

  “Is she ready for you to download yourself into her?!” Boyd shouted, flabbergasted by Alexandra’s question. “Whoa, slow your row. Besides,” he said, glancing back at Femmy, “she’s not nearly aggressive enough.”

  Boyd was quite the looker. He found it slightly egregious that he had to resort to fembots in the first place, considering his pedigree. But who had the time for a real relationship? He’d built Femmy so he could take out his sexual frustrations for Alexandra on her, which made this call doubly ironic, as Femmy already looked a great deal like Alexandra, or his idealized version of her. Why settle for the real thing when he could have the idealization, he had said to himself many a time, by way of covering up the hurt from his failed advances. She had quashed his ego like a potato bug.

  “You want a cyber-version of you—” he paused for effect—“able to communicate wirelessly with the robot—” he paused for effect—“as it migrates through the computer brains of an alien spaceship—” big pause for big effect— “so you can pilot the crashed ship to some place where only we have access to it? Who the hell have you been speaking to, Dr. Mindbender?” He ran his fingers through his mop of hair. “Adrienne. Should have guessed.”

  He slammed the phone shut. Ordinarily, he responded to missions with greater aplomb. But this was his vacation.

  He pranced outside and joined Tinker Bell—his name probably explained the other chip on his shoulder—pruning the hedges into tall animal shapes.

  They fought over the contouring of the magical, whimsical creatures the neighborhood children loved so much, until Boyd gave up, flopped himself down on his porch step, contemplating Alexandra’s latest agenda for him.

  Her challenge was calling him past the forest of possibilities inherent in his front yard, past dueling with Tinker Bell for control over house and garden, which had clearly become Tinker Bell’s domains. Threatening his sense of territory further—after the birthing of Femmy—could well lead to a psychotic break, so Boyd was better off letting him win this one. He had probably only dug into the house and garden provinces as a final stronghold against the bitter reality of Femmy filling ever more niches in Boyd’s life with each passing day. Dumber robot designers with more humble offerings entering the market as the first generation of maid bots could put off these kinds of problems for years to come. His mind wasn’t always the portal to Narnia it promised to be. Witness Femmy and Tinker Bell.

  Boyd ran inside the house, no longer able to escape the pull of Alexandra’s latest project, which would also save him from a mounting feud between Tinker Bell and Femmy. If Femmy were on assignment most of the time, and her domain was far and away from Tinker Bell’s, then maybe some truce was possible.

  He jumped on the computer in his living room and, through a secure channel, emailed the brain specs on Femmy to Adrienne so she could get to work on the self-evolving algorithms. The challenge was to coax them to self-agglutinate into a virtual-life Alexandra-clone-counterpart that could migrate easily from server farms on alien vessels to Alexandra’s robot’s surrogate body and back again.

  That done, Boyd set to work on the last of Femmy’s upgrades from the neck down, tweaking her modifications to see how much more power and poise he could stuff into the hard-shell.

  On the plus side, his nose had stopped draining, and he was off the coke. Cravings gone. Maybe now that he had just cause and sufficient opportunity to race his mind, he didn’t need the artificial pick-me-ups.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Ermies Paragon tore into the box like a museum curator, anxious to put the latest item on display.

  “What is it?” Bespellion asked, suitably mesmerized.

  “Damned if I know. Looks awfully impressive, whatever it is. That’s what counts, isn’t it?”

  “But it’s got to do something,” Bespellion protested. “It can’t just sit there and look pretty. Or they won’t buy it.”

  “How do you know? These rich people are forever buying useless things with which to clutter up their lives.”

  Ermies could tell from Bespellion’s face he was wracking his brains for an answer to the mystery of the box’s contents. He’d always been poor, even before the world economic meltdown. He’d never owned anything of his own, but, living homeless on the streets, he got to see a lot of fine things up close, knew a lot about the silly trinkets rich people liked, which was his value-add in Ermies’ inconspicuous import-export firm, run with the assistance of his homeless kids.

  Viewing Bespellion’s distant expression, Ermies thought, Let’s hope he hadn’t drifted back to the remote-controlled jeep that sped by him one fine morning, turned around, and circled back to the kid, to Bespellion’s abject amazement. Even when he saw the remote control in the kid’s hands, he couldn’t quite put two and two together. The doll driver behind the wheel of the jeep, looked, for all intents and purposes, demon possessed. He was forever telling that tale, and forever digging into the boxes ahead of Ermies, no matter how many times he yelled at him to get his grubby hands off the new merchandise, hoping to find his favorite toy—a remote controlled vehicle of any kind.

  “I know what it is!” Bespellion exclaimed. “A remote-controlled spaceship.”

  “Blimey, I think you’re right. That should fetch a pretty penny.” He ferreted out the instructions buried in the box to confirm their suspicions. “Says here it’s an egg poacher.”

  “A what?”

  Ermies just shook his head. He set the “flying saucer” back in the box and said, “Put it with the other conversation pieces.”

  “If only the cook sees it, who’s gonna talk about it? Rich people don’t go in their own kitchens,” Bespellion protested.

  “I’m sure we can find a cook who’s getting on in years, who could stand someone making her job a little easier.”

  “More likely she’ll bark at you for giving the master of the house one more excuse to ease her into retirement,” Bespellion said, adding the egg poacher to the junk pile. He took the hit harder than Ermies. He was still only twelve, after all, and would relish the chance to play with a real toy, if only on the down low, when Ermies’ back was turned. He’d never allow it otherwise. He wasn’t selling used merchandise. Just opening the boxes to sneak a peek required a specialist at repacking the items so they looked as if the boxes had never been opened.

  One of his kids, Rubicon, was just such a specialist. She spent most of her day inserting items back in their boxes, playing Santa’s elf, secretly delighted by the thought of giving a sparkling new experience she had never had to someone. She must have been a budding saint, as she never got jealous, seemed to prefer giving to getting. Maybe that was her coping mechanism, pretending to be the parent, stocking the Christmas tree, rather than the child.

  ***

  Bespellion’s other value-add was that he’d be a perfect replacement for Ermies come time to retire and hand over operations to a younger version of himself, and take his fifty-percent skim off the top for building up the firm to its future heights. Bespellion had the harsh, cynical, grown-up voice that came with being deprived of a childhood and having to mature too early to survive the mean streets of London. He could point out everything to go wrong with a scheme, because his childish mind had been set to plotting and scheming on how to deprive rich people of their coin from a ripe early age.

  How he kept the cynic, and the childlike-wonder, aspects of his nature in play at once never failed to surprise Ermies, but then, he supposed, that’s why Ermies himself had opened the import-export business. It allowed him to combine his own savvy business sense and man-of-the-world cynicism regarding just how hard it was to make a buck, with his childhood delight over opening presents. Ermies, too, remained forever enthralled by exotic items arriving from all over the world. The point was to sell them to locals at a colossal markup because they’d never seen the likes, and had no idea what any of these trinkets were worth.

  It was hard to find an edge in this economy. Ermies wasn’t the brilliant inventor type
. Those folks made most of the money. All he could hope for was to be a middle man, connecting their wonderful creations with people desirous of them—whether they knew it or not, even if they needed to be educated on just how desirous of the items they were. There were far too many creations for anybody to keep track of anymore, far too many products and services than could be consumed by anyone, and not enough time in the day to introduce everyone to everything. That left a very special need for niche marketers like himself with a very fine sense of just what to sell to whom, and when.

  The Internet was putting him largely out of business by beating him at his own game, so he specialized further in rich older people who didn’t spend time in front of computers, PDAs, iPads, or electronic doodads of any kind, had no interest in doing so, even if you could teach them. It was a dwindling marketplace. But there were pockets of hope. Folks who lived like the Amish, back-to-the-landers, gentlemen farmers, alternative-lifestyle types who relied on technology as little as possible, and didn’t care much for the virtual world.

  His niche wasn’t exactly affluent, explaining why he had to prey on unfortunate children who’d sell their souls for a sense of family, of belonging to something, to be off the streets, to feel safe and loved. He did his best to reciprocate in kind. He had a better head for figures and business than any of them, explaining his own value-add, meaning he could do more for them than they could do for themselves. He was quite intent on making his import-export business a win-win situation for everyone.

  ***

  SOME WEEKS EARLIER

  Bespellion ducked into the alley to tinkle. As he hosed the wall, he looked up to see a small girl, halfway down the narrow passage, taking boxes out of the garbage and neatly repacking them, just like new. Only there was nothing inside them.

  He didn’t have long to ponder the mystery. The vile Mentos swooped her up and disappeared down the alley with her. He ran the opposite direction up the alley.

  ***

  “Mentos snatched up another little girl,” Bespellion blurted, half out of breath. He’d just come to a full stop out of an all-out sprint, with enough braking force, he slid across five yards of cement floor. His squealing sneakers caused Ermies to scrunch up his shoulders to his ears and use them as earmuffs.

  “What business is it of mine?” Ermies grumbled. “I can’t save them all. Ermies tapped Bespellion’s head with his fist, ringing it like a bell to call attention to the void inside.

  “She can reseal opened boxes like they had never been opened.”

  “Is that so?” Ermies said, suddenly interested. He sighed, desisted with his busywork matching labels on the latest arriving boxes with his order sheets. “I suppose we better go rescue her, then. One humanitarian gesture a week, Bespellion. Offsets the nine hundred-ninety-nine more questionable ones.”

  ***

  Ermies crawled through the mountain of garbage, inching along a hidden passage at its base, revealed by sliding a portable refrigerator out of the way. It was one of many such mountains of garbage at the city dump. Only, Mentos paid a monthly fee for his mountain of trash to be left alone. It was built largely of metal-box castaways: broken ovens, stoves, refrigerators, ice boxes, bicycles, car parts. Underneath it all was his double-wide mobile home, large enough to conduct business in true clandestine fashion.

  Ermies, tunneled into the mobile home, finally, stood erect, ironed out the kinks in his lower back with a couple fists to either side of his spine. Bespellion decided to be accommodating, perhaps, being as Ermies was being so generous, by punching him in the lower back as hard as he could. Once he was finished using him as a punching bag, Ermies groaned, “Thanks, dear boy. If you weren’t such a shit, you’d be of no use to me at all.”

  It didn’t take Ermies long to find the girl in question, seated at the base of the Christmas tree. Every day was Christmas here; Mentos made sure of it. Nice, precious little gifts were how he lured and kept his castaways. The little girl, he noticed, enjoyed picking out presents for the other dazed looking children. She contented herself with the empty boxes which she kept for herself, repackaging them nicely, tickled pink to look at the images on the box-tops.

  Ermies strode straight over to her and picked her up off the floor. “You’re coming with me, sweetie,” he said.

  “Now, look here,” Mentos growled. His teens lined up to impress upon Ermies the finer points of Mentos’s disdain.

  “If she decides she was happier here, you can have her back,” Ermies said. “Otherwise, I’ll find the one person of means and opportunity in this city who refuses to stand for this covert operation of yours, and see this mountain brought down on your head.”

  Mentos absently waved him off.

  The teens backed away, clearing an exit for Ermies and Bespellion.

  Ermies made the mistake of glancing back on his way out the trailer, half afraid he’d turn to a pillar of salt. He saw Mentos gesture to one of the boys who ran to the Christmas tree and excitedly grabbed a present for himself. It was a remote control jeep, just like the one Bespellion wanted. The sound of the whirring motor and wheels turning had Bespellion craning his neck to see behind him. “Don’t look back, Bespellion. I forbid it. There’s not enough light in you to erase this darkness.” Luckily, Ermies’ own body was blocking Bespellion’s sightline, as they were in the narrow confines of the tunnel, and Bespellion was out ahead of him.

  ***

  “When’s Armageddon getting back?” Bespellion asked, his tone whiney, as if he was tired from all the heavy lifting of disappointing boxes. He had a small frame, and Armageddon was definitely bigger and stronger, owing to being a few years older, and so better suited to unloading shipments from the trucks.

  “I sent him out to find us some better scammers,” Ermies said impatiently.

  “But—”

  “Yes, yes, it means I will have to let some of the lads go. I’m not running a charity here, as I’m forever reminding the lot of you. Fear not, Bespellion, your spot is safe. You’re my most valued asset.” Ermies sensed the lad’s mind racing. He did his best thinking when his back was against a wall. He supposed they all did, another virtue of life on the street.

  “Maybe we can put the ones you’re thinking of dumping into scouting instead, make it their jobs to stalk the rich folks, find out what they like, report back to us, so we can target them better.”

  Ermies eyed the stacks of inventory piling up to the ceiling because they couldn’t move it fast enough. It was definitely cutting into his profit margin. Usually, they went in hit and miss, fine-tuned their sales offerings as they got a better bead on their customer’s likes and dislikes. But evidently there was opportunity to take his game up a level. “I think you’re on to something, lad. Very well, then, that’s precisely what we’ll do.” The wheels weren’t done turning inside Bespellion’s head yet. Ermies imagined he could see inside Bespellion’s mind about as well as one of those nineteenth century automatons with the glass face covering the brass wheels as they turned.

  “If we send them out to the country estates, they might be able to feed themselves off the rich people’s gardens, so zero overhead.”

  Ermies nodded. “Yes, yes, brilliant. You’ll grow up to take over the business one day, lad, if you can keep your bleeding heart in check. Leastways, figure out how to turn it to making us money as you’ve done today.”

  Bespellion pranced over to the list tacked to the wall. “The Harding estate is at the top of your list.”

  Ermies whistled. “Tough nut to crack, that one. As good a place to start as any. We’ve yet to sell them a bloomin’ thing—one bloomin’ thing!”

  “Give me the names of the ones whose heads are on the chopping block. I’ll go brief them.”

  “You don’t need me to tell you. Time you got around to handling some of the harder sides of this business, which includes hiring and firing. And now, thanks to you, who gets farmed out and who doesn’t.”

  Bespellion clenched his teeth and his fists. Thi
s was going to be hard on him, Ermies thought. Well, these were hard times; he didn’t have the luxury of coddling.

  ***

  THE DAY PRIOR

  Rake dabbed the sponge on the old man’s face a few more times. “Enough?”

  “Fill in the cracks,” Rupert pleaded.

  “You’re eighty years old. If you want the cracks filled in, you need to stick your face in a bee’s nest.”

  The old man chuckled softly, afraid to crack the cement setting on his face. “I guess playing the part of a forty-year old is a stretch.”

  Rake lowered his eyes to conceal his contempt. The old man read him anyway. “It’s a small company, child. You’ll get your chance.”

  “I’m thirty-five.” Rake squeezed the sponge so hard he unwittingly dropped coloring on the old man’s pant leg. “I was a logical choice to play your part.”

  “Only, no one knows you. Furthermore, sweeping up floors and parroting back everything you hear does not constitute acting lessons.”

  “I can do your makeup, can’t I? Learned that from watching others.” Rake’s latest deftness with the sponge played well to his side of the argument.

  “They just figure there’s not much you can do to ruin my face,” the old man said.

  Rake smiled. He enjoyed Rupert. He had a melancholic demeanor that struck Rake as a natural metamorphosis from world-weariness; the next step in evolution. He was at the pinnacle of his art, just as his body and mind were breaking down. He was forgetting his lines. Some nights, he forgot what role he was playing and slipped into a character from another production he’d played however many moons ago. They hadn’t had to let him go because, as it turned out, most everyone these days was caring for some senile elder at home. The audiences found his lapses strangely endearing, heartrending, and often the highpoint of the drama, even if the writer hadn’t called for them. Still, it wore on him, taking so long to ripen, only to perfect his trade and come unglued all at the same time. “It’s a great life, if you don’t weaken,” Rupert said, as if reading his mind.