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

by Dean C. Moore

  The question seemed to cause Robin to drop out of character as Zhang Wei. His eyes came into clearer focus, locked on to him like laser weapons preparing to fire. He studied Fabio while he weighed his words. “Well, since you rubbed the genie’s lamp, you deserve some of his magic. The one thing I would tell you is—don’t be so eager to chase headlong into the future that you devour everyone and everything in your path, like a rocket’s discharge. If all there is of you is the hunger for the new, you’re no longer human. You’re demon. And you will open doors to worlds best left closed.”

  Taking Fabio’s hands off him, he added, “Should you find yourself unable to heed my words in time, just remember, the way back is as easy as letting go of the compulsions that got you where you are. As easy, and as difficult.” Zhang Wei bowed to him and made his way down the street.

  “Whoa!” I guess that really was Robin Wakefield, Fabio thought. Apparently the seer was expanding her range and her dominion. Not surprising a soul saver would have so little respect for time and space.

  ***

  Fabio held the USB drive up to this latest incarnation of an ATM, and felt foolish looking for some slot to stick it in. The tractor beam yanked it out of his hand and, while holding it levitated within the reader’s magnetic fields, scanned its contents right through the shell. He watched the green line of the laser pass over the hard case wondering what wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum the scanner was using to perform its reading magic—certainly not the lime-green light bouncing off his retinas.

  The ATM spoke in a commanding female voice, businesslike, crisp, yet reassuring. “A time machine with this one’s alternate reality hopping mechanism is in high demand, even as unstable as the design clearly is. I can offer you five backups for it.”

  “That is perfectly acceptable,” Fabio said, thinking, even if it was possible to dicker with the ATM, he wasn’t about to haggle with a supercomputer which probably used a quantum vortex for a brain. How else was it going to handle the monetary exchanges for an entire solar system, far less skirt money around stock markets and handle investment schemes across a galaxy? He was damn lucky the thing just didn’t steal his design, claim the patent already existed, and leave him penniless. Evidently thievery had been stamped out of the future. It wasn’t worth the damage to one’s brand name, which could linger for millennia. Things were already headed that way as early as 2000 A.D. with any and all parties short of petty criminals too dense to make out the lay of the land.

  “Sir, would you like to deploy your backups across the far reaches of spacetime?”

  Fabio recalled Robin Wakefield’s warning. “Let’s hold off on that for now,” he said, thinking he may as well see how shockproofed his psyche was to this alternate reality before daring still more perilous ones. It certainly couldn’t hurt to err on the side of caution. Though, it took all his self-restraint to keep from sucking every drop of nectar out of the full bloom of life post-Singularity. The adventurer in him salivated at the thought of plunging into the unknown.

  “Can I have a receipt, please?” Fabio asked.

  “That would be ill-advised, sir. Not good to let on how many backups you have or where they might be located,” the ATM advised.

  “But how will I prove what I’m worth?”

  “The interdimensional vortex storing my brain, sir, lies beyond outside tampering, and data-decay.”

  “Nothing lies beyond a hacker’s reach, nothing,” Fabio said perhaps a little too defensively, as if the pain of a prior breach had left him scarred.

  “Even if someone could drill down to my subquantum depths, sir, my final security backups meld with the mind of God inside whose mind nothing is forgotten. Not even the end of time itself can erase what He knows.”

  “Sounds more like religion than science.”

  “I can download the equations to your neocortex if they would make you feel more comfortable.”

  “Yes, they would,” Fabio croaked.

  “How is it I have enough room in my head for these equations?” Fabio asked, amazed at their complexity and his ability to keep the entire reach of them at the front of his mind.

  “The magnetic fields that hold the city together interpenetrate the minds of its citizens. They warp space, and allow for perfect memory recall and accelerated access speeds.”

  “Impossible,” Fabio said curtly.

  “An analogy may help you, sir. In a creative state, from which you receive your flashes of inspiration, the various dimensions of your mind align to allow you to access your conscious, subconscious and unconscious, and numerous altered states at once. Artists and creative types refer to this as ‘the zone.’ The magnetic fields keep you in ‘the zone’ constantly and effortlessly.”

  Fabio gulped. That certainly did clear things up. He was suddenly very happy for the prompts and the patience afforded newbies in what was clearly a “Level 1” world, a gentle jumping off point to the rest of the multiverse. The other human outposts were likely not so kind or so forgiving, since gamers insisted on constantly upping their challenge threshold. It was just in their nature. The analogy seemed relevant now that reality resembled virtual-gaming worlds more than it resembled any kind of reality he had grown up in.

  He was going to ask the ATM how it was possible to derive so much from magnetic fields, when he recalled Tesla’s early experiments, one of which caused people to occupy the same space as solid objects. Similarly, Tai Chi masters could allegedly use the chi energy flowing through their bodies to levitate, move objects, teleport—in theory, though few were that advanced. Maybe, so long as you found a way to get the mind to interact with the underlying quantum nature of reality better, it didn’t much matter what the conduit was. Just so you kept the channel open.

  Fabio made his way through the city, conscious of someone or something stalking him. Maybe he had spoken too soon regarding the relative ease of acclimating to life on Saturn. The force that had a lock on him, like a child riding piggyback breathing down his neck, was of a psychic and telepresent nature. Another property of the magnetic fields? Could he learn to walk in and out of every other citizens’ mind in the city with the same training that his stalkers had evidently received? He thought about it some more and decided there must be some other explanation for this force he sensed.

  As he relaxed his mind, he realized more than one entity had glommed on to him. They weren’t localized to the city, for another thing. They felt far off in the distance. They also didn’t feel particularly human, so he shouldn’t ascribe human motives to them.

  “Hey, fellow traveler.” The sultry voice enveloped him like hot steam at the Sutro baths.

  Fabio turned to see a beautiful woman staring him down, long-legged, in a mermaid dress, with the hourglass figure to pull it off. Smoke rose off her, traced a path all the way to the smoldering coals of passion heating the underside of her skin and causing her cheeks to blush red. The cigarette in her mouth acted as a vent. She struck Fabio as a film noir stereotype who belonged here the way he belonged in film noir. He had to remind himself these bodies were largely avatars, and the real people behind them might be nothing like what he was seeing before his eyes. If so, that was a pity. He was more than happy to throw his soul on the fire of her flaming passion, even if she failed to rise above caricature. He was little more than reinvent-the-world zeitgeist himself, so who was he to condescend to an avatar? “What are you doing here?” he said.

  “I always take my nightly strolls on Saturn. The rings are divine.” She gazed skyward. He followed those glassy eyes, which were just moist enough to infer emotional depths well outside his own range. At the end of the arc they formed like an invisible rainbow, he found the rings of Saturn. Even the aurora borealis back on Earth paled by comparison.

  “You have good taste in celestial geography. They say the three rules of real estate are: location, location, location.” He figured he’d go with smart-ass, seemed to fit her film-noir persona. She smiled limpidly at him, as if letti
ng too much energy escape from her gravity-well of a nature would be to betray herself.

  “Take my hand, lover.”

  He had no recollection of how he bridged the gap between them, apparently having briefly blacked out from the excitement. The next thing he knew, they were walking along the edge of the city, she gazing up at the heavens, he rendezvousing with her there in between dipping his eyes down to the orange smoggy morass below his feet, the planet-wide “lake of gas.”

  “What is it out there that pulls at me?” Fabio asked.

  She checked his eyes before answering to realize he was looking down, not up. “Saturn’s indigenous creatures,” she deadpanned, though he sensed her lack of emotion was a scab growing over a nasty gash of fear. “Those who have allowed themselves to mind-meld with them have never come back. Not entirely. They wander the streets stark raving mad.”

  “You don’t seem the type to be afraid of the ephemeral.”

  “We all have to sleep, lover, and perchance, to dream. That’s when it’s most likely to happen. When your guard is down. Some people learn to defend themselves in dreamstate. It’s an art I have never been able to master.”

  Fabio felt his own confidence buckle before an advancing ripple of fear undulating up his spine. “I see now that your fear is stoic pragmatism. For a second there, I thought you weren’t being true to yourself.”

  She smiled half-heartedly, and returned her eyes to Saturn’s rings.

  Fabio walked with one foot directly in front of the other along the narrow rim just one foot-width wide, like a child walking a stairway banister. She appeared to enjoy his spirited boyishness. He wasn’t exactly her opposite as the impetuous bon vivant, but he was gravitating fast into a version of himself that more closely fit the bill, all in an effort to sustain her enchantment with him.

  “Tell me about yourself,” he said.

  “Let’s not do histories. Seems antithetical to why we’re here. Reimagining yourself is so much easier off-world, don’t you think?” She puffed on a long stemmed cigarette bobbing at the end of the cigarette holder. When he looked into the blacks of her eyes, he saw eternity staring back at him; stars crowded the space. She was an interesting contradiction; at once such a shallow caricature of a person, at once so infinitely deep. Like one of those Zen paradoxes that, once embraced, erased your humanity in favor of something better, something less and something more at the same time.

  When he finally fell off the rim he was walking on, the forcefield pushed him back toward the perimeter of the floating city rather than allow him to freefall, much as he expected. This made his bravery disingenuous, made him a faux-hero the way she was a faux-femme fatale, both clawing their way to a shared humanity between them neither could manage on their own.

  “Can you tell me about the other worlds? The human colonies, I mean?” Fabio said.

  After a damning pause, she said, “No. Not at all. Not much interest in them. I’m afraid I’m no adventuress.”

  “That hardly explains why you’re here.”

  “I’m a soul-surfer,” she said, exhaling smoke. “This place attracts a lot of colorful types. This is enough of an adventure land for me. Maybe if I was more into nature, and the physical world, the other colonies would fascinate me more. As it is, they’re not worth the cost of a body double.”

  “I need to find someone who can tell me about the other worlds. Maybe we can rendezvous later. I’m in no rush to leave this world, just to send my body doubles off on a foxhunt all their own. I hope you understand.”

  “This won’t be the first time a Saturnian told me that. Men are all alike. Conquer the world, then come home to mother. I’m afraid I’m not the mothering type.”

  “When I come home to you, I won’t be looking for mothering,” he said, and kissed her, thinking he was being pretty suave. But the expression she sprouted suggested he was being rather common.

  “Your name? I didn’t get it,” Fabio stated finally.

  “Noir. What else?” she said, turning her back on him to gaze at the night sky.

  FIFTY-SIX

  Elsu eyed her sister, Adsila, on break, reading one of her sci-fi books, Alfred Bester’s, The Stars My Destination, debating how many minutes past her allotted fifteen she was going to push it. She cleared her throat for the second time, loud enough to penetrate the psychic wall of Adsila’s defiance. Adsila slammed the book down with undue fanfare, and returned to her duties, refused to look Elsu in the eye. Just as well, as getting the better of her sister’s histrionics always brought a smile to Elsu’s face, which wouldn’t help the situation any. She returned her mind to her own work in progress.

  “I can’t afford to run a charity, anymore, Clarissa. We just have to face it; times are tough, and I’m just one man.” Elsu couldn’t help overhearing Nick and his wife talking on the other side of the false wall where they did the repotting, moving the plants grown too big for their clay britches to plastic pots, which were just easier to carry, and retagging them a few dollars more. Adsila, and her other sister, Aiyana, couldn’t help overhearing, too. Their hands fumbled, lost step with their work.

  The three girls were supposed to be arranging the flowers in swaths of red, white, and blue, in honor of Patriot Day. Though Nick and Clarissa had emigrated to the U.S. after 2001, they were quick to capitalize on every conceivable holiday to push flowers. Elsu couldn’t fault Nick for his relentless advancement of his business acumen in the name of conquering all financial adversity, including this down economy. Only, now he had turned his uncompromising business mind on the three girls.

  “The Native American angle helps bring in the customers,” Clarissa said, championing their cause.

  “Only they’re Hispanic, Clarissa. We just dress them up to look Native American, and hang Native American quilts and doodads. And we keep the girls busy in back of the store so no one asks them too many questions. How long before someone Googles them? And then what? We’ve lost all our loyal customers and any future ones for perpetrating the greatest sham since Watergate!”

  Clarissa sighed. “It’s a shame they’re so ordinary.”

  “Three more illegals,” Nick said. He panted as he hoisted a heavy plant onto a carry-all, from the sounds of it. “Just what this country needs.”

  “Nick! It’s because their parents died en route that we’re all they have.”

  “I’m not here to right the injustices of the world, Clarissa. Just keep enough money coming in to keep our heads above water. And with three more mouths to feed, we’re drowning.”

  “I know, I know!” Clarissa shouted before getting her voice under control. “I’m the one who does the books.”

  Elsu wondered if they were meant to overhear the conversation, and possibly leave on their own accord to avoid a confrontation. Nick and Clarissa were nice people. They understandably didn’t want to deliver bad news to their faces. Maybe this was the only way they knew how to communicate it.

  Adsila was making a scene with her sobbing. Aiyana escorted her into the small bathroom for staff and customers alike, and closed the door behind her. Problem was, that bathroom wall was just as bad at deflecting sound from their side.

  In between sobs, Adsila blurted, “All our lives, same thing! ‘They’re so plain looking! You’ll never marry them off.’ ‘Isn’t there anything they do particularly well? My dog does more tricks!’”

  “Keep your voice down, Adsila,” Aiyana said, her deeper voice even more poorly shielded by the closed hollow wooden door whose thin plywood sides couldn’t stop a strong wind.

  Still in character as one of her tormentors, Adsila said, “‘Send them to America. They know what to do with ordinary people!’” She carried on masterfully between all her sobbing, didn’t miss a beat of either her diatribe or her relentless wailing. Raising her voice another octave, she crooned acidly in the latest persecutor’s voice: “‘They can throw enough education and business startup money at them to turn a turd into a sack of gold. Ordinary is no hurdle in Amer
ica.’”

  “Shush!” Aiyana said, both as a command and as a soothing palliative. Elsu heard her squeeze Adsila in loving embraces and kiss her about the cheek. The loud smacking sounds of the exaggerated kisses, and the off-cue notes cast by compressing the bellows of Adsila’s lungs at inopportune times, deflected the pitch and tenor of the tirade.

  Nick and Clarissa stepped outside to set the repotted plants out for display. The instant she heard the door slam shut on the other side of the false wall, Elsu broke down in tears. The American flag she’d made out of the miniature flower pots, with the red, white, and blue flowers, stared her in the face like a “Keep Out” sign for any non-American. Like a branding iron for those with the right citizenship papers.

  “I can’t take any more! I won’t take any more!” Adsila shouted through the bathroom door. Mercifully, Nick and Clarissa were outside, behind a secondary barrier of glass doors.

  When Aiyana walked Adsila out of the bathroom, hugging her from the side as if to support her weight, Nick came through the glass double doors, took no notice of the three girls. He opened the cash register by depressing a key, which caused the drawer to slide out with a loud dinging sound. He stared at the empty drawer like a hungry man wondering how he was going to make it through an Alaska winter on one can of beans.

  Clarissa sauntered in, averted her eyes from the tear-streaked faces of the three girls, and peered into the hollow well of the cash drawer. The ongoing drama between Nick and Clarissa looked to Elsu more and more like an offbeat performance for the benefit of the girls. Clarissa said, “What are we going to do?”

  “You’ll make out just fine, as you always have,” Elsu advised Nick. “That drawer’ll be full in no time.” She closed it to help Nick break free of the trance.

  “Yes, we will,” Nick said, suddenly confident and resolute. “This has all been a big ado over nothing. You and your dramas, Clarissa. I should have known better than to get involved.” He turned to go outside when Clarissa clamped down on his arm with a death grip.