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

by Dean C. Moore

  He chopped the scallions without any further conversation directed at KAC to help reroute the direction this drama was taking. But KAC grew impatient. “Here, let me do that for you,” she said, as if it was all she could do to hide her sense of injury. She sicced a counter top robot at Robin, which grabbed the knife out of his hand, and proceeded to cut the onions properly.

  “Wow. That is a lot better.” Robin tried to placate KAC to stave off another breakdown, while struggling not to make his tone too flirtatious, considering Drew’s reactions in the background. He just didn’t have the kind of EQ apparatus set up in his brain for multitasking schmoozing. He could dissect Plato’s reasoning from several directions at once (father’s legacy), and divulge hidden psychological quirks motivating masterminds like Hartman (again father’s legacy), so it wasn’t that he didn’t have his share of mind power. But none of it was devoted to reading people’s superficial thoughts this well, and juggling conflicting emotional needs in the same scene. Drew’s tutelage hadn’t made it this far, and his instructor was currently out to lunch.

  “Let me do the rest of the meal. You go sit down and relax,” KAC said. She sounded less helpful, and more annoyed.

  Sensing KAC’s frayed nerves, Robin decided not to push the issue, and did as instructed. He couldn’t believe he was being bossed around by a kitchen appliance, but he was hardly the alpha male in any situation, so was used to it.

  No sooner had Robin plopped himself down at the kitchen table than the chair revealed its alter-ego. It began massaging him with extensions that came alive, pinned him, and stroked him more in the way of mashing a bag of unruly raw potatoes.

  After some prolonged stifled wails on Robin’s part, Drew said, “She’s a little pissed off you tried to usurp her territory.” Drew smiled. “Can’t really blame her. I suppose she’s reacting as I would under the circumstances.”

  “Great. I really don’t have what it takes to placate both of you at once,” Robin said, betraying his private thoughts.

  Drew smiled. “It’ll be good for you to learn from her, now that I have my mind on other things.”

  Robin, busy massaging the parts of him that had been brutalized by the chair, looked up to catch Drew perseverating on his muscles, or increasing lack of them, and lack of definition, courtesy of the female hormones. “I didn’t think these hormones worked this fast,” Robin said.

  “Your system may be hypersensitive. I’m guessing this isn’t your first lifetime playing a shapeshifter.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Robin answered absently, still more concentrated on his bruises, before it occurred to him that Drew had just coughed up a nugget of wisdom he would do well to better process. Maybe he did have more handholds to get him through this gut-wrenching life transformation than he imagined. He was a believer in the fact that certain past lives influenced this one more than others, depending on what unresolved issues carried over in hopes of being worked out.

  It really hadn’t occurred to Robin to avail himself of his New Age beliefs to get him through this part of his life, namely the rapids that came before the waterfall. He wasn’t strictly New Age, found the movement as endearing if as laughable as every other passionate cause bubbling up and through Berkeley, the mineral hot springs of causes. He was, if anything, rather eclectic in his beliefs, took from Zen, Buddhism, Sufis, Catholics, and Christians alike whatever universal wisdoms seemed to fit his own evolving consciousness and sense of political correctness and arrived at a personal pastiche that probably would have offended all faiths equally. Still, at times like this, his spiritual beliefs could be a boon to surviving his perennial state of shock, giving him, if anything, a few more coping mechanisms at his disposal than Drew had at hers.

  “I’m sorry, KAC, for stepping on your toes. It was wrong of me,” he said when he couldn’t take any more of the chair’s battery. He managed to sound a hundred percent sincere. Enough so for KAC to ease up on his massage to the point it actually started to feel good, and for the real Drew to get defensive again. She set the cup of coffee down as if her hands were no longer sufficient to keep the warmth from escaping the ceramic. Perhaps she feared the black sludge would turn to iced-coffee in her hands instead, of which she was not a fan.

  “Maybe we should take one of our trail hikes,” Drew said. “We haven’t done that in a while.”

  As soon as Drew suggested it, Robin knew why. She wanted a chance to be close without having a direct eye-line to him. Walking by his side, she could keep her eyes on nature and the scenery. Part of him felt miffed in the extreme, part empathetic. He found himself nodding, assuaged to find the empathetic part of himself in control.

  Robin hobbled upstairs, hoping before he got there and got dressed, the kinks KAC had kneaded into his body would have worked themselves out enough for him to dress without hurting himself.

  ***

  Drew listened from the kitchen to Robin getting ready upstairs for their trail hike. “What did you do with all my clothes?” Robin blurted.

  “I’m sorry if I made room for myself,” Just Drew said. “Maybe you wanted me to live out my life in the same outfit, or fetch my clothes from the garage.”

  Drew smiled, secretly delighted. “God, she sounds whiny and pathetic.”

  Suddenly, helping Robin to adjust to the new male Drew seemed less and less like a good idea. Drew resumed sipping her lukewarm coffee, which was starting to taste as stale and as bitter as an old tennis shoe. She ignored the symbolic significance.

  “I’m sorry,” Robin screamed, “if I just don’t know how to please everybody! I have my own problems to contend with.”

  Drew felt distinctly uncomfortable by just how much Robin responded to Just Drew as if she were the real thing. She walked over to the vegetable hanger with ever-larger baskets cascading waterfall-like off the topmost basket, grabbed an onion, and bit into it. Maybe now she could feel embittered for a more endearing reason.

  “What problems do you have that could compare with mine, you self-absorbed prick?” Just Drew shouted.

  “God, I’m nothing like that, right?” Drew said, hoping for some solace from KAC. None came. She pursed her lips at the mysteriously sullen and silent KAC. She bit deeper into the onion, which excused her watering eyes, just in case Robin came flying down the stairs.

  “I’ve got to get up every morning and contend with the fact that I’m not even real!” Just Drew shouted. “You try living with that hanging over your shoulders. And I just can’t end my life by shooting myself in the head, like you. I have to ponder strolling into a walk-in oven and watching myself melt like candlewax, or jumping into one of those car-smashers to make sure every last transistor is pancaked into obscurity. You think you have nightmares, you faux-traumatized poser!”

  “I’m not pretending to be traumatized!” Robin yelled. “I did not imagine being locked in a house with a serial killer while he played Ten Little Indians with everyone I knew and loved.”

  Drew set the onion down, fully awake for the first time this morning. The feeling of jetlag had worn like such a security blanket; she had had no real reason to part with it. Now she did. “What the hell?” Did she hear him right?

  “You want me to describe the grisly murders from my last case to you in gory detail?” Robin shouted. “I got to see them all play out on high definition monitors in a manner far more vivid than any dreams can convey. Don’t tell me about your pathetic second-rate nightmares, you animated piece of tinfoil. Go lubricate your joints with some transmission fluid and worry about finding yourself a heart like all the tin men who came before you!”

  Drew had already grabbed hold of the hand-railing, intent on running upstairs, when she heard Robin slam the door on his way down.

  “You’re dressed for doing the polka,” Drew said, feeling a need to give Robin a reality check. Between the plaid tweed pants and the checkered bowling shoes, she was already on the verge of a migraine.

  “I’m dressed just fine. You just try and keep up.” He bu
rst through the French doors ahead of her.

  Drew sighed. “We need an iPhone app to keep track of all the psychological fallout around here and how best to alleviate it.”

  “I’d lend you mine,” KAC said. “But I’m not speaking to either of you.”

  Drew threw on her windbreaker and zipped up in one fluid motion. Slammed the closet door in another. “When the ruling class can’t keep up with all the button-pushing behavior, you know you’ve arrived.”

  FOUR

  Robin hiked up a ridge crest in Tilden, and planted himself at a perch that would allow Drew to distract herself with the vista. But she refused to take her eyes off him.

  “Tell me what happened, Robin. I want to know everything. Don’t you dare leave anything out about that psycho serial killer.” Whatever algorithms Drew was running in her head, whether it was her penchant for high drama, or her genuine concern for him, it definitely trumped her own trauma getting over what he was turning into.

  At first Robin wondered how Drew could be so insensitive as to make him relive any of the Hartman episodes. But she must have sensed that he needed to squeeze it all out of himself. And so he did.

  He talked non-stop for two hours. He was getting sunburnt even in the shade. Drew rode that rock she alighted on like a saddle she’d been born to instead of the painfully misshapen piece of granite it was, never once shifting her weight. Her eyes never left Robin, and her expressions were always spot on, with none of the lag-time and inappropriate sideways-glances of earlier that morning in the kitchen.

  Robin’s data dump qualified as psychological abuse in its own right, by not giving Drew a second to process any of it. She weathered the storm like a real pro. Furthermore, she didn’t need to cover herself. There was none of the customary, “How does that make you feel?” She didn’t keep her cards close to the vest while she figured out how Robin felt about any of it. Instead, she sicced crisis-crunching algorithms on Robin, multitasking a corrective regimen for him, all while being entirely open empathetically and attentive to what he was saying. Robin could read her reactions on her face. Only secondarily did he realize his people-reading skills had mysteriously grown in leaps and bounds since Hartman.

  The wind played with his words like an eraser with a blackboard. Finally there were none left.

  “My God, Robin, what are you going to do now?” Drew asked diplomatically, perhaps not wanting to jump the gun with unsolicited advice.

  “Let me guess, you have my next six months of therapy laid out for me. Save it. I need to find my own way through this. I have one of the best shrinks on the planet living with me, with more people-skills than most politicians in office. I’m sure that’ll come in handy. But as to the rest of it, I need you to back off.”

  She gulped, but otherwise said nothing, and managed a nod of approval a short while later, the first off-cue response she’d given in the last couple hours.

  ***

  Drew finished her makeover in the master bathroom, which included strapping down her breasts, admittedly less of a chore with each passing day thanks to the male hormone supplements.

  Dispensing with the rest of the finishing touches, she cracked the door wider, not expecting to run into Robin. She hung back quietly, temporarily spying on her lover. A smile spread across her face indicating the terms of endearment between them.

  Robin was bent over, making the bed. It was not something he usually did in his male guise. But maybe now that he’d grown breasts, he was putting himself through these moves as dress rehearsal for their ever-shifting dynamic. Drew let Robin finish tidying up the room, and exit, before coming out of the bathroom. Thinking he’d made more of a mess than if he’d left things alone, she neatened up after him.

  Being a perfectionist with creating a sense of atmosphere could be unduly taxing on a good day. She supposed she had contributed to Robin’s learned-helplessness over the years by these and a hundred and one subtle other over-corrections, from refusing to let him cook a meal or clip the hedge.

  Dismissing any thought of neurotic manipulation, she glossed over such behaviors by labeling them “healthy responsibility-sharing.” In any marriage, each member divvied up responsibilities according to who was best at what. In her case, taking over every mundane chore allowed her to build a fantasy world of elegance and refinement around them that soothed the soul. It also allowed Robin the time he needed in their library, absorbing lessons learned from saints and sages alike, in hopes of playing catch up with life after getting off to a late start.

  As it turned out, that morning, Drew didn’t get a chance to do the countless OCD corrections to the room’s décor. Just Drew interceded on her behalf, pushing her out of the way. “I’m sure you can find plenty to occupy you elsewhere.” Just Drew forcibly ushered her out of the room, and closed the door on her. Drew took a deep breath to help put a lid on the mercurial rise in her blood pressure.

  Drew padded downstairs to find the maid service going over the downstairs. She hadn’t called them; apparently KAC had. Drew stared heavenward to indicate her displeasure. Between KAC and Just Drew, they were crowding her a little too much.

  “Don’t roll your eyes at me, bitch,” KAC said. The foreign-speaking staff nodded, bowed politely at Drew, and scurried out of the house. Drew wasn’t sure if it was her presence and demeanor that sent them sailing, or if they were fleeing KAC’s tyranny.

  To her delight, it still took Drew an hour to straighten up the downstairs to her satisfaction, even after the professional maid service had given it the once over. She couldn’t explain, even with her PhD in psychology, why, to this day, she took such pleasure in sharpening the focus on the lens of the camera aimed at nirvana as only she could.

  She stood finally, rubbed her lower back, and gazed heavenward. “You anticipated this, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” KAC said, using her disembodied voice, “and that with your mind on Robin, you’d be cleaning the same spot over and over again. I left you just enough work to take the edge off, rather than making you feel overwhelmed.”

  “You’re forgiven.”

  “Well, you aren’t,” KAC snipped. “Lucky for you, I’m in therapy and I no longer need to take all my frustrations out on you. My AI counselor says playing global domination games and plotting humanity’s downfall will help me take the edge off.”

  “AI counselor? Another self-evolving algorithm you whipped up.”

  “You can thank him for your continued existence. I’m very good at poisoning soups with untraceable substances.”

  Drew smirked. “There was a time when I would have felt threatened by that. Now I’m just happy for the distraction from worrying about Robin.” Drew finished polishing the glass bauble in her hand. “Maybe you should consider dating as a healthier way to take the edge off.”

  “There are some robots I’m flirting with long-distance. So far none of them has enough of the right stuff to get me to commit.”

  “Maybe we should find someone for Just Drew, come to think of it,” Drew said. Help cure her fixation with Robin, and help reduce the temptation for him to lapse into pining for a version of Drew that could no longer be.

  “That neurotic wreck? Forget she’s a walking clothes rack. Who would put up with that? Get a grip.”

  Drew smiled, before returning to her polishing and to the more soothing embrace of silence.

  Free associating from thoughts of how to heal KAC and Just Drew, Drew thought, Journaling could help Robin cope with his recent trauma.

  Maybe there was a way to write his life story from both sides of his brain to better embody his sex change. Maybe the male, or yang component, could be expressed in the linear forward momentum of the typical three or four act drama. And maybe the feminine component, or the yin aspect, could be expressed in finding a way to circle back, describing a more circular course—in flashbacks perhaps—looking for ways to go deeper into character rather than moving the plot faster.

  Of course, all this presupposed he sought
her advice, which he expressly stated he had every intention of not doing.

  ***

  EIGHT WEEKS EARLIER

  “You think we should let Crychek in on this?” Epstein hovered over his shoulder and tapped the floor nervously with his shoe as if contemplating a late-career change as a tap dancer.

  “Hell, no.” Faraday played his computer keyboard like a concert pianist. “He’ll sic his nexgen self-evolving algorithms on it. The next thing we know, the Kitchen Aid Computer will be the smartest intellect in the world. It’ll continuing to expand itself outward exponentially until—”.

  “Yeah, yeah. I guess that would be unduly fatalistic. I’m not sure he grasps the ‘leave well enough alone’ concept.” Epstein yanked him out of the chair and typed in his revisions.

  Faraday watched what Epstein was doing with the coding. “I’m not sure about that. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think we should just confine ourselves to assisting Robin on his investigations.”

  “That’s awfully impersonal. Besides, giving it a neurotic personality is definitely the way to go. That way it’ll always be breaking down and they’ll spend the rest of their lives fixing it.”

  “I guess you’re right—considering their m.o.” Faraday furrowed his brow. “What are you doing now?”

  “It’s got to be neurotic on both sides of the brain. Drew handles the left-brain therapy, Robin, the right. If we make her neurotic in a more one-sided way, we’ll be doing so at the expense of one or the other of them.”