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

by Dean C. Moore

  “It’s a gift handed down only to tenth generation addicts, who’ve amassed sufficient inertia to keep justifying their insanity through End Times.”

  Robin rose from the edge of the bed and walked over to the vanity. She started to change herself over before the mirror: her hairstyle and makeup; her wardrobe; everything.

  “Look out,” Toby said. “I think she’s getting ready to change constellations in the zodiac wheel of star-aligned personalities.”

  “What are you fingering so zealously on your iPhone?” Drew asked.

  “I patched in the Three Stooges a few hours back. We’re good, but not good enough to check her predictions in real time. These guys are phenomenal. Crychek has already written the self-evolving algorithms to ferret out the information from the net that pertains to Robin’s conquest-of-space paradigm. So far, she’s right on the money all the way down the line. I’m propagating the intel out to the underground network here in Europe so they can take further actions.”

  “What kind of further actions?” Drew pulled at his collar. “Are we supporting this space program or sabotaging it?”

  “I guess for now we’re just monitoring their efforts and awaiting further instructions from Nostradamus reborn over there,” Toby said, alluding to Robin.

  “How is this any more than wishful thinking? I just don’t get it.” Drew toyed with his cufflinks, which he just couldn’t get to sit right.

  Toby brought Drew up to speed without his fingers slowing over his virtual keypad. “The self-evolving software and hardware, which came out over ten years ago, only held under wraps, was the real breakthrough for the entirely robotic, self-sustaining work crews needed to open up space. No one at the time thought to put it to the applications we’re putting it to today. But even back then, they were looking for a way out of a double bind. On the one hand, we were passing the tipping point with regards to civilization’s sustainability, considering our talent for genocide. On the other hand, natural disasters alone were threatening to take us out.”

  Toby briefly lifted his eyes from the 4” x 5” screen. “Corporations cooperate a lot better than national governments, moreover, and have the excess wealth to tackle the tasks. They’re able to ride the Singularity wave of profits well ahead of the Singularity reaction spreading to the masses proper to feed the starving monster hungry for new technologies to continue the rate of progress.”

  “Where are you getting all this from?” Drew brushed his hair, attended his self-image with ever more care as his image of the world about him continued to fall apart.

  “I’m reading from Science As Culture, the online version, being updated by our people now off the intel mined by the Three Stooges.”

  Tired of ogling Toby in the roadster, which looked strangely at home in the bedroom suite, like one of those displaced Victorian bath tubs, Drew poured brandy from the crystal decanter. “Christ, if it gets any more surreal around here,” Drew protested, “I’m going to have to revisit those Luis Bunuel films from my college years to help me cope.”

  Robin seemed to recognize her cue and burst on the scene with her latest alter from her conglomeration of surrogate personas. Drew shook his head, then guzzled brandy which was meant to be sipped.

  Toby, who’d migrated to the iPad, after pulling it out of the glove box, when the Science As Culture magazine on line got unduly intriguing, gazed up and beheld the made-over Robin. Her hair was braided in pigtails and she had freckles dotting her face worse than a savage breakout of small pox. “What’s with Little Orphan Annie?” he said.

  “Going from the eyes,” Drew said, “I’m thinking this poor demon-possessed creature was the best Robin could come up with to channel the venom that’s coming our way. Kids do have greater resilience, as a rule.”

  Robin contorted her face, opened her mouth wide, and angled her head in ways that would make a Cirque de Soleil acrobat wince. Drew said, “You have a rocket launcher that can take out that plane flying overhead just in case, right?”

  “In the trunk,” Toby said.

  “I suppose it pays to have lived with madness all your life.” Drew took another drink.

  Robin’s voice, when she spoke, was characteristic of demonic possession. It wasn’t her voice, for one thing, and the tone conveyed the condensation of toxic emotions stowed for centuries, and only now bubbling up from the pits of hell courtesy of the opportune volcanic vent of Robin’s throat. “We’re going to shatter your precious blue gem of a world into tiny little shards.”

  “How so?” Drew asked, partly playing along, partly genuinely concerned, considering how the last prophecies had gone.

  “A Tesla oscillating wave generator sends vibrations through the core of the planet that will build, multiplying harmonic frequencies, until it calves the planet in two.” The demonic voice that conveyed the message reeked of ominous satisfaction.

  “Tesla actually designed and built such a device,” Toby explained, after surrendering his relaxed posture in favor of one more constipated. “I read about it.”

  “Where?” Drew said, directing his question at Robin.

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” she hissed, then laughed.

  Toby discretely fingered his memo to the underground railroad on his iPad.

  Robin’s body contorted further. The ripple effect extended now from the head and neck through her spine, and ultimately out through her limbs, as if she were practicing some bizarre, incredibly advanced form of hatha yoga. Drew and Toby both indelicately scrunched up their faces, feeling the pain she could no longer feel for herself.

  “Doesn’t sound all that inspired for a hell beast,” Drew goaded.

  Robin’s laughter sent cracks through the floor and walls.

  “She doesn’t do anything half-assed, does she?” Toby surveyed the ground the car was perched on. “Tell her easy on the cracks, huh? Those white walls get scratched, there’s no repairing them.”

  “Careful what falls on your head,” Robin said, then lost herself in echoing laughter; the echoes reverberated in a room that should never have allowed for them.

  Drew gazed up at the roof before he realized she might be talking about something else. He turned to Toby. “Is it possible to redirect the asteroids on near-pass orbits with the Earth to impact us?”

  Toby took a deep breath. Finished keying in the latest intel, he said, “Before today, I’d say no. Wishful thinking. But if there are self-assembling robotic factories strategically located on them, capable of generating all the thrust they need, and self-evolving software and hardware on site to handle contingencies the designers themselves couldn’t foresee—”

  Toby glanced at his iPad. “Crychek and the boys are on it. They’ll work on giving the self-evolving algorithms on the asteroids an attitude check. But they’re getting overloaded.”

  “I guess it’s all hands on deck,” Drew said. “We’re not going to be able to avoid getting our hands dirty.”

  He picked the contorted Robin off the floor, hardened like the twisted roots of a tree, and stuck her as best he could into the back of the roadster. He slipped himself into the front seat beside Toby, as Toby fired up the engine. “You have a quick way out of here?” Drew said.

  Toby hit him with the “I’m so hurt” face.

  Then he gunned the car out the window.

  It landed from free fall—after generating what felt to Drew’s stomach like a brief zero gravity effect—on a trampoline placed strategically below.

  The resilient canvas sheet bounced them up to a ramp which they drove down, headed straight for the main road.

  “Sanity really doesn’t prepare you for the real world like it used to,” Drew said, holding on to Robin to keep her from being hurtled from the car.

  He steadied himself as the vehicle bounced down the road. “I hope you have a good field general to deploy the troops. It is going to require sensitive timing to put out all the fires in time.”

  “She doesn’t exactly have the
charm and personality of this one,” Toby said, “but she’ll do.”

  TWO

  “Where is this footage coming from?” Alexandra said, standing on the podium, glaring at the giant flat screen monitors showing the robotic mining of a distant asteroid.

  “Crychek, and his pals, Epstein and Faraday.” Boyd was struggling on his keyboard to keep up with the separate data feeds coming off the satellite—the one catching the baton in the last arm of the relay of satellites spread throughout the solar system. Alexandra thought, They needed more supercomputers with better than NASA-sized memory space to give real time translation of the zeros and ones into images, relative to the closest satellite. They couldn’t do anything about being several hours behind the first satellite to pass the baton in the relay race.

  “What’s it doing?” Alexandra asked.

  “It’s mining by using pressurized gas to push the minerals into its smelter,” Boyd, the robotics engineer among them, explained. “They would have had to study the dynamics of that extraction method in a vacuum. There’s no atmosphere on that asteroid. Only way to learn just how much pressure to apply, the best gas propellant to use, i.e. oxygen versus nitrogen.”

  “Get on it,” Alexandra barked at Adrienne.

  “If you want a personality of your own someday,” Adrienne said, “you’ll need a vocabulary of tones besides commanding.”

  Alexandra stifled her rebuttal, and did what she usually did to center herself, skittered about the floor, and bit her fingernails. She used to think the nasty habit betrayed weakness, until she realized cannibalizing herself for a food source was just a way of surviving between kills. The eternal hunger, the anxiety and impatience, waiting for the next opportunity to pounce on her prey, stuffed neatly into one very counterintuitive habit, generated more fear than pity.

  “And you might want to consider some form of exercise besides pacing,” Adrienne added, “even if eating away at yourself beats most diets I’ve been on.” Adrienne, not advertising anything close to the Barbie figure Alexandra sported, nearly choked while swallowing her latest doughnut. She cleared her throat with soda. She was already fifty pounds overweight. What were a few more ounces?

  Alexandra had never had to climb on a treadmill or take up jogging. A high-strung nature alone kept her svelte and ready to lunge catlike at her adversaries. Hence, she never considered apologizing for a system that worked so effectively. She trod back and forth as if waiting to be shot down by an imaginary sniper in the shooting-gallery box she paced off. She kept her mouth shut, figuring this was the price she paid for commanding a bunch of brainy nerds who were used to sharing authority and thinking in hive-mind configurations. It really messed with the whole chain of command thing. Shit, which in the conventional military, flowed downstream, around here, just as often flowed upstream.

  “This space age, which isn’t so nascent as we were led to believe,” Adrienne said, keying at her computer, “is making it hard to run down vacuum test chambers.”

  “This isn’t the excuse department,” Alexandra said. “It’s the get-our-ass-out-of-a-sling department.” She returned her eyes to the big screens. “That thing has to run out of gas sometime. What then?”

  “If it’s built right, it will recycle the gases trapped in the minerals to power the pressurized nozzle,” Boyd explained.

  “Maybe they’re not as smart as you. Maybe it only has to work for a finite period of time, just long enough to change the trajectory of the asteroid. Check who’s making what prototypes on the market.”

  “You mean besides HoneyBee Robotics, who built this model for mining the moon? Yeah, I can do that,” Boyd said.

  “Never mind, I got it,” Brandon, their life-sciences guy, said. Up until then he’d been attending his pets—cave-dwelling and bottom-of-ocean creatures just alien enough to turn their subterranean abode into a melting pot for alien lifeforms—which survived here courtesy of Brandon’s pressurized Plexiglas habitats. They made Alexandra feel as if she was truly on the deck of a spaceship—headed to their next planet just to add to their menagerie of finds.

  Brandon was stepping in for Boyd, presumably because he was anxious to test his DNA-computer inspired search-algorithms.

  He pedaled his people-powered computer array as he worked with his naked size-sixteen feet.

  “You should have been an Olympic swimmer with flippers like that,” Alexandra said.

  “Don’t have the elongated V-shaped back I need for the rest of the package, sadly.” Brandon upped his pedaling. “Sure beats waking up every-day inside a cave, feeling buried alive.” He roamed his eyes about the windowless room just to give himself the heebie-jeebies.

  Adrienne, eying Brandon exercising, reached for some cheese puffs, tenuously. Rationalizing her cravings as a testament to individuality caused her to pick up the pace. So ran Alexandra’s rapid-fire assessment of her facial expressions.

  “Point of contention,” Adrienne said. “Why do we care who built this thing? Just shut down the little robo-critter. End of story.” The fact she was thinking better on the cheese puffs than she was five seconds ago, emboldened her to reach for another one.

  Alexandra explained, “No sooner will we undo their algorithms than they’ll write new ones. I’m not spending the rest of my life in an unending game of mental chess.”

  Boyd snorted a line of coke in full view of Alexandra, before returning to playing tracker, stalking his fleeing victims along the many cyber-trails on his computer. There was a time when she would have taken his coke mirror, broken it, and gouged his eyes out with it. But she was under strict doctor’s orders to cultivate a sense of calm, or see her head explode due to high blood pressure. Something about an exaggerated response to stress even the Bystolic 10mg could do little about. One way or another, she had to get better control of her mind. Sneaking into a career that was perfect camouflage for her wound-tight personality, wasn’t turning out to be so smart as all that.

  Alexandra paced a couple more laps, bit her fingers down another notch, then asked, “How are we coming with the Tesla device?”

  “We have operatives in the field at the three most likely sites,” Boyd said.

  ***

  “I hate obelisks.”

  “Why?”

  “They seem to defy explanation by their very nature.”

  “Well, this one sits on the ley line connecting the Great Pyramid of Giza with Stonehenge. That can’t be good.”

  “I hate deserts. Why can’t someone plant one of these things in a garden spot?”

  “Probably was a garden spot once upon a time.”

  “You think it goes back that far?”

  “We tried blowing it up, didn’t make a scratch.”

  “Could be men in black technology, flying under the radar, just in case they need to drag it out to kick some tyrant’s ass in the next war.”

  “Dude, it’ll take us a month to finish digging it out. Has to be of alien origin.”

  “This is what I mean. You sit around and speculate all day, until you go mad. They’re mind eaters, all of them.”

  “It’s not putting out those pulses, anymore. I guess that rules it out as a planet killer.”

  “Why? Besides wishful thinking?”

  “Doesn’t look like any Tesla device I ever read about.”

  “Definitely not Tesla.”

  “What about ancient aliens? Maybe all the sacred sites scattered across the ley line intersections are there to protect the energy meridians themselves, like needles in Chinese acupuncture, to keep the energy flowing. Energy keeps flowing, you get a nice healthy Renaissance age like the one we’re entering. Energy gets blocked, and whamo, the Dark Ages all over again. The monoliths make sure no one gums up the works. I guess that would make the ancient aliens who instructed civilizations throughout the ages on how to build these things, our benefactors.”

  “They didn’t really stop the Dark Ages from happening, did they?”

  “Only because we forgot to tend
the Earth’s energy body; we forgot how to draw sustenance from it. We no longer live on or around these sites. The further away we build our cities from them, the more likely we are to offset the delicate balance.”

  “You’re right. I say we find a way to blow up this thing before we go mad just thinking about it.”

  “We could compromise, and just obsess about it. Monomania is all the rage. Mythomania, too. We could be a hybrid: monomaniacs and mythomaniacs in one.”

  “Dude, you’re a Wall Street wizard, who, finished crashing our world economy, wears Birkenstocks and prayer beads. That makes this entire conversation a little too real.”

  “You’re a Nubian prince with a body that shouts demigod. You’re probably a direct descendent of one of those alien-human matings, intended to continue the lineage of high priests and secret society practices through the ages. Your mere presence here makes this entire conversation too real for words.”

  “Screw it. Let’s go chew on peyote.”

  “Yeah, I guess there’s no point meditating on an obelisk from anything other than an altered state.”

  Rodin, the Nubian demigod, and Dogan, his Berkeley-born-and-bred, Birkenstock-wearing, not-exactly-ex-hippie mate, footing it behind him, traipsed back to the plastic poncho stretched across a couple sticks, acting as shade, and lit up their pipes. They figured the pot in their pipes would do well to supplement the peyote in their craws; one could never have enough mind altering drugs when contemplating an obelisk.

  They studied the crew working zealously to extract the obelisk, Iranian tribal locals who had promised their shah that it held the key to destroying America once and for all. That had gone a long way to securing their funding and making the dig site suitably National Geographic in scope, Dogan thought, appreciatively. In point of fact, the Iranian locals were archeologists like themselves, about as loyal to the shah as a dog who jumps on the couch as soon as the master is out of the room.

  Dogan said, “We gotta stop with this Beavis and Butthead routine we’ve been doing for the last ten years. We’re older now. We’re respected scientists, for Christ’s sake. People will talk.”