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

by Dean C. Moore

  This was now the third two-headed species he’d spotted. What exactly had come up from the center of the Earth during that last Mt. Shasta eruption? And what exactly was it doing to the environment? Or did the mutation rate pertain to something else entirely? He shelved his concern before it sent him on another odyssey just like the one from which he was supposed to be vacationing.

  ***

  It was hours later before Brandon stumbled on something of note. He’d given up on finding anything more of interest, and had headed back home to preserve the two specimens he’d found, when he chanced upon it.

  An albino hummingbird.

  He wasn’t sure it was exotic enough to fit his collection, but he couldn’t resist. It hovered over the purple flowers, like an ethereal vision. He swooped down with his butterfly net, which had been concealed until now in his walking staff, the net ejected only at the push of a lever. After he hung enough hummingbird feeders, and instilled enough red and orange trumpet flowering plants running up trellises along the walls, he’d free the bird inside his house and let it buzz around the place.

  Then it dawned on him. Maybe the insight had been trying to swim to the surface of his mind all along. Maybe it had just come to the fore now with the associations invited by his return home and his trail hike.

  He jumped on the cell phone to Alexandra. As soon as she picked up, not even waiting for her to talk, he erupted. “I know what the obelisk they unearthed in the desert signifies. It was found just when it needed to be found.”

  “Why?” She sounded as guarded as ever.

  “This Renaissance age we find ourselves in… The obelisk’s designed to emit a vibration that affects us on a genetic level; that fosters mutations. It’s facilitating a new Cambrian explosion of sentient life.”

  “You’ve been singing this song for a while now. According to you, all the great pyramids and Stonehenges are situated for the purpose of maximizing the chi energies flowing through the planet.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said impatiently. “And they were enough to carry us through every other period of history, leading up to this, but not through a new Renaissance period. For that, the energy grid has to be boosted further. We have to suck in more energy from the universal energy grid. And for that, we need a pipeline.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Hey, what if you were an alien civilization and knew we were in a garden hotspot, but you couldn’t spread yourself across the entire Milky Way and beyond, you couldn’t maintain that scattered of a civilization? What do you do? You commission the locals to build some obelisks, situate them along the key acupuncture points for the planet, the chakras and nadirs. That way, you accelerate evolution in your favor, hastening the uplifting of life so it can catch up with you.

  “You seed a federation of planets filled with sentient lifeforms, leaving the rest to carefully calculated fate. Only, if you boost the energy grid too much at first, while life is taking hold, you drive people crazy from the excess of mental energy. You need them to evolve far enough fast enough until they can handle the extra cosmic energies flowing through them. Until you can turn them into walking obelisks themselves, or acupuncture needles tapping the energy grid directly, feeding off it, and feeding into it in turn, like those people who install solar arrays and sell back energy to the grid during periods of surplus.”

  “It sounded brilliant and crazy the last few times you said it, Brandon. I’m just not sure I’m buying this latest updated version of your thinking any better than I bought the earlier versions.”

  “Just look into it, will you? If I’m right, there should be some way we can track the obelisk’s emanations. The people closest to it might be the most affected. Or perhaps, it doesn’t work quite so narrowly, maybe so long as you’re close to one of the other planetary chakras, a pyramid say, you’ll feel the effects. Or maybe its frequency is specific enough that only certain individuals can pick up on it.”

  “I’ll sic Boyd on it. If he’s willing to waste his vacation on this nonsense, if this is his idea of a good time, fine. But I’m not ordering anyone to get hot and bothered about anything just yet. We’re all still in recovery, and we’re gonna stay there until we’re in any shape to come home and get back to work. Apparently you guys are even more productive in your downtime than in your uptime. One more reason not to call in the troops just yet.”

  “And, I would think, one more reason to listen to me.”

  “Save it for Boyd,” she said, and hung up.

  “She probably just hates the idea because it doesn’t give her something to chase after. She can’t run down every budding genetic freak on the planet.” Realizing he was talking to himself, he didn’t feel the least deterred. “You have to admit, it does sound suspiciously like that New Age theory that says all the nuclear explosions on the planet so far were necessary to raise the radiation level enough to alter our genetics so they could handle higher frequencies of consciousness. And, along with rising pollution and the greenhouse effect, make the atmosphere more livable for the three alien species intent on colonizing us, who depend on the more complex mixture of gases. An idea to which you strangely also subscribe.” He sighed. “Maybe if you’d taken a more sober approach all along, when you burst out of the starting gates this time, she’d have to listen to you.”

  “Hi.”

  The voice startled him. It was emanating from a pretty young girl around his age.

  He gulped. “Hi, are you like sexually insatiable, and into nerdy guys with genius IQs, and a penchant for talking to themselves? Because if you are, it could really power blast us past a lot of awkward nervousness, fear, and inarticulateness.”

  She laughed. “Yeah, I’m down with that. I mean, it’s northern California. Your approach seems more California-chic, but arguing casuistries is so ancient Greek, don’t you think?”

  “God, I’m in love.” He took a step closer, resisted the urge to fly into her arms. “We could get married in the woods to celebrate how we met. It would have to be just us and a few people, kind of a low-impact wedding, so as not to disturb the animals. Maybe we can use birdsong for the wedding march.”

  “I’m right with ya. And you’re a romantic, obviously. I mean, you can barely keep all the passion in. You’re spilling all over yourself. And you’d never be boring, not with a racy mind like that. And you’re into planet-vibing obelisks… Honestly, I don’t think we’re going off half-cocked at all.” She combed her hair of spun gold, catching the breeze like angel’s wings, behind her ear.

  He noticed she shared his habit of walking in bare feet to feel more connected with the earth. “I feel like we’ve already done more deep dives into our interpenetrating realities than I did for my last research paper.”

  “And there are lifetimes to be lived on the way back to your place. You have a cabin in the woods, right?”

  “Doesn’t everybody?” he said. “Just follow me.” He took another step toward her. When she held out her arm, he stopped so fast he could feel his brain slosh around inside his brainpan.

  “You aren’t afraid this relationship could spiral out of control and burn out before we get there? I mean, I ran through my last few relationships nearly as fast.”

  “That’s just total immaturity. We all have our sticking points, our obsessions, our perversions, but if we’re both rabid dogs frothing over at the mouth for life, what else really matters? And who better to wash over those dams penning in the parts of our nature not yet flowing as one with the Godhead?”

  Falling into step with him as they hiked back to his place, she said, “God, my sentiments exactly.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have a name, would ya?”

  She sighed. He could tell it was his first misstep. “If you’re going to be so pedestrian as to require a name before we marry… It’s Aurora.”

  He smiled. “Brandon.”

  ***

  Aurora slid the drape off the tank, shaped like a coffin, but standing vertically against the back w
all of his living room. “Okay, this is a little kinky.”

  “Yeah, about that…” Brandon lowered his eyes.

  “No, I get it. You had a girlfriend. It didn’t work out, so you cloned her.”

  The life that had drained out of him returned just as quickly. He felt like a mummy responding to a curse. “I’m waiting to thaw her out until I’ve mastered hypnosis, just in case her copy is just as inclined to run away. Of course, my Mia clone has an entirely different personality that wasn’t predicted. So, I could just get lucky.”

  “And we haven’t even gotten around to pillow talk.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Adrienne floated in her antigravity flat, using technology of her own invention, not patented, not classified, not registered, not anything. She didn’t need any men in black paying her a visit.

  NASA should have long perfected artificial gravity, since it was the only reasonable solution for the problem of long-duration flights off world. Instead, they’d opted for an aborted space program and sending people to the moon over and over again until everyone was soured on the romance of space exploration, and had long put it out of their minds. Leaving NASA devoid of technologies that could sustain human life in space long-term. And leaving Adrienne devoid of off-the-shelf artificial gravity options she could merely tweak to get from a half-G or a third-G down to zero-G. Alas… If only she ran the world.

  Admittedly, her reasons for crimping the timeline to bring someplace out in the not-so-distant-future into the here and now was even more stoic and humble than NASA’s wearisome moon launches. She had dreams of getting obscenely fat. Her boyfriend and coconspirator was a feeder. Though only a hundred and thirty pounds himself, he worshipped fat women, lived to feed them; it was his greatest erotic turn on. He repeatedly came to orgasm stuffing food in her mouth and watching how well she took it. At two hundred fifty pounds, she was admittedly off to a rather pathetic start to reach her goal of six hundred pounds.

  The antigravity environs she had designed for herself would allow her to float as easily at six hundred pounds, even, dare she hope, at a thousand pounds. She would, ironically, get about more effortlessly than she did when she walked about her flat in a lithe body, not too long ago.

  Soon she would have to telecommute. The idea of working from home suited her fine. She could indulge protracted coitus fantasies with Averly, her feeder, that went on day and night. Brandon and Boyd were just as comfortable in the virtual world as she, so she didn’t see them minding. The only real holdout from virtual reality was Alexandra, and Adrienne didn’t entertain any hope of her abstaining much longer. Even playing action figure doll out in the field, she was increasingly wired up to them back at home, and the intel they could pump into her virtual-reality goggles and backpack laptop.

  Averly used the same antigravity suit technology to float beside her, the fabric’s magnets repelling the various magnetic fields in the apartment. A skin tight body suit left nothing to the imagination, the way they both liked it. He used a floating metal tray to support the victuals destined for her mouth, placed teasingly on the other side of him, away from her. That way, he could stroke her with his left hand, and reach for the morsels with his right hand, keeping himself good and hard in the process, and keeping her pretty wet herself.

  When the tray emptied, he adjusted the suit’s resistance to the magnetic fields with a sliding bar on his belt that doubled as a belt buckle, and drifted down to ground level.

  Averly worked in the kitchen, restocking the tray, whistling the whole time to maintain an auditory connection with her. He hammed up the chopping, grating, slicing, cleaving, hammering, and other sounds of food preparation, which he knew she loved to hear.

  Twelve hours into her thirteen-course meal, maintained at the height of Eros the entire time by a skilled feeder, Adrianne incurred her first psychic hit. They often came unbidden like this at the end of a long session of feeding, after her sexual hormones had surged long enough to drive a phase shift in consciousness. She rarely appreciated the interruptions to her sex life, but this time, she was grateful.

  Brandon was given to similar flashes of intuition. But with him, it was more often or not the end to a long chain of calculations of probabilities playing out at an unconscious level when he didn’t have room in his conscious mind for them.

  She ferreted out her cell phone from one of her fat folds. Like extra pockets, they came in very handy for hiding food from Averly, as well, in case he decided to hold out on her. He was moody like that.

  She speed-dialed Alexandra. As soon as Adrianne heard her pick up at the other end, she took control of the call. “We better leave those HAARP people alone,” she said. “I see them knocking a UFO out of the sky with that energy shield they have around the planet thanks to those Tesla towers. The damn ship is half the size of Alaska. Can’t wait to see how they plan to keep that out of the news.”

  “When is this happening?” Going by her tone, Alexandra was making no effort to conceal her eagerness.

  “Hard to say.”

  Alexandra had a way of humoring her and her visions, and ignoring Brandon and his intuitive flashes, which Adrienne thought both unfair and unreasonable. She even wondered at one time if Alexandra was lesbian, thus explaining her preferential treatment. This one time, she didn’t mind the favoritism; the stakes seemed high enough to warrant it.

  “You better get Brandon hopping on that idea to clone yourself.” Adrienne let that sink in. She knew Alexandra had to be rattled by getting her brain hacked. Adrienne wasn’t supposed to know Alexandra was entertaining fantasies of duplicating herself. “You’ll need the clone to explore that ship. God knows what kind of radiation it might be giving off. You’ll be busy fending off the men in black, who’ll have other ideas for the clone.

  “And you’ll need me to fabricate your virtual life alter ego to infiltrate the ship’s computers to find out what she can, while you’re busy playing action-figure in the flesh.” She let that sink in, knowing full well that Alexandra had barely begun to seriously entertain these notions herself.

  “As to the robot-body you download yourself into, you’ll need to leave that on location at the spaceship when you get tired freezing your ass off in Alaska. Not to mention the robot could communicate with the algorithmic consciousness telepathically by secure radio frequencies to combine their handiwork, maybe enough to fly that vessel to where we’re the only ones with access to it. Furthermore, the robo-version of yourself may well be needed to rescue the clone past the radiation expiration point.

  “As to procuring the robot with your robo-likeness, I’d get Boyd on that right away. Even the two beasty boys of mental brawn are going to need time to come up to speed.”

  “Looks like you’ll all be working from home for me in lieu of your vacation,” Alexandra mused out loud.

  “Suits me fine,” Adrienne said. “I have another few hundred pounds to put on before we meet again.”

  “God, that’s so gross.”

  “Love you, too,” Adrienne said, and signed off.

  She inhaled and nearly had an orgasm just off the aroma. “Is that roast beef I smell, snuggle bunny?”

  “That’s for me to know, and you to find out,” Averly shouted back from the kitchen. “Can you identify the cuisine?”

  She sniffed the air so hard she bounced herself off the wall. “Ethiopian? You dog, you.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Boyd strained under the pressure of his fembot’s latest wrestling hold.

  She twisted and mangled his body into one painful pin after another. The camel clutch. The chin lock. The lion’s claw. The crippler crossface.

  Lucky for him, his drug abuse left his body surprisingly free of tension and limber, allowing him to slip out of the holds as readily as she put him in them. The wrenching full nelson. The Fujiwara armbar. The cobra clutch. The stomach claw.

  Maybe Femmy had gotten her subroutines mixed up. Maybe the lovemaking program needed adjusting.

  �
��What are you doing?” Tinker Bell, yet another of his robot companions, asked.

  “We’re making out,” Boyd managed breathlessly.

  The small robot, cobbled together from lawn mower parts (its base), an upright Hoover vacuum from back in the day (its mid body), and a very personable head, tilted its head sideways at the curiosity before him. “You’re not planning to live long enough to reproduce, are you?” He straightened up his head and said, “Why don’t you bury your face in this?” He tilted over to expose his twirling lawn mower blades. “Less painful.”

  “Very funny. Do I look like I’m laughing to you?” Boyd struggled to get out his next words past the front sleeper hold. The head and neck rake. And the mandible claw. His body was being tested beyond its warranty limits today. “You could help me, you know?”

  “You chose to upgrade to Fembot Fatale over there, and stick me in the closet somewhere and forget about me. I hope she wrings your neck. I taught her those moves, by the way.” He howled his sickening hyena laugh as he turned his back on Boyd and rolled toward the front yard to finish attending to his garden duties—mowing the lawn and clipping the shrubbery. The wheels gave him just enough clearance to avoid tearing up the carpet and the front door riser board on his way out.

  “This is what I get for giving you a mind of your own!” Boyd shouted after him. “No good deed goes—” He couldn’t get out the last word past the three-quarter facelock.

  Finally, to the rescue, cloud cover drifted in, greatly reducing the light shooting in the window, and allowing Boyd’s strength to briefly surpass Femmy’s. He slipped out of the hold and secured her hands long enough to reach her on/off button, and shut her down. Poor Femmy. Solar power was not without its drawbacks. His lungs heaved as he dropped to the ground on all fours, trying to bring his panting under control.

  He picked up the ringing cell phone vibrating the carpeted floor that had slipped out of his pocket during his tussle with Femmy, and somehow, against all odds, managed not to get shattered. “Yeah!”