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

  RENAISSANCE 2.0

  “Carnival of Characters, Crusades, and Causes”

  A Robin Wakefield Book

  By

  Dean C. Moore

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  CHARACTER INDEX

  LEADS

  Robin Wakefield

  Drew Morrow

  Clay Hartman

  MAJOR ENSEMBLE PLAYERS (Volume 1)

  Manny Breakman (Books 1 and 2)

  Winona (Books 1 and 2)

  Mort (Books 2-5) (Book 1, cameo only)

  Santini (Books 2-5) (Book 1, cameo only)

  Gretchen (Books 2-5)

  Perdue (Books 2-5) (Book 1, minor ensemble only)

  Purnell (Books 2-5) (Book 1, minor ensemble only)

  Piper (Books 2-5) (Book 1, minor ensemble only)

  Cliff (Books 2-5)

  Saverly (Book 2) (Book 1, minor ensemble only)

  Iona (Books 2-5)

  MINOR ENSEMBLE PLAYERS (Book 1)

  (the Cal Berkeley students)

  Chad

  Murray

  Fiona

  Adam

  Jeannie

  Spence

  Lorie

  Danny Sparks

  MINOR ESEMBLE PLAYERS (CAMEOS) (Book 1)

  Lucia

  Desdemona

  Vikki

  Thornwall

  Maynard

  Victoria

  Crispy

  Cilantro

  Zan

  Baxter

  Baudriguard

  BIT PLAYERS

  All other named characters

  BOOK 1

  “Humpty Dumpty had a Great Fall”

  ONE

  Rave had finally figured out how to blow up the world.

  A mere scientific curiosity at first, the idea had gotten under his skin and festered there, like one of those exotic tropical diseases spreading from the most minor of cuts. The idea was simple enough, but had proven quite the engineering headache.

  He petted his baby, drawing more arousal from its contorted pipes, Tesla coils, and crystal oscillators, than the breasts of a woman. But then, women were decidedly more complicated.

  Once he flicked the switch, Earth would enfold dimensions forever. What he was looking at, was a shortcut, a one-way ticket to the multiverse: access to any and all parallel universes. The mind-field created would allow anyone within its sphere of influence (which, after many recalibrations, now covered the entire globe) to slide from this reality to any alternate reality they desired.

  If centaurs and minotaurs and unicorns existed, if they were indeed more than mere imagination, one could easily key to them, and awaken in a magical world more suited to one’s tastes. Giants? No problem. Winged angelic people? Again, no problem. But they had to exist somewhere; the machine couldn’t create them. However, Rave figured, in infinitely many parallel universes, for sure, they had to exist somewhere.

  His device, in all likelihood, would end imagination, make it obsolete. Instead one would talk of “attunement,” “migration,” “vibrating to a dimensional frequency in keeping with one’s soul-emanations.”

  Of course, by “blow up” the world, he meant make it infinitely bigger. But there remained the vague possibility that his device, if it ever got out of tune, despite his efforts to make it forever self-tuning, could reduce the planet to a pile of rubble. A remote possibility. But certainly not out of the question. And worth the risk, in any case, to get humanity to settle in among the stars in such a way that they could never be a danger to one another again.

  His finger hovered over the switch just long enough to allow for some self-aggrandizement. He had done it, after all. He deserved a “You go, fella.”

  The doorbell rang.

  Eye to the keyhole, he observed a man dressed in black, possibly a tuxedo, standing erect and firm, looking every bit as calcified as the Greco-Roman pillars decorating his front porch.

  He opened the door.

  “Mr. Rave Landers, such a treat to find you home.” The man pushed his way inside the house, eyes hawking Rave’s machine.

  “Hey! Wait a minute! Who do you think you are pushing your way in here!”

  With a better look at him, Rave said, “I’ve seen you somewhere before. I never forget a face. I have quite the eidetic memory,” he said proudly. “Yes, it was in a photograph taken in 1836. You held a silver sphere under your arm, smiling like a fool. But that would make you…”

  “People have doppelgangers, Rave.” He slid his hand over the curving lines of the time machine, as if he was a fellow suitor for her affections. “Fathers have sons, and their sons have sons. You see how it goes?”

  “No. My memory has never failed me,” Rave said, drawing enough courage from his convictions to step closer towards him. “Even clones of the original would veer in another direction after so much time, owing to small errors in the duplication process. The only explanation is you haven’t aged at all past the point your development arrested. Quite remarkable, I guess that makes you a fellow scientist yourself.”

  “I may as well confess.” The man fussed with a tight-fitting leather glove, which he attempted to slip over his right hand, like a snake determined to squirm back into its shed skin. “Many fools ran around like you back then, convinced they had a free hand to remake the world in their own image. That silver sphere I had under my hand then, did you know what that was? Some idiot had decided to suspend gravity. You can just imagine…”

  “Yes!” Rave said. “Floating cities! A space race started over a hundred years ago, instead of fumbling to get underway now!” The man in black’s eyes rose from the glove he was wrestling. “People living much longer,” Rave said. “Of course, they’d morph into something else entirely if they didn’t spend some time in artificial-gravity fields.”

  The glove fitted in time to gesture demonstratively with that hand, the man said, “Nothing rattles you, does it? Your kind are all alike.”

  Rave said, “Aren’t you one of us?”

  “No. I’m a genetic freak, no more.” He caressed the time machine with his ungloved hand. The gesture had all the fondness of a farewell embrace. “Can you imagine me going around trying to give everyone what I have?”

  “No one dying!” Rave said. “Hundreds of years to acquire the enlightenment that usually takes lifetimes. The world might become a peaceful place.”

  The man in black laughed. “My God, what a fool you are. The innocent and the gullible shall be the death of us all, so sayeth Psalms.”

  The light finally flicked on in Rave’s head. His eyes went wild. And every drop of blood, as far as he could tell, migrated straight to his head. He sprinted to the closet, and dug through the pile of bric-a-brac for the shotgun. He’d gotten it for home security once upon a time, never bothered to learn to shoot it, and even now, couldn’t say if it was loaded or not. But it was his best chance, however slim.

  The man whistled an aria from Puccini. “I find opera very soothing, don’t you? Especially in technologically-driven End Times.” He pulled out a .50 caliber gun and shot holes in Rave’s device.

  He spared no angle of trajectory as he paced three-hundred-sixty degrees around it. “No!” Rave screamed with each bullet hole.

  “Relax, kid. I have to blow the entire house. Just couldn’t have you flicking that switch on me.”

  Rave realized his fatal mistake.

  “Sorry, bu
ddy. If it makes you feel any better, nine out of ten of these wild ideas get off the ground all the time. Sooner or later, thanks to people like you, we will climb out of this worldwide depression. In fact, I hazard to say, people like you are about the only force capable of pulling us out. But some ideas, well, let’s just say they’re best saved for one of those parallel universes where God does play with dice.”

  “It’ll take forever for the economy to rebound now, thanks to the likes of you.” Rave was on his knees, begging, not to save his life, but for this man to see reason, for the greater good of all.

  The gloved hand grasped the snow globe on the fireplace mantle with a Japanese pagoda monastery on a mountain perch. He shook it to get the snow to fall. “Maybe all that extra suffering will help people in another sense. All those Zen masters, don’t they come from the poorest countries?” He set the globe down. “There are worse things than a worldwide economic collapse, son.”

  “How did you even know?”

  “We’ve had our eyes on you for some time, Rave.” He pointed his gun, shaking it as he might his index finger, as if to say, you bad, bad boy. “Don’t look so flabbergasted; humility is so unbecoming on true genius. And let’s not belittle what you’ve accomplished.”

  Even now, Rave couldn’t quiet the scientist in himself. “So what, every so many years, you just find another agency to work for? Fake your death, move on?”

  “That’s about the size of it.” He looked up, appeared to be admiring the high ceiling and its wood inlays. “There are so many agencies, and they all wear black. Saves on suits.”

  “The more you try to control things, the more bizarre and random the universe becomes.”

  “As good an explanation for this Renaissance age as any I’ve heard.” He cackled. “The control freaks, they aren’t getting much sleep these days, I assure you.” He reached for a peanut in his jacket pocket, cracked the shell, and chucked the peanuts in his mouth.

  “The People’s Movement will get you. They have the numbers on their side.”

  The man in black shrugged. “I suppose in another universe they would have died out long ago. Where people had the sense not to resist. He tapped the tip of the gun to his nose. “A pleasure knowing you, Rave.”

  He fired a shot to Rave’s chest, stopped his heart cold.

  Rave could feel his brain powering down in the oxygen-starved environment, the room going black. Viewing the scene askew from his vantage point on the floor, he lived long enough to see the man in black reach inside his jacket and retrieve an explosive, which he then attached to Rave’s device. He was making sure nothing of the design remained.

  Maybe in another age he would have won, Rave thought. Not in this one. There were too many of them now, too many like Rave. He used the thought to find peace. He hoped he wasn’t deluding himself. Hadn’t they always had numbers on their side? What good had it ever done, really?

  ***

  As the lights went out for Rave, Thomas Rex (or T-Rex as he preferred to be called for the in-joke pertaining to his age) felt his heart skip a beat. One of the bullets he’d fired into the device caused a piece to break off. It struck the on-button.

  The device fired up despite his well-placed shots, which he had been assured by his scientists, would decommission it.

  In the ensuing vortex, he saw the world change around him time and time again. Giants stomped past one minute, rattling the earth in the process. Dragons swooped overhead the next, raining fire. Metropolises manifested that were so grand, T-Rex wasn’t sure if it was future Earth or some other planet.

  He worked feverishly to set the timer with just enough seconds for him to make it the hell out of there.

  Only, getting a safe distance from the blast would mean losing himself in whatever alternate reality to which his mind was attuned. Maybe if he focused only on this world at this time, as he fled...

  He felt himself carried into the air by the concussion wave behind him, as if he could suddenly fly. He had always had dreams of flying. None of them involved the hard landing that came next.

  When his eyes opened, he had no idea where he was.

  How many alternate realities looked just like the one he came from, except for any number of small details: some other president getting elected, some other invention making it to market to become another game changer… How long before the critical mass of these “minor” differences was enough to erase the grand destiny he’d been building for himself for time immemorial?

  As panic overran him, he grew more conscious of how he’d let fear control him all his life. Maybe, on final analysis, he would have been better off surrendering his mind to some higher power.

  TWO

  Johnny surveyed the stalled traffic. It was bumper to bumper for as far as the eye could see. To hell with this. He revved the throttle on his motorbike. “You might want to hold on tight,” he shouted to Phoenicia; then he cut loose on the throttle. He felt her hands grab his waist like a tourniquet.

  He sped between the stalled cars spaced just far enough apart to accommodate his racing motorbike, though he clipped a few side-view mirrors along the way. Phoenicia removed the helmet from his head and strapped it onto hers. “Probably a good idea,” he said.

  The two trucks up ahead were too wide to squeeze between. The bastards were definitely cramping his style.

  He spied the semi-trailer stalled in the far right lane, the one used for transporting cars on an upper and lower deck, currently emptied of cars. He got himself into position early to jump the car right behind it, and from there catapulted himself onto the top railing of the transport.

  He sailed over the top of the semi-truck, and back down onto the hoods of the cars in front, skipping like a pebble across a pond by timing the bounce of his tires with the jerking of his throttle.

  Phoenicia eyed the dented roofs in their wake. “It’s not fair to let your lifestyle cramp theirs.”

  “Not to worry. Most cars come built with memory metal, these days. They fix themselves. Clearly, they had someone like me in mind all along.” He caught her smirk in his side views.

  Johnny saw the cops blocking traffic up ahead about the time they saw him. They shared their feelings about his current antics by drawing their guns. Johnny braked, and spun his bike around. Though he was tempted to call their bluff, he headed back in the other direction.

  This time, the mad motorists he’d touched to get here awaited him outside their cars with whatever was at hand for beaning him really well.

  “You need mad skills to survive a world where no one has a sense of humor,” Johnny said as he sped toward the mob, figuring between them and the cops it was the lesser of two evils. He’d rather dodge baseball bats than bullets.

  He rode the ramps of the cars’ front windshields, worked the trajectories and the velocities until he landed on the car roof he was targeting. It had a two-seater kayak lashed to the roof rack with bungee cords. “Grab it.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “There are people trying to kill me. I thought now would be a good time for a relaxing boat ride.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Phoenicia freed the kayak and inverted it over their heads. “The sun was getting to me.”

  “Just don’t cover my eyes so much, I can’t see.”

  “Get to the punch line of this little joke before I take to clubbing you myself. This boat isn’t exactly light.”

  “It’s made to be ultra-light.”

  “Don’t argue.”

  He accelerated onto the next car’s roof, then down its back end onto the street in front of the manhole. He grabbed the crowbar from the guy who was determined to club him to death, after delivering a left-hook to help change his stance on the matter.

  Johnny applied the crowbar to the manhole. Lifted it out of the way. Threw the kayak down the hole. And then Phoenicia. Before diving in himself, he looked up to see the crowd converging on him from all sides. “I can’t stand mob mentality.”

  Once ins
ide the sewer line, Johnny jumped in the kayak, waited for Phoenicia to climb in. “Shit, I forgot to tell you to grab the paddles,” he said.

  “Bitch, bitch, bitch.”

  Johnny picked up a tennis racket drifting amid the flotsam, used it as a paddle.

  Phoenicia found a stick. She stood and drove it to the bottom of the sewer line and pushed off. “Maybe you’re right, and fortune favors the bold.”

  “You see? A little attitude change, and a whole new world comes into focus.” She was quiet. “You’re smiling at me, don’t deny it.” He craned his head in time to see her suppress a grin and pretend to be irritated.

  “I suppose this quiet time-out’ll do us good after all that excitement.”

  “Is that an alligator coming toward us?” Johnny said. “God, I heard those things lived down here. I just never believed it.”

  ***

  “Oh, God. Oh, God.” Phoenicia’s pitch climbed another octave. “Oh, God.”

  “I suppose now is not the time to mention, I’m not particularly religious,” Johnny said, slamming her back against the refrigerator. He picked up a Schlitz while he was there, popped the top.