Serial Sunday: The Renaissance Man and the Strange New World, Part II
- 12 hours ago
- 6 min read
By Ryan Fleming.
Outside the Midtown brownstone, the assembled press of New York City was aflutter with excitement that the reports of a strange new world coming from the Pacific were being investigated by the legendary Renaissance Man. Inside the brownstone, on the other hand, Charles Chance, a name he had adopted long before the moniker of the Renaissance Man, was slumped against the heavy door that marked the demarcation point for that persona.
Outside the brownstone, Charles Chance was known to the world as the Renaissance Man. Inside the brownstone, Charles Chance would be the first to admit that he was merely one part of the combined talents that were responsible for the exploits credited to the Renaissance Man.
Chuck, as Chance preferred to be called by his friends, was no slouch when it came to doing his part. He had been brought up on an Iowa farm by his German parents to do his share of the chores as soon as he could walk. The first time he had left home it had been to run away, lie about his age, change his name, and enlist in the army – if a fresh-faced private did not pull his weight, chances were he would not last long in the trenches. When he was not smiling confidently for the cameras, his main duties were punching the lights out of anyone standing in their way.
He had been chosen for the part of the Renaissance Man by Reginald Cullen. The oldest member of the ragtag collections, for years he had been a non-commissioned officer in the British Army, oppressing all over the globe until they finally fought an enemy who could fight back with the same technology. The Englishman had met Chuck in England after the War, both masterless men cut adrift by the cessation of hostilities.
They were joined by Benjamin Williams. Another man left adrift following the end of the War. It had been Williams that had really captured the woolly mammoth that now lived in the Bronx Zoological Park. Like Chance, he was a midwestern farm boy, albeit from Oklahoma rather than Iowa, and his parents were both Americans – Choctaw and African American, to be specific.
As they made their home base in a Midtown brownstone, the trio would meet Aileen Wong. The second youngest member of the group, and the only one originally from the city from where they operated. She had grown up around machines most of her life and was the one who had kept the team’s ice crawlers moving when they had rescued the lost Antarctic expedition.
The now quartet would also meet Annie Thomas in New York City. Her talent for numbers and organisation bordered on the preternatural, whether applied to the group’s efforts or at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library where she had first met the group. Those talents proved essential when the pirate airship had been shot down over the Hudson by the artillery piece that still sat atop the brownstone.
A mission to Cullen’s homeland had introduced them to Alastair Eliott, an orphan scratching out a living on the streets. His guile and bravery during those events had led to his being invited back to join them. Barely in his teens, to the rest of the world he was known as the Renaissance Man’s ward, to the team he was their jack-of-all-trades.
These were the Renaissance.
Much of the societies they tried to help would be unlikely to accept help from such a group, for numerous reasons, but help they would. That’s why the world only knew them as Charles Chance, the Renaissance Man.
***
Elsewhere in Midtown Manhattan, at the top of the tallest skyscraper, a young man stared determinedly at a map of the world. On the map, the territory of the great powers and their allies was colour coded. There had been many changes to that map since the end of the War, but whether before or after, one thing was abundantly clear from the map: there was precious little land that stood out without the colour of at least one great power painted over it.
The young man steepled his fingers. He had been presented an unprecedented opportunity, and he had always been an ambitious young man. His own parents had found out just how ambitious seconds before they perished in a freak accident. There was precious little land left on that map up for grabs, but a new continent had appeared, seemingly out of thin air, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
The great powers would no doubt conspire together to carve it up between them. Control of the coasts, protectorates and tributary states in the interior, eventual take over. Though the Americas, Africa, and China were at different stages of this process as the young man saw it, the ultimate result was the same. The process had been made simpler by the League of Nations compared to how it had been done prior, but it also made it that little bit slower.
International bureaucracy was a great gift to an ambitious entrepreneur.
And none came more ambitious than Maximilian S. Macmillan.
A glass of red wine lay untouched on the desk. His hulking valet, Ironstone, was the only other person in the penthouse study that on its own was bigger than many homes in the city.
“Do you know what the future holds?” Macmillan asked.
He had not asked his valet. Ironstone had also been in the employ of the young oligarch long enough to know anything not screamed was not directed at him.
Instead, Macmillan asked the four marble busts that sat on the mantle of the gargantuan fireplace of his study: Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Philip II of Spain, Napoleon Bonaparte.
“The future is this map all being one colour, but it won’t be the colour of any king, nor republic,” a smirk spread across his lips. “Nor even a socialist union.”
The four busts did not answer as Macmillan took the first sip of his wine. The four busts sat atop four plinths. A fifth plinth sat next to Napoleon, waiting for a fifth bust to join them one day.
“That one colour will belong to a corporation. A single corporation uniting all of humanity. Today, people lay down their lives for country, whatever that might mean. It’s just as meaningless as laying down your life for some king or God. One day, all of humanity will realise that the only thing worth putting your life on the line for is more money.”
Macmillan stood up from his desk, a block of solid marble the length of a whaleboat and continued speaking as he paced to the window.
“The Soviets, despite being Russian, have the idea but have it backwards. There has been no truly civilised society on the Earth since the British East India Company was castrated. These two entities, to the simpleton as dissimilar as apples and oranges, both organised people into unified goals and anyone that would not, or could not, pull their weight became a warning to the rest.”
Returning to his desk, his fingers hovered over a console of buttons by his left hand.
“They both had a great thing going for them. Control over enough land that they were dependent upon no royal proclamation or consent of the governed, other than to respect the niceties of diplomacy. Now, there is a brave new world ready to be made into whatever image her master has in mind for her.”
Macmillan pressed one of his buttons. From a small side door, not the opulent doors at the other end of the study, seven people lined up before the desk of the ambitious young man.
“Gentlemen,” he began, ignoring that one of them was a woman. “You have work to do.”
***
These were not the first underlings Maximilian Macmillan had spoken to that day. Since the late editions, one of which was now ashes in his study’s fireplace, had come out to assure the public that the Renaissance Man was on the case, Macmillan had known he had to move quickly. A telegram was dispatched from his secretary to one of his many employees in his skyscraper. From that employee another telegram was dispatched, and from that recipient another, until finally a telegram was delivered to a quiet man in Hell’s Kitchen.
The telegram simply listed an address.
A short time later, that quiet man, dressed in the uniform of the U.S. Postal Service, knocked on the door of a familiar brownstone.
In his hands, he carried a package. In his pocket, he carried a gun.
Ryan Fleming is the author of SLP's Reid in Braid and various short stories for the anthologies, as well as editing The Scottish Anthology.
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