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

by Dean C. Moore

  Most of the bulbs were burnt out, and Manny hit his shin against a box in the hall while navigating through the entrance to his flat on the second floor. He’d been meaning to replace the lights but it was less hassle just to let his eyes adjust.

  He made his way to the sink and emptied the bag of overripe fruit he had purchased for a discount at Monterey Market. They had the best produce in the area, better even than the Berkeley Bowl. They prided themselves on freshness, and Manny prided himself on ridding them of their dark, dirty secrets out the back side of the building. They were only too happy to conceal any notions that produce actually ever went bad, ever lost that ethereal glow they sported inside the store. Nothing but the best for his boys, all locally grown, and organic, of course.

  He broke the brown skin on the bananas so his frenzied fruit flies could have at them. They were thriving, he was happy to say. Every time he looked around their numbers were growing. They had broken off into separate colonies now, and the ones rimming the toilet bowl kept him company while he took a shit, providing those tactile skin sensations that lovers usually provided, at a fraction of the cost and annoyance.

  The rats were lying around drunk again. Harvey, gray-haired and senescent, stumbled his way to his bed. Manny had made miniature beanbag beds for all of them, and set them against the walls in his bedroom. Harvey vomited before collapsing into his Hacky Sack mattress. Manny freshened the doggie bowl with another bottle of beer. Keeping the rats addicted was the only way he could coax the little critters to hang around. Apparently the downstairs neighbors were even bigger slobs, and they were often tempted to stray. So far, the plan was going off without a hitch. To allay guilt over over-taxing their kidneys, he kept an emaciated cat, which the rats ganged up on at least twice a day. Lulu, the cat, wasn’t happy if she didn’t get worked over. He wasn’t sure what her diagnosis was.

  Manny never fed Lulu; she subsisted on rat droppings, rotting fruit, and plates of uneaten food Manny left out after passing out drunk himself. Of course, that was all speculation. He wasn’t really sure what cats ate; he had never looked into it. All he knew was Lulu would howl incessantly until he let her in from the fire escape one fateful day. Ever since then, she seemed perfectly content to have one or two good wails a day to get all that gut-wrenching depression – if it was depression – out of her system. Could have been the pain of cancer the rats were distracting her from; she did look pretty bad.

  Manny sat on the toilet staring at faces on the wood grain of the door to the bathroom, haunting, ghoulish countenances rising up from the allegedly random whorls of wood. He dropped his eyes to the stained linoleum floor, and found a chorus of nightmarish facades contemplating him from below as well. Robin had taken one look at his dive and insisted that his inner artist, his soft sensitive side, denied as a child by his oppressive father, was erupting in colorful ways, and he best deal with it before the eruptions got any more colorful. He dismissed Robin’s diagnosis for the simple reason he couldn’t ever remember having artistic impulses of any kind. Nor was he subject to prolonged bouts of introspection. Which is precisely what set him apart from the carnival of fools populating the Berkeley streets, making him feel like a stranger in a strange land.

  Manny flushed the toilet and pushed back the moldy plastic curtain on the Victorian bathtub, left over from the original tenants before him who no doubt dated back to that era. Once inside a rent-controlled apartment, everyone held on to the bitter end, forestalling even death, which just didn’t seem worth giving up the discount, not with uncertainties of what lay on the other side.

  Fandango, another of his rats, was licking the mold-covered grout between the shower tiles. Either he’d gotten hooked on its hallucinogenic properties, or secondary to subsisting on beer for the last six months, his kidneys had indeed failed. Failing kidneys meant the mind wasn’t far behind. Manny closed the curtain back on Fandango to give him some privacy.

  ***

  Manny woke up hours later, in the middle of the night, bolted upright in bed, realizing he had forgotten to feed the cockroaches.

  He padded out to the kitchen and flicked on the lights. There was a time when that set off a mad dash for dark crevices. Instead, the cockroaches all froze waiting to see what he’d do next. He slid over one of the folding chairs from his dinette set, by the sink, and reached into the dirty plates buried underwater, liberated them one at a time and set them on the floor. The boys appeared hungry tonight, judging by the rush for the plates.

  Manny fell asleep in the chair, awoke the next morning to find the cockroaches gone. Well, they were fickle that way.

  He set the polymerized glass chalice on the blender base, and reached into the refrigerator for the fresh banana and mango and milk. The interiors sparkled as if the fridge was brand new. The oasis of fresh food inside was quite the contrast with the rest of his apartment. He had no explanation for why he was anal about his refrigerator and nothing else. Robin said it was a reflection of the cold analytical side of his mind he used to function at work as an investigator, suggesting his entire personality was a façade. The sweltering unconscious that was the rest of the apartment was the real him. If he ever expected to heal… he had never heard the rest, had zoned out every time Robin got on his high horse.

  Robin had good intuitions, he’d give him that, but he was still a little green as regards human nature, explaining why he revered Drew, his life partner, who was to modern-day psychology, apparently, what Freud was to his era. There were times when Manny found the woman a bit scary. Aristocracy stayed on top generation after generation for a reason – they manipulated people better than anyone. The fact that Manny felt so good around her was proof enough that some evil force was at work, as he never felt that good ever.

  He topped off his protein drink with a one-pound bag of peanut M&Ms, and set the whole concoction to puree. About a third of the bag didn’t fit, so he saved it for the next morning.

  Manny exited the apartment drinking out of the blender jar, not realizing he’d forgotten to transfer the contents to a thermos he kept for the sake of protecting his public image. Alas… He’d have time to finish it and tuck it under the front seat by the time he got to work.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Perdue’s yawn bored another Holland tunnel through his face. Purnell didn’t think he’d survive the drilling. Finally, the hole closed and what was left was the landslide of facial muscles which would likely never find their original resting places again. Not even after being propped up by the sixteen ounces of Dunkin Donuts coffee he was holding.

  The SWAT team had been hitting it hard, Perdue harder. He had to be the first man in, and the last man out. He made all the tough decisions. They were all aging on fast-forward, and Perdue led the pack here, as well. They were all feeling sleep deprived. Purnell wasn’t sure if he wanted to apply the term “slap happy” to a bunch of guys with automatic weapons, but not doing so might just hide the truth.

  Finished with his morning ritual of yawning facing the sun, he sipped his coffee. He gazed at the perp’s residence as he kept an ear to Robes-Pierre in the back of the SWAT truck.

  “You gotta love this guy,” Robes-Pierre said in his customary ejaculatory way. RP kept himself juiced on his own endorphins keyed just a few registers above what you could get sniffing a couple lines of coke every couple hours. “I should have thought of this. I’d be sitting pretty, right now, instead of set to slow-simmer in the back of this oven on wheels. Hey, speaking of, you ever gonna put in a requisition for them to fix the air-conditioning?”

  “I like it hot,” Perdue said.

  “I bet,” Robes-Pierre mumbled.

  Perdue smiled at his expense. “Tell me more about Video Game Guy.”

  “His game’s called POSTAL.” Robes-Pierre said, slapping his hands together. “And it’s no commonly hypnotic video game. It’s Mesmer on steroids. Each time you play this thing, it fine tune’s itself to your likes and dislikes, creating the perfect nightmare situations that
might drive you to go postal. I guess not everyone wants to shoot up a bank, which would be my preferred mode, incidentally.”

  Perdue smiled. “Glad I could help keep you on the straight and narrow, RP.”

  “My favorite setting is the Infiltrator mode. Where the players turn on their own teammates like sleeper cells going active. Freaking stunning. I’m telling you, with some tweaks, you could probably turn idiots into Einsteins with this thing. We’re talking serious psychological makeovers, the kind your shrink couldn’t accomplish with the best meds in a hundred years.”

  Purnell eyed the team spread out at the edge of the perp’s property, eating their breakfast rolls and coffees, perched on the rocks that were part of the landscaping. Pembroke’s front yard dipped downwards from the street like the bowl of an amphitheater, with the house sitting center-stage at the lowest point. Must be hell in the rain, Purnell thought. Though, with some stadium seating cut into the yard, he could be a rock star playing to crowds of thousands without ever leaving his house. The perfect solution for a performer with agoraphobia. Also the perfect solution for Perdue and his team. They had the high ground going in. Not that they needed it. “Don’t you risk alerting this perp to our presence? The guys aren’t even bothering to stow their weapons.”

  “He’s a computer nerd, Purnell.” Perdue’s eyes corrected for the rising sun faster than a porcupine could get up its needles. “We’re not scaring a skunk that can spray us. We’re stepping on a slug.”

  “That window on your soul? Do me a favor, and pull down the blind.”

  Perdue smiled. Purnell was beginning to think in the absence of a good fight, Perdue was reduced to getting a rise out of others the old fashioned way, by being an asshole.

  “Hello,” Perdue said. He set down the coffee. Purnell turned to see Pembroke aiming a rocket launcher at the SWAT truck. A smart tactical move, all in all, as it would rob them of access to their heavier artillery. “This is why I don’t believe in gun control,” Perdue said. “Every citizen should have the right to defend themselves against a government turned oppressive and autocratic. A second ago, who’d have taken him seriously?”

  Perdue swung his rifle off his shoulder, slipped it out of automatic-fire mode and into sharp-shooter single-shot mode, and took aim through the scope.

  Pembroke let go with the rocket launcher.

  The truck took the hit hard, rolled sideways until it was right-side up again on the other side of the road.

  “Was that an RPG!” Robes-Pierre shouted from inside the SWAT bay. “The guy’s got game.”

  He stuck his head out the back of the truck. “Ah, Perdue, you might want to check out your men.”

  Perdue examined his troops. Two of them had gone POSTAL on the others. There were now no guns aimed at Pembroke, as the entire team was caught either defending themselves against the moles, or doing the attacking.

  Outcries went out from his own people taking hits from armor-piercing shells slipping past their next-generation Kevlar. Perdue, his face expressionless, his breathing regular, raised his rifle, and took out the first mole.

  As the other mole turned his weapon on Perdue, his rifle jammed. Without the assistance of a scoped rifle at this distance, Purnell didn’t figure his chances were particularly good.

  Perdue took out his pistol and shot the mole dead before he got off another shot. Purnell would remember not to bet against him again.

  Robes-Pierre came running up to Perdue, who saw him coming and said, “Get back in the truck, RP. You’re not cleared for field work. Leastways, not outside your protective womb.”

  “I just came to say, you better be prepared for one or more of these guys to come out of sleeper mode as you get closer to Pembroke. We don’t know how many of them have been playing POSTAL. And Pembroke, like any code writer, thinks of the game in terms of levels. Get past level one—”.

  “Yeah, yeah— I get it,” Perdue said. “Remind me to remove ‘defenseless nerd’ from my vocabulary.”

  “Will do.” RP raced back to the protective womb of the truck.

  Perdue gestured for his men to descend. The ones with wounds had already applied field patches and were back in action, even if not exactly at a hundred percent. They didn’t hesitate responding to the orders.

  As the men disappeared into the house, Purnell awaited either weapon discharge or the sight of Pembroke walking out the door with his hands up. When neither outcome was forthcoming, he grew antsy.

  “What the hell?” he said. “Maybe it was a bad idea to let them go in and fortify themselves in the event they were going to turn on you.”

  “That’s why I gave them a head start. This was turning out to be a slow morning. And that RPG blast spilled my coffee.”

  Purnell checked to confirm the coffee cup’s contents lay sprawled on the asphalt, drying in the morning sun. “I’ll bring a socket you can stick your finger in from now on. The next time you want to raise the stakes, you could at least have the decency of telling me. I’m supposed to have your back. Right now, I’m thinking of putting a bullet in it myself.”

  Perdue smiled. “You’re growing on me, Purnell. An idealistic fool who can handle his end of the repartee is a tolerable fool.” He checked his weapon, changing settings yet again to grenade launcher mode. “You hang back, keep an eye on RP in case any of the neighbors decide to go POSTAL on him. Can’t have one of them taking out my best hacker.”

  “Any luck, you won’t make it out, and I’ll finally get control of this company. Put an end to our mass murder spree.”

  “When you’re facing down a gun, Purnell, even an idealist has to fire back if he plans to continue to repopulate the world with more fools like him.”

  “For the record, I remember when you were less of an asshole. When I write your biography, I’ll make sure this important fact is documented so the reader can better appreciate your descent into the heart of darkness.”

  Perdue smiled.

  Purnell watched him walk down the driveway, like he couldn’t be bothered with using the patches of cover in the landscaping and running from hiding place to hiding place, like any sane person. He’d be using his special goggles to see past the reflections in the windows of the house, and see what lay behind them, especially rifle muzzles aimed his way. Maybe he figured his catlike reflexes would take care of the rest. The goggles benefited from VR assist and computer telemetry that analyzed shadows and upgraded images, and were wirelessly connected to the SWAT-truck supercomputers. They had zoom functions and could see across various bands of the EM spectrum. The goggles were another of RP’s toys. And one more reason Perdue babied him in ways he didn’t the rest of the team.

  Purnell footed it to the back of the SWAT truck. “You cut off the rest of the team, right? Jammed their weapons? Blocked their telemetry?”

  “Yep. Ten steps ahead of you. Doesn’t mean they aren’t still lethal. There’s still a lot they can do with whatever’s at hand. Can’t erase their training from here.” RP looked up from his telemetry. “You think he’ll kill them?”

  “Not if he can avoid it. Easier to reprogram them than train new recruits to his exacting specifications.”

  “I’ll get to work on those tweaks to POSTAL. Make sure he thanks Pembroke for me, or we’d have zero chance of bringing these guys back on line anytime soon.”

  “I’ll do that,” Purnell said absently, his attention already more on what to do if Perdue got carried away with his morning constitutional.

  “Good thing Perdue had the SWAT truck built to withstand this kind of punishment, huh?” RP said, already working on tweaking the POSTAL game software. “Give the guy some credit. Normal people dream when they sleep. He strategizes.”

  “That’s what concerns me,” Purnell said.

  ***

  Perdue watched Widget playing POSTAL on an iPad, resting his back on the other side of the fridge, ripped out of the wall and thrown on its side to provide cover. His goggles weren’t particularly impressed by the shiel
ding, able to see Widget as readily as if he were standing in the open.

  Sensing Perdue’s presence, Widget raised his voice, “You gotta get on Pembroke’s network, Perdue. This wi-fi is to die for. I’m playing online with six thousand gamers and counting. You know the kind of throughput you need for that? The Pentagon makes do with less.”

  Great, Perdue thought. So much for RP cutting them off from the SWAT network. Thanks to Pembroke, they’d found a better one. That meant they were more fortified than he was. If Widget was kicking back, he had already set out his traps and snares and was banking on them doing the rest of the work for him. Of course, whether Widget was friend or foe was yet to be determined. “Where the hell is Pembroke?”