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

by Dean C. Moore

  Spence whirled around and threw a punch. Hartman grabbed his fist. Stared at it. There it was. Proof that enlightenment triggered not gratitude but loathing. Several generations of Big Brother later, the response had become genetic. What was one to do but wipe the slate and start over? The realization flicked a switch in back of Hartman’s brain.

  He ripped Spence's arm off at the shoulder.

  Spence stared at his squirting blood in shocked disbelief.

  Hartman sighed, his face passive. “Are we any closer to the truth, Spence? Because I feel the time is ripe for revelation.”

  Gasping, squealing, Spence ran for the door. Found it locked.

  “You can't run from the truth, Spence. It'll haunt you the rest of your days. Best to face up to things right here, right now.”

  Spence charged him like a bull, head first. Screaming. Hartman used his severed arm to bash him – again and again – over the cranium.

  “Talk fast, Spence. With each tap on the noggin the return on investment of my original insight diminishes tenfold.”

  Hartman grabbed him by the head, pressing a hand against each side of his face. He dangled him off the ground, shaking him. “Do you feel a breakthrough coming on?”

  “Yes! Yes!” Spence said, as he pressed against his hemorrhaging wound to stem the tide. He could feel his consciousness flickering; fear alone was keeping him from passing out. “I— I— I need to melt into her with each orgasm. I can use the profound sense of peace to erode the blockages in my brain… Take advantage of the endorphins to— to neutralize the programmed behavior!”

  “Spence, you're just repeating what I told you, word for word. That's not revelation. That's being bird-brained. You feel your mind getting smaller? I do.”

  Hartman waited as patiently as he knew how for the revelation that never came. Then he squished Spence’s head in his mighty hands like an over-ripe melon.

  “God, it's like talking to a wall.”

  ***

  From within the main festivities room, the onlookers snapped themselves out of their shocked stupor.

  Manny and Robin pulled out their guns.

  “Drama therapy, huh?” Manny croaked at Winona. The two detectives charged out of the room as Winona collapsed on the sofa.

  “Oh, Clay,” she moaned out loud. You didn't let him give you the gift he had for you. OCD is the flipside of incessant thinking. That kind of mind power, redirected, could make him like you. Enough mental energy to light up the world!

  ***

  From the hall, Robin and Manny heard screams echoing through the house. Party revelers thudded against locked doors, scrambling to get out.

  “Shit!” Robin exclaimed. “They must have a monitor in each of the rooms. So they can watch the dramas play out while they wait their turn with the good doctor.”

  “He's got better waiting-room etiquette than the rest of my doctors.”

  Robin sprinted after Manny up the stairs to the closest locked door impotently restraining the sounds of screaming on the other side.

  Manny reached for the doorknob, noticed it turned freely with no effect. There was no visible lock on the door. “What the hell?” He tried to break the door in with a hard shove, then motioned to Robin. They tackled it together.

  “Don't you love the fine workmanship you just can't pay for, anymore?” Robin said, drawing his gun. He aimed at the doorknob.

  “Save your bullets,” Manny said, after testing the give on the door at various heights, and realizing the entire door had no play, as if slotted into a groove for which the doorknob was irrelevant. “I’m guessing, once the traps are sprung, these things are designed not to open, lock or no lock.”

  Robin elected to try his gun anyway after telling the guy in the room to step back. After shattering the lock and getting nowhere, he holstered his pistol.

  He checked his cell phone. “No signal. This area is mostly hills and trees,” he said, pocketing the cell. “Unless… Hartman.”

  “All this wood and stone, could be just one more consequence of the home’s lovely design features.”

  Robin looked up for a landline, saw what might be a hide-away phone in the hall. He guessed right, but it was dead. “Now this definitely is Hartman,” he said, holding the receiver.

  “Remind me to give up this job for one where I don’t have to think twenty steps ahead.”

  “Hey! You still out there?” came the panicked voice from behind the door.

  The two detectives, feeling powerless, didn’t respond to the poor man.

  “I guess they're safer in there than out here,” Robin said.

  “On the other hand, let’s hope one of them is better at trap doors and hidden passageways than I am, or Hartman is likely to find them before we find him.”

  ***

  Winona watched Robin and Manny run up a flight of stairs, overhearing their conversation thanks to the acoustics of the old house. She knew once those rooms were locked there was no way of getting in or out of them in the conventional manner. That left the crawl spaces as the only option, and they wended through the house in a convoluted, counterintuitive manner meant to foil the brightest rat in the maze. She retrieved the floor plan she had pocketed earlier, and trotted after them.

  Reaching the upstairs hall somewhat breathlessly, Winona whistled to get their attention. She nearly got her head shot off.

  “Oh, boys! You want to get in and out of mysteriously locked rooms quickly? You're looking at the puzzle queen.” She waved the floor plans in front of them. “Not to mention, former tour guide at Disneyland.”

  Manny grabbed the blueprints out of her hand. “Unbelievable. Looks like you're the one person he shouldn't have invited.”

  “We need to get one thing straight. That's my future husband whose head you're thinking of blowing off. But we can have our honeymoon at Bellevue, instead. If you're not with me on this, I can't help you.”

  Manny, hearing the screams, studied the map, totally lost; he may as well have been a sighted person trying to make sense of Braille. “Fine, you win. Talk about emotional blackmail.”

  “My wife's worse,” Robin said.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Dying on the floor, Spence managed to squeeze more living into his final moments than most. His mind galvanized the most compelling episodes of his life to ensure he carried only the right mental baggage into the next lifetime.

  ***

  Spence fished alongside his buddy Thornwall off the Berkeley Pier which jutted into the water an astounding 3,000 feet. One of the longest piers in California, it owed its distinction to the shallow waters that made the engineering feat possible. They were angling for shinerperch and bullheads. The more veteran fishermen who understood what they were doing better could pull in sharks, rays, jacksmelt, kingfish, and bass to forty-five pounds. Spence and Thornwall had never made a dent in any of those other species. Of course, it helped to investigate what fish to expect at different times of the year and what to use to fish for them. Spence and Thornwall were of the more spur-of-the-moment variety of fishermen who never thought beyond grabbing their poles and their brewskis.

  Maynard landed his butt on the deck on the other side of Spence. His line was in the water before the rest of him had settled in to a comfortable position he might actually hold for an hour or more.

  Spence had bumped into Maynard at the National Air and Space Museum some years back, and immediately fell into arguing over the exact shade of red used in Amelia Earhart’s red Vega. They finally fessed up to the sense of protectiveness they felt around Amelia, and that they were secretly pining for a woman of her exact character, part science nerd, part adventurer, who would perfectly complement them. That led to further confessions regarding their inherent narcissism and the fact they were at least being honest about just how far into loving another person they could get.

  Spence, like Maynard and Thornwall, belonged to that variety of handsome nerd that frequently landed girls, only to drive them away with their s
avantism, or embarrassing eccentricities which they seemed powerless to suppress. If anything, being around girls just brought it all to the surface, as if it were rising on the plumes of anxiety.

  “I’m making this dress for Victoria with frilly lace at the bottom…” Spence said, inseminating the egg of silence about them.

  “God, here we go.” Maynard groaned. Thornwall shared the sentiment by curling his lips in a squiggly line that echoed perfectly the lazy locks rolling off his head, and the even lazier ocean waves lapping the pier. The color bleeding out of his lips got the pink to a faded enough color to match his bloodshot eyes. “The longer you’re with her, the more of a fag you turn into. Next you’ll be doing her hair and nails.”

  After a protracted silence, Spence confessed, “I love doing her hair and nails.” Thornwall and Maynard shook their heads in two-part harmony.

  “The foot fetish thing I saw coming,” Thornwall said. “But not the hair. Armpit hair maybe. Expressing your undying love by licking her armpit hair. That seems more you.”

  Spence refused to admit he was guilty as charged, having spent the morning teasing her armpit hair with his teeth. “I do think I have a foot fetish. How did you see that coming? I didn’t see it coming.”

  “We’re all fetishists, idiot.” Maynard flicked his line. “It has to do with the superhuman concentration geeks are prone to in tandem with unusually high arousal states over stupid little things. Maybe if we were less excitable, or only got stimulated by the things that normals had feelings about. Like cars. Motorbikes. Baseball.”

  “As opposed to an electron’s P-state. Radioactive decay ratios. And growing fruit flies with two heads.” Thornwall seemed overly preoccupied by getting three undulations of worm onto the hook instead of just two.

  “I was the most popular kid in class with my three-headed fruit-flies,” Spence said defensively.

  “Yeah, in third grade.” Maynard reeled in his line a couple clicks.

  “No. In college, too. Guys never outgrow three-headed fruit-flies. Not even the two-headed ones,” Spence said.

  “The point is you need to learn to love without it turning into a tryout for the Obsessional Olympics.” Maynard yanked on his line looking convinced he’d snagged a rubber boot; it would be his third this week.

  It took the uninitiated effort to separate nerds into distinct personas. Even for other nerds, the job wasn’t so easy. It was times like this Spence was reminded Maynard was more argumentative than most, way more. It was a niche he’d carved out for himself. He also had this way of flicking his rod and whipping the line, as if he were fly-fishing along a fast-flowing river, to accentuate his every point, like now. Being too forceful with physical gestures in general was very him, in the way that Spence was too forceful with psychological gestures, like using the Vulcan mind-meld on a first date.

  “I don’t see what all the fuss is about obsessing.” Spence fished a hairy plastic caterpillar out of his tackle box, attached it to his line. “I find it very calming. Like standing under a waterfall of thoughts devoted to Victoria.”

  “Dude, you will drive away all your friends, us included.” Maynard went back to perfecting his fly-fishing.

  Thornwall, the most self-deprecating of the three of them, chimed in, “And we don’t have any friends. We can’t afford to be snobs. And even we can’t stand to be around you, anymore.”

  “That’s not true.” Spence saw the unsympathetic heads nodding in tandem in his peripheral vision. “You’re just jealous because you have to settle for sublimated love. Arguing in N’avi because you’ve watched Avatar so many times, it sounds more natural to you than English.”

  Maynard and Thornwall spent the next few minutes talking amongst themselves in N’avi just to be wiseasses. They had fleshed out the rest of the language in their downtime, and uploaded the tutorial to Cameron’s website. As it became progressively less chic to talk in it, as memory of the film waned, their private language just took on more cachet for them. The few girls remaining speaking the language in years to come would be just the ones they would be seeking for mates; girls of an equally constipated nature who could never let go of anything, raised on a lifetime of deprivation when it came to matters of the heart to ensure clinginess of world class proportions. Self-awareness of the fact was simply an item to stimulate chuckling in bed.

  “Look out, chickadee at three o’clock,” Thornwall said to give them time to get into character. They knew from experience that the real them was never something they wanted to present on a first date. Best to get the hooks in the fish first.

  “She’s got a fishing pole,” Maynard said, as if the sight of her carrying one wasn’t enough to push past his resistance to the idea. He needed to say the fact out loud a couple of times to get the reality to register in his brain. “She’s carrying a fishing pole.”

  “She’s a reporter, undercover. Got to be,” Thornwall said.

  “Could you be any more sexist?” Spence whispered, as she strolled closer.

  “It’s not sexist if it’s a fact. When was the last time you saw a girl out here?” Maynard said, always up for an argument on any subject because being right rated rather highly for him.

  “Will you check out those boots? I think she’s Hitler Youth.” Thornwall’s rod angled upwards like his boner.

  “Those are galoshes, you idiot,” Maynard said. “Though, I must admit, probably for the best Hitler never saw any. Not sure brown rubber wears as well as black leather on most chicks as it does on this one.”

  “Who are you going to pretend to be?” Thornwall said. “Decide fast. We have like ten seconds to get over ourselves.”

  “I think I’m going for Greek and suave, this time,” Maynard said. “Subsist on nothing but fish I catch, and live on my boat on the marina.”

  “Not bad. Save for the tan. I think all Greeks are tanned,” Thornwall said.

  “Freaking Greek-o-phobe.” Maynard yanked on his rod to make his reel sing, rather like a lewd whistle.

  Thornwall said, “I think I’m going for Aussie down under. Dropped my twelve-inch knife in the water, which I usually use to pull fish out with one stab, so now I have to resort to emulating the locals. How’s my accent?”

  “Best Russian I ever heard,” Maynard said in earnest.

  “Do Russians even fish?” Thornwall asked.

  “Better hope they do. Okay, enough. Here she is.”

  Pretty Girl sat down at the edge of the group, like a mockingbird pretending to be some species it wasn’t. “Hi, guys!” She sounded so bubbly and happy to be with them, they nearly came on the spot. “Fishing with two poles, huh? Should improve the odds.”

  They gazed down at their give-away hard-ons tent-poling their shorts and felt betrayed. “We’re very excited about fishing,” Spence said. “Hi, I’m Spence, and this is my geek friend Thornwall, pretending to be Russian.”

  In a passable Russian-accent, Thornwall said, “Why, what lovely hair you have, my dear.”

  “A Russian with a Red Riding Hood fetish, apparently,” Spence said. “We’re big on fetishes around here.” Pretty Girl smiled from ear to ear. “And this is Maynard who is going with Greek and suave, minus the sun tan.”

  “Maybe you would like to come back to my boat later?” Maynard twitched his eyebrows.

  “He’s not being sexually suggestive,” Spence said. “That’s just one of his six facial tics he’s auditioning for you. He does that whenever he’s around girls. It’s part of the larger mating ritual.”

  Pretty Girl turned to Spence. “I think I’ve decided you’re my favorite.”

  “He’s taken,” Maynard said triumphantly. “Besides, he digs into a relationship like a wood-boring bee. I, on the other hand, suffer from ADHD, so you can sleep around on me, come off-cue, and even change your hair color without me noticing. It’s very freeing once you get used to it. See, I can be funny too.”

  “Kind of hard-edged humor, though, like you have an ax to grind.” Pretty Girl cast h
er line, somehow managing to get it out further than any of the guys.

  “Maybe we can share her, before we get any nastier and come off like a swarm of killer bees,” Thornhill suggested. He extended his hand for her to shake. “I stare at rats’ asses all day long as part of a study. I’m trying to determine what size suppositories they can tolerate before it leads them to claw their own asses out, and what kinds of drugs are better absorbed anally than orally.”

  “That’s actually pretty fascinating,” Pretty Girl said. She sounded like she meant it.

  “I make pretty lousy money at it,” Thornwall confessed. “But when I finish my PhD I expect to make a fortune off one of the applications from my studies.”

  “Easy, big guy. She doesn’t need to know your entire life story in the first five minutes,” Maynard said. “I was going to let you keep hanging yourself the longer you talked, but as that isn’t working, it’s my turn.” Focusing his lips on Pretty Girl, he added conspiratorially, “I’m the most sexually experienced of the group, and have the biggest dick.”