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

by Dean C. Moore

  “Right on, man,” said pothead with the blond dreadlocks, sauntering by in his Birkenstocks. Though he couldn’t be bothered to slow his gait any.

  “Amen, brother,” Cerise chimed in. Maybe that alliance wasn’t as far off as Chad thought.

  Chad caught Robby rolling his eyes as the voices sounded off from the booth to the other side of them. Those were the Satanists for Post-Apocalyptic Survival. Not exactly the company the People’s Movement and The Help were looking to have beside them. But it could have been worse. They could have been sandwiched between the Sisters for Perpetual Indulgence (gay men who wore habits and rode motorcycles) and the colon-cleanse fanatics. Something about blocking kundalini from rising if we didn’t all do coffee colonics. That was their fate the day before.

  ***

  As Chad’s brain sent its final sparks of life through its internal networks, what was left of Chad inside the punchbowl in the grand hall of Hartman’s home couldn’t help thinking how silly he had once been. He was out to save the world; he just had no clue how to save himself. The sentiment would be confirmed further by the next memories to flash across his neural nets.

  ***

  Walking down Bancroft Avenue, Chad noticed the car colors this year were off. The trend had shifted from silver to white across the board, and amid Prius, quite popular in his part of the world, sea-glass green was all the rage. Big Brother’s solution to the People’s Movement was color therapy on a mass scale, figuring compliance would be up versus putting Quaaludes in the drinking water and hoping for the best. Easier to keep meddling with the mass psyche on the down low this way.

  He was already working on his counterstrike. A stunt worthy of Jack La Lane. He’d chain a bunch of scantily-clad muscle-bound types to a semi-trailer carrying the national debt, on top of which would sit the Wall Street bail out money, and have them carry the float by bits in their mouths. Not content to stop at the symbolic gesture, they’d tote the trailers up each lane of I-5, blocking traffic for miles, and they’d time the demonstration to shut down every major freeway in the country.

  Then again… popular sentiment was already with them on the big bailout. Most everyone was already seeing red. Better he focus on outing the other dirty little secrets of the one percent. For instance, fracking with chemicals that poisoned the ground water and had flames coming out of the faucet every time a rural landowner reached for the tap. In California, a woman bought a used SUV, drove it to Florida and noticed the gas needle had barely budged. She Googled it to figure out what was going on. A short while later, men in black came and took the device they had meant to remove before releasing the car for resale. Her gas mileage returned to normal. Maybe if people knew they were being enslaved for a purpose, to keep them fat, dumb, and lazy, and too frantic fighting to survive to come up with alternatives and business options that could put everyone on Easy Street and take control out of the hands of the few...

  Chad met with his shrink later that day, provided by the university for free. She advised that a cubic acre of fog, basically all the air we breathe and move around in throughout the day, was created by a single glass of water. In other words, people make mountains out of molehills and he should really learn to desist from catastrophizing.

  Maybe he was going about this all wrong. Making the enemy stronger by resisting him. Maybe he needed to switch into artist and engineer mode and give people countless new paths to travel down. Like that guy in North Carolina, who, for ten thousand bucks, took a Prius, affixed his own little black box, and doubled the mileage from fifty to one hundred mpg. Why fear men in black, when you could do them one better? Throw the designs on the internet for free, with assembly on the cheap from a thousand resellers… Surely then, there’d be no stopping the People’s Movement. Make the alternative lifestyle options so accessible, the men in black couldn’t stop everyone from availing themselves of them.

  Chad quickly chucked that idea. The powers that be would always find a way to sabotage any and all routes to the future, no matter how many healthy alternatives you put before people. More to the point, the top one percent had all the money needed for the entrepreneurial startups. Meaning they knew about the ideas before the public did. So they were in too good a position to buy off or kill off the inventors.

  Maybe he needed to start more fires than they could put out. Maybe then they’d need to solicit the help of the ninety-nine percent. Maybe then they’d buy into the idea that it takes everyone pulling together to make the future sustainable. He needed to break the back on centralized control, give them no choice but to decentralize power to save themselves.

  Chad formed his cabal of twelve, the way they built the atomic bomb when they needed to gestate the atomic age fifty years early. Only with one big difference. He wouldn’t solve the problems of today by borrowing against the solutions of tomorrow, by yanking them out of time. The whole point was to create problems the controlling one percent couldn’t manage on their own in a hundred years.

  He found the twelve brainiest guys he could get his hands on with activist blood in their veins. Together, they spit out the most radical stuff and threw it into the public domain. An internet free-for-all for anyone and everyone who wanted genocide-in-a-bottle. And they kept themselves on the move, walled securely behind hack-proof quantum protocols.

  The biblical plagues had nothing on them.

  They designed ozone eaters that never depleted, just floated about high in the atmosphere playing LEGOs with the ozone molecules, shaping them into other things.

  Acid clouds were concocted that gelled into acid rain, and drifted ominously around the world, causing epidemic flu from crashing immune systems wherever they hovered for too long.

  Waterborne viruses targeted specific segments of the population with entirely different symptoms requiring designer gene-modifying solutions.

  One of their designer bugs devoured petroleum and reduced it to harmless building blocks of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon. It just kept spreading and spreading, threatening to grind the global economy to a stop inside a few years.

  They mutated the prions responsible for mad cow disease, made them über-prolific, and shut down half the meat industry overnight.

  Coincident with their interventions, it was discovered that honey bee populations, already down thirty-five percent nationwide, were experiencing colony-collapse disorder secondary to neonicotinoid pesticides, a product of the Bayer company, being sprayed on over 90 million acres of corn. And it didn’t stop there; the neonics had worked their way into soy, wheat, sorghum, cotton, and peanut seeds. Over 142 million acres of crops in 2011 had been destroyed, and the number was just expected to go up in 2012. Food crops were collapsing without sufficient pollination from honeybees, themselves down more than thirty percent, without needing any extra nudging.

  Jellyfish populations exploded in the world’s oceans, secondary to the rising acid content caused by pollution. Soon jellyfish would be all anyone would be pulling out of the ocean, other forms of sea life unable to compete in the altered ecosystems. Rather than find lasting solutions, many restaurants were tooling up with “delicious” jellyfish recipes. More alarmingly still, all efforts to kill off the jellyfish had failed. The instant you hacked into an adult, it dropped its babies, billions of them, to secure the next generation. The babies settled to the ocean bottom, took hold, and could survive for decades before the right impetus caused them to blossom into free swimming jellyfish.

  Forget the examples Chad had already cited. La Nina was dropping the equivalent of an atomic bomb on city after city around the world in the form of cyclonic storms coming weeks apart of one another.

  All without the cabal of twelve he’d formed doing anything to make matters worse.

  Most alarming of all, none of the earthshaking doomsday scenarios made much of a dent on their own. They were announced casually as the latest scientific curiosity. And people were advised scientists were working on it. No one adjusted their schedules or changed their hab
its in the slightest. Though, everyone carried with them a vague sense of things hitting critical mass. What was there to do but rely on the experts who alone were smart enough – hopefully – to come up with the fixes in time, like trying to glue a collapsing building back together after the explosives were detonated?

  A short while later, Chad’s club of twelve disbanded, realizing life on the planet was spiraling out of control without them. They couldn’t collapse the house of cards any faster if they tried.

  They also realized their fatal mistake. It takes seventeen years to make a scientist who can devise a solution to any of their problems, seventeen years no one had.

  What’s more, even with life at the brink, the one percent saw no reason to decentralize power. Driven mad by greed and power, their solution to escalating global crises was the same as it had always been: there was nothing more power and greed, more centralization of power couldn’t solve.

  The band of twelve spread like seeds to the wind to tackle the real problem this time: How to get genius to not rise to the top but to settle to the bottom, in the ninety-nine percent.

  Pathos set out to figure out how to combine critical-thinking skills with access to the combined human knowledge available on the internet for free to see if he could collapse those seventeen years to seventeen months. There were folks online who were eager to help. To get around copyright concerns and royalty fees for individuals who expected to be paid for their contributions to the global knowledge fund, Pathos came up with some creative options. Thereby solving several other problems in the process.

  The idea being to design a chip implant to give wireless twenty-four-seven internet access, boosted by a chip with search-algorithms that would impress IBM’s Watson. Searches could be conducted on chip, essentially away from conscious attention. The results alone would be fed back to the conscious mind to keep from bogging it down with unnecessary workloads. The “human” interface, would allow for dialoguing with the chip to discuss ways to enhance the searches. A bridging chip would furnish implantees with the vocabulary of aptitudes needed to conduct this dialogue. An additional chip would serve as expanded memory space to augment human recall. And yet another chip would monitor even the hacks into private servers so every single transaction could be monetized. Everyone gets access to the Godhead; no one gets cheated out of the spoils.

  Veritas, and most of the others, set out to make people smarter, figuring the obvious niches were probably already overpopulated. Mindchips were too obvious. Nanococktails that encouraged the brain and body to function more efficiently likewise were probably being done to death. That left admittedly less dazzling options, too un-sexy for the über-brains to bother with. Or that didn’t require armies of researchers only Intel-sized corporations and consortiums could muster.

  Veritas elected for a form of genetic predetermination, designing retroviruses that identified the host’s strengths and amplified them, so average artists became Picassos, just not Einstein’s. Paranoids became really paranoid, NASA-rocket-building-grade paranoids left to ponder all that could go wrong between here and getting to Mars.

  Crackerly and Divot decided to advance brain scanning technology decades ahead of schedule and speed human migration onto microchips, holding out no hope for biological life being viable much longer, upgraded or otherwise. Moreover, too many big problems required interlocking intelligences working in parallel with numbers that exceeded what Earth’s biomass could support. In other words, even if you could turn everyone into geniuses, and eliminate sleep, and coerced them to generate solutions during every living moment, there just wasn’t enough combined brainpower on the planet to lick the planet-killing problems that threatened us today. Forget ten or a hundred years from now.

  Crackerly and Divot also rejected systems theory – the idea that enough artificial and biological sentient intelligences making up a diverse enough ecosystem of super-sentience could solve the really big problems of today. They calculated, even if they factored in robots big and small, cell phone apps that could think as well as people, and every human upgraded on the planet to post-Einstein levels of genius, the numbers still didn’t add up to the amount of genius required to pull us back from the tipping point.

  Only by eliminating space and time as variables all together – as a limiting factor – could sustainable-life equations be made to work.

  At that point they realized they were approaching an extreme version of what the Singularity Watch people were preaching, already pretty extreme by most people’s standards. Rather than melt into the movement, they started recruiting at the periphery of it. Calling it post-Singularity consciousness for pre-Singularity times. The idea being to leave standard spacetime behind altogether, migrating consciousness into true Singularity State. And to devise the bridging technologies for the greatest migration of consciousness of all time. To generate enough collective power of mind via the collective of human and artificial intelligences interlocked and dispersed throughout the planet to defy basic physics; bend it to the will of the embodied Godhead.

  Chad dropped out of the movement around this time. The reason: a purple pill he’d taken stuffed in his B-complex vitamins bottle.

  Ever since that fateful day, he stopped worrying about the big picture. Got very Zen about it. If control freaks needed to be in control – give it to them. Who else was going to do it? He could do as much to save the world by doing nothing than by inflated self-importance. In fact, he’d already pretty much proven that thesis.

  ***

  Chad all but collided with his best bud, Cilantro, on the crowded sidewalk. He should have known better than to play obstacle course with the moving bodies while perched on the seat of his bike. They were headed opposite directions in the heat of the moment, but, of late, in other aspects of their lives as well.

  “There he is! What have you been doing with yourself?” Chad hoped the mock excitement over the chance reunion wasn’t entirely transparent.

  Cilantro brushed the cornrows out of his face. “You know, just vibing.” After a respectful amount of time to allow the spirit of awkwardness to possess them completely, they were both finished with the bizarre prayer ritual conducted in silence. “You should come join our transcendental meditation group, man.”

  His foot tucked snugly in the toe-clip, Chad back-pedaled just to hear the clicking on the ten-speed bike’s gear sprocket. It helped him think. “Nah.”

  “Fifty meditating in unison lowered crime in Chicago twenty-five percent, man. Think what a hundred could do.”

  Chad eyed him with a bemused expression. It could work. The theory was sound enough. By New Age standards, anyway. Kind of the way repeaters worked to boost a cell signal in houses with poor reception, he imagined. But it sounded more like an invitation to back pain and leg cramps. He didn’t get along with lotus positions.

  Cilantro sighed. “What happened to you, man? Used to be your fire was permanently lit.”

  “These days, I’m all about chilling. You want to change the world, start with the face in the mirror, you know? If no one can get a rise out of me, out of anyone, that’s no more wars right there. Indifference is the cure, not the problem.”

  Cilantro spat out the ganja he was cheeking, like chewing tobacco. “Bull shit. Besides, I think you can get killed in Berkeley for apathy.”

  Chad chuckled obligingly. Though gazing around at life on Telegraph Avenue, he could hardly argue the point. An elderly couple bribed a street urchin to get his fancy dog away from him, convinced they could give the Shar-Pei a better home. When dumping money on the mangy kid didn’t work, they tried yanking the chain away from him. The thought of rescuing the kid didn’t seem to cross their minds. As to the tarot reader slapping the death card on a motorist’s windshield, saying, “You don’t stop and get out of that car right now, you’re gonna die,” Chad didn’t know what to say to that, either.

  ***

  Crispy kicked back alongside his friend, Cilantro, on their fishing boat bobbing
in the water of San Francisco Bay, their legs propped on the ice chest. Brewskis in one hand, they tossed legs of lamb. The sharks jumped out of the water to catch the delicacies. They were so trained, the simple hand motion was enough to trigger the Pavlovian response. Beneath the surface of the water, the ship emitted a particular siren sound that served as the dinner bell.

  “You think we can get in trouble for training these things?” The sight of just how big the sharks had gotten had triggered Crispy’s sudden pang of consciousness.

  “In the Bay Area?” Cilantro’s face grew pensive. “Nah. I think you can get arrested for violating fish rights, or some shit like that. But not for just feeding them.”

  Crispy could tell something was bothering Cilantro as he took a swig of his beer. His face had that distant look. And he was all about being present.

  Cilantro burped his beer. “Chad needs an intervention, man.”

  Crispy eyed Cilantro, his hair hanging down over his face like a black puli. He was forever combing it back from his eyes and over his ears with his fingers. Crispy was bald, so the magic of hair remained one of the seven sacred mysteries of the universe. That made Cilantro a high priest in his books, and his every word akin to biblical prophecy. Crispy nervously picked the flakes of skin from his sunbaked scalp. “Why do you say that?”

  “Nothing fazes him. I was thinking electroshock is the way to go.” He threw another leg of lamb overboard, endured the splash of the shark landing too close to the ship.