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

by Dean C. Moore

  All that, believe it or not, Danny reminded himself from his current perspective years later, was Hartman’s lead in for an explanation of the different patterns of energy emanating from each of our seven spinal chakras as made visual by Kirlian photography. He was helping his students better understand the mathematical language of God. So that if we ever lost our way, simply attuning to the mathematical forms during meditation would serve as scripture taken directly from heavenly sources, escaping the corrupting influences of verbal language and thought altogether. Assuming of course, one could decode the math on the fly. Danny wondered how much of the mathematics department’s recent expansion was on account of Hartman’s lectures which made it damn hard to be metaphysical without proper mathematical training.

  Hartman, still getting warmed up, digressed yet again from his auditorium’s pulpit. “What I’d like to do now,” he said, turning from his blackboard, “is tie in our earlier discussions of knot theory and fractal geometry, chakras and Kirlian photography with God-conscious architecture. Building on our ideas from earlier, we, like geomancers of old, when siting the Gothic Cathedrals, will avail ourselves of sacred geometries, lines, proportions, and angles that facilitate altered states of consciousness more conducive to talking to God directly, to prophecy, and enlightenment.

  “We will, using the CAD software I furnished for your laptops, with some tweaks of my own, further explore the effects of siting such sacred geometrical structures. Much as geomancers before us did, we will place them above energy vortices where the Earth’s energy meridians cross, so that we may begin construction of Heaven on Earth for real, via an urban architecture, which from the very small to the very large, facilitates communion with God. And we’ll try to do this without tying in too many more fields of endeavor before the end of the lecture, in the interests of time.” That last remark drew some laughs from students trying to keep up with the aptitudes required to trail Hartman.

  His slide show, rife with video-inserts showing his models, illustrations, and cities in 3D, from the smallest of apartments to the largest of skyscrapers, left people aghast, and resulted in a standing ovation.

  But come time to get his students to submit their work, nothing truly compared. Hartman despaired more than his students. They grasped the fundamentals of what was being asked of them, but lacked the meditative composure to trigger the mind-state necessary to work n-dimensionally. Without access to “the zone,” they could not sustain integral thinking across so many fields, sucking insights into the vortex.

  Because the complicated argument to win over hearts and minds had been won by Hartman, the rest should have been easy. While it took Hartman to explain why such God-conscious, spiritual-infused architecture held out such promise, once that premise was accepted as a given, students ought to have been able to procure the architectural designs easily enough. All they had to do was employ the principles and design methods handed down to them from above by Hartman. Hell, they could stand to forget the rationales behind the designs and procure them fairly mindlessly.

  But without being able to feel the flow of energies through them, either by aligning themselves with the Earth’s energy vortices and meridians, or through clearing the channels in their own body via acupuncture and/or various forms of meditative practice… Without running energy through their body at will from any location on the planet, say through tai chi practice, which as a rule, concentrated on moving and molding such energies and using them to facilitate higher consciousness in moving meditation… The would-be architects and urban planners, already feeling the strain, considering their true aptitudes were in philosophy, came up with second rate drawings that weren’t properly to scale, because the mathematics was still too advanced for them, even with the guiderails of which equations to ignore, and which to employ.

  Without Zen mind locked in, the mind of the integral thinker was a house of cards that came crashing down, one superlative field of endeavor after another, needed to support the interdisciplinary design structures. It really didn’t help much when Hartman made philosophy the center of the fulcrum, and allowed his students merely to inform their philosophical thinking with insights from other fields, rather than trying to think philosophically from within mathematics or engineering design. To make much use of the broken fragments of learning required the Zen mind to suspend and cohere otherwise chaotic bits which bore no relation to one another into cathedrals of thought as ornate and as precise as any gothic cathedral.

  Danny realized his eyes were tearing, recalling his own pitiful attempts to walk in Hartman’s shoes, feeling the same letdown Hartman felt reading his papers. Ah, but, like Icarus, to have flown so close to the sun, even for a moment…

  It was true he’d relapsed lately, explaining his late start this semester (after a detour to the sanitarium.) Danny’s ADHD had not dissipated, but his ability to taste the sweetness of greatness, even if it was Hartman’s greatness, had departed him. He had no real explanation, other than a strange purple pill he’d unwittingly taken mixed in with his regular meds. But surely that was just coincidence, not fate, black irony, or anything so pointed.

  FORTY-SIX

  When the din of laughter from Jeannie’s latest joke dialed down, Hartman was the last to stop laughing.

  Adam looked noticeably calmer. Jeannie’s performance had assisted him with getting into character. Gone were the fidgetiness and the unnatural tics.

  “So what about you, Clay?” she said. “Any memorable moments you care to celebrate?”

  Not believing that Jeannie, who was usually diplomacy in action, could make such a faux pas, Adam’s nervousness resurfaced in the form of a cough. The hacking wouldn’t go away. He disguised its source as something lodged in his throat by reaching for a glass of water. But Jeannie doubted the gesture fooled anybody.

  “Nothing out of the ordinary.” Hartman rotated his coffee mug one way, then the other. “I'm a creature of habit, I'm ashamed to say.”

  Jeannie smiled. “We'll have to fix that.”

  “Please,” Hartman said, “rescue me from myself.”

  Adam sunk back in his chair. “Our entire day's a routine from one end to the other. It's all in how you approach it.”

  “I’m eager for the abbreviated version.”

  Jeannie and Adam eyed each other and agreed they would act out their routine on fast forward for him.

  Adam reset the alarm clock. They both jumped into bed and pretended to be fast asleep.

  The alarm beeped, flashing 6:00 AM. Adam faked being electrocuted in tandem with the maddening buzz of the alarm, spasming on the bed, until he vibrated himself right off it. He thudded against the carpeted floor like plank wood rolling off a conveyor belt.

  Hartman bellowed with laughter, and the “morning routine” was just getting underway.

  Jeannie slammed the snooze button. “Didn't we do this waking up thing yesterday?”

  Adam blew raspberries against her stomach. She giggled and squirmed helplessly, then screamed like a kettle rising to a boil as he tickled harder. In a matter of seconds, she transitioned from no-one-will-ever-animate-me-again to fully conscious.

  “Who needs coffee when you have a sadist on hand?” she groused, her mood seeming to sour on a dime.

  She stepped out of the room and Adam rolled back to “sleep.” She padded back, poured a bucket of cold water over him. He bolted upright, gasped, looked around disoriented. When he finally realized he was someplace familiar, he passed out, cold.

  She returned, blew soap bubbles over him with her swizzle stick and bottle of solution. Opening one eye, he popped one with his fingers. By the time he opened the second eye, he was really going after them.

  Finally he was jumping up and down on the mattress to get at all the bubbles. And he was fully awake.

  ***

  From the living room later, after Jeannie and Adam had acted out more of their daily routine for him, Hartman said, “I can’t believe you kept this side of your life from me whe
n you had me as a guest in your home, what seems like ages ago.”

  “We were still too infatuated with one another to think we’d ever have to work to keep things fresh,” Jeannie confessed.

  “You kids’ve made major inroads into the game of life.”

  “You think?” Jeannie played absently with her hair.

  “Absolutely. When people have to claw their way back to humanity, they'll watch spycams of you over the Internet. Good way to pay your way through college, come to think of it.”

  “Won't it be too late for them?” Adam said. There was the would-be schmoozer performing far better in the foot-in-mouth part, Jeannie realized, and then perished the thought before her face could relay it to Hartman.

  “I don't think so.” Hartman poured them a drink. “The life force took us this far because it wants to evolve.” Handing them the glasses, he said, “Neither humanity, nor inhumanity will stand in its way. And it'll use whatever hurdles are in front of it to leapfrog to the next level.”

  Jeannie and Adam tensed, wondering how long it was going to be before they became the next hurdle to overcome at all costs in Hartman’s evolutionary scheme.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  The entourage crawling through the walls arrived at the secret entrance to Jeannie and Adam's suite. Winona confirmed as much by putting her ear to the wall. “We're there.”

  Manny flopped down on the floor, tapped his wrist with the tip of a cigarette. “So what’s the story on these two?” He lit up, filled his lungs with fire.

  Robin eyed the screen on his cell phone. It wasn’t too hard to guess the effects of Hartman’s drug on them as regards their personality makeovers. After grimacing, he said, “You don’t want to know.”

  Manny breathed smoke on Robin. “How are you making these connections? The FBI data base isn’t this good.”

  “Crychek and the boys in the basement of the Berkeley PD, their latest hunting and gathering algorithms.”

  “Remind me to kiss their lily-white asses.” After taking a deep breath, he added, “I'll take it from here. You two clear me a path to the others.”

  Manny pushed through before they could utter a word of complaint, and closed the latch behind him.

  “I don't know about this,” Winona said.

  Robin sighed. “I'll stay close. You find us a way out of this rat trap. Being locked in with one monster was bad enough.”

  She nodded, and disappeared down the twisting labyrinth. Robin pressed his ear to the hidden egress, and pulled out his ankle gun.

  ***

  Manny crawled through the hatch. Adam gasped a sigh of relief, as Jeannie shot him a stern look: Don’t break from character!

  “Manny!” Hartman exclaimed. “You've got to experience these two firsthand. What a treat!”

  Manny came to standing and dusted off his scuffed pants at the knees. “Oh yeah?”

  “They've got this whole life as art thing going on that's the best slap in the face to this dehumanizing age.”

  “You mind if I put that to the test for myself?” Manny puffed on his cigarette.

  “Absolutely!” Hartman exclaimed. “I have to press on to the other graduates. The army of angels is coming along nicely, Manny. We're earning our keep, tonight.”

  Adam motioned to rush him before he got too far, but Jeannie held him back.

  Hartman found a quick way out, and was gone.

  “So Manny, spent much time with Hartman?” Jeannie said.

  “I tell ya, the guy's the second coming.”

  She glared at Adam to convey: You getting the picture yet?

  “We agree he's something special,” she said. “Come on, you heard the man. It's art therapy hour. What's your pleasure?”

  ***

  Robin, listening in on Jeannie from between the walls, whispered, “She knows what's what.” His hands shaking, he popped the lid on the lozenge bottle, reached for a couple more female hormone pills, the red ones this time. As he heard Manny babble on, he said, “Good luck matching that psycho shit against her female hormones, buddy. Go with God, I say.”

  He gulped down the pills. “Few more of these, and I'll take you and Hartman on singlehanded.” Maybe he was being sexist. It was just a stereotype women were far superior to men in the playing-people department. Then again, for much of history, survival in a patriarchal age left them with few other options. So Robin hoped there was something to the belief that estrogen was the female’s genetically adaptive response to a several millennial-long campaign of terrorism.

  After taking the hormone pills, Robin’s mind reeled. The medicine lifted the cork off his bottled-up, unprocessed emotions from the instant Hartman planted the first victim in the ground. Or maybe the tablets were just the excuse he needed to come unglued. An umpteenth generation Berkeley-born and bred ultra-liberal, he thought people were reflections of God, even if there was a little dust on the mirror. So recent events were hardly anticipated. He had held it together on Manny’s backbone alone, doing his best to emulate his steely hardness. And now that backbone had broken.

  Robin felt control of his mind slipping away.

  The distress inflicted upon him by Hartman had opened the gate to all the other traumas in his life, well repressed all this time. He honestly hadn’t even realized these scenes from his life had inflicted such wounds. This was all news to him. But from the way his mind bounced readily from one flashback to another, free-associating wildly, it was clear all these memories shared one thing in common: for better or worse, they failed to be anything he could integrate into his conscious awareness. Until now. If that’s what he was doing, integrating, as opposed to willfully allowing the dismantling of his psyche to proceed at an unprecedented pace.

  ***

  Robin walked in to their home after a long day’s work, exhausted, expecting to be revitalized by one of Drew’s gourmet meals and her talent for stage setting, down to the perfectly selected wine and candlelight. Instead what greeted him at the door was a secret cabal of men, holding cigars like bad actors rehearsing the parts of social-smokers. They filched their tips with their cigar clippers, and returned the dross to their smoking-jacket pockets.

  On blinking a few times, it occurred to Robin that what he was actually watching was a room full of transsexuals, new to the roles of men, still perfecting their parts, falling short of the mark owing to overcompensation. At the time, Robin had registered only mild discomfort and the need to stifle a condescending smirk; he’d picked up on none of the horror that would leave him traumatized. Maybe he just didn’t have the energy for that much self-realization. Perhaps he didn’t have the accelerated neural processing speeds required to adequately defuse the shock in the moment with the tower of relevant rationalizations, so he went with the low energy end-of-day option, and stuffed his true feelings to the back of his mind.

  Robin’s arrival was grounds for more rehearsal. The would-be men tipped their hats, flicked their cigars. Some rose and shook his hand. Others made snide jokes to one another at Robin’s expense, practicing perfect pitch, and honest-to-God macho sniggering.

  Dresden, going by the nametag on his smoker’s jacket, felt accomplished enough to engage in male-bonding dialogue with him. “Robin!” he said, shaking his hand a little too zealously, with a grip that made Robin wince, to Dresden’s delight. “Drew tells me you arrest bad guys for a living. What’s that like?” Dresden was going with a cancerous clicking guttural sound to mask feminine vocal cords which still weren’t under sufficient enough control to “pass.” The fact he looked genuinely male, and his altered voice could have been attributed to a bad head cold, made Robin flinch. Suddenly his whole life, built as it was on the search for truth, rang false, mocked by one red herring after another thrown in his path to prevent him from ever arriving at verities.

  “Well, Dresden,” Robin said, “the hardest part is telling the posers from the real players. Everybody lies. We have genuinely innocent people determined to pass themselves off as criminals, hoping
for their fifteen minutes of fame. And we have actual perps who could wheedle their way into your house for dinner. The hardest part is knowing who is who.” Robin meant all of that, of course, as a dig. Dresden, not to be deterred, lit up like a Christmas tree.

  “Gentlemen!” Dresden crowed, “We’ve hit the jackpot. Robin says he’s a pro at telling the posers from the real deal. His job demands it.” The entire room brightened. Robin cringed as he was mobbed, everyone determined to audition before him all at once. He caught Drew smiling at him in the background, realizing, no doubt, even before he did, the ill-considered gambit. Robin, who wanted above all else to be able to read people as well as Drew, had the practice-opportunity of his life right before him. Just when he wanted to flee the room, he was being sucked down the vortex, curiously, insanely seduced by the idea of unmasking each one of these posers, while simultaneously wanting them all to pass so well Sherlock Holmes would be put off. Which would be the smallest of gestures that would give them away? Which were the real women still only flirting with thoughts of a sex change? Which were the women only half-way through their surgery? Which were the women who had completely changed themselves over?