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

by Dean C. Moore

  “You don’t come with your own drug database.” Jim was perplexed.

  “Nope. That’s the upgraded model.”

  “He’s going back,” Fontanegro said.

  ER2 started furiously mixing ingredients from inside the cabinets.

  “But you can make your own drugs?” Jim asked.

  “Yep.”

  Chorus: “We’ll keep him.”

  “What’s got his neck in a knot?” Fontanegro asked unsympathetically.

  “I put him on fast-forward for that drama queen, Stephanie,” Moses explained. “She isn’t happy unless the robots are absolutely hysterical taking care of her. She’s got to get back in time for the place to burn down.”

  “Well, calm his ass down,” Fontanegro said. “You can flip the switch to her personal setting when she gets here.”

  Moses complied with a sour expression. “Patience of a saint, Moses. Patience of a saint,” he mumbled, using the adopted name Julianne had given him so as not to give away his true identity.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Manny played basketball with the boys on the outdoor court of the Saverly Psychiatric Center. The clinic was located in Berkeley, but it wasn’t listed in any directory, and there was no sign adorning the building. Funny, he hadn’t picked up on that last part until now, he thought, dribbling the ball a little too close to the fence. The precautions were all in an effort to keep the banter about Manny’s breakdown to a minimum, as well as protect the privacy of every other patient in here. Leave it to Berkeley to leave no politically correct rock unturned. Too bad that sentiment didn’t extend much past the front door. Saverly had more freedom to run things his way than most fascist dictators.

  For the time being, however, Manny was having the time of his life. He sweated, jumped and landed hard, stole the ball when he could. Bumping shoulders, he scored the winning points to cheers.

  Nurses and orderlies in calming pastel-colored scrubs dispensed medications on the sidelines. From the grave looks on their faces, you’d think they were the haunted ones. They wanted to be elsewhere, so they put their minds elsewhere.

  The mixed signals given off by the Saverly Psychiatric Center were registering loud and clear in Manny’s mind. There were its architectural nuances, for one: outside all rural estate; inside a dungeon. Then there were the quirks of its staff. Left to their own, they were inflexible and rigid personality types; in Saverly’s presence, they were more flexible than swamp grass. He’d grown up in a house with parents expert in mixing messages. Maybe Saverly was slyly signaling (to staff and patients alike) all we had to do to open the door to heaven or hell was change our outlook from cup half-full to cup half-empty. Maybe making this the best and worst of times in Manny’s life was meant to be strangely enlightening.

  ***

  After basketball, Manny played an animated game of ping pong in the rec room, whooping it up with each point. He held his ground as his partner threatened him with a series of mad-dog killer faces.

  Around six, Manny watched TV with his feet up on an ottoman, and a big bowl of cheese curls in his lap. He laughed alongside the asylum regulars, some of whom would never leave.

  Saverly entered the ward holding a clipboard, his gait entirely clandestine. He was very good at not agitating patients. To the uninitiated, he was the one everyone wanted for a doctor and never got; no one was this conscientious. A glance or two to size up the mood of the floor, and then he approached.

  “So how are we doing, Manny?” Saverly asked.

  “Fabulous, Doc. One hundred percent, I'd say. Hell of a thing to have to go to a psych hospital for a vacation.”

  “You wouldn't be the first,” Saverly joked. “Although it's more of a poor man's getaway.”

  Manny laughed.

  Speaking softly, Saverly said, “Manny, there’s a lecture going on now I think you’ll want to sit in on. It’s really for the other doctors and medical staff. Most of our patients aren’t exactly in the right frame of mind. But I think you’ll get something out of it.”

  “Sure, anything for the program.”

  ***

  The lecture hall was within the larger building that was on lock down, so Manny guessed Dr. Saverly figured he wasn’t going anywhere if he decided to make a break for it. And if he got unruly, he’d be surrounded by more staff than on a code blue.

  Dr. Atwell spoke to a packed house in a room with stadium seating. Evidently, he was popular on this circuit.

  “I want to talk to you today about the virtues of compartmentalization,” Atwell said, walking as if he was keenly aware each joint connected a different compartment of his body. Between the spina bifida, and the swollen rheumatoid knees and knuckles, he resembled the Tin Man learning to walk for the first time after his creator had magically breathed life into him.

  “We have many locked rooms inside our heads behind whose doors we conceal from consciousness all sorts of demons from our past. Now, conventional wisdom says that for healing to take place we have to open those locked doors and step into the rooms, hell, tear the walls down all together. We must seek higher integration and wholeness by reabsorbing every painful memory into consciousness.

  “Well, I’m here today to tell you that we may have gotten it wrong.” A hushed silence followed that swallowed up the din of a lot of nervous shuffling and people trying to get comfortable in their seats.

  “If the mind, in its infinite wisdom, wants us to face something, chances are we won’t be able to run from it, as anyone with PTSD will tell you. On the other hand, if we’ve tucked the memory away so we have forgotten about it, chances are quite good it is not relevant to living our daily lives to the fullest.

  “But what if it is, you ask?” Atwell said, managing to make it to the edge of the stage without falling off. “Well, it’s my experience that life will keep presenting us with opportunities to revisit lessons left unlearned without us having to go rummaging around in back of our minds where we may indeed unearth something before we’re ready to face it, and with disastrous consequences.”

  A hand shot up. “Yes,” Atwell said, acknowledging.

  “That last part sounds like you’re preaching New Age religion. The idea being: no one is in our life without some dramatic—drum roll, please—reason. As if God is on a desperate mission to awaken us, with such a sense of urgency, that everyone, down to the person we meet on the bus, or bump into on a crowded sidewalk, is there to shake us to the core, help us see the light.” The well-appointed Asian woman sounded more anti-God than anti-New Age to Manny’s way of thinking. But he may have been reading in.

  “I don’t believe I inferred any of that,” Atwell said, “but now I’m sorry I didn’t.” That got some laughs. “While we might be wrong about all of that, and it might indeed be no more than wishful thinking, rest assured, digging around in our minds with a pickaxe is not all it’s cracked up to be. And on that score, I have quite a lot of hard facts to share with you…” He turned to his slide projector and keyed the first slide.

  Manny wasn’t buying any of it. He’d lived with demons from his past long enough, namely memories of his father and ex-wife, which he’d tried to cloak from consciousness, only to instead substitute an ill-defined sense of anxiety that never quite left him. The conscience of a coward who refused to come to terms with his past, moreover, ate at him like the slow drip of battery acid. Over the long haul it was probably worse than just facing up to the failures once and for all. But he could never quite talk himself completely into going into those rooms with the locked doors. No amount of reasoning lent the genie the courage to rise from the lamp crafted by his resistance to the past.

  Manny left the lecture early. Dr. Saverly regarded his departure with a mild look of disappointment, which he hid rather well but for Manny’s trained eye.

  ***

  “You still up for this experiment after hearing Atwell’s lecture?” Saverly asked with his gentle, supportive manner.

  “You bet. I played it his way for most o
f my life, and look where that got me.”

  Saverly gestured for Manny to follow him to his office. Manny took his eyes off the TV with the roadrunner barely escaping the coyote’s latest nefarious trap only begrudgingly.

  The second they were in his office, Saverly took off his white smock, hung it up on the coatrack, better exposing the peacock colors below. He didn’t bother to close the door. “First, let’s get the disclaimers out of the way.”

  Screams rang out across the hospital floor. Saverly glanced up from his desk and out the door, and waited for them to subside. “Scenario games are big in the corporate world, but they’re relatively new to the psychiatric setting. In fact, we’re the first in the country to use it as a therapeutic technique. We believe it holds a lot of promise. And since Berkeley prides itself on being the future of consciousness relative to the rest of the planet, well… it would be beneath us not to be ahead of the learning curve on this one.”

  “When the customer’s sold, Doc, close the deal.”

  Saverly laughed. “Don’t be so eager.” This time, the outcries coming from the floor were more angry than hysterical. The sounds of furniture smashing followed, and shortly after that, the sounds of a man being taken down by other men. And then silence. “Based on what you’ve told me,” Saverly said, “a traumatic childhood like that, the key to setting you free will be to retraumatize you. We have to overwhelm your traditional coping mechanisms so they fail to be adaptive, and can’t engage. That way, in a manner reminiscent of Piaget, you’re forced to rewire your mind entirely, instead of just modifying your existing thinking.”

  “Praise God.”

  “You remember what happened the last time they pushed Humpty Dumpty off the wall?” Saverly said with the kind of on-demand ominous tone of an old stagehand. With the explosion of noise coming off the floor from the latest disaffected patient, Saverly tired of ducking the shrapnel of errant sound waves and closed the door.

  It was because Manny did remember that he thought to ask, “What if this takes longer than expected?”

  Saverly sighed. Taking his seat again, and turning a Rubik’s Cube in his hand without really trying to solve it, he said, “This project is partly funded with scholarships, but not nearly enough. You may need to come back more than once if we can’t fit everything in before your insurance runs out. This would be unfortunate. Because it means you’ll be running around in the outside world in a state of PTSD without our guiding influences to ensure you don’t overlay new maladaptive coping mechanisms over the old ones.”

  Audible through the window: A car accident. Ensuing road rage. A gun shot.

  Saverly closed the window.

  “I’ll take my chances, doc. From where I’m standing, I’ve got nothing to lose.”

  “Very well then.” Saverly hit him with one of his warm smiles. “Let the games begin.” He gestured for Manny to let himself out.

  “I don’t suppose you could cue me on the specific scenarios I’ll be subjected to.”

  Saverly laughed. “No.” He reclined on his swivel chair and made a pyramid by barely touching together his fingers and thumbs. Trying to remain helpful, he coached, “Think of it as a video game. To get past level one, you have to beat the game without any help from us. And at each level things get harder, not easier. But as with any video game, the object is to have fun along the way. Just because you’re caught up in a horror story, doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the genre for the thrills and chills it offers.”

  One of the staff came flying against the steel-mesh-reinforced window to Saverly’s office, cracking the glass in Douglas fir leaf patterns from the trunk of the central crack. There were enough of them to hang Christmas tree ornaments on. Gravity had to wait until the force driving him into the window had dissipated enough before claiming the body.

  Manny chuckled. “Maybe some final Cliff Notes in honor of the fact that I have to accomplish things in a condensed timeframe.”

  “Well, all I’ll tell you is: don’t form any hard and fast attachments. A friend one minute could be an enemy the next. As soon as you’re on to the game you think we’re playing, we’ll change it on you to keep you off balance.” When Manny set the chain of balls on Saverly’s desk in motion by hitting the one at the end against the others, Saverly threw a Rubik’s snake at him to fiddle with. “Just like in the real world, you have to learn to guide yourself through a universe of incomplete information and sheer disinformation. People will lie to you more often than tell the truth.”

  Saverly emptied a box of high definition video tapes onto his desk. “Each one of these tapes is a session with a different personality. Same person, mind you.” He picked up one of the tapes, shook it in Manny’s face. “My advice, you take a page from her book.” Saverly threw the tape back on the pile, picked up another one. “You play a role of your choosing which you’ve selected because it’s most adaptive to the situation, and when it fails to get you anywhere, you try another one on for size.” He exchanged tapes in the pile yet again.

  “This is a far cry from the role playing you versus you playing the role. Most people get so attached to their personalities that it limits the degrees of freedom they have in any situation—and that includes our disassociative disorder case highlighted here.” He threw the latest tape back on the pile. “That makes them an easy mark for those who want leverage and to push their buttons in order to obtain that control.”

  “So it’s a crash course in politics,” Manny said, “where everyone will stop at nothing to block my path, and see that they, and only they, get to level two while I remain stuck on level one. Since, in a world of limited resources, no one gets to have even a little of what they want without depriving someone else of what they want.”

  “You learn fast.”

  “Let’s hope,” Manny said, feeling more concerned now that the big picture was coming into focus.

  “And just as in real life, the higher up you climb, the more vicious and duplicitous people get. So trust that inner voice. It’s the only compass you have. That’s the God or higher power, if you prefer, within. At its core, the game forces a spiritual strength, and visionary abilities that transcend mere morality, and the ability to discern the right path based on logic and the scientific method. All valuable tools, but not nearly powerful enough to get you where you’re going.”

  Saverly started stuffing the tapes back into the box. “There’s a reason scenario games are usually just played with leadership: They’re expensive and time consuming, as you can well imagine.

  “But with corporate downsizing, and everyone playing a game of musical chairs with fewer and fewer jobs available each year that haven’t been outsourced or turned over to software and robotics, politics has risen to the surface as the prima facie mode of survival.” Now each time he stuffed a handful of tapes back in the box, it was like that many less jobs to go around, unwittingly highlighting his argument for him.

  “High or low on the totem pole, everyone has to be politically savvy today in ways that formerly only kings and queens and royals had to be.”

  “You’re right,” Manny said pensively. “This is one game in which understanding the rules will do little to help me survive.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far, or I wouldn’t have expelled all this hot air.”

  Manny, extrapolating from what Saverly had just told him about the dynamics of the game, said, “Basically the only way to win this game is to quickly get leverage on everyone to minimize the amount of time spent strategizing. Otherwise, since my enemies aren’t neutralized, I have to constantly think of how to outwit them, which is exhausting.”

  Manny threw the Rubik’s snake down on the desk, having made zero progress with it. “It’s what I know, moreover, and making sure I know more than the competition. The man with the most information, and the most leverage, is the man with the most power.

  “Finally, I have to build alliances based on what I discover about another’s character and their capacity for loyal
ty and shared goals.”

  “Even if you accomplish all those aims, you’ll find you can never ease up on the plotting and scheming,” Saverly confessed. His breathing sounded labored as he returned the box of tapes to the shelf against the wall. “That’s why you end up living and breathing strategy games after a while. And you’re right, it’s the worst kind of hell if you can’t find a way to make it fun for yourself, and you can’t find a style of play that caters to your strengths.”

  “What if I just don’t want to play the game anymore?”

  “The game itself is all there is. It forces you to reinvent yourself at every opportunity. That way, you’re a phoenix rising in the fire.”