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

by Dean C. Moore

  Had the would-be Renaissance men have gone down the correct road, with those self-makeover skills mastered, using, moreover, the magnet of the God within to draw more and more aptitudes into the vortex… The next obvious step would have been to turn themselves into anything they wanted to be. Now that they’d mastered the art of the personal makeover, why not invent a new them that would shift control of their lives away from someone else? Namely the overlords of the economy, who seemed less and less interested in them, anyway, favoring software and robotics that worked for less, complained less, and never tired, broke down, or demanded health benefits. The newly made over men who broke away, and chose to go their own way, would be none other than the world’s true Renaissance men. “True” as opposed to “posers” by having survived their trials by fire without going postal.

  Robin was vaguely aware of having slipped into hypo-manic mode in order to condense more reasoning into less time. His thinking had simply gotten “loose.” Loosely connected thoughts were a hallmark of mania. Was hypo-mania one more sign of his decaying mental state in the wake of Hartman, the latest after-shock? Or one more sign he was healing in the wake of those aftershocks?

  What was that Coren had said about looking for signs—like knowing things he had no right knowing? So maybe this was a good thing, despite his rising sense of panic. If he was becoming more psychic, moreover, in the seer or Nostradamus sense of the word, able to divine the future, then maybe some of these thoughts weren’t entirely his, either. Maybe he was pulling them out of Saverly’s head, out of Manny’s and Drew’s, out of anyone close to him in his life with whom he had a strong heart connection. Maybe if he couldn’t believe in his blossoming brilliance and originality, he could, ironically, believe in his superhuman ability to rob people of their best ideas. He realized how absurd he sounded. A strange time to be having self-esteem issues just as he appeared to be straying outside the realm of ego into a trans-human realm.

  The last time he’d stumbled onto the term trans-human it was at Singularity Hub, a website dedicated to the coming Singularity. Devotees were particularly preoccupied by the idea that the ever-accelerating pace of technological evolution would sweep us away, washing away our humanity in the deluge in favor of an emergent trans-human condition, the next step in human evolution. Technologies within this paradigm were less focused on mastery of the physical world and more on co-evolution with man. The merger of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and IA (Intelligence Augmentation) technologies with hu-man, moreover, is what gave rise to the trans-human as part of a holy trinity, like uniting Father and Son and voila – the Holy Spirit emerges as an emergent phenomenon, as a synergistic property.

  Robin had dismissed the call to hysteria over the prospect that The Singularity is Near, in Ray Kurzweil’s words, because he didn’t think that technology as a crutch could do much for man outside of a major shift in planetary consciousness happening first, besides what it had already done: bred more wars and human subjugation, despite the prophecy regarding a major shift in technology’s focus. But there was nothing to say the shift in global consciousness couldn’t happen in tandem with the shift in technology’s focus.

  Human-upgrades, with a focus on consciousness-advancement, meta-thinking, enhanced environmental feedback by way of proliferating sensors and cheap, ubiquitous computer chips, could conceivably all be part of a self-organizing universe paradigm. Meaning trans-humanism could flourish in the face of all this as an emergent property of the – dare he say it – new world order – considering how the term had been so coopted by the tinfoil-hat types on the Fox News Channel. Not to mention the Bilderberg Group, the John Birch Society, and other conspiracy theory favorites.

  Hartman’s own experiments in helping humans to get over themselves were among many possibly going on in the background of which Robin was unaware… recalling Drew’s admonition to keep his eyes to the UC Berkeley tech labs. The realization taken together with his own meditations on the true significance of a global recession at this juncture of history – i.e. what could such a global depression do but drive higher consciousness, if only to facilitate survival, at least of the meta-thinking variety, the thinking about thinking for the purposes of identifying flaws, weak-points, self-destructive habits of mind – all in an effort to outcompete the competition for dwindling jobs…

  Robin, working virtually in the dark and entirely clueless the whole time, had stumbled on all the proof the trans-humanists needed for their argument that Singularity was near. With the shift of human thought away from thinking to meta-thinking, from attachment to self-limiting self-concepts and an ego-identified state, to a trans-egoic one in which we, like a phoenix standing in the fire, remade ourselves constantly to fit the ever changing demands of the marketplace, essentially were building a psychology robust enough to not only survive Singularity State, but to sustain it, and even prior to that, to kick-start it.

  The People’s Movement, moreover, was documenting the groundswell of that shifting global consciousness just as human-upgrade technologies were jumping onto the scene, from their humble beginnings as choline smart drinks, to countless cell phone apps helping one to take command of the chaos that would envelop them in the absence of higher integral order. The codependency between increasingly self-conscious technology (uniting AI and IA streams) and humanity had already begun.

  The hypo-mania was driving connections in Robin’s head. As such, the phenomenon was proving for him something he had long suspected: so called mad people, diagnosed as paranoid, schizophrenic, manic-depressive, et al – may have valuable insights that could assist this migration from the human to the transhuman. Even so, the rising tide of a sense of adventure was struggling to keep up with the tsunami wave of fear overtaking him that he was no longer able to find his way back to sanity and the real world on his own.

  Wow, Robin, you got one ticket to ride… Now please try to step off this bottle-rocket thought trajectory…

  But it was no good. Like a computer program relying a little too heavily on branching tree logic, each time he went out on a limb, he branched off on an even smaller offshoot, and again and again, as if caught in a fractal-geometry take on Dante’s many runged Inferno.

  He imagined he was one of those transhumanists floating his consciousness across cyberspace, perhaps trapped in a quadriplegic body, only too happy to soar on the wings of virtual reality. He engaged those different DSM-IV diagnoses, using the chameleon shape-shifting of his psyche as catch-nets of information, as if data-mining the internet for connections only he could see using the many-sided geometry of his mind.

  Was that Drew’s voice coming to the rescue?

  “I see that inflated sense of social consciousness so endemic to Berkeley has swept you away again,” Drew said. “Shame, you’re missing some of the more dazzling sights.”

  Robin followed her eyes to the profligate parasails overhead, dropping from the passing plane, and to the jockeys who wielded them. Their giant banners contained slogans from the People’s Movement. “Free Yourselves.” “The Future Is Now.” “Participatory Democracy not Representative Democracy.” Some of the banners were so long, they had two parachutists, one at each end of the parasail.

  “A shame we don’t have a patent on the future, anymore,” Drew said. “Hard to feel special knowing this is going on in every city in the country.”

  “I suppose higher consciousness had to escape Berkeley some time. Wasn’t fair to keep it imprisoned here.”

  Drew shaded her eyes with her hand to better take in the sky-show. “According to Ken Wilber, you can tell how far into the future you are by the distribution of consciousness among the masses, as opposed to the top few percent. So, by my reckoning, we’re in the twenty-third century.”

  Robin smiled. “The timeline collapses as consciousness expands in favor of an eternal present. Zen masters have been advising us as much for some time.”

  “There’s nothing saying it’s still not a passing phenomenon,” Drew said,
her more conventional thinking taking hold. “There were no doubt signs of the first Renaissance rising in Europe decades before it came into full bloom.”

  “Decades? God help us all.”

  “You can bet it’ll feel like that for those living through it.” Drew winced as one of the parasailors landed hard. “From inside the black hole, I imagine it feels like time is standing still the faster it is rushing by.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Drew tidied Robin’s scarf for him, while determined not to be condescending about it. “Remember what I told you about high society?”

  “Yes, they’re mean, hateful, manipulative—”.

  “And, most importantly, the only friends I have.” Drew straightened his earrings for him so both dragons’ tails pointed down. “So you will be on your best behavior and remember all those days I humored you when you thought De Kooning was actually art.”

  Robin bit his lip and wondered if Drew was going to let the doorbell ring for a second time before building up enough nerve to answer. “And what are they to make of our sex changes?”

  “They’ll be tickled with delight at the choice gossip they can send careening around the globe. It’s very hard to outdo aristocrats for dirt. Besides, how this game works is: so long as you’re filthy rich, nothing much else matters.”

  Drew opened the door with her best faux smile, beaming brightly enough to illuminate a thousand cities. “Claire! Darling.” They kissed cheek to cheek. “Platinos! Look at you, you handsome devil,” she said to Claire’s Greek bronze-skinned husband, who was about as handsome as a postage stamp of Kate Smith. They were both in their forties, but fine living and over-indulgence had taken their toll. They were pleased to pass themselves off as fifty-somes, which was the best surgery could do to reset the clock. Robin had gotten a bit of the bio from Drew prior to their showing up on their doorstep, presumably to dull the shock, and help him get into character.

  The Cumberlands could not wait to divest themselves of their tales of terror enduring the Berkeley flats on their way to Drew’s home on Mt. Olympus, perched high up in the Berkeley hills.

  After taking their seats on the couch, Claire said, “One of those Occupy people shit on the hood of our Rolls! The things this city makes the chauffeur endure, poor man. He’s the one who’s got to clean it up, one of their very own ninety-nine percent.”

  “It’s a real test of character,” Drew conceded. Evidently, Drew felt the moment called for genuine compassion; it was all Robin could do to keep from laughing inappropriately.

  “We passed a naked man eating a bagel with a knife and fork at an outdoor café,” Platinos chimed in. “Now, how does one get civilized enough to eat a sandwich with a knife and fork, and looped enough to do so nakedly in public?” He laughed at his own joke.

  “It’s called transcendental logic. It’s all the rage,” Drew explained. She offered Platinos one of the rum-filled truffles to settle his nerves. “Reason is meant to yield to the consciousness-raising shock of the theater improvisations. They’re meant to throw you out of your body. That way you can see reality without rational mind, with all its culturally imposed inhibitions, getting in the way. It’s all part of the Derrida deconstruction movement so prevalent in these parts.”

  “That actually doesn’t sound half bad,” Claire said giddily. “We’ll see how well the theory holds up when Platinos decides to eat naked in public with that beer belly of his.”

  “That’s even better,” Robin said, eager to find a safe jumping off point into the shallow waters of this conversation without cracking his skull at the bottom of the pool. “We’re quite against norms of beauty here. All body types are celebrated.”

  “Really?” Claire nibbled at a chocolate truffle that contained more whiskey than resided at the tip of Margaret Thatcher’s nose. Drew was either anxious to help them loosen up, or was catering to their alcoholism on the down low, so no one would have to face the ugly prospect of drinking openly at ten in the morning. “Must be positively disorienting knowing who to dish dirt about. Speaking of which, will you get a load of these two, Platinos? Trans-gender, Drew? Really? Can’t you just be fashionably lesbian like everyone else?”

  “I’m certain she’s just throwing her support behind some local trans-gender politician to help him/her get elected,” Platinos interceded, evidently no stranger to the covering-for-one-another game. “The things we do to hold on to power, huh?” Platinos added, hopefully.

  “No,” Robin said sternly. “She couldn’t exactly accept what her lesbianism meant, presenting a less than picture perfect image to the world, which requires, of course, a couple be of opposite sexes.”

  “Oh,” Claire exclaimed. “Well that makes complete sense, as does your going along for the ride. Though I imagine I’ll have to make up something far more scandalous for the sake of our European friends.”

  Evidently, Drew could see Robin was reaching her boiling point, and interceded. “No one’s tried my pâté.” She held out the plate like a priest offering a ticket to the Promised Land via a few tasteless round wafers.

  Claire spread the pâté on a cracker and bit into it, while Drew chastened Robin with a face-peeling glare.

  “Don’t you think the People’s Movement has a point?” Robin said, refusing to stand down. Back ramrod straight, chin thrust forward, he added, “What happens to the world when all the wealth is concentrated in so few hands?”

  “I agree that’s a little extreme, darling,” Claire said, composedly. “But what happens when it’s more evenly spread out? You get what they have in Japan: business men—successful businessmen, mind you—sleeping in chests of drawers, renting a drawer, because they can’t afford to buy one. They’ve got a nightlight so they can read a book and recline, but they can’t quite sit up without bumping their heads. Their personal space is no bigger than a coffin. And they’re several social rungs up from the ones sleeping in stacked cages on the streets.”

  Platinos coughed. “Or how about those Kurds living in tents with dirt floors inside of which is a giant fifty-inch flat-screen TV? They consider themselves quite well off. Or those towns where the whole village has to gather to see the one TV hooked to the one satellite dish.” Platinos shivered from the chill running up his spine. “Equality for all means damn little for anybody.”

  “Let’s face it, darling.” Claire dusted the crumbs off her skirt. “There’s not enough to go around, and the dog-eat-dog world that’s the result just isn’t pretty.”

  “So the only solution is really to be a more vicious and cunning dog,” Robin said bitterly.

  “No one likes to face the facts so baldly, but what do you want us to say?” Platinos reprised his coughing. Robin felt as if he was being cued to stop choking him on these sappy sentiments.

  Claire relaxed into the couch, fiddled with her earring in an oddly seductive manner. “In point of fact, dear, the aim is to be beguiling. You want people to willingly concede more of the pie to you because your cunning and guile will see to it they get a bigger share than they would have obtained without someone as sly and covertly ruthless as yourself as their watchdog.”

  “Robin is the idealist in the family,” Drew said placatingly. “He’s still convinced we can all eat caviar. It’s just a matter of another one of those Al Gore technological fixes.”

  The Cumberlands howled.

  “I love that man,” Claire said. “He can keep you entranced for hours, drown you in social importance, and make you realize all you have to do to save the world is write him a check. He’s really our kind of people.”

  “I’m a fan of the universal base income idea,” Robin said. “Some mathematician worked out that each person can get $520.00 a month as a base income, just drawing on the legacy of technological innovation over history. As new technologies allow us to spread more wealth around, the base income rises, until we arrive at what Buckminster Fuller predicted decades ago, an age of prosperity for everybody.

  “He further argues that reclaimi
ng just ten percent of capital gains from those who eliminate human jobs in favor of automation and robotics and redirecting it towards that universal base income is enough to keep the system going in perpetuity. Meanwhile the captains of industry can still make a killing off the ninety percent gains from eliminating jobs. Everybody wins. No need to even ask the rich and greedy to stop being rich and greedy.”

  Claire covered her mouth until she was done chewing as a cue to everyone she was getting ready to speak to this issue without the shame of food caught in her teeth. “You’d need a world government to get that to work to ensure everyone abided by the same rules; otherwise those who played nice with others would be outcompeted in a heartbeat. Good luck selling that idea. National sovereignty isn’t easily surrendered.”

  “But when the entire economy grinds to a halt because no one has any money to keep it going, maybe they’ll listen then.”

  “That’s where we are now, and you’ll still not hear that talk in the corridors of power,” Claire said. “Reason has never stood up well to people who prefer to be demonized by their fears.”

  Robin sighed. “You have me there.”