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

by Dean C. Moore

  Gretchen was in the shower; Santini could hear the rush of water from his living room. A less vociferous flow had caused homes on Brazilian hillsides to slide off their foundations of late. That vision tried its best not to be upstaged by the one of Thor sauntering out with a dress for Gretchen, held in his mouth by the hanger, and failed. He promptly opened the bathroom door by turning the knob in his mouth. For modesty’s sake, the curtains had been drawn around the bathtub. He then hung the dress on the inside or the door, and closed the door.

  Shortly thereafter the water shut off. Gretchen shouted from the other side of the door, “You read my mind!”

  He scowled at Thor, who proceeded to put his paw up to the TV and change the channel. “Hey! Oh, wait, this is a good one. Conspiracy Theory. Mel Gibson is great in this.” Thor picked up the remote from the couch in his mouth, set it down on the floor, before reclining on the rug. He pressed the channel guide with one of his talons, and began scheduling recordings of films. The International. The Prison Break TV series. Absolute Power. Above the Law. Antitrust. The Assassination Bureau. The Fugitive. The Game. The Man Who Knew too Much. The Pelican Brief. Santini was confident he saw the pattern. “So you’re a conspiracy nut? I knew we were bonding.”

  Thor yapped. “Ah, you’re developing your aptitudes for thinking around all powerful, secretive government and corporate entities, whose bread and butter are one conspiracy or another.” Thor nodded. “How is it you put that thought in my head?”

  “God, I’m dense? That’s not very nice. Oh, I see. God, I am dense. You’re psychic and you speak English? Seriously. Since when?” Thor telecast the image straight into his head of the purple liquid pouring out of Hartman’s lab into the culvert the Bullmastiffs on his estate drank out of. “Wow. You might be the first victims to come along in a long while who weren’t subject to some distantly removed party’s plotting and scheming. A child of mere happenstance. Must be liberating.”

  Santini took a pull on his beer. “How am I going to explain this to Gretchen?”

  Thor barked. “Yeah, you’re right, could upstage our little drama going between the two of us. I agree, we’ll save that topic for another time.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  Robin stretched into a lotus position and breathed in slowly. The yoga class was well attended today. The regulars, in whom he took endless delight, were all present.

  Cooper was fussing over his Chinese herbal teas brewing over at the edge of the room. Like so many others, he couldn’t wait to rush to the next form of therapy, the next chance at self-transcendence. That left multi-tasking. He’d steep himself in his herbal brews as he stretched into Downward Dog.

  Jasmine had her classical music blasting in her ears, courtesy of her iPod. She was still smarting from the brutal bashing she received when she tried to play the music on a phonograph to the entire class. Some were a little too attached to the Yanni the yoga instructor favored.

  Others were playing sitar music in their ears via Denon high performance in-ear earplugs and other technological homages to the value of combining audiophile sensibilities with yoga.

  Nina, who followed this class with her whirling dervish class immediately after, frustrated with the tightness in her body today that was keeping her from striking the yoga poses properly, had sunken recidivisticly into her whirling dervish routine. She spun in circles, and chanted happily to the duress of her classmates, whose patience she was taxing in the extreme.

  Nathan was inhaling the smoke from his bong, which he insisted was part of his yoga regimen. Apparently, the keys to the gates of heaven were no more than knots in his bones and musculature that needed to be undone so the divine could flow through him and saturate him, for which the hashish smoke helped immensely.

  Berkeley might be losing some of its sparkle relative to the rest of the world, but Robin had to believe that nowhere else on the planet was there a yoga class quite like this one.

  Raven, the instructor, strolled over to Robin and, flopping down in front of him, ran through a series of yoga postures in quick succession as a teasing reminder of the ecstatic release he could trigger in Robin’s body, given half a chance. Half way through his sex change, Robin figured the sexual innuendo would ease up; apparently not. Raven was either bisexual, or simply unbigoted regarding Robin’s anatomy.

  Robin would have been less annoyed if he had found him less attractive. He was the only man Robin ever had ideas of crawling into bed with, and he was just too old to be having these insecurities. What’s more, Raven forced him to confront thoughts of exactly what he was going to do sexually with Drew once she was entirely in male form, for which he was in no way ready. The fact he should have been thinking about that before agreeing to the sex change apparently was not appealing to Robin’s sense of logic, as influenced as that logic was by Berkeley mores.

  “I wish you’d consider joining our church,” Raven said. He had initially applied for church status to avoid taxation, a ruse all too common to local businesses in Berkeley, before realizing his guru status before a cult was even more of a goldmine as regards getting laid. “You can see how far the others have progressed since taking membership seriously.”

  Robin couldn’t deny that the regulars, most of whom had been homeless at one time on Telegraph Avenue, had blossomed in ways Hartman could only dream of. Doubly irksome was the realization that there might be something to the sweatshop approach to enlightenment. Put a bunch of people behind locked doors over a sustained period of time, dial up the pressure of a particular ideology which lays down the laws for self-transcendence, and voila, six months or six years later, you have people who have indeed managed to get over themselves. Robin might just have to admit, that while the approach wasn’t for him, it clearly worked for some people.

  Maybe the increasing tribal consciousness Robin was seeing all about him as small fanatical groups proliferated was the response to the unraveling social fabric and rising chaos. This yoga congregation was but one of many such cults.

  All the same, Ken Wilber had warned of the pre/trans fallacy.

  Namely, that one can easily fall into a pre-rational state, mistaking it for a trans-rational one. Trans-rational like trans-ego states of consciousness were healthy as they posited realms of understanding beyond what reason, logic, and the scientific method alone could grapple with. It allowed more evolved souls to access planes of truth that those trapped in the worlds of reason were blind to. But ascension was only certain if reason were along for the ride, subservient to the higher states of consciousness, still participating, not silent, not repressed, and certainly not denied, as was the case with pre-rational states. Historically, the latter harkened back to a time when mankind as a whole hadn’t yet incorporated reason into its vocabulary.

  Robin wondered if these new tribes were more of the pre-rational kind, or if they were proof of a new higher consciousness settling over the planet like a blanket of negative ions rolling off a mountain slope to elevate the spirits. If they were actually evidence of that higher consciousness taking hold, as individuals self-organized in ways that amplified the projection of one or another color and hue in a rainbow of consciousness.

  Robin had not sorted through his ambivalence over how he felt towards New Age tribes when he emerged from his hypomanic fugue. He couldn’t tell how he pulled out of it any more than he could tell how he’d sunk into it.

  He was doing yoga as the latest tonic for a mind reeling out of control. So far, this remedy was working about as well as all the others.

  “Sorry, Raven,” he said, focusing. “I don’t believe in middle men coming between me and my higher power. I hear my inner voice quite well. This, despite the static coming over the airwaves, as we muddle, as best we can, through the disinformation wars promulgated in the media. God knows, they require Derrida-like degrees of deconstructionism to circumvent.”

  “I suppose I’m just more static on the line.”

  “Ulysses needed his Sirens as a test of his resolve. I
thank you in a similar manner,” Robin said, actually hoping to avoid offending Raven. He smiled softly to take the sting out of his remark.

  Raven leaned over and quite brazenly gave him a kiss on his cheek, managing to turn his current yoga position into an even more impressive stretch in the process. No doubt the flush in Robin’s cheek had encouraged him, and he was more interested in his physiological reactions than his words. Words do lie, but pheromones always speak the truth, was a credo by which Raven clearly lived.

  Raven retreated to the rear of the room, and into the depths of his coven, protectively surrounding him and cutting him off from the real world. Robin departed the class, extracting himself from “religious service,” having had his fill for the day.

  Let’s hope Manny does better with the cult approach than I, he thought fondly, on his way out.

  ***

  It was time for Manny to find his way to the exit.

  Saverly and entourage were starting to feel more to him like a religious sect demanding his devotion and what little sanity he had remaining, and offering nothing in return but deeper and deeper fracturing of his once coherent psyche. Maybe he’d never been “cracked up” to be entirely sane, but he was not living solely within the fault lines either—his fate these last three months. Three months, if the calendars on staff desks and hanging on the walls could be trusted. He wasn’t entirely sure they could; it might just be part of the psy-ops games they were running on him.

  Think, Manny. What grand gesture was going to get him ousted from Shangri-La for psychos? The answer was as obvious as it was unsavory.

  He needed to kill someone.

  He needed to provide a sense of finality, so they wouldn’t keep resetting the game to start position. He had to stray beyond the boundaries while the game still had them. Before his entire society was nothing but games within games.

  Next problem: What to use for a weapon?

  He walked right up to the staff kitchen and knocked. He heard strange mechanical sounds, and footsteps that seemed a little too regularly paced coming towards him. To his surprise, a robot opened the door. He was pleasantly surprised to find they hadn’t shit-canned the entire menagerie after his little stunt rewiring them.

  He stepped into a strange wonderland of whirling gizmos and squeaking noises and artificial people more awkward than he was. And felt strangely at home. He might have to trade in people for these admitted clunkers. They were poor emissaries from another age, but as it turned out, at this juncture of history, they could be pretty broken down, decrepit, and inadequate, and still compare favorably to humans. One fewer barrier to entry to their age of ascendancy, Manny thought.

  “Can I help you, sir?” the one sporting a microwave for a belly asked. “Might I suggest the frozen beef bourguignon?”

  “Shush. Let’s do this on the down low, shall we?”

  “Why, yes, sir! Dieting are we?” Microwave Man replied conspiratorially.

  “Looking to cut a few pounds,” Manny said, without specifying off whom exactly.

  Bolting the door behind him, he asked, “Where do you keep the knives?”

  Coat Rack turned his Shiva-like arms, four on each side, into instant knife dispensaries, flicking them out as if the limbs themselves were enlarged switchblades.

  “Another robot with a knife fetish. There is a God.” Manny noted the opened box the robot was standing beside, and the fact his tag wasn’t cut off him. Apparently it had just been assembled, and it was possible the guy who put it together hadn’t even tested it yet.

  Manny grabbed the knife out of Coat Rack’s third left-arm, and turned to make his way out of the room. He beheld Microwave Man inserting a microwave dinner into himself with the utmost care and tenderness. Manny wanted to cry. He hadn’t been shown this much affection since Robin was at his side cracking jokes. He hated abandoning him. When he scuttled out of the room, closing the door behind him, he noticed MM was still making sure to center the dish in his stomach and stand right so it didn’t slide off his microwave carousel. It occurred to Manny, as he fled the scene, the robot might have a slight case of OCD courtesy of faulty wiring. He wasn’t sure if that killed the romance, or if they’d bonded further.

  Next problem: Who to kill? There were so many people he wanted to dispose of, but the thought of rationalizing murder just made him feel like they were winning the game, turning him into a psycho he just refused to become. One thing to arrive at the decision expediently, and strategically. Another thing to run twisted murder fantasies through his head one after the other as if that was the point, some sick erotic self-stimulation. It was decided, then. He’d wander about blindly, and the first person he ran into would die. Let God decide.

  As fate would have it, that person was Jim.

  What were the odds the one person besides Saverly he half-way liked would be the one staring down at the knife in his gut? “Sorry, I feel like shit about this.” Manny wasn’t kidding. And having to flee the scene once again just made things worse. He couldn’t be there for Jim’s departure to the afterlife, couldn’t even take time to envy his final escape, the completeness of it, versus the very partial escape which was the most for which Manny could hope. The steps racing towards them saw to that. Jim wailed like a beached porpoise. Just as well. No point sounding an alarm if no one can hear.

  Manny ducked around the corner, into the adjacent hall.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Drew ran her eyes over the elegant décor of The Mandarin Palace. It was a departure from their usual haunt, Vegi Food, deep in the Gourmet Ghetto, which served up vegetarian Chinese food in true Buddhist fashion. Straying outside the Gourmet Ghetto was quite the reach for her. But she was calming down, seeing as The Mandarin Palace’s décor was simple and tasteful with clean lines and subtle Asian accents. The effect was soothing.

  The seamless setting was matched with smooth friendly service. Their drinks were refilled and plates were cleared silently and efficiently. Their every need was anticipated and dealt with gracefully.

  Then there was the food. Drew, deciding for them, had elected to start with the chicken salad. Then the pot stickers. For entrees, the hot braised shrimp delighted. The tangerine beef proved another stellar entree. The Mandarin Palace’s version of chicken cashew debuted exceptionally. All in all, despite being cursed with the standards of England’s old world landed gentry, Drew had been pleasantly surprised. No one had done anything to shatter the illusion of a perfect evening, which was important to her because she was playing host to Robin. It was her idea to eat out at this establishment, after all. More to the point, living life without the seams showing took a complement of well-trained and well-organized staff she was happy not to have to underwrite on occasion.

  She had decided that an artful life was the best form of drama therapy for Robin. Like enforcing the imaginary world of a psychotic. Let the bubble break when Robin was good and ready to reach beyond it, and not a moment before. Then again, this approach was Drew’s cure-all to stress. Robin was proving increasingly resistant to all approaches.

  “It still messes with your head, doesn’t it?” Drew said. “Hartman experimenting on those kids. He proved just how much biology and psychopharmacology shape our every thought and deed, constituting the essence of who we are.”

  “Yes, I suppose it does.”

  “And yet, what better testimonial could be given to your changing sexes in order to perceive the world through new eyes?”

  “Maybe the revelation won’t quite take because there are other corollaries to that theorem I haven’t quite assimilated yet.” Robin picked through his cashew shrimp, grabbing hold of just the cashews with the chop sticks. “So I have to keep roasting the chestnut over the open fire of my imagination until it yields all its secrets.”

  Drew smiled obligingly. She could remember when Robin struggled to keep up with her. Drew was the one with the advanced degree in psychology, not Robin. How far he’d come. She wished she could take all the credit, but it was be
coming increasingly clear the psychopath Hartman had more to do with his metamorphosis. “Despite putting on a bold show for your public, Humpty Dumpty is still in shattered pieces after Hartman, isn’t he?”

  “I’ll be putting my psyche back together for months.”

  “Thereby giving testimonial to the value of a slow annealing process over one that is forced and arbitrary. One that includes love, gentleness, and patience, versus one that hinges on force.”

  “I don’t suppose until I’ve lived those credos and experienced their effects firsthand will I truly be sold on them. Thanks to embracing the philosophical temperament more since Hartman, I also now see things from multiple perspectives. It makes it hard to invest too heavily in any one, no matter how attractive the argument may sound.”

  Drew harrumphed, having no clever come back for that one. Not initially. “If you succeed, if you’re right, you’ll be the first Renaissance man not to come out of the oven half-baked.”

  “Maybe the pendulum is swinging back from the extreme specialization common to a technological age. Maybe, as a result, there will soon not be anything special about me.”