Gretchen reached into her purse and pulled out a snatch of plaid shirt. “I mailed his wife saying I’d contribute five hundred dollars to her medical bills, if she’d send me a swatch of his clothing. I suggested she put the rest on eBay.” She held out the patch so Thor could sniff Coma Man’s scent. “I suppose I should have waited until the other dogs got here. There’s not much to sniff, I’m afraid.”
“Thor has already communicated the smell to the other dogs,” Santini said. “Why do we need the swatch if we have the wife? Are she and the husband estranged?”
“She’s a gypsy woman. Though, the politically correct term in Europe is Romani. They don’t have an actual address, just places they squat illegally. She finds him places to work for free so he can concentrate on his experiments. I was only able to reach her through the hospital on her last visit to pick up her husband.”
The C-130 was landing.
The colossus of a plane turned around and dropped its tail gate like a sperm whale scooping up krill.
“Holy shit. Look at this guy,” Mort said, eying Brutus padding towards them. “He makes yours look like the runt of the litter.”
“Thor says he suits you,” Santini said. “Big and brutish.”
“Don’t tell me I stepped on a psychically sensitive nerve.” Mort rubbed behind Brutus’s ears.
The other Bullmastiff disembarked the C-130, flanked Gretchen without being told. Apparently, they would each have their own private doggie escort from here on out. Whatever Thor had keyed into, Santini couldn’t say he liked it. Spelled more trouble ahead. “Yours is named Brutus,” Santini explained to Mort. “And Gretchen’s is named Hunter.”
Sable jumped out of the baggage compartment of the Air France plane and barked. She bolted away from the airport. “That’s the scout,” Santini explained, getting the psychic broadcast from Thor. “She’ll press ahead for Coma Man, keep us abreast of trouble.”
Mort was impressed. “There’s nothing like military order to set a person’s life straight. Even if it’s a life full of psychic dogs that eat brains to sustain their higher functioning. Considering my behavior of late, I suppose I don’t get to judge.”
TWENTY-THREE
Toby checked out the view of The Shambles from his 1932 Auburn, the top down. “Very nice of this bloke to consider parking his derriere someplace with a decent view.” Manchester had been enough of a drive to feel he deserved the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
His car wasn’t exactly permitted where he was parked. Whenever anyone gave him duff about it, he said, “Ten pounds to sit inside,” as if he was part of the attraction. The wankers were falling for it. They stepped back, eyed the gorgeous vintage automobile, then walked on. Who the hell was going to pay ten pounds when they had all the eye candy they wanted without actually stepping inside?
Coma Man was situated on the top floor of the building straight ahead. Toby adjusted the GPS screen, currently giving him a view of Coma Man’s flat. Just in case he had to run interference for Robin, he had hooked her up with a spy cam. Just more spy-craft inherited from Lady Harding. Coma Man’s address wasn’t exactly known, being as he was squatting illegally. Toby could thank Lady Harding once again for the MI-6 intel that had taken them this far.
***
Milton Freed, AKA Coma Man, scooted his wheelchair towards the window. “You say your driver has claustrophobia and agoraphobia?” He laughed. “And rather than coax him out of his safe haven, you’re enabling his insanity by allowing him to watch us from the car, which he hasn’t left in thirteen years?”
“You call it enabling, I call it a different branch of Christianity,” Robin said. She eyed the chickens strutting their stuff around the apartment and the live goat with the same charity.
“How does he stay in shape?” Milton wheeled himself to another window to get a better angle on Toby. Most of his body had long atrophied from years in coma, which physical therapy, and passive range of motion exercises thus far had done little to offset. The motorized wheel chair, which he could operate with his thumb, was still no easy challenge for him.
“He has sex with the maids in the backseat. Just thirty of them, he says, not the entire staff, trying not to boast. He is quite the looker.”
Milton laughed. “So he’s starting his own race of bubble boys and bubble girls.”
“With global warming, and the loss of a viable atmosphere, I imagine it’ll be all the rage,” Robin said.
“Not to mention the cost of a decent flat.” Milton eyed his digs as if wondering how much longer he could get away with hiding out here. He imagined the bubble children roaming the English countryside like giant hamsters in their spherical bubbles. Exercising and staying fit from inside a plastic world no bigger than the breath of a coffin spun on a centrifuge. And laughed.
Robin came out of his head. It was the first time she’d seen exactly what was going on in someone’s mind. Psychic flashes weren’t covered in the DSM-IV. Up until today it had never occurred to her, she might be adding to the manual. Few would think it lacked in thoroughness from its sheer girth. She wondered if Coma Man’s surreal images allowed him to channel lightning flashes of emotional discharge in ways other outlets could not. Maybe they had an unsurpassed ability to anneal various layers of the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious minds, after trauma had created fissures between them. Maybe her own unconscious was pointing the way to the next stage of healing post Hartman by alerting her to the realm of the surreal. Maybe the combination of empathy for Milton Freed, budding psychic abilities, and a newfound penchant for the surreal had all come together at the precise moment to create the link with his mind.
Milton sighed. “I suppose my formula for life isn’t any more enviable.” He turned his back on the window and let the subject of Toby go.
“You mean, spending the first third in a basement building a time machine. The second third in a coma. And the last third dodging men in black,” Robin said.
He chuckled. “Something like that.” He eyed her with piercing blue eyes that hadn’t lost their sheen for all he’d been through, and how much life the coma had sucked out of his body. “You’re curiously well informed,” he said. “I suppose that was what this surreal conversation was about, getting me to feel less sorry for myself. Getting me to loosen up.”
“And to feel like less of a madman,” Robin explained. “Genius is always mad relative to the rest of the world.”
“I appreciate the effort to kickstart my brain, I really do,” he said, wheeling himself closer to her. “Especially considering that the formulas escape me now. I can’t remember the theories underlying my time machine that made it work. I can’t engineer it if I don’t remember the physics it’s built on.”
“Someone was pretty confident you could put the pieces back together,” Robin said. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have awakened you from your coma.”
“You think that was deliberate? As opposed to another fluke of fate, like the rest of my life.” Milton pondered the point, looking more troubled than relieved someone believed in him when he could no longer believe in himself.
“The damage to your memory centers was well documented. As was the untainted part of your brain governing higher reason. If they couldn’t count on you to remember, they could count on you to meet up with someone who could fill in the missing pieces for you.” Milton’s shimmering eyes, catching the rays of the sun, alighted further with a terrible understanding.
***
“Who is this woman?” Mort asked.
To Toby’s chagrin, Mort, Santini, Gretchen, and Fabio had all taken him up on his offer to sit in the vehicle for ten pounds each, and were now coveting the GPS screen as zealously. The four Bullmastiffs that accompanied them had the car surrounded, pushing the crowd a safe distance back, which definitely helped his sense of claustrophobia. They had been rammed by the afternoon crowds raining down on The Shambles the way London fog choked the River Thames.
“That’s Robin Wakefi
eld,” Gretchen explained. “I’ve read about her. She was in charge of the Hartman case. Ever since Hartman, she only chases after Renaissance types like herself.”
“What makes her so special?” Santini asked.
Gretchen disclosed, “She does deep dives into mental illness, schizophrenia, paranoia, manic-depression, you name it, to retrieve the insights she needs to push a case forward. She doesn’t let anything about the human condition scare her.”
“That’s right. I heard she used to be a man,” Mort said. “There was a time when I would have looked down my nose at that kind of thing. But drinking has really hollowed me out. I can’t even remember why I was so angry at the world.”
Toby said, “You gotta love how she drives herself a hundred kinds of crazy to uncover hitherto unearthed clues in an investigation. She’s all to hell and back.”
“And who are you?” Mort asked. “A groupie?”
“I’m one of you. Part of the underground railroad, shuttling scientists to safety.” Toby shook his hand.
“No shit,” Mort said. “And how would you happen to know how we spend our time?”
“Lads, your exploits are epic.”
Toby took the earbud out of his left ear that trailed to his iPad. And then he unplugged the cable from the 5 x 7 display so the rest of them could hear the broadcast he dialed up on the screen from a list of underground news briefs. “Sergio Santini, Mort Willis, and Gretchen Sharper are being hotly pursued by the men in black following the disappearances of several scientists that were being closely monitored. It’s unclear at this point who they want more, the scientists or the intrepid threesome. One Zip Cunningham, a new Renaissance scientist himself, recently released from custody, is believed to have ratted out Santini and Willis, which put them on to Sharper. Stay tuned for more news of the resistance across the world.”
The now dated news flash came with photos of each of them, which Toby proudly highlighted. “You’ve kept more next-generation technology from going off line in the last few weeks than we’ve managed to do in a year. If you were around in Tesla’s day, the world would be an even brighter place.”
“According to Sister Gretchen here, we were.” Mort turned to Gretchen accusingly. “And you, Sister? Tapping man in black secure sites, too, to get at Robin’s information?”
“Honestly, the fan-zines are enough,” she replied.
“Shush, you two, I can’t hear what they’re saying.” Santini adjusted the volume on Toby’s miniature TV.
“I have instant playback, zoom, and autocopy, all in HD,” Toby said. “Their exchange is being backed up to your PDAs as we talk.”
Mort leaned into Toby, as if determined to sniff subterfuge on him. “You have all this technology at your disposal, and you can’t find a few renegade scientists?”
“It actually belongs to Lady Harding,” Toby explained. “She makes a difference in her own way.”
Mort’s crinkled face suggested he found Toby’s effusiveness suspicious. Then he found the mini-bar in the backseat, and put two and two together. “You mean, she’s an alcoholic, mad with paranoid delusions, who goes around assassinating possibly deserving, then again, possibly innocent people, to keep the madness in check.”
“How did you—?” Toby said.
“I’ve long had to resist the impulse myself,” Mort confessed.
“Damn it, you two,” Santini spouted. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life on rewind to figure out what just happened.”
“He’s a stickler for reality,” Mort explained to Toby in a hushed tone. “Myself, I don’t mind instant replay coming between me and the monsters. Living in the here and now isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
***
“You seem to know more than I do about what’s going on with me.” Milton drilled into Robin with his piercing blue eyes. Finding nothing, he surrendered the excavation project, and sighed. “Sorry I couldn’t be of more help.”
“You’ve been of great help.” Robin observed the wife in the background, refusing to make eye contact with her. She pretended to be busy with wifely duties, from cleaning the kitchen to preparing a meal, all the while taking in every word.
“How so?” Milton asked.
“Your wife is evidently part of the underground.” Robin heard a dish break in the kitchen. “I’m guessing she had her hand in your resurrection. It stands to reason she found herself a code writer, who could insert a constellation of self-evolving algorithms onto the Internet, aimed at bringing you back from the dead.” From how the wife was flushing red, and losing track of where she was with her meal preparation, Robin figured she was square on target. “A program that could reach across an ever-widening number of disciplines both in the digital and the real world to pull out the ordered relations necessary to affect your awakening. The best part is: no human mind will ever be able to prove it, as the logical force behind the pattern recognition isn’t at all human, is an intelligence we may never fully understand. Furthermore, it may have already erased itself to cover its tracks.”
Robin noticed the wife perspiring in the background. Not the fan she’d put in front of her face, or the opened window, were doing much to ameliorate that.
“What if it hasn’t?” Milton said. “What if it’s still going, still making connections to help me rebuild my time machine? Could I be so fortunate?”
“That’s a sword that cuts two ways,” Robin said. “On the one hand, these artificial entities might provide better protection for rogue scientists hot to remake the world than any underground railroad. They become an ecosystem in which your genius can be properly incubated. It solves the problem of any garage-start-up enterprise that isn’t sufficiently networked with a global supply chain to get the scientist everything he needs. Without such virtual reality assist, what’s more, all it takes is one weak link in the supply chain, and dreams of a better world turn to dust. That’s a lot of attack points for men in black. Even without them, most people just don’t have what it takes economically, politically, mechanically to pull it all together. They lack enough of the necessary aptitudes. Up until today, I would have believed only Renaissance men could affect the future in any telling way. I may have to revise my thinking in lieu of a new kind of Renaissance man in town.”
“Who do you mean?” Milton asked.
“Mother, of course. An all-protective, sheltering, sentient Internet. Maybe not fully sentient yet. Maybe only partially and only for short periods. But each time one of these self-evolving algorithmic clusters cocoons one of you scientists in its self-organizing ecosystem of relations necessary to bringing your work to market, she has effectively demonstrated a disembodied Renaissance man consciousness that isn’t localized to place and time. Interlink enough of the clusters, furthermore, and she would essentially be building the mind of God from the ground up.”
“What’s the other side of the sword?” Milton asked.
“She’d be fostering codependence. What human being would ever have to become a true Renaissance figure when protected in such a womb from which he never has to emerge?”
“I see your point.” Milton drew pensive.
“The more things break down around us, our social relations, our economic success, the more subject we are to failure, the more we have to turn our eye inwards to see what about our thinking is causing us to fall short of the mark. That is the beginning of the Renaissance man reaction. Finding sufficient distance on ourselves to identify the flaws in our thinking, make reparations, and continue the self-improvement from there throughout a lifetime. Ultimately, the paradigm shift comes when the individual, in order to evolve further, has to learn to incorporate more vantage points, more aptitudes. He has to become an integral thinker, which is the opposite of a specialist.”
Milton played with the joystick on his wheelchair to help him think. “Maybe this world of ours has room enough for both. Maybe Mother provides a middle path for all the ones who aren’t up for climbing Mt. Olympus on their own.”
“Maybe. I’ll have to meditate on it.” She paused to give herself room in her mind to think. “Something else you need to consider: If the underground railroad has stumbled on to Mother; it’s not long before the men in black do. There’s nothing stopping them from creating self-evolving algorithms of their own and freeing them on the Internet. Your cocoons shielding you from them could just as easily become jaws of death from which no amount of running and human assistance can allow you to escape.”
Milton gulped. “You have a way of cutting to the heart of things.” He wheeled himself back and forth, and ended up in the same place. “I’m afraid this is all a bit much for someone who hasn’t used his mind in a long while. Still, I’m emboldened by your words. Now I have hope, if along with it, a healthier sense of danger than I ever had before.”
Robin bid him adieu.
“What will you do now?” Milton asked.
“Pray I’m wrong,” Robin said. “Playing against Mother is more daunting than playing chess against a supercomputer. She can keep reaching out for more computer power, keep expanding her cloud of consciousness as needed, synthesize more artificial personalities in the form of her clustering self-evolving algorithms. It would be very hard to win coming up against her, or even to guess her next move.”
“But that is what you do, isn’t it? Pit yourself against the greatest Renaissance types of our times, in hopes of showing them up as posers. You had to figure that sooner or later, they wouldn’t all be biological entities, localized in space and time.”
Robin chortled. “We can’t be too sure, I’m not the poser.”
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 102
