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

by Dean C. Moore

  ***

  Robin decided to check in with Go-Along Charlie; he was the last of the hecklers on swing shift. He’d saved him for last because, by definition, if the others softened towards him, so would he.

  “You know what I stand for?” Charlie said, staring at Robin’s tits. “Nothing. That’s what.” He took off his glasses and started going over the lenses with a lens-cloth. “Managed to live this long without taking a stance on anything. Didn’t seem worth antagonizing others. And there you stand before me, my worst nightmare. A crass symbol of what I might have been.” The lenses wiped clean, he donned his glasses. “How you making out by the way?”

  “Not sure I’m any proof finding yourself this late in life is the way to go.”

  “That’s what I figured.” Charlie took out his gun and shot himself in the head.

  Robin froze, sensing the blood spatter on his face. Felt it trickle down to his chin, gather there and hang before falling to his breasts.

  Woody stepped into the picture, took the cigar out of his mouth. “Saw that coming. Told you, people hold few true surprises.”

  Woody took out his handkerchief and wiped Robin’s face as he stood unable to move. Robin heard all muffled and distorted: “Damn you to hell, Charlie!” “Do you believe this shit?” “No way!” “As if I don’t have enough paperwork to deal with with the perps.” He couldn’t put faces to the voices.

  He walked back to his desk through a long dark tunnel formed by blurred, bending light and sound, and sat down. “Glass half full, Robin. Glass half full.” He sipped his coffee, enjoyed the comforting sensation of the familiar, starting with the simple repetitive movements that framed his day.

  ***

  “So, let me get this straight.” Paolo dropped the dumbbell on the floor, finished working off his stress with that part of his regimen in the wake of Go-Along Charlie’s suicide. “He disses us to schmooze the swing shift because he can’t stand the idea of letting down the people he knows. And what happens? The first guy on swing shift who feels like he knows him, offs himself. Are we talking sign from God here? Maybe if I keep my mouth shut he won’t even make the connection.”

  “Definitely keep your mouth shut.” Ethan watched them mopping up the blood with a world-weary numbness.

  “I thought he took it pretty well.” Emmett regarded the cleaning crew smearing the blood with the mops and reached for his latest clown-gag from the gag store. Assembling it would help settle his nerves.

  “He numbed out. He went into zombie mode.” Paolo absently dumped a pinch of fish food in the bowl with the goldfish on his desk, his eyes on Robin.

  Emmett had the gadget out of the box. “Like I said, he took it well. Who hasn’t availed himself of the zombie strategy? I tell you, the kid’s a survivor.”

  “Well, I have my concerns.” Ethan twisted his face up at one of the guys in white scraping brain matter off the walls with a spatula. “It’s a mad mad world. So the sane thing to do is to go crazy. I just hope he’s holding out like the rest of us for no good reason, except being a hard ass.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Drew poured the tea for Robin and herself at The Great China Restaurant. Watching her, Robin got the sense she was no newcomer to Japanese tea ceremonies. Her motions were refined and exacting. Her mood both calm and ceremonial. Robin found it disquietingly easy to focus his full attention on her, and to disassociate himself from Go-Along Charlie’s suicide, just hours earlier. That was probably not a sign of healthy coping.

  Drew said, “I spoke to Saverly. He’s putting Manny through scenario games, something usually reserved for the executive class, and usually conducted in-house at topnotch corporations.”

  “He thinks that wise?”

  “Scenarios show a success rate second to none.” Drew set down her tea cup. “In an increasingly variegated world, no one has found a better way to train the mind to sift through complexities, ambiguities, conflicting information, and mixed signals in such a condensed timeframe.” Drew role-modeled for Robin how to pick up the tea cup, sip it, and set it back down with exacting grace.

  Robin followed suit. Drew’s expression suggested he’d gotten maybe a C+ grade on his first try.

  She said, “Forget your Ivy League schools; you want to create genius from mediocre stock, scenarios are how you do it. And in the timeframes you need to do it in to keep pace in a world changing faster than you can flick your fingers.”

  Robin tried his hand at raising the tea cup to his chin, sipped, then put it back down. He checked Drew’s face for the results. Definitely a B- this time. “I’m not buying it. Nothing comes of high pressure tactics and forcing things but doing more damage to people than life can accomplish without assistance.”

  “Then maybe this rhetoric will sway you. In a hyper-political reality such as ours, where upward mobility is on the outs, no one able to climb faster than they can eliminate jobs, humans daily losing ground to robots and software… The ones playing musical chairs, playing last man standing, are the ones with the most political savvy. And they got to be where they are—”.

  “By thinking faster on their feet than anyone else.” Robin put down his tea cup. He checked Drew’s face; C+ this time. Okay, so his improvement didn’t exactly follow a linear course; how symbolic of the rest of his life. “Hell, even if everyone’s out to get you, and plays the game with the darkest of hearts, looking to backstab, lie, cheat, steal, and kill their way to the top, just so long as you strategize better than they do, you win, taking morality out of the equation. Making the game beyond good and evil in a true Nietzschean manner. And odds are—”.

  “Good wins out over bad,” Drew said, finishing his thought for him.

  The light going on in his head, Robin said, “Because it’s really hard to climb that far, that fast, without doing a lot of good deeds for a lot of people who then feel very indebted.”

  Drew let Robin sit with the idea awhile before saying, “It’s Zen and the art of leadership; to lead is to serve.”

  “Maybe,” Robin said pensively.

  “Drink your tea,” Drew said. “You’re spoiling my Japanese tea ceremony with such bad timing between sips.” All the same, she was impressed with how much better Robin was getting at holding up his side of the conversation. Soon, if Robin kept to the course he was on, he might even surpass her, leaving Drew to focus on the aspects of her personality as a value-add she knew Robin would have no desire to duplicate, merely admire.

  She regarded Robin as he sipped his tea.

  “What if you’re wrong about scenarios?” Drew said. “The stakes are awfully high to take a chance.” She set her cup down without the expected crisp ceramic-on-ceramic sound. “Maybe you should consider admitting yourself to Saverly’s care before you have another relapse.”

  Robin froze. Looked as if he was deciding whether to be offended or not. Guess not. “The real world is the true pressure cooker, and the pressure never lets up, not ever. If the sustained high pressure is the transformative element, then that’s for the best. If it did let up, that’s when I’d risk a relapse. The phoenix can only work his magic at making himself over while standing in the fire.”

  “Never lets up?” Drew prompted. “Not even now?”

  Setting the cup down, more gracefully this time, Robin said, “This is a break by way of variety more so than intensity. After all, we’re still at the foot of the mountain as regards our reworked relationship, still trying to get a handle on the new dynamic, in order to strategize the latest ascent up the mountain, the best path to take.”

  “What if Saverly’s high pressure tactics surpass your more leisurely approach to enlightenment, sans undue pressure? Then you lose.” Drew held her hand up defensively, anticipating Robin’s retort. “Life as one unending pressure cooker situation after another is all well and good, but that doesn’t obviate Saverly’s approach of dialing the heat up even further in the short term to pressure treat the lumber, so to speak, so it can sustain such heavy loads over the
long haul. If he’s right, and you’re wrong, you won’t be able to keep chasing after the Renaissance men you so love.”

  “Am I that transparent?”

  “I can tell Hartman got under your skin,” Drew said, relaxing now that Robin was doing better with the Japanese tea ceremony component of their evening. “You weren’t just popping female hormone pills to keep us together. You were chasing some idealized image of yourself, some yin-yang version of wholeness to take the last Renaissance man idea to new heights. To beat Hartman at his own game—and any other comers.”

  “Right now, the only thing separating me from the other Renaissance men is my turtle versus the hare approach. Show me someone over the deep end and I’ll show you someone determined to apply too much force. Effortless effort is the Zen way.”

  He poured more tea for them from the mosaic-patterned ceramic kettle. “What’s more, better wiring the heart to the mind is the path to accelerated learning. That implies gentleness, kindness, and patience; virtues sorely lacking in megalomaniacs determined overnight to end the world, or subjugate it, or to simply get up the mountain faster than anybody else.”

  “Tell that to the next corporate czar who has to figure out how to keep his leadership team in the zone better than the competition can.” Drew raised her napkin to her lip in a tutorial manner. “Business is Zen and the art of warfare, lest you forget. And the stats they can cite in support of their methods are quite impressive.”

  “So you keep saying.”

  Robin, tracing his finger over the rim of the tea cup, had to admit Drew had a point.

  Gurdjieff, the Russian spiritual master, had argued for schools using scenario games to put their religious adepts under grueling pressures. He said it was the only thing that minimized the need for endless reincarnations on the path to enlightenment.

  The only middle ground Robin could think of between his position and Drew’s, which would make them both right in their own way, was the idea that the global depression was in fact the kickoff into Singularity State. The idea that the new Renaissance age he was feeling emerging would launch one rippling wave of Renaissance ages after another without end. So one would talk about “The Early 21st Century Renaissance Men,” “The Middle-Era 21st Century Renaissance Men,” “The Latter-Day 21st Century Renaissance Men,” divvying up the hundred years into quantum slices like a pulsing electron moving from its S orbital to its D and P orbitals in response to the extra energy moving through it.

  As to The Singularity Is Near notion, Robin was surprised he remembered the reasoning of Ray Kurzweil, and the book from their library. He hadn’t had the intellectual real estate to spare inside his head until now. A testament to how much his mind had grown in such a short while.

  Maybe Robin’s mind hadn’t grown so much as it was being fertilized by these flashes of intuition in preparation for the upcoming growth phase. The flashes starting in the cracks of his psyche left by Hartman, and spreading from there.

  When Robin shared the fruits of his thinking with Drew, all he got was a grunt. For a moment he’d forgotten that she indulged him in these debates because he fancied them. It was thus part of good form, healthy relationship cultivating, as if their relationship was a fine bonsai that needed pruning from time to time.

  And now the evening required they enjoy their fine meal and indulge in lighter conversation, otherwise life couldn’t be maintained in designer living mode – by the criteria Drew had divined in her head. If he didn’t play his part, he wasn’t being fair.

  Besides, Robin rather relished this part of her, as it helped get him out of his own head, helped keep his quest to wise up from gobbling up everything else by holding on too tight. He really did need to be coaxed to lighten up.

  Speaking of lightening up… Robin wondered if Manny had made any progress on that front.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Manny had half the locker room torn apart when Saverly walked in. He couldn’t imagine he’d survived the weekend, or that it was morning, the time for Saverly to report for shift. The locker room was windowless, and there was simply no sign the night had passed into day.

  “Friend or foe, doc? That’s all I need to know,” he said, holding up the pepper spray can he’d liberated from a nurse’s purse. “What role are you playing today?”

  Saverly’s smile was soft and gentle and empathetic, and constrained the instant he realized he was to blame for Manny’s state. “This is my fault. Come with me.”

  Manny followed him toward his office, walking triumphantly past the staff who he glared at so they’d know he’d gut them, spilling the entrails of gossip on each one, the second he was in the same room with Saverly and the door was closed on them.

  Once inside his office, Saverly opened the top file drawer of his file cabinet, reached in for a handful of files. He promptly handed them over to Manny.

  “My God. These are all Hartman’s students.”

  “More correctly speaking, they’re all my patients,” Saverly explained, his elbows on the arms of his desk chair and his hands touching at the fingertips.

  “How? Why?”

  “Believe it or not, philosophy is one of the most therapeutic disciplines for someone with psychological imbalances, providing the patients are high-functioning. When I had taken them as far as I could with medications and more conventional treatments, it seemed a logical choice to hand them over to Hartman. You can understand my reticence for coming clean.”

  “How could you miss the fact that Hartman was mad as a hatter?”

  “I didn’t.” Saverly said, clamping down on the arm rests with a death grip. “He’s one of my longest running patients. And proof of just how much you can do with philosophy to heal the mind.”

  “Or how little.”

  Saverly sighed. “Imagine for a second, you have barely repressible urges to harm someone.”

  “No problem.”

  “The voices in your head tell you why you need to kill. But alongside those voices is just one voice in particular, cajoling you to think of the implications if everyone did as you did, goading you to think of the greater good, reasoning against every single one of those voices, all of whom are very closed-minded and not the least open to debate. But the philosopher has to prove his case or die; the other voices want to kill him for what a threat he is to them.”

  Saverly played with a pair of Chinese silver meditation spheres in one hand. “You’ve seen these last few days what a threat to survival can do to sharpen the mind. The philosopher, by arguing his positions ever more convincingly, allows a once fragile ego to emerge. The sense of self, once established, has been battle-hardened against the most acerbic dispositions of all time—against demons designed to topple titans. There’s no place to go now but forward, no chance of regression; the ego is just too solid, too impregnable.”

  The balls clacked as they changed direction in Saverly’s hand. “This opens the door to trans-egoic states that lie beyond reason. The most pronounced one being the integral thinker, arguably the first to emerge. You’ll notice psychological and strategic acumen improve, mechanical aptitudes, foresight, and so on. The exact cocktail of characters may be no more than the ones needed to extricate you from the situation at hand. This interdisciplinary thinker can fashion out of the nothing, the divine ground of the Buddhists, everything he needs to be. No fixed self-image persists at this level; as it would be too limiting.”

  Saverly set the spheres back in their Paisely-patterned silk-clad box, shut the lid. “It’s real man into superman stuff. But the path is to Hell and back; there’s no other way to get there. Most don’t survive the journey.”

  “So that was you?” Manny realized for the first time that it was Saverly who was behind his charming little weekend getaway.

  “Sorry, but you’re not the average patient. I had to up the stakes to challenge someone who was used to dealing with cutthroats and sociopaths, and danger lurking around every corner. Your reality is psychotic for most people. And it’s
hard to beat a psychotic for constructing a sense of reality.”

  Manny sighed. “No wonder you don’t bother to flip between good guy and bad guy. Your good guy is one hell of a bad guy.”

  Saverly smiled at the weak humor, no doubt figuring Manny was just trying to defuse himself after the weekend he’d been through.

  “Back to Hartman’s students, Doc.”

  “They’re quite a crossroads of culture, that much I can assure you. Different income groups, wide ranging IQs and EQs. High functioning doesn’t do them justice except to gloss over the even more striking differences between them. There were serial rapists and murderers in that group, control freaks, addicts, those with OCD, PTSD; you name it.”

  Manny regarded the acute-care unit beyond Saverly’s reinforced window. Strange, with the sound muted, an inch or more of glass separating him, how much more violent everything seemed out there.