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

by Dean C. Moore

  Maybe among those inventors, moreover, would be the Renaissance men Robin needed to keep an eye on before one of them became the next Hartman. Maybe he needed to watch protectively over them as much for maintaining his own sanity as theirs under the grueling pressures wielded by an imploded global economy, making funds scarce that were needed to provide the fertile soil in which genius could take root without becoming malformed.

  And he needed to recognize that philosophy proper had exploded into any and all fields as the doctorate of philosophy degree implied, which one could earn in any specialty. Maybe that was for a reason. The philosophical temperament married to these individual fields meant the puzzle pieces could be made to fit together synergistically, as the philosophical temperament was at its core both analytic and synergistic, not merely one or the other. Interdisciplinary Studies (IDS) philosophers could then arise not just to craft Renaissance men, but to make the big picture connections that needed to be made for still more empowering versions of reality to take form.

  Philosophy was undergoing a tectonic change, only the philosophy department didn’t see it that way, afraid that to take the Platonic or Socratic disposition into other fields would leave them with nothing to teach. Not true.

  Teaching the mind to think philosophically about every aspect of life, however, meant likely teaching with an IDS degree. Most philosophers simply weren’t up to the task. Perhaps those individuals should take to writing the philosophical novel, Robin thought, a better place to invent more worthy futures if lacking in sufficient aptitudes in these other areas to make significant contributions there. That way they could at least empower their visions with thought experiments that might very well guide the engineers and builders of tomorrow in various fields.

  How better to inspire a smart-home than to write a book or make a film in which the smart-home was very much the star, in the way Hal was the star in 2001: A Space Odyssey, as the intelligence of the spaceship?

  Maybe philosophers as novelists and filmmakers and videogame designers was a lot more becoming than philosophers as linguists.

  Maybe Robin would take to writing as a better way to narrow the gap between Hartman and himself, and maybe one day, who knew? Surpass him. There was a lot to be said for thought experiments over real world experiments, moreover, considering Hartman’s recent real world experiments and the disastrous results.

  ***

  After departing the seminar on Derrida, Robin never made it over to the science division. At least not that day. Drew found him on campus staring into a creek, lost to the flow of the water. He had been drooling into his shirt. His eyes were dry from not having blinked in hours. He was more depressed than catatonic, honestly. He didn’t have the energy to get up. And he felt strangely at peace with the melancholy, as if paying divine retribution through it for his sins. Which was precisely Drew’s prognosis.

  She said, “You have to stop thinking you could have done anything to save those kids. Even if you succeed at boosting your smarts to Hartmanesque levels with your meetings with remarkable men… You will never divine the big picture in time to forestall calamity if calamity is what is meant to happen.”

  Drew squeezed his arm. “Sometimes calamity is good, like a forest fire sweeping the woods that need it to break out of the evolutionary energy well they’re stuck in. Calamity may even be good in your case; look at how far you’ve come already. Things never stuck to you before because you didn’t let them. Enlightened, perhaps, but unearned. It’s one thing to take in life deeply, process it, and let go. Another to be immune to it all together.”

  Drew stroked his back. “That’s what your father did to you, made lack of introspection seem like a godsend. Made being in the moment infinitely preferable to standing back from it.

  “Hartman set you on a journey that’s only now beginning. Don’t rush it. Don’t dwell on things lost. Just enjoy it. Each step. Your unfolding is like a flower opening. It will be painful up until the end, but delightful too. You don’t want to get stuck somewhere again like you did in the role of the innocent forever and a day.”

  She continued to massage his back as she talked. “If you’re to reach Hartman, far less surpass him, you have to accept all these truths and more. Truths you’ve yet to discover. It’s the journey that matters, silly.”

  All platitudes aside—many of which she had already turned into mantras—if Robin was determined to prove philosophy could heal the mind as much as psychology, Drew was definitely arguing one without the other was likely to lead to stillbirth. How like Hartman.

  Robin decided then and there that stating the obvious could be far more profound than peeling back the nature of the atom, if the timing was right. It was. The last time Drew had come inside anyone’s head to play coach to this degree was when she was talking Wilfred, a corporate exec at Chevron, off the cliff. Maybe she had held back this long because that was exactly what Robin had asked her to do, to let him find his own way.

  All the same, Robin wanted Drew to leave him to his depression. Maybe he was self-medicating with it. Maybe he was punishing himself for sins committed by someone else for which he was not to blame. But it nonetheless felt nurturing. More so than understanding right now. More so than all the enlightenment in the world. Apparently sensing this, after sitting in silence with him and seeing he wasn’t going to budge, Drew left him alone.

  Had his higher self drawn him to such a dreadful murder scene at Hartman’s estate to shake him into higher consciousness when nothing else could? Was he in some way not to blame for the incident, just his exposure to it, for being such a hard head? For withdrawing so completely into his psychological defenses? The New Age aphorism, “We Create Our Own Reality,” may have been just another platitude, but in the proper context, it could be as profound as any other adage. We unconsciously created our own reality to the point where intercession by the higher self alone could rescue us from it. Robin resolved to keep that channel open so his higher self would never again have to act out in an Old Testament fashion just to get his attention.

  He had no more explanation for why he’d sunk into depression than for why he’d previously slipped into catatonia. Except maybe that this was the latest aftershock following in the wake of the initial trauma with Hartman and, like all aftershocks, when and where they would strike was rather hard to nail down.

  The summer of his youth had yielded to the fall. The browning of his colorful personality, he would have to accept, was as crucial to consciousness as the other seasons of mind. He might have to get used to the changing weather as an important way to access altered consciousness. Seen from that light, his current meltdown was more blessing than curse.

  Once again he chose to flee the cushier confines of self-insight for the sensual pleasures of his depression, slipped into the slow moving mud of his mind and out of the faster flowing river of thoughts.

  For the next few hours the well of toxic emotions didn’t offer much that was productive.

  Henceforth, his every extrapolation from inventions rumored to be underway in the science labs of Berkeley ended in apocalypse, with all the positive branches of his thinking clipped in favor of all the negative ones in keeping with his depression. That in fact was what got him off the log he was sitting on, and compelled him to place one foot in front of the other, in hopes of making it to the science labs.

  They were closed. That left tomorrow.

  In his frustration, it dawned on him that, while depressive thoughts might seem unrealistic from a sunnier perspective, it didn’t mean the scientists he wanted to observe weren’t also working from inside depressions no less profound that would compel them to lose track of alternative futures. In the same way, their skewed thinking could compel them to favor a very grim fate they chose to open up and invest their psychic energy in until it was made real.

  He had to get a handle on the psychological states of those students to see indeed what alternative futures they would be opening. Maybe their inventions would, on
ce released into the market, spill into an equal amount of positive and negative applications, thus neutralizing the overall impact.

  But maybe, if the depressive or depressed-with-schizo-affect science student refused to come up for air, seeing only negative applications of his inventions, he might hit on an even more drastic solution to the whole sorry mess of life.

  Had Robin not mired himself in negativity, such thoughts would either never have occurred to him, or he would have dismissed them outright as the product of defective thinking, not realizing that defective thinking unlocked doors to insights in the same way that the clear-skies thinking of his earlier brighter disposition did.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  When he arrived home, Robin was in the same sorry state Drew had left him in by the creek, only ambulatory. Drew was coping with stress in her usual fashion, cooking up a storm in the kitchen. For all Robin knew, he was the cause of the stress.

  “There he is!” She hammered her wooden spoon against the wok.

  Mock glee. Just what he needed. Time to put a quick end to it. “I was thinking someone able to mutate deadly viruses, could, in the fashion of AIDS, cause an explosive growth of alternative strains that would overwhelm any effort to contain them. That would lead to decimation of the global population.” He fell on the barstool, nibbled on the homemade cheesy-curl fries in the serving bowl. “The only ones who survived would be naturally immune to such an approach. It’s possible a suicidally-depressive virologist would come to the conclusion this was for the best in the long-run and decide to hasten our path to the endgame. After all, one sustainable future is one where those alive are immune from most any form of viral attack.”

  “Such lovely thoughts before dinner. I think they’ll go better with the curry.” Drew, whose hand had arrested over the carrot she was dicing during Robin’s spiel, resumed her frenetic chopping.

  Robin dug another fry out of the bowl. Speaking in a soul-sucking monotone, he said, “Alternatively, a few well-placed electromagnetic pulses—high up in the atmosphere—could bomb us back to the Stone Age, eliminating any technological threats of such magnitude for hundreds of years, thereby avoiding a major die-off. Without international travel to spread diseases, or atomic bombs, we’ve arrived at yet another sustainable future.”

  “I can tell you’re pulling out of it,” Drew said, formulating her curry powder concoction by hand. “We arrived at a sustainable future this time without first killing off ninety-nine percent of the world’s population.”

  “We need a Herbert Hoover of our times focused less on commies and more on profiling science geeks.” Robin dipped his index finger in the curry, sucked on it.

  “Let’s not forget about those rogue viruses,” Drew taunted, evidently appalled by his sticking his unwashed hands in her curry.

  Robin arrested his finger’s arc halfway to his lips, stared at it, then wiped the curry powder with a dish towel, as if delousing himself after a nuclear spill. Drew smirked unsympathetically.

  She took a deep breath to fortify herself with the patience of the saints. “Let me see if I follow your reasoning. You’re entertaining this depression for the hitherto before unseen and unseeable insights it grants you into the future. All well and good, I can buy that.”

  Her hand never stopped flying over the carrots with the carving knife. Though what carrots had to do with curry, Robin couldn’t say.

  “The logical thing to do,” Drew said, “is to first profile your science students, and only then delve into the implications of those psychologies. Otherwise you risk exhausting yourself to no good end.”

  “I’m sure somewhere there’s some chemist capable of poisoning a big city’s water supply, working from just this state I’m in now. Which is why I won’t be sleeping tonight.”

  “Not your concern.” Drew had moved on to mincing potatoes, to Robin’s horror—with the skins on. “You specialize in Renaissance men, remember? Leave some glory for others to steal.”

  “Point taken,” Robin sighed, realizing the revelation did nothing to change the dire fate of the world.

  Drew said, shaking the cumin into the curry powder, “Renaissance men ought to be more immune to any lingering state of mind, because their ability to readily shift mindsets provides a natural antidote to any single one’s hold on them.”

  “All that shiftiness could also open up hell worlds of orders of magnitude far greater. Who else would have ready access to them?”

  “Almost certainly, explaining why you should probably rest up in time for dinner. You’re going to need your energy to chase after them.”

  Robin felt grossly manipulated, but couldn’t deny the logic. At least not initially. An idea occurred to him as he undid his shoes in slow motion. He stared at his socks, unable to go any further. “Why couldn’t depression serve as the unifying theme connecting many aptitudes in our Renaissance man? Just being able to synthesize mathematics with genetics and a half dozen other fields doesn’t inoculate one from depression in the least. If I have any chances of finding this person, I owe it to myself to stew in these negative emotions.”

  Drew’s hand arrested with the coriander-shaker as she thought about it. Resuming her sprinkling, she said, “No, I beg to differ. Insights into life for a thinker is like honey to bees. And the more insights the better. Like shock therapy to snap him out of his doldrums. And a Renaissance mind ought to generate more shocks per capita than any other. What’s more, he is excited by each shock into ever more exalted states.”

  She tasted the mix before rotating more seasoning bottles in search of the missing ingredient. “They may be prone to adrenaline overload and over-secretion of hormones as a result, like any workaholic who can’t stop chasing after the fix.” She fought with the lid of the turmeric. “Which is where your larger-than-life fallouts will come from. But the exact nature of those meltdowns is one you can only explore by first locking in the specific profile for your Renaissance killer, or would-be killer. So once again you’re putting the cart before the horse.” She at last wrestled the lid free of the turmeric jar.

  Robin felt suitably trumped, or at least suitably exhausted to let the matter drop. The depression, having served its purpose, lifted, and in its wake was a gentler melancholy more suitable to a quiet evening at home.

  ***

  THE FOLLOWING NIGHT

  “How did the science labs at Cal treat you?” The tone of Drew’s voice as she asked the question made it sound more cordial and obligatory than earnest. Though the fact she was distracted with stir-frying broccoli and tofu in peanut oil in the wok might have explained the tone shift. Then again, she could have been disguising mild disinterest beneath the veneer of multi-tasking.

  “Complete waste of time,” Robin complained. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.” He unshouldered his book pack and tossed it on the sofa, then flopped down beside it and stared at the ceiling. “There’s no reason to believe they aren’t all the next Unabomber. I definitely empathize with paranoid bureaucrats who want to stick mosquito-sized cameras to buzzing around them twenty-four-seven. As it is, I’ll have to work backwards. Wait for a crime to be committed, and then get inside their heads. There isn’t enough supercomputer time in all the world to attack the problem from the front end. Why are you smiling?”

  “Maybe now, you’ll set aside more time for us. At least we can enjoy the hiatus between killing sprees. Speaking of which, how is the healing coming along?”

  “I had a mild dose of schizophrenia today!” Robin said, perking up.

  “But no depression and no catatonia?”

  “No, that was yesterday.”

  Sounding clinical, Drew said, “Sounds like emotional discharges of the intensity of lightning strikes are working their way through your brain in regions, one tangle of neuronal nets at a time.”

  “If you say so,” Robin said with zero sense of commitment to the idea. It sounded far too rational, and rational was out this week.

  “And what did schizophrenia guy
have to contribute to the case?” Drew sampled the brew in the wok.

  “The electron microscope came alive and chased me through the campus, firing lasers out its evil eye. By the time I reached Oxford Avenue, I was dripping wet with perspiration, had scabs from my thighs to my ankles from falling, and shin splints from leaping over obstacles, to prove I didn’t imagine the running part. On the plus side, I made friends with a couple marathon runners who were impressed by my spiritedness.”