Or, maybe she was right, maybe the reason no one had read about it, was that, prior to this age, few existed who had all the right aptitudes in place. Saints and sages had extremely high spiritual aptitudes, high SQ, not necessarily high EQ or IQ. They may have lacked other aptitudes not possible in an age other than a Renaissance age, where reinventing oneself, and slipping in and out of various roles, was a matter of survival.
Maybe, historically speaking, Robin had a chance to do something unique, something which wasn’t possible in prior eras. Then again, by her own admission, she was a little insane right now. This could all be ego-aggrandizement of the worst sort intended to shield her from the otherwise shattering experience of being charged with protecting human lives, only to let them down en masse. Maybe this was no more than a comforting delusion for both of them, Mrs. Willis, and herself. She supposed, even so, the exercise wouldn’t be entirely without value.
Stepping onto Mrs. Willis’s porch, Robin ran into the paperboy, who elected to hand her the paper rather than throw it. “You should go for it,” she said, “with this Bernadette girl. She’s sweet on you.” The boy’s eyes bugged out, and he raced off on his bicycle, looked back to make sure he wasn’t being followed. Robin smiled. “I guess it takes some training for gratitude to get to the front of the line ahead of all the other emotions.”
***
Drew arrived home in time to see Robin erecting a shrine to the fallen in their bedroom, filled with their pictures and mementos, lit candles, and all the rest of the serial killer profile. All in all, Robin thought things had gone well. It had taken her only a couple weeks to do the interviews and to wheedle the memorabilia out of less than pliant hands and even more closed minds. She was feeling very proud of herself until she saw herself in Drew’s eyes. And then she was back to worrying about her sanity along with him.
“What are you doing?” Drew asked tentatively.
“It’s a shrine to the fallen.”
“Yes, I see that,” Drew said. “That’s when I started worrying.”
“I intend to reach out to Hartman’s slain students across dimensions, using the psychic residue remaining on these knickknacks.”
“You’re doing séances now?”
“Nothing so pedestrian,” she said, resenting Drew’s flippant tone. “I intend to go into the spirit world and do healings.” She adjusted the pictures on the altar so she had a better angle on them.
“Like a shaman?”
“Not exactly.” Robin didn’t appreciate Drew’s tone of incredulity that had replaced the tone of condescension. “I’m going to use my artistic aptitudes in conjunction with my psychic and my healing aptitudes to do something that’s never been done before, at least, not to my knowledge.”
“I didn’t know you had healing or psychic aptitudes, or artistic impulses, for that matter.”
“It helps to have your mind shattered into a million pieces. All the things trapped inside… like opening Pandora’s Box, really.” She pressed on, ignoring the increasingly stunned expression on his face. “I’m going to run scenarios that allow them to continue to grow spiritually and fulfill their unfulfilled destinies.”
“Robin, I’m the one person on Earth who has read more spiritual books from all the world’s traditions than you have, a necessary requirement for steering my very high-functioning client base in the same direction, and, well, for practicing in Berkeley, where New Age is a religion, and favoritism towards all things Eastern has continued unabated since the 60s. And I must tell you, I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“Maybe it was never done before because it never could be done. Maybe historically, as evolved as those souls were, they still lacked the right stuff. We have a unique opportunity here, Drew, a Renaissance, like the one following the last Dark Ages, only new and improved, Renaissance 2.0.”
“History evolves the mass psyche over time, yes, yes, I’ve read Hegel, and Ken Wilber. I rather agree with them, I just don’t agree with you. You’re reaching, looking for some way to outlast your survivor’s guilt, which I guess is more extreme than most, hence the epic nature of the undertaking.”
“But what if I’m right?”
“I must confess, I don’t see any real harm in what you’re doing, since you’re likely just hallucinating all this self-importance. But if you’re right, your inability to let go could do as much to hold those souls back, prevent their moving on, as any truncated lifetime, maybe more. There’s a reason the biggest human destinies imaginable are no more than soap bubbles skirting a bathtub. The paradox of our almighty cosmic significance with the utter frivolity of our lives, the fact that no matter how big the canvas on which we work, we’re just one person, and the ultimate impact we can leave on this world is quite small, is one you have to come to terms with to heal. If you can’t embrace your smallness, then your bigness, which is just as important, will drive you insane. You won’t be on a path of healing, but on a path of destruction.”
“Well, I guess time will tell, then, which direction I’m headed in, greater mental balance, or imbalance.”
“Not exactly the reassurance I was looking for,” Drew said, before departing.
“You think you’re scared,” Robin mumbled, not intending to get in the last word. The sentiment just slipped out.
SIXTY-THREE
“So how’s the project to rescue lost souls from oblivion coming?” Drew filled his cup with tea, wishing he could squeeze the flippancy out of his tone as readily as the empty space in the cup.
“That project’s on hold until I can summon some reserve energy.” Robin sighed, poured a cup of tea for herself. “I guess in the meantime, I can see what I can do to track down Clay Hartman.”
Drew, biting down on his toast at the breakfast table, acted as if he’d just chipped a tooth. “Robin, you need a vacation from purposefulness. From your agenda to chase after the most notorious Renaissance men of our times in hopes of beating them at their own game.”
Seeing she was getting ready to object, Drew held his hand up to arrest Robin’s mouth before the lips parted, while he dabbed his with the cloth napkin.
“I promise you, if you relax out of all that, the world as-it-is will reveal itself to you with that much more sparkling clarity. It’ll be like taking the blinders off. I think you’ll be startled by just how much of life you’ve allowed to slip by you.”
Robin wasn’t so sure. But the theory was sound enough, and it jived with Zen teachings. Could she let go of her makeover agenda to such a degree that she paradoxically advanced it? Could she ignore the Hartmans of the world long enough in the hopes of building a still stronger mind all the more able to narrow the gap between them? That would better enable her to bring him to justice? To bring others of his kind to justice?
She had to take the gamble. What choice did she have? As far as she’d come, Hartman had traveled farther.
How could the truth set her free if she was becoming cocooned in her own myths of self-transcendence?
Drew, apparently realizing she was teetering on the edge of agreeing with him, reiterated, “You’ll be startled to see just how much of the world you’ve allowed yourself to become blind to.”
The thought sent chills up her spine. “Yeah, OK,” she said meekly.
“I sense surrender over true acceptance. Here.” He held up a DVD that was lying on the table beside him in a clear plastic case, somewhat camouflaged by its two-dimensionality, and waved it. “Maybe this’ll get you the rest of the way across the finish line.” Drew padded into the next room and stuck the DVD in the player. Robin followed him, deciding to play along.
“What’s that?”
“The two of us as we might one day be. Forget that a couple robot surrogates who are less than a few months old each got to the Promised Land before us. What’s one more slap in the face after all we’ve been through?”
Drew brought over a bowl of popcorn and they quickly got lost in the drama unfolding on the fifty-inch monitor.
Just Robin caught up with Just Drew on the trail leading into Tilden Park, tackled her to the ground, tickled her until she laughed hysterically and convulsed.
“How are you doing that? I’m a robot. I’m not supposed to be ticklish.”
“I’m frying some neurons in your brain’s bio-chip. Honestly, you could stand a few less turns in that labyrinth to get lost down.”
Just Drew let her laughter subside. “That’s so sweet and so wicked at the same time. Glad to see you’re finally making peace with being at cross purposes with yourself.”
Just Drew turned her ear at a knocking sound. “What’s that?”
“Deer locking horns. It’s mating season. Come on.” Just Robin lifted her up. He pulled a small tree with a trunk no wider than a couple inches and quickly pruned it of branches, handed it to Just Drew. Then he made a staff for himself.
“What now?”
“You’ll see.”
***
“Good thing,” Drew said, “both those robots can get enough of a lock on our defining facial features while still looking so gender neutral, if they expect to keep up with our shapeshifting. Otherwise I could never get lost in the drama.”
“It’s still a little confusing. They have their own underlying personalities, when they aren’t busy role-modeling us for our benefit.”
Robin laughed as she saw Just Drew and Just Robin on the fifty-inch monitor jousting atop the male deer, using the animals’ determination to lock horns. “God, they’re having such fun.”
Drew grabbed a handful of popcorn. “They make it look easy, don’t they?”
“They sure do.” Robin sighed. “Fine, let’s see what a vacation does to get us one step closer to that.”
“In for a penny, in for a pound, I see. Good.”
RENAISSANCE 2.0 BOOK 3
“The Renaissance Comes of Age”
CHARACTER LIST
LEADS
Robin Wakefield
Drew Harding
Clay Hartman
MAJOR ENSEMBLE
Mort
Santini
Gretchen
Purdue
Purnel
Alexis
MINOR ENSEMBLE
Rufus Ramley
Pontius Pilate
Piper Shiftly
Cliff Masters
Iona Pax
Chester
Waverly
Dominic
Ardel
Milton Freed (“Coma Man”)
Aala Freed
Fabio
Ernestina Chadwick
Lady Harding
T-Rex
Atam
Carson
(Harding estate staff)
Aart
Toby
Muriel
Minerva
Frumpley
CAMEOS
Japhet
Shareef Cartel
Ragnar
Jeremy Bright
Radon
Veryl
Johnny
Phoenicia
Lily Palmer
ONE
Rufus Ramley slammed the door shut on the black Suburban. He straightened the tie on his black suit in the side-view mirror.
Regarding his façade, he thought, he hated the men in black stereotype, but it came with admitted advantages. If the suspect was quaking in his boots at the mere sight of him, it saved Rufus a lot of threatening, and with his blood pressure these days, that was a godsend.
He checked his pants pockets to make sure he had his Eucalyptus nose balm. He took a moment to apply some. Interviewing suspects who had soiled themselves in advance made his job harder in this one respect, as he had a painfully sharp sense of smell. A fact that explained why he collected orchids and spent his downtime in his greenhouse. There, he could find himself again after being bent out of shape by the big bad world, which seemed to brutalize him as much as his victims these days.
As Rufus continued to take himself in from different angles before the reflective smoked glass passenger windows of the Suburban, he combed back his hair, dusted the dandruff off his shoulders, and reviewed the other rationales behind softening his target up in advance… Torturing people to extract information was a long arduous process that required the patience of Michelangelo as he painted the Sistine Chapel. Rush it, and you botched the job. Go at the correct pace, and Rufus quickly bored. He turned to reading his Agatha Christie novels mid-session, leaving his assistant to apply the rest of the blows. What’s more, he was sore for days after if he alone did the beat-downs. So unless he couldn’t make it to the gym, he didn’t see the point.
***
Farrell eyed the men in black disembarking the black suburban, their guns showing prominently, and proceeded, without further ado, to shit himself. He had never been so scared in all his life. “Well, you see, it’s like this.” “You’ve got the wrong idea about me entirely.” “No, no, it’s nothing like that.” Maybe, by the time they reached the front door, he’d figure out what to say to turn them away.
***
Pontius Pilate, Rufus’s sidekick, looked like a leg of cow hanging in a walk-in refrigerator—huge, stiff, and cold, and just as thick. It didn’t take much imagination to see him for what he was—a brute with an on-and-off button whose niche was dismantling suspects Guantanamo-Bay style. If one look at Rufus didn’t do the trick, one look at Pontius, and even those trained to resist torture figured they’d save themselves the trouble.
His wingman walked beside him, looking like his shadow and like the sun going down on Rufus’s life was really bad news for anyone getting in his way.
Rufus checked his pocket for his paperback copy of Agatha Christie’s The Secret Adversary, made sure he hadn’t lost his bookmark, and returned the book to his inside sleeve jacket-pocket. Heading towards Farrell Donnelley’s porch steps, he jogged his memory over what he knew about Farrell.
Farrell had had the bad sense to design a rather workable prototype of a teleporter. The powers that be were quaking in their boots. The trucking industry would collapse overnight. Big Oil and shipping would virtually implode. Industries related to the transportation sector—the ones that laid asphalt and strung telephone poles—would take an egregious hit. There were a lot of people getting very excited about Farrell’s invention, and very determined to see him dead.
Maybe if the fool had had the sense to migrate to China first, or to one of those European countries where Big Oil wasn’t so entrenched, and the economy was based less on old world technologies. But the poor guy apparently lacked any political acumen, and any sense of how the real world works, typical for these geniuses. Like horses running with blinders on, they were way too specialized to be of any real threat to the powers that be. In short, owing to his unsurpassed naiveté and cluelessness, he hadn’t gotten to hell out of Dodge. So the new world, which he was helping build—which Rufus wouldn’t mind seeing, in all honesty—was never going to be.
Rufus couldn’t recall when America had become as resistant to the future as it had, considering we were once the number one pioneers of tomorrow. But reading Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class, and The Flight of the Creative Class—the latter documenting the flight of the creatives oversees to environments more friendly to entrepreneurs and builders of tomorrow—had really opened his eyes. Maybe because he didn’t have all that money to blind him from seeing the writing on the wall, and convince him he could overwrite it with some writing of his own.
About the one good thing to come out of this entire situation was the fact that Farrell thought entirely in advanced physics and mathematics that maybe a dozen people on the planet could even understand. That meant Rufus wouldn’t have to worry himself with hiding the evidence, burning it, and later being suspected of holding on to it himself, so he had to worry about another man in black showing up at his door. He could leave the papers where he found them. They’d end up in a shoebox somewhere, if they made it that far. The
other twelve people who could make sense of the equations, should they find their way to them, were all being monitored, anyway. All in all, fate had dealt Rufus a good hand. Not so much Farrell.
He rapped on Farrell Donnelley’s door.
***
TWO HOURS EARLIER
“You sure Mr. Donnelley didn’t email, snail mail, hell, carrier-pigeon any other sensitive information to you?” Rufus said, looking up from page seventeen of The Secret Adversary. “Because I’d really hate to think you were lying to me.” Mr. Sitwell’s face was puffed up from Pontius’s love taps. Strictly soft-tissue inflammation. One good all-out-blow from Pontius and Mr. Sitwell’s face would have been crushed like a rider thrown in a motorcycle accident, ending the interview.
Mr. Sitwell—hands tied behind the dining table chair—feebly shook his head.
“Now, I know what you’re thinking,” Rufus said. “My face all puffed up like this, how can he read anything off it? But I assure you, sir, dead as a doornail, lying in a morgue for a week, should the spirit possess you in an effort to communicate to me, I could translate the word of God Himself off your face. And you know what I see, right now, Mr. Sitwell? I see the face of a liar. A stone cold liar. Yes, sir. Now, don’t let this get any uglier. You don’t want me to start in on your six year old daughter next, do you?”
Rufus panned his head to the little girl playing with her dolls in the room. “Such a nice child. See how well she plays with others? You don’t see her interrupting the big boys’ games, do you? Content to play right alongside us in her own little world. God, you gotta love children. The world is years away from messing her up but good, Mr. Sitwell, if you just tell me what I want to hear.”
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 85