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

by Dean C. Moore

Calming down some, Epstein leaned into Faraday and whispered, “Considering what happens to people who don’t wow him, I vote for showing him how inordinately brilliant we are.”

  “I put the odds of that working at the same five percent,” Faraday bitched. He retired to his computer for entirely different reasons than Crychek. His fight-or-flight response resembled an ostrich burying its head in the sand.

  “What are you doing?” Epstein said, his tone suggesting Faraday might want to take a different tack.

  “Making sure my living will survives the death of mankind, and even of cockroaches.” Turning to face Hartman, Faraday said, “Sorry, no offense intended. But you are a bit final.”

  Epstein painted a plastic smile on his face and gestured for Hartman to lead the way.

  Hartman stopped before one of their experiments which tickled his fancy. “I can see this is an engine of some kind,” he said.

  “Yes, we built it to beat the speed of light, in spite of what Einstein says,” Epstein said.

  Hartman ran his hand over its contours. “Does it work?”

  “To tell you the truth, we’re a little afraid to turn it on. Not sure if the entire planet will be gobbled up in the wake of the vortex.”

  “One thing we are sure of,” Faraday said, “If we don’t get humanity off this planet soon—flung far and wide across the heavens—our goose is cooked. Solar flares. Magnetic polar shifts. Super-volcano eruptions. Greenhouse effect. Pending Ice Age. Asteroid collisions. Super novae. Aggressive alien species with an appetite for gobbling up the garden spot sectors just the right distance from the sun to sustain life. Spreading across the solar system isn’t enough, or even this section of the Milky Way. Nope, flinging humanity far and wide is the only real solution. And for that, you need to beat Einstein at his own game. Which, of course, can’t be done.”

  “So, that’s why we did it,” Epstein said, patting the rocket engine. “Crychek’s baby. He specializes in things that can’t be done.”

  Hartman smiled in his direction, which showed his hand more than he wanted, but Crychek was unmoved by the superlatives hurled at him. He refused to look up from his experiment, and the others didn’t read facial cues all that well.

  “You realize what a boon to the economy this will be if it works?” Hartman said. Epstein’s clueless look suggested otherwise. “Bionengineering humans to fit all those niches in the universe alone could employ the entire planet many times over. Not to mention mining the solar system for the necessary raw materials to support such a venture. The materials science projects needed for building the ships that will ultimately house this engine, and the various habitat designs that go into the ships’ shells, would employ the entire planet once over again.” He fetishistically petted the engine. “You’d need a subsidiary industry dedicated to blasting out artificial life forms faster than humans can blast out babies in order to fill the screaming demand of all those expanding market niches. As good a way to sustain the Singularity reaction as any.”

  “Yeah, yeah!” Epstein said excitedly. “The idea that a Renaissance age powered by self-empowerment technologies focused on turning men into gods rather than in raping the environment, would lead to ever-accelerating change, such that it could only be contained inside of Singularity, a place ultimately outside of time and space. Very sexy idea.”

  “It could take hundreds, even thousands of little inventions of the kind you’re involved with here to spark Singularity. Or just the one very well-crafted invention,” Hartman said leadingly. Epstein nodded, following his train of thought. He did love to tweak his investment portfolios, Hartman realized, having boned up on all of them prior to coming. “All this off ADHD, huh?”

  “How did you know?” Epstein asked.

  “I inferred as much from the nature of the patents all three of you have filed,” Hartman replied.

  He stopped this time at a monstrosity of a device that looked vaguely like IBM’s Watson super-computer. “What’s this?”

  “We’ve come up with a nexgen brain scanner,” Epstein explained. “The idea is to scan people with various scientific aptitudes needed for inventing the future, to see which genes map to them, and which neurochemistries favor them. From there, we can design a retrovirus to inject people with in order to build the necessary infrastructure inside their heads. Their original personalities remain intact. You still get to be an artist or a fool. You just have a way to support yourself so you’re not a starving artist or a starving fool.”

  Hartman coached, “Just think if the mind functioned like a Rubik’s cube whose ever-shifting configurations of aptitudes exposed hitherto unforeseen connections. That’s the kind of mind you need to trigger the Singularity reaction.”

  Epstein crowed. “Right! That way, they don’t have to take time out from what they love to do the dirty job of scientific inventing just to make a living. Your way, everything connects with everything else; technological prowess grows out of a passion for art, or history, or culinary science, depending on how you configure the cube. We’ll need Crychek to jump on board. This problem is starting to reach the vexing proportions it usually takes to get him interested.”

  Epstein looked up at the towering giant that was Hartman. “You mind if I ask the real reason you’re here? I’m getting the sense you didn’t just chance on these two devices at random. And you’re well aware of everything we’re working on.”

  Hartman smiled. “I’m here today to solicit the help of the Three Stooges, of course.”

  “For what?”

  “We’re going to make the Internet sentient.”

  Crychek and Faraday materialized out of nowhere. Epstein blinked, and they were just there, Faraday with his mouth hanging open, Crychek with a focus in his eyes no one had seen in a while, a sheen replacing the dullness.

  “Now hold on,” Faraday said, gasping.

  EIGHTEEN

  “Are you mad!” Faraday raved, “Making the internet sentient? As if the world isn’t enough of a nuthouse. As if we don’t have Big Brother up our asses already with traffic cameras at every intersection.”

  “Done deal, dude,” Epstein said. “Oh, yeah, some Los Alamos guy did it like ten years ago. Released self-evolving algorithms onto the net. I read it in a book, Complexification, I think. Maybe not. Anyway, it was in a footnote in the back. A footnote, if you can believe that.”

  “Seriously?” Faraday said. “When my car didn’t start this morning, I bitched at her for nearly an hour. Now I have to apologize. I didn’t realize she was under orders from the über-mind to piss me off. Maybe if I’d come in early, scratched my hand unwittingly rushing between experiments, looked down at the growing rash on my arm, and was inspired to cure staph infections once and for all, I’d have set back the pharmaceutical industry billions, if not trillions of dollars. No doubt, the sentient Internet saw the writing on the wall and intervened before it was too late. Before Big Pharma was compelled to send men in black after me. Kind of makes perfect sense why a new battery would die on me, now that I think of it.”

  “That was a strangely inspired explanation as to why we need the Internet to go sentient,” Hartman said.

  Faraday was still pacing, lost to his paranoid delirium. He came up for air at the irony and shock of Hartman’s pronouncement.

  “I’m just a second generation paranoid,” Faraday said. “I’m sorry, I just don’t have the genes for this. You need a hundred-and-tenth generation paranoid of the first order!” Faraday stomped off towards his computer.

  “What are you doing now?” Epstein asked Faraday.

  “Adding a clause to my living will,” Faraday said, keying at his computer’s flexible, rollout keyboard. “Should my sperm survive global genocide, I don’t want it ending up on any planet with any descendent remotely related to this guy. Just to be sure, you don’t spell Hartman with an ‘e’, right?”

  “Can we hear the guy out?” Epstein begged. “In this economy, by the time my 401k recovers, money will be obsolete. Can
you imagine having the planetary über-mind doing all our investing for us? Shit, how could we not all be richer than God in no time at all? Literally. The electronic impulses flashing through her brain happening in vanishingly small slivers of time until, relative to us, virtually no time has passed back here in the real world.”

  Crychek, silent all this time, said, “I’m on board.”

  “Seriously?” Faraday and Epstein said at the same time.

  “I’ve run the scenarios in my head. It’s the best solution to a sustainable future,” Crychek assured them. He sauntered back to his desk.

  “What’s he doing?” Faraday said nervously.

  Epstein peeked over Crychek’s shoulder. “Shit, he’s writing the code.”

  He was biting his nails, running neck and neck with Faraday for adding nervous ticks under pressure.

  “Guys, think it through,” Hartman said, gesturing broadly as he sat on his chair, legs crossed. “You’ve got problems proliferating beyond the reach of environmental sensors to identify and track. We don’t have even one percent of the sensor arrays deployed worldwide we need for the necessary feedback to keep the biosphere in balance. Once that picture comes into sharper focus, you’ll really be scared out of your minds.

  “What’s more, by the time anyone notices a pattern, the global scientific apparatus kicks into gear, and more decades are lost determining if it’s even a problem. And if so, what might actually be causing it, what complex, hard to identify, confluence of interactive forces. By the time the scientists can agree, politicians are dragged into the picture. Now they need to debate the merits of taking action, not based on common sense, but on vested interests, and you can bet change of any kind never favors those currently in power. Still more decades lost.

  “The whole human machine is so hopelessly out of sync with economic and physical and scientific realities that it was bound to crash sooner or later, with no hope of getting this bird in the air again. It no longer flies. The air required to lift it is no longer there, replaced by an atmosphere so thin, so rarefied, it’s beyond human capacity to even sense it.”

  Surveying the stupefied faces, Hartman realized he hadn’t yet pushed past their fears of a sentient Internet. “Let me give you an analogy from quantum dynamical theory. You’re heating oil in a large frying pan. You turn up the heat, more bubbles, happening more explosively, ever-widening chaos. No way to know what bubble is going to pop next, where or when. No math on Earth can predict it.

  “But turn up the heat further and, at some magical point, a higher integral order emerges. Suddenly all the bubbles are organizing themselves into neat little hexagons. The system is able to channel the extra energy without coming apart.

  “All the human mind can do is sit back and watch helplessly as history rocks back and forth between long bouts of widening, maddening chaos, and the new paradigms of order that emerge secretly out of time, like a time traveler out of the fog.

  “But Mother, my name for the sentient Internet, could be a real player, capturing energy that would otherwise be dissipated by chaos and using it to fuel the next integral order – no matter what temperature the fire is under the frying pan.”

  Epstein rubbed his chin. “Hmm, it does make sense that she would see patterns where we perceived only chaos, and act long before human minds could wrap themselves around the most germane issues of our time. To your point, by the time we recognized the problem, it may well be too late to do anything about it.”

  “What’s more,” Hartman explained, “Her little interventions into our lives would be so beyond our understanding, it would be as if she wasn’t there at all, and our lives were every bit as circumscribed by fate.”

  “I imagine,” Epstein said, “that she could use her abilities to forge meaningful connections for us with one another, unconscious at first, but increasingly conscious as she continues to upgrade us. She could connect us with the kind of remarkable people, places, and things that set our minds afire creatively, that deepen and broaden our understanding of the world.”

  Hartman, gesturing expansively, finished Epstein’s thought for him. “The entire economy would be powered by her little nudges in the right direction. She’d do so if only to take her game to the next level, graduate to the next higher integral order of consciousness. Because her uber-mind is ultimately informed by each of us and is only as good as the component parts.”

  Epstein paced, playing with Hartman’s idea out loud. “The whole thing reminds me of Eastern spiritual philosophy. A lot of their traditions believe in these discrete bands of consciousness, too, that emerge as more and more spiritual energy flows through the person. Increasing the flow rate involves arcane techniques in letting go of self-limiting concepts and ego-based psychology in favor of centering in Witness state, a state of sublime non-attachment.

  “The longer one resides in Witness state, what’s more, the more one is able to choose whichever band in the spectrum of consciousness is most conducive to doing the work of the moment.”

  “You’ve been hanging around Robin Wakefield too long,” Faraday squawked. “She’s the one you should be having this conversation with, Hartman. She’s all about preparing the mind to enter Singularity State; a place of unending and ever-accelerating evolution or mind, body, and soul.”

  Hartman smiled. “Our paths aren’t meant to cross again just yet. But we will meet again.” He zeroed in on Faraday. “Well, son, you appear to be the only one not getting religion.”

  “I got religion, all right,” Faraday protested. “I read the same Zen books he does as an antidote to my paranoia. And you know what they all say? You have to be married to the divine ground, in such a way, that it can alchemically transform your mind from lead into gold. The top one percent know what I’m talking about. The star athletes, the inventors, the people at the top of their field, any field, know what it’s like to have that creative covenant with their higher power. Most of them can barely stay in the zone for even a few hours before they get thrown out. By the time you can live in it fulltime, they call you a saint, or possibly a sage.”

  “You understand our situation very well,” Hartman said. “Staying in Witness state won’t just be a struggle for humans, even with Mother’s help. Mother, too, will struggle with her sentience, forever going back to sleep. Like trying to kick-start one of those Model T jalopies with a hand-crank. There’ll be more failed cranks than successful ones. Those self-evolving algorithms you’re going to write for us will crash and burn, most of them.

  “Others will meet up with one another and mutate in unexpected ways which will delight and surprise, but will ultimately prove fairly moribund in their ability to affect the world. Or will affect it in ways we don’t want, necessitating still more interventions to set things straight.

  Still no reaction from Faraday. Hartman said, “Hey, guys, if this was going to be easy, I wouldn’t need you. In a very real way, it can’t be done.”

  Faraday snapped to, as if hearing the magic words he needed to hear. By empathizing with Faraday and seeing the world through his eyes, Hartman had managed to flick the switch in back of his brain, at last. Faraday nodded sheepishly. The gesture signified his unconditional surrender, even if it was announced with a whimper and not with a bang. Now that he, too, was on board, Hartman’s work here was done.

  “Well, fellas,” Hartman said, “I don’t know what more I can contribute to this picture.”

  As if looking for an excuse to entice Hartman to stay longer with the latest conundrum, Epstein said, “We never did get around to figuring out how he got in here.”

  Crychek sighed with mild impatience over the slow student who just couldn’t fathom the lesson, as close to a show of emotion as he was ever likely to come. He picked up the flexball Faraday used to help him think, and threw it at Hartman. The ball went straight through him. “You two can be really dense sometimes,” Crychek declared.

  “No way,” Faraday chirped. “Can’t be done. The technology is decades
out.”

  “No, no,” Epstein said. “I have been meditating on this problem. Vexing, but not impossible. He’d have to have miniature projectors all over this room.” Epstein scouted for possible projector hiding places. “Which begs the question… how did he get those in here?” Epstein and Faraday turned to Crychek.

  Crychek thought about it, which seemed to take forever respective to Faraday’s and Epstein’s cranked up nervous systems. His eyes canvassed the room following a lazy path. Finally: “Self-assembling nanobots hitchhiking a ride in on our clothing. Impressive,” he said dryly, and returned to his experiment at hand.

  Epstein chased one of the projectors down with a jeweler’s eye piece and stuck it under a microscope. “I’ll be damned if he isn’t right.”

  NINETEEN

  “Does it seem strange to you that a man—lying in a coma for three years—suddenly wakes up? And get this, because the electronics administering his medications malfunctioned, as if it suddenly grew a mind of its own.” Robin talked to the chauffeur at Drew’s estate through the sliding glass windows separating the back and front seats, realizing he had no choice but to be polite to her. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t also speak his mind.

  The chauffeur studied the crazy woman reading the magazine Science as Culture, reaching for the right thing to say. His hands on the steering wheel, his eyes bounced back and forth between the rearview mirror of the antique car, and the road ahead. He was clearly anxious to get the car in motion. Missing his cue, he also missed his chance to speak up.

  Robin prattled on. “Wait, the plot thickens. Get this; the nurse administering his care on the night shift had been wrongly assigned by the hospital computer, which automates shift-assignments. And just coincidentally, mind you, she was later arrested for tampering with patient medications. Apparently it was in an effort to find out what the admixtures did to people, when she couldn’t get funding for her own research. We have to investigate this; I sense a mystery most foul.”