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

  Maybe if he was ready to go quietly into the night, he could cease the outcries, the lion lonely for a pride of suitable mates. Maybe if he had actually accomplished anything with his life besides proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that displaying intelligence in this age in service of anything but the status quo was an exercise in masochism. In the service of accelerated human evolution, forget it. The only breakthroughs that made it past the men in black did so because it benefitted those in power.

  It was all about keeping humans docile. No better explanation existed for why video game designers had a far greater success rate at capturing kids’ attentions. Meanwhile the reality comptrollers, the titans of business, set to work building better slaves for themselves in the form of robots. They’d work for less, complain less, do a better job, and one day, even serve as hosts and repositories for their consciousnesses.

  By then, courtesy of the robots, those consciousnesses would be immortal, ensuring the status quo remained as it was, the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer and more numerous – forever.

  Time was running out. Not just for him. For the entire human race. Or at least for the ninety-nine percent not lucky enough to be one of the overlords. If he could only impart the same sense of urgency to his students.

  All the caterwauling to the contrary in one philosophy class after another, across all the years of his tenure at Cal Berkeley, had done nothing to stem the tide, and little to awaken those who simply preferred the fictions to the reality. Who could blame them? Who but the most lionhearted could face such a fate?

  Each generation seemed more inured to the way of things, more accepting of their place, and less determined to aspire to greatness. The ossifying social strata were becoming nearly as immutable in the U.S. as in India.

  Maybe his failure to find the last free thinker was on account of cosmic retribution for his arrogance and condescension. His only defense against drowning in the rising tide of conformity was to constantly remind himself how far above it all he was. For what little good that did.

  Recently returned from his morning philosophy class, Hartman finished reorienting himself to his private retreat from the world. The gym and lab rooms adjoined, but were largely inseparable from one another, anymore. That owed to the fact he could no longer push his mental and physical limits without also pushing the science. With each passing day, he slipped further and further down the very same rabbit hole he’d hoped to avoid.

  Maybe the early 21st Century world he inhabited was indeed a branching point into an alternate reality, starting with the turn of the millennium. The concept of a multiverse with innumerable alternate universes held out hope that somewhere in those eternities within eternities sanity prevailed, and a more egalitarian society was the norm.

  Was the People’s Movement another such branching point? Dare he take hope? Or would it run out of steam for lack of adequate mental machinery its advocates could use to understand the depths of their own frustrations? Not to mention the mental acumen that could help them formulate the necessary corrective measures. Hopefully it was just his prejudices and predilections that made his questions appear rhetorical.

  He walked to the workbench in his lab, where each step of his Get-Over-Yourself formula had been worked out in excruciating detail, from end to end. The chemical cocktail was filtered, distilled, sublimated, tortured, and twisted until it lost its liquid form altogether and condensed into the form of purple pills collected up in a canister as the final step.

  Frustrated beyond measure, Hartman took a bat to the entire worktable, smashed the apparatus.

  He watched absently as the formula drained into the culvert leading out into the yard, washing this latest failure back out to sea with all the rest.

  SEVENTEEN

  Hartman tilted his head up at the nightclub’s marquee, “The Lost Souls Club.” The cheeky humor wasn’t entirely lost on him, but he wasn’t feeling all that focused. His brain dimly registered the apropos phrase, and then quickly sequestered the flash of awareness from his frontal lobes.

  He pulled the brass handle on the ornate wooden door. The blast of noise, along with the upwelling of crassness, nearly threw him to the curb. Luckily, he had the frame of a Mack truck; he was not about to be washed away by the tidal wave of sonic dissonance. No, he would no doubt sink to the bottom of this ocean of the blasé, suffocating more and more with each fathom he descended into the club’s interiors.

  The college hangout for drinking and picking up girls was outfitted with wood grains and brass. The amber lighting further encouraged warm-fuzzy feelings and the dropping of one's guard. Not to mention casting an angelic sheen no one in this crowd deserved. Hartman figured he had little right to be here. But he was determined to pry into his students’ minds so he could get more leverage, and that meant trailing them to hell and back, apparently.

  Hartman strolled through the throng, largely invisible to the boys and girls who only had eyes for one another. The fact he looked like one of the bouncers was just one more reason to ignore him. Moreover, he navigated the shadow realm, the area where hid those who wanted to avoid even the flattering amber lighting. It was an ill-defined zone, worming its way around the pools of light like an estuary draining the teenage hormones back out to sea.

  He was already succumbing to the mindlessness of the place, forced upon him by the droning music, the pulsating lights. What’s more, the bodies writhed without the rhythm that even earthworms possessed.

  Chad’s voice startled him out of his stupor.

  At twenty, with his dark curly hair, Chad was a complete heartthrob, with more on the ball than the rest of his crew—a lot more, even if he was the last to recognize it. Hartman’s periscope height made it easy to spot Chad in the throng.

  He’d made sure to pressure his students enough this last week to encourage them to vent at every opportunity, giving Hartman in turn a chance to peer into their minds so he would more likely discover what he was really dealing with. For starters, he had threatened to end their academic careers, and then he had commenced a browbeating agenda that would have triggered post traumatic shock in even the most seasoned vet. If they could stop talking about him for five minutes, he was clearly losing his touch.

  People didn’t display their true colors unless they were under sustained and extreme pressure; only then did the fault lines in human psychology emerge. Hartman did his best work operating from inside those rifts. The fact that his philosophy class involved a psychological overhaul could be excused by the simple fact that one didn’t think in a vacuum. Profound philosophical arguments could be mounted in the service of any twisted psychology. His social obligation necessitated, thusly, he tackle the two subjects together.

  Hartman hovered listlessly in the shadows until the right words brought him back into the moment.

  “You believe that crap Hartman was peddling in class?” Chad asked absently, his gaze on the crowd. From the distant, nearly hostile look in his eyes as he regarded the dancers, and the self-consciously stiff manner in which he moved, Hartman figured Chad was frustrated by his inability to surrender his mind to the music as readily as the rest of the swaying masses.

  Spence, to whom Chad was talking, was a mere year younger, and rather proud of his one-track mind. He resented having his attention derailed from the girl he was watching. Without turning, he replied, “Dude—all efforts to rile us aside—I find the path to happiness is to tune him out.”

  Hartman couldn’t subdue the wince on his face quickly enough. He had no desire to be unmasked, in here of all places.

  “How do I fake being enthralled by fifteen hundred year old Greek philosophy?” Chad gulped his beer.

  “I keep my hand on my dick the whole time,” Spence replied. “I'm so enthralled, he probably thinks I'm hitting on him.”

  Chad laughed distractedly. “No, seriously, what am I supposed to say to, what was it? ‘The dreadful decline of intellectual standards in America?’” His head turned to track the
blonde sauntering past them. Spence didn’t notice; he was still locked on target. “What self-respecting American would lay claim to having intellectual standards?” Chad said.

  “What standards?”

  “Exactly. You can't even spell it.”

  Hartman's face twitched, despite his vice grip concentration. He was close to losing voluntary control over the body armor that shielded his soul. All his time spent cracking the eggshells of their resistance, only to find the casings were hollow. What was it about these last few generations of kids? It was starting to get under his skin; his whole reason for living had been the freeing of others’ minds.

  “Europeans, okay,” Chad droned, “they go in for that effete shit. But in America, honestly, it seems a bit gay.”

  “Dude, can you focus for five seconds?” Spence gestured with the beer bottle. “Major hottie at six o'clock, and you're going on about... What are you going on about?”

  Chad reined himself in. “Forget it.” He threw a glance at the girl Spence had fixated on. “I see you have a type. If you’re trying to tune out the heartache from losing the love of your life, you picked an interesting way to do it.”

  “Shit, you’re right. She looks just like Victoria. This is what comes from letting Hartman under your skin, an unconscious desire to hurt yourself over and over again.”

  “Honestly, my heart goes out to him,” Chad said. “But this is corporate America, for Christ's sake. Corporations are de facto fascist states. They don't put decisions to a vote. We're a country of fascist states; big, bigger and biggest.”

  Another pained grimace blew across Hartman’s face before he could cap the erupting volcano of emotions. Sometimes the truth hurt even him. Chad’s ability to philosophize with some depth, despite the vanishingly small percentage of his mind dedicated to non-sexual thought, managed to impress the old man. Hartman's eyes misted. The kid was growing on him despite the uptick in his anger.

  Gesticulating with his beer bottle, Chad said, “The small fish, such as they are, live to be gobbled up by the big fish, or nibble at their asses in some sick symbiotic relationship.” He spilt some of the beer as he gestured, “You're not supposed to think, you're just supposed to know your place in the food chain.”

  The hand waving while talking was a bad habit his students had picked up from their philosophy professor. Hartman did it in class on purpose; the intention was that the better they mirrored him externally, the more likely they were to duplicate his inner machinations. Hope springs eternal, Hartman thought.

  “I'd send him back in time if I could,” Chad said. “He deserves better. I guess we all do.” Chad swilled his beer, eyed this latest girl passing him as if she might be the one. Nope. He shut her down so fast on approach, Hartman wondered if he was near-sighted. Considering the girl’s clipped manner, Hartman couldn’t contest the defense mechanism.

  Spence continued to bop to music only he was hearing, judging from his total inability to synchronize with the DJ’s tune. He was convinced locking eyes with his lady love across the way was beginning to generate some real heat. Hartman saw his smile grew broader and his manner bouncier. “Dude, I haven't heard a word you said,” Spence remarked.

  “It’s okay. If chicks think I’m talking to myself, they have one more reason to approach, given my evident good taste.”

  Spence handed his beer to Chad and pushed a straight path through the crowd to the girl.

  Moments later, Chad watched Spence get his face slapped. He laughed so raucously he splattered his beer on the girl in front of him. He was quick to apologize and even quicker to see this as a possible lead-in. But she pushed him away, inferring her personal space ended about where the moon’s orbit began. Hartman, observing both dramas, thought, What a pair of groin-driven clowns.

  He watched Chad compose himself as Spence resumed his position next to him. Spence grabbed his beer.

  “That sucks,” Chad said with mock empathy.

  “Ah, she's an Amazon,” Spence replied, genuinely unfazed.

  “I thought that's how you liked them.”

  “Only if they're throwing me around the room.” Spence forgot the last girl and found a new one in the crowd. “There she is. I'm going to spend the next twenty years with that one.”

  Chad laughed. “Small steps, big guy.”

  Hartman walked, canvassing the crowd. College students bumped into him, briefly regarded the wall of his chest. Not even bothering to look up at his face, they shouted "Excuse me!" and moved on.

  ***

  Hartman next stumbled on Murray in the throng. At twenty-one, he had the moodiness of the Caribbean Sea in summer to go with the portly physique and the olive skin. Yet another of his less-than-dazzling protégés. With Spence and Chad, that made three he’d found so far. He was starting to feel like a metal detector attuned to tracking the dense-as-lead mentalities of his students.

  Murray massaged his temples and winced, then squeezed the sides of his head together, evidently hoping making even less room in his head would trigger a rebounding sense of relief the instant he let up. Hartman bided his time, clung to the shadows, observed and decoded the meaning in Murray’s subtlest gestures. He was grateful that the crowded room triggered sensory overload, further deterring from him showing up on anyone’s radar; filters were up against anyone but the hotties.

  The song changed to something couples could actually slow dance to, and in the relative quiet, Murray commenced his tirade.

  “I tell you, Hartman talks to me like that again in class...,” Murray bellyached. Hartman took a step closer to take in the rest of the conversation. “…I'm going to rip off his head, and use it as a doorstop for the frat-house bathroom.”

  Murray’s twenty-year-old girlfriend, Lorie—another of Hartman’s students—was damage control on two fine legs. Showing her experience in the role, Hartman noticed she didn’t give Murray long to ruminate on the idea. “You want to be an emotional infant the rest of your life?” she said. “Because honestly, it's starting to creep me out making love to a perpetual two-year-old.”

  “How can you defend the guy?!”

  “I'm not defending him,” Lorie said. “Do you even know what class you're in?”

  Hartman flinched. It seemed no amount of muscle thickening, throwing the weights around at home, caustic humor, fault-finding, or still more contentious distancing techniques, was enough to shield his hypersensitive nature. Even the fortress of reason only a philosopher king could erect to dull the pain of living through End Times failed to provide any real protection.

  “You're so busy frothing at the mouth,” Lorie said, “I have to walk you around like a rabid dog on a leash for you to get through the day.” She slammed her beer as if applying Novocain to an ache in her jaw.

  “Screw you. I’m only with you because you come from a long line of enablers, and don't you forget it.”

  She lightened up in response to the good-natured ribbing, as did Murray. He gave her a kiss. As a pair of psychology majors, they were both well aware of the games people play, Hartman realized. But they were a long way from letting go of the secondary gain their roles afforded them.

  “It's gotta hurt not being understood,” she said, reflecting on Hartman with a strange mixture of empathy and condescension.

  Murray grunted. “That's the human condition. Who isn't misunderstood?”

  Smarting, Hartman moseyed on.

  He segued into the men’s room. His body needed to rid itself of the buildup of bile and endocrine secretions secondary to the anger and heartache.

  At the urinal, Hartman was taken aback when two girls barged in. One took a birth control compact case out of her purse and jammed the door so no one else could come in.

  She slipped up a dress that barely covered her ass, squatted, feet on the urinal. Gasping relief, she applied her lipstick before her compact mirror.

  “Don't mind us,” she said, noticing Hartman. “The girls’ bathroom – skank city.”

  He g
lanced over at the one squatting on the toilet seat. She snorted a line of coke off a compact mirror through a coffee stirrer as she peed. She looked up at Hartman and sneered. “Take a picture, why don't ya?”

  Hartman shook out his dick. “The image is forever etched in my mind.”

  Urinal Girl said, “Be a sweetie and slide that coke mirror under my nose.”

  After zipping up his fly, Hartman reluctantly took the mirror from Toilet Girl, and held it under Urinal Girl’s nose. He pinched her nostril for her. She inhaled the line. He squeezed the other nostril.

  “You can't think clearly on this shit,” he said.

  “Sweetie, that's the point.”

  “Then you have nothing to separate you from a lower primate.”

  She slowly nodded. “That's deep. But I could use another line.”

  There it was: The complete denial of everything he stood for, the testimony to a life wasted swimming upstream of human ignorance and indifference. In one short phrase uttered on the lips of one who epitomized her age – it all came to a head.