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

  God, this is going to be an adjustment. Robin smiled politely. Ah, the times, they are a changing. He remembered when sexual identity was less liquid of a concept.

  Keep an open mind, Robin.

  Do not, repeat, do not react with fear or emotion. Your unflappability is all you’ve got to get you through this.

  “You going in early? That’s a first,” Drew said, mercifully zipping the pants over the offending member. Robin didn’t need to seizure right before work or experience blackouts that could compromise any claims on his insurance, which hopefully covered loss of sanity.

  “The crazies need catching,” Robin replied. He kept the rest of that thought to himself. Drew didn’t need to know that beating up and imprisoning bad guys was a great vent for frustrations at home.

  “You got bad guys crazier than we are?” Drew said. “You’re hopeful.”

  Robin was glad to see Drew had lost none of her wit. Charm, on the other hand...

  Drew had elected to undergo the steps in gender reassignment surgery in reverse to see if the shock of the penis undid her resolve, explaining why she was strapping down her breasts. The gesture recalled how the Chinese had once bound the feet of young girls to ensure they stayed small and “beautiful,” with just as little thought to the torture involved.

  Robin wondered how much more loss was in store for him in the days ahead. Maybe Drew’s determination to change her sex would be the least of it.

  In a collapsed world economy, individuals were getting pretty desperate. Reinventing oneself had become all the rage, up to and including elective sex changes. Females, as it turned out, were climbing corporate ladders faster than men, enjoying a historical surge of discrimination in their favor. Seen as more emotionally stable, more people-friendly, and willing to work for less, they were the current darlings of corporations everywhere, especially in executive positions. Even in government, long the bastion of patriarchal dominance, they were virtually strip-mining congress and the senate in their favor. Most editors at major publishing houses were already female, controlling the fates of unpublished writers; they too were doing their part to float the bubble of rising feminism by ensuring that those who got the word out got published ahead of those who didn’t.

  Ordinarily, Robin would be happy to admit women were owed their day in the sun; it was just a matter of the scales of justice balancing finally. But he was paying a steeper price than most for this new embrace of womanhood. Drew was nothing if not finely attuned to game playing. And making sure she stayed afloat on the shifting tides of political and economic power very much went to her raison d’etre.

  She had thus elected to buck the trend, and change from a woman to a man, because she calculated she had the political finesse to go against type and make what was an increasingly unworkable position for others, her ticket to even greater political power. She had every intention of being the one person in government both sexes came running to when they couldn’t get past the gender barrier of their political adversaries. By being the one man sensitive enough for women to confide freely to, and the one man who understood women deeply enough to assist men past their clumsy come-ons, she would become the true fulcrum of power in the senate.

  Speaking of mentally preparing for what else might lie in store for you… “What’s your take on the headline news? You’ve got to admit it’s getting pretty crazy out there.”

  Drew took a deep breath and sighed. Maybe she was getting tired playing the role of divine oracle in his life. Maybe he had been using her social sophistication and political savvy, which included admittedly penetrating insights into humanity—he who manipulated people best had to know them better than they knew themselves—as a one-stop shopping solution to his own naïveté.

  “If we make it to the other side of all this chaos there’ll be a higher integral order, in keeping with chaos theory, for you, me, everybody. The trick is to make it to the other side, to see what we can become and what we are becoming in order to cope with all this madness. Something more human I suspect, superhuman even.”

  “Or less than human,” Robin sad.

  She modeled pants before the mirror to see which one looked more butch. “I suppose it can go either way. But when you can’t rely on your fellow man and on yourself to get you through any longer, there’s only one person to turn to, God. God seen in this context as your higher power, however you choose to define that. So in a way, society unraveling is a deeply spiritual process. In the vein of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, though I suppose a better way of saying it is, The Devil Too Shall Do God’s Work.”

  Robin felt a shiver go up his spine. “You think the devil’s behind this?”

  “In a manner of speaking. Human greed, and the rest of the seven deadly sins certainly are. You can bet when Wall Street and the economy collapsed and the fat cats who caused it got a free pass, when the average joe was asked to foot the bill, that the devil was behind that. You can bet when American firms profit on genocide happening halfway around the world, and we don’t care who we supply guns to, that the devil’s behind that. Or we don’t care how many people around the world starve, just so life is good for us, and we tune out all the suffering in the world because who can keep track of it really? And we use all that’s going on around us as excuse for a growing inhumanity, that the devil’s behind that.”

  “Sounds funny to hear you talk of God and the devil; I mean, I know you’re Republican and all.”

  Drew laughed. “Well, we’re being a little colorful to express a point that’s worth expressing. Every once in a rare while extremist thinking does catch up with extremist times.”

  “I just don’t see how these random events can add up to anything, except maybe getting your mind blown,” Robin said.

  “Trust me, they’re not random. If they’re making the news it’s because someone sees a benefit in it, even if it’s only to keep you cowering in fear. Scared people are that much easier to control. And if the incident galvanizes your attention, then there’s some specific message in it for you separate from all the other messages.”

  “The lady who blows her own brains out after killing her boyfriend and a dog walker?”

  “If it caught your attention, maybe it’s a lesson for you in resilience; in having enough distance on yourself and what’s going on around you to not be swept away by the course of events, and yet enough immersion in your surroundings to be so at one with life that you arrive at a place of non-judgment. It sounds like a paradox and I suppose it is, one we have to resolve. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has a word for it. He calls it flow psychology, says artists are very prone to it. It’s what allows them to make art of life. When you’re in a state like that you can roll with the punches no matter how hard they get. Maybe that’s the lesson for you.”

  “Sounds like more of ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’.”

  “If you understood the context of those people’s lives, the dog walker, the woman and her boyfriend, you’d understand that the event had meaning for them, lessons even more specific to them, challenges posed and not met, and certainly not random. Maybe for them it was about getting their minds blown, and allowing themselves to rest in that state. What we call mindless a lot of Zen masters would call mindful, being so present in the moment, that you’re not letting your mind filter what’s going on for you with its preconceptions, its biases and prejudices, its limited intellectual capacity for processing information, and all the other crap it puts between you and what’s going on.

  “When you can just rest in the moment without any of that, you give God a chance to talk through you and make sense of things. You realize life is beautiful and precious and more meaningful than you can imagine. Maybe events have to get so mind-blowing so we all can rest in this state. Maybe for society to find this higher integral order chaos theorists talk about, this next stage in social and human evolution, we have to first be pressured into increased mindfulness, because it’s the springboard to everything
else.

  “Such a message, what’s more, redeems their lives, and their mistakes; it’s the greatest way to pay them homage.”

  “You have the soul of a philosopher king, an artist, a priest, and a snake oil salesman all rolled into one, and that’s forgetting the politician, and the entire gamut of lowlifes that also make you up. I steep in your complexity.”

  “But it’s the bullshit part you particularly enjoy.”

  Robin laughed.

  “No, don’t laugh. That’s sacred in itself.” Drew switched pants yet again, from butch to butcher, almost daring Robin to be distracted by her bulge in between fittings. “When life becomes meaningless, it’s up to us to give it meaning by whatever stretch of the imagination possible. That’s the most human thing of all.

  “As to the shocking headlines, you can thank these godless times for your humanity. If they didn’t tear you down, slashing right through your every coping mechanism, you’d have nothing to give others except what someone else made of you. How much of our psyches are framed by unchallenged assumptions inherited from authority figures from the time of a young child? This way you get to remake yourself, if not in your image because you have no idea what that could be, then in God’s image, as a being whose mind is open enough not to be blinded by the light of God.”

  “And the mad inventor who thinks he’s building a time machine in his living room, to probably end up with nothing more than a jungle gym, only to be taken out by someone who cares. What’s that about?”

  Drew sighed, and tossed a handful of shirts, still attached to their clothes hangers on the bed. Now that she’d finalized her decision on her pants, she needed a top to go with it that was just perfect. Robin took small solace in the fact that such attention to coordinating was still a far more female trait. “There’s a new Renaissance happening; it threatens the old world order. They don’t want any challenges to their power and authority and to the way things are, the way things have always been.”

  She held up a shirt to the mirror. “That’s the thing about an unraveling social order, makes gods or demons out of men, nothing much else can survive it. When times get this tough you have to dig deeper than you ever have before. When your humanity isn’t enough to get you through, only God or the devil can. One represents the transformative aspects of love, the other fear. So who you gonna lean on? The devil’s not good for much but tearing things down; fear is a mind killer. But God, on the other hand, is a source of endless creativity.”

  Switching shirts, she said, “These Renaissance types have found that well-spring inside themselves; that’s the real fountain of youth. Those endless inner reserves that can’t be exhausted, that won’t allow them to get run down and beaten down by life, because they’re too busy redefining and reinventing it. The Steve Jobs that goes on to remake the world in his image… Bad enough when there was just a handful of those guys walking around, but this is a Renaissance age, which means they’re everywhere, crawling out of the woodwork like rats in a fire.

  “The powers that be can’t control them, they can’t manage them, they can’t spin-doctor their reason for being, and that scares the hell out of the ruling elite because these people live for control. They haven’t yet gotten the message yet that the only stable society is one that’s shockproofed from every possible contingency. And the only way to make such a world is to have everyone functioning like a Steve Jobs, hell, to make even him look positively rigid and inflexible. It’s a Zen paradox, admittedly, a rather counterintuitive notion, and hard to grasp. That for everyone to have control, no one can have control.”

  “So now you’re an anarchist?”

  “You haven’t been paying very close attention. Anarchy is chaos. But in moving from chaos to a higher integral order something very fundamental has to happen. We have to get in touch with that inner voice, that God within, that higher power, and we have to let it guide us and inform us as to our missions in life; and we have to follow that path unfailingly. When we stray from the path instead of a higher integral order arising, we get chaos, or the other extreme, and overly ordered, autocratic society.”

  She decided on a shirt finally, and exchanged the last one for it.

  “You have an answer for everything.”

  “As I said, that’s my job, creating myths to live by. If I don’t do it, someone else will. If you don’t create meaningful ones for yourself, someone else will and they’ll call it reality and you’ll be too dumb and ill-informed to know otherwise.”

  Robin bit his lip. Touché. Though, you’ll forgive me if I find your myths have the ring of higher truth to them. Drew was one smooth talker, but she was an even smoother thinker. Robin was using her as training wheels to help him keep balance in an unbalanced age.

  Having gotten his “fix” for the day, he let his mind wander, letting the momentum of the waterfall of words carry him over the edge to the inevitable, inescapable conclusion. Just what additional backlashes from the power elite were in store for them in this Renaissance Age? If he was having trouble getting his mind around people’s increasingly bizarre behaviors under the Herculean stress of the times, he was even more flummoxed by the increasingly savage interdictions by those in authority. They were no longer going after just the outliers, the game changers, the people determined to affect history. The more anonymous and innocuous types were increasingly getting caught up in their dragnets.

  Drew was right; the powers that be were fighting dirty to hold chaos at bay, ironically using technology to forestall the future, instead of bringing the future to the rescue.

  FOUR

  Radon pressed the button on his earpiece, and smiled wickedly. To anyone who might be watching, he was simply adjusting the volume on his Bluetooth. He watched the traffic hurtle by at forty-five miles an hour, and collide at the stop light at San Pablo and Ashby Avenues.

  He approached the pile-up of cars in the role of the concerned Samaritan, and fleeced the drivers and passengers alike of their valuables. All the while, he pretended to be feeling for pulses and did mock rescues, dragged the limp bodies out of the cars, and applied mouth to mouth and CPR.

  As a crowd gathered, and people jumped on their cell phones to dial 911, his behaviors got more demonstrative. Radon was clearly a saint, no more, no less.

  Other brave souls wheedled their way into his rescue acts, and attended the other crash victims. Radon inserted himself in their dramas. He took on the role of the medical authority determined to see no further unwitting harm came to the victims by careless or simply unknowing would-be rescuers. “Maybe you should let me handle that. You’re going to crack his chest with those compressions.” “Let me straighten him out so we don’t end up crippling him from the neck down.”

  It was a little harder to rob people blind with eyes on him from so many angles. But he’d been a magician in his early years. It was really just a matter of calculating the trajectories of the eyes on him, blocking their sight with his own body positioning, and procuring the sleight of hand from their perspective. By attacking people’s blind spots, he could make them think he was levitating right in front of them. Fleecing jewelry and wallets was a walk in the park by comparison. Not as much fun as doing magic on stage. Unlike a David Copperfield, though, hacks like Radon had to ply their trade how they could. The complete dominance of the top one percent in every career field in the world was a tsunami wave that had finally caught him as it had caught everyone.

  Radon jumped into the middle of the street as the ambulances arrived on the scene, pointed “helpfully” to the victims who needed attention first. In truth, he was being strategic, making sure his positioning relative to the crowd’s sightlines was once again the most fortuitous for slipping away unseen.

  The second his mental calculations confirmed all was a go, he was gone, like a mirage, like no one was ever there. He could hear the testimonials now. “He must have been an angel. It’s the only logical answer.” He could see the ones being interviewed making the sign of the cro
ss over themselves as they described the man who was simply everywhere at once, saving more lives ahead of anyone’s ability to count the injured.

  ***

  “You got him?” Perdue, the SWAT commander, sounded impatient for a reason. This was the third mass murder scene in as many hours. Twelve dead so far. Twenty injured, and counting.

  “Oh yeah, we got him.” Robes-Pierre zoomed the GPS Google World map in on their mark. He was running north and east of Ashby and San Pablo Avenues. He appeared headed for San Pablo Park. The perfect place for a turkey shoot, as it turned out. “The controlled EMP bursts he’s using to upset the traffic light rhythms are so fine-tuned, he could stop a pace-maker at a half-mile and not bother the cell-phone in the user’s hands. Gotta love it.”

  ***

  The SWAT vehicle braked in front of Radon, maybe twenty feet away. Armored police poured out the back end as if someone had thwacked a hornet’s nest. He immediately dropped to his knees, placed his hands behind his head. He’d had time bury his booty. They had nothing on him. Not even the Big Brother eyes adjacent to the traffic lights and in stores and cars, the cell phone cams being held on him by awestruck pedestrians, would reveal a damn thing he didn’t want them to see. Even if they had their suspicions, it’d never go to court; the circumstantial evidence alone would be just too thin. He smiled. American legal system—gotta love it.