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

  “I appreciate the sentiment, man, but here’s not the place or the time,” he said.

  Hotly pulled a short-barreled shotgun with a pistol grip from under his trench coat, and dispatched the guard. “No one would ever guess my mother was black,” Hotly shouted over the ringing in his ears, “or that she worked as a slave in one of those diamond mines until she died prematurely.” He cocked the shotgun. “Or that the real reason the bastards got away with it was that blacks turned against their own people, acted as guards and informants for the white bastards who did that to her.” He blew away the black man.

  Now, there was just the white girlfriend, which gave Hotly pause. Her drama with this dead man lying on the floor seemed to echo that of his parents. He decided to give her a pass, gestured with the business end of the shotgun to make her way to the door. Bent over the body of her significant other, sobbing, she refused to go. The shock and the grief compromised the reality of a shotgun in her face, smeared the view like splattered bugs on a windshield.

  Silver Hair’s hand dipped below the jewel case. He had no doubt pressed a silent alarm. It was Hotly’s fault for letting his emotions cloud his thinking. The right thing to do would have been to kill Silver Hair second, not third. He vented his frustration at Silver Hair’s face. The shotgun blast, which effectively decapitated him, hardly felt cathartic. An eighty-some year old man could probably stand to be put out of his pain; he wasn’t sure he hadn’t done the man a favor.

  Hotly left the woman to her misery, feeling strangely bonded with her, as if she alone might understand what it meant to Hotly to be without his mother.

  He exited the store, taking one of the emeralds Silver Hair had suggested to fund his crusade to set the world right.

  EIGHT

  “Let’s get some quick follow-ups on these two killing sprees.” Sadie took a seat at the head of the table after her din-settling entrance. “We may have gotten scooped on this, but that leaves us the in-depth stories no one else has been able to cobble together. People are going to be looking for explanations.”

  Realizing the attraction of this one, Piper spoke up ahead of everyone else. “I want them. I want both of them.”

  There were collective groans around the room and shifting in seats, playing off Piper’s predictable reaction.

  “Anyone but you,” Sadie said. “You have as much distance on this as Lizzie Borden lecturing on the utility value of an ax.”

  Piper counter-punched: “So I’m a niche specialist. Maybe I’ll put together a book on all the reasons people go postal and what it does to the survivors. Should serve more social value than the next so-called diet breakthrough.”

  Peggy snorted. “What, fat people can’t go postal?” Her sarcasm drew a few chuckles.

  Marvin interjected his usual cool reason. “You want to write about people going postal in an End Days economy? Really? I hope we plan on expanding our staff.” More chuckles, but they all liked Marvin, so that was to be expected. His cynicism seemed earned. The rest of them were too young to sound this jaded.

  “Ah, give it to him.” That was Minsky, not so much the peacekeeper as the guy who gives everyone the head’s up the argument was getting tired, and it was time to move on. “The sooner he works out this thing about his mother taking one to the back of the head from some psycho, the sooner he realizes no one does anything that stands up to reason. Maybe he can get on with real journalism.” Following in the wake of those comments were: smirks and snorts, some uncomfortable, tightening bodies, rueful looks, but no out-and-out laughs.

  At least they still had some respect for what he’d been through, and Piper wasn’t beyond playing the guilt card. “Thank you.” Sadie didn’t enforce her will and play the presidential veto card. Good, always advantageous to have a chief editor in his back pocket.

  ***

  Piper searched his desk drawers and filing cabinets. “Where’s the damn recorder and video camera?”

  He glanced up in time to see Buzz Kill coming his way. For the life of him, he couldn’t recall the guy’s real name. “To hell with it,” he said, slamming the drawer shut. Looking for the missing equipment wasn’t worth running into Buzz Kill. He launched himself out his office.

  But Buzz Kill was perfectly positioned to shoot him out of the sky. Damn him.

  “Here, you go.” Buzz Kill stuffed the sheet into his hand.

  Piper played dumb. “What’s this?” Maybe forgetting this guy’s name and what he did here were both coping mechanisms. All he knew was he didn’t want to look at the sheet in his hands. Not now, not ever.

  “It’s our latest analysis of how the page-one articles of our competitors are faring. We looked at the interview questions getting the biggest rise out of people. We studied point-and-click data and mouse-highlighting stats off the ezines, as well. And so much more. Love to show you the graphs.”

  “And if I ask my own questions using that thing we call a reporter’s instinct?”

  “I can’t promise any of that’ll make the final cut,” Buzz Kill said dryly, in line with the rest of his nature.

  “Don’t you have someone else’s job to kill off? I’d hate to think I was detaining you.”

  Buzz Kill hit him with a wary look before turning his back on him. Piper wasn’t sure if he was wary of Piper’s digs, or of his own role in the End Times economy, killing off people’s spontaneity with far more efficient analytics and mathematical equations. Eroding their trust in themselves day by day in favor of the big computer in the sky, or at least of the next best thing, the numbers guys. Maybe Buzz Kill felt genuinely sorry for him, and that muted emotional response was just the best he could muster.

  Piper tossed the computer printout Buzz Kill had handed him in the waste basket on his way out the door.

  ***

  Piper had spent the last hour staring at Raanan, the boy survivor of the bar shootings, and Rhonda, the wife of the slain black man at the jeweler’s, a half hour each, behind the one-way mirror of the psych hospital. “I think I want to speak to the boy first,” he said, as Saverly entered.

  “Not a problem.” Black, and at least passing for someone in his mid-thirties, Saverly’s manner could best be described as self-assured.

  “You’re not afraid I’m going to make matters worse by pushing the wrong buttons at the wrong time?”

  “I believe in keeping people off balance.” Saverly shielded the contents of his patients’ files by holding the clipboard to his side. “Best way to see inside their heads in a hurry. If you think you can beat me at my own game, have at it.”

  Not exactly your run-of-the-mill psychologist, Piper thought. He’d have to remember to insert this guy into his contact list. A good therapist was hard to come by. Plenty of hand-holders. Few genuinely good counselors who could do more than lend a sympathetic ear and then blather in psychobabble when prompted. A conclusion well-earned after a lifetime spent in shrinks’ offices.

  Piper entered the kid’s all-purpose room designed to draw him out of himself. With its menagerie of offerings, it was definitely taking a scattershot approach as to what might actually work.

  The kid was throwing darts at a dartboard. He wasn’t half bad, a lot better than he was an hour ago when Piper started spying on him. He threw darts with a windup suggesting a future as a baseball player, his face intent and his concentration focused to a pinpoint. He was hitting a bull’s eye every one in three darts on average. Was Piper seeing him in revenge-mode, budding-mad-dog-killer-for-life thanks to undigested pain that would remain forever stuck in his craw? Was he using the target as a surrogate for the day when he had the killer in his crosshairs? Or was he just the type to feel more at ease through action, a natural athlete, keeping his mind off the pain the best way he knew how?

  “What was going through the killer’s mind when he was gunning everyone down, if you had to guess?” Piper asked. Way to break into things gingerly, Piper.

  “Don’t have to. He spoke his mind better than most people. Bett
er than you. What are you, some kind of journalist?”

  “Yeah, the failed kind. So don’t feel so down on yourself. We’re all failures at life, kid, acting all noble and defiant about it. That way we can show off our humanity as a kind of consolation prize.”

  The kid snorted derisively. Piper could tell he’d won that first round. The kid was warming up to him, despite his “bug off” body language.

  Piper endured the silence which followed and another few rounds of darts. Maybe the kid needed to trust that an adult could actually be in a room with him, and endure how uncomfortable things could get, without coming unglued. Maybe he just needed to get lost in his head and only the reminder of Piper’s ongoing presence in the room would steer him back to the unanswered question posed to him.

  Finally, the kid said, “He was really pissed people cared more about ideas than they cared about other people.”

  “Like they were forcing enlightenment on him, not caring if he was ready for it or not?”

  The kid froze in his wind-up position, before releasing the dart. “Yeah, like that.”

  “Maybe he needed people just to spend some time with him, let him unburden himself. Maybe then, he’d have been more open to their ideas. But no one would take the time. Everyone had such a sense of urgency, such a need to dump their own baggage. No one wanted to play the game of give and take.”

  “That was him, all right,” the kid said, throwing the dart and hitting another bull’s eye. There was something cathartic in how he flung the dart, the force applied in the windup and release. Piper saw someone determined, someone not a victim, someone capable of strategizing his way back to homeostasis. A real survivor, this kid.

  Piper stayed in the room another hour or so, didn’t say a word, just soaked the kid in. Let him know he was more important than what information Piper could extract from him, more fascinating; he was the better story. He couldn’t just act the part; he had to live it. One thing about survivors of trauma, they got to read people really well, all the halo-signs that prefaced the change in character. They had to know all the buttons to push to keep Jekyll from turning into Hyde. And for the ones able to soldier on, as they began to piece themselves back together, there came a curious sense of detachment, the kind Zen masters preach. He wasn’t sure that was an adequate justification for End Times, judging by the rising chaos out there on the streets, but it’d have to do.

  Piper felt himself melting beyond the confines of his own body as he went into phase with the kid, escaping like a gaseous vapor into the room. At once both hyper-relaxed and stiff from not breathing, he felt as if the blood was pooling in him, pumped as it was by a contrastingly timid heart.

  He lived the part of eager disciple before his guru long enough to gain some understanding of his own quest. He was not writing about the bad guys, or about the true nature of this particular form of near death experience. He was writing a survivor’s story, his survivor’s story.

  So in his noble effort to do right by the kid, the kid had left him with an even bigger gift than the factual detail that brings a story to life; he had left him with the secrets to life. Piper witnessed the alchemical transformation of character taking place before him. The kid was showing him the way: use the flames burning inside him like a baptismal fire.

  Now, if only he had the courage to follow suit. Maybe he wasn’t done feeling sorry for himself. Maybe he wasn’t done punishing himself, driving himself crazy, as a form of penance.

  ***

  Piper entered Rhonda’s room.

  Her arms were straightjacketed behind her back. Her cranium was covered in a rubber helmet suitable for hitting her head against hard cement. She gently rocked back and forth, watching a tennis player bat one ball fired from the tennis-ball shotgun after another to the opposite side of the court. She sat just past the halfway mark at the net, in full view of the balls pooling on the gun’s side, presumably taking a vicarious pleasure, judging from her somewhat vacant smile, in his exorcising his rage on the other half of the tennis court. Perhaps she couldn’t give herself permission to vent directly; this was as close as she could come to therapy.

  Piper lifted her up and carried her over to court number two, and set her to firing the tennis cannon manually by banging her helmeted head against the trigger. He demonstrated for her, moved her body through the rocking motions she was inclined to do, and did the head-butting by placing his hand at the back of her head. By the third try, she was doing it on her own.

  He strolled over to his side of the net and played his part, swatting the ball, and promoting transference from the tennis player to Piper, her new hero. Maybe he should give Saverly a run for his money. He was better at this psychology stuff than he realized. More survivor syndrome, no doubt.

  After the last ball was expended from the tennis gun, Piper trotted over to the other side of the court. He collected up the tennis balls, used the netting on the racket as a tray, and dropped them, one racket-full at a time, into the bucket in back of the machine. He lingered each time he approached Rhonda, trying to gauge her state of mind. On the third racketful, he asked, “Why do you think he did it?”

  She briefly interrupted her rocking before resuming. Silence followed in the wake of his question. Piper returned with a few more racketfuls of balls before any kind of response was forthcoming.

  She whipped her neck to flick a savage glance at him as he went to drop the balls into the bucket. “He was a madman. What more do you need to know? Mad with anger.” Softer, riding the aftershock of her own angry explosive outburst, she said, “He let his anger eat away at his mind until there was nothing but a lot of impulses he could no longer see as contradictory, as much bigot and racist as he was colorblind, as much other-hating as he was self-hating.”

  “Maybe his madness was an attempt to make larger than life what was so much less than life, so senseless, so inhuman,” he said. She averted her eyes. Piper sighed. “Don’t feel guilty. “It’s hard to change the mind of someone who has organized his thoughts into a deranged philosophy he’s spent years cobbling together. It takes time to debug his mind when he’s convinced he’s already factored in every counterargument in a synthesis that really does explain things.” She threw him a peculiar look; stabbing, accusative. “His growth ceases,” he said, “and because how he sees the world remains the same, the world ceases to change for him.” Her eyes returned to the tarmac. “But fear not,” he said, “all that web-spinning in the spider’s mind, interlacing discordant threads of thought, is meant to make sense of the world, give him a way of navigating it. Maybe it’s the only way he knows how to be up to the task, a man with such middling, maudlin, mediocre talents.”

  She laughed. “Why do you glorify him?” She kept her eyes on the ground in front of her, unblinking, to help steady her mind.

  “If I lack sufficient empathy to understand him as he is, if he can’t see in my eyes that I see him, truly see him, he can’t ever stop. None of us can ever stop. I don’t seek to glorify him, only the impulse which drives him, the impulse to heal, to be whole, which is noble.”

  “To heal?”

  Piper explained, “Madness is the mind’s attempt to find a higher integral order than can be accommodated by reason. It’s a transitional state to higher consciousness.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “As the walls come down,” he said, continuing as if he hadn’t heard her, “separating conscious and unconscious minds, left and right brain, there is a misguided pursuit of wholeness that was lost subsequent to the trauma. Misguided because the necessary distance needed on oneself to piece Humpty Dumpty back together just isn’t there.”

  She laughed again, and returned to her rocking. “You can have the straight jacket after I’m through with it.”

  NINE

  Pembroke kept his hands flying over the keypad and his right index finger twitching intermittently over the mouse to retain full control of all his attack and maneuvering options. The massively multiplayer online game
he was engaged in across the internet with roughly 350,000 other gamers, all playing live, and some, winner take all, was called Eve Online.

  He piloted his customized ship through one of many star systems connected by stargates. This star system contained a wide assortment of astral bodies: moons, planets, wormholes, asteroid belts. There were also some stations and complexes in evidence.

  His in-game profession was piracy, though he could have chosen from mining, manufacturing, trading, exploration, and combat. He closed in on the vessel he was readying to divest of its bounty.

  “Pembroke, I need you back in the real world.” The staticy voice coming over the speaker phone conveyed all the charm and warmth of a bolt of lightning to the brain. Pembroke experienced the immediate lowering of endorphin secretions as a wave of discomfort spreading across his body.

  “There are currently over two hundred and fifty million people playing MMOs at any one time. I think I can safely say, reality is a thing of the past.” His body nearly keeled over from his leaning a little too zealously into the right side of his keyboard.

  “Pembroke, look at this.”

  With consternation, Pembroke took his eyes off the game to eye the newscast Winston was highlighting for him on monitor number two. It showed the victims of the “Barroom Butcher” as he was being called, being carted out of the club. A swarm of ambulances, police, and media choked the square block surrounding the place. “So what?” Pembroke said. “Out of context like that, it means nothing. That’s why I prefer virtual reality, Winston. Designer limitations aside, at least the world makes sense. Not like this real-world shit you remain attached to. The more you give it credence, the more you encourage it to continue.” His hands never stopped working the mouse and keypad.

  “Get a load of news TV 9.” Winston, remotely controlling Pembroke’s monitor number two, switched the channel for him. “They’re calling him the Conflict Diamonds Avenger.” The in-store surveillance video gave the blow-by-blow playback of the massacre. “You want to find order in the chaos... Two mass murders in the same day, Pembroke. Don’t tell me that doesn’t constitute some sort of pattern.” Pembroke absently watched the footage, running into real difficulty with Eve Online.