Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 7

  “What are you trying to say, Winston? You’re occupying more mind-space than you’ve been able to justify.” Pembroke, with the overzealous but well-timed press of an index finger, jetted out the latest stargate, more keen on what he’d find on the other side of it than on the other side of his question to Winston. The ship he planned to sack had been ready for him and more than a match; now he was fighting for his life.

  “I think I smell the latest hit MMOG. I think we can safely call it POSTAL. Or GOING POSTAL, if you prefer.”

  “There’s already a POSTAL video game; Uwe Boll did the video adaptation in 2007.”

  “Hear me out. It’s played both in the real world and online. We have people do the murders in the real world, and then we have them compete online for the best storylines to justify the killing sprees. They can cooperatively generate the follow-up newsfeeds to see if they can get higher ratings than the traditional TV mass-media investigations and follow-ups.”

  “I think you might be on to something, Winston,” Pembroke said, still undeterred from his gaming. “Let me think about it.”

  “You’ll do it, then? It’ll take the two of us to write the coding.”

  “Let me think about it, I said.”

  “Christ, you’re the one always arguing reality is passé. You want your one answer to it to be total escapism, you limp-dicked, motherless child? Or you want to morph reality into a virtual-reality real-world hybrid? Thus helping to bridge the migration of human consciousness through successive generations of intermingled reality and fantasy until it’s moot to discuss which is which?”

  Pembroke sighed, threw down the keyboard. “I may as well confess, I’ve been losing myself in these games to avoid facing the writing on the wall. All right, Winston, I’m in.”

  “How long you think GOING POSTAL will dominate this generation of hybrids?”

  “Who the hell knows? Till we can think of the next best thing, I suppose. Assuming the media doesn’t bury us alive with an overkill of real-world GOING POSTAL headlines, causing people to tune out, a very real possibility.”

  “Damn, I didn’t think of that. We better start working on a plan B for that eventuality.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Pembroke pressed the disconnect button on the speaker phone, ending the call. He ran his hands through his mop of greasy hair; he hadn’t bothered to shower in about a week. His skin was starting to crawl in an effort to get away from him. His thighs chafed from the salt build up. And his crotch smelled to where if he was a dog, he’d howl. There was a time when feeling uncomfortable in his body would force him to deal with real world rituals, such as hygiene. Evidently the threshold for such snaps back to reality had risen.

  Pembroke picked up a stale slice of pizza. His stomach started to growl defiance as his eyes rushed a signal to his brain, which hurried back, “this is not a good idea.” He gazed down at his ever-widening gut, and tossed the slice down. He supposed he was overdue for a change in more ways than one. Let’s see if this makeover goes any better than the last time.

  One last listless look at his basement cave of a command base, and he had all the motivation he needed to embark on GOING POSTAL. He started in on the code.

  TEN

  “Stop right there,” Ethan said, his gun drawn, one too many times this close to retirement, he thought. His police blues were already sweaty from anticipation of getting shot before getting to enjoy life at long last. “Unbelievable. What makes a pair of kids think they can mastermind a burglary in the middle of a busy BART station, in a crowd this thick? And look at the size of that painting! Did you even consider it won’t fit up the stairs?”

  “It will, asshole. I measured it,” Bohemian Chic said, twisting against the beefy bronzed arms of Paolo, the backup cop. Ethan had had to listen to his bitching in the police car on the way over here. No one in the Berkeley PD had taken the report seriously, explaining why there were just two of them on the scene.

  “Two kids with everything going for them,” Paolo said in heavily accented Brazilian-English. “I guess it was just too much for them.”

  “You know, they might just have gotten away with it, too,” Ethan said, reconsidering. “They both look artsy enough to have drawn the damn thing, and just here to reclaim it.”

  Ethan waltzed away with Bohemian Chic’s girlfriend in arm, her wrists cuffed, like her boyfriend’s, behind her back. Her resistance was something his fifty-some year out-of-shape frame could handle a little better. Even so, he was panting and feeling a distinct sense of pressure and constriction in his head. His heart pounded. He was getting to where walking was all the justification he needed for a heart attack. Before adding these two pulse-drivers to the equation.

  Bohemian Chic blurted, “Embrace the chaos, man. The more you pigs clamp down, the slipperier we get.”

  Ethan, feeling like waxing poetic himself, declared, “What do you know? Another man with a vision. Trying to brand the rest of us with his enlightenment. Acting all surprised when someone turns the branding iron back on him.”

  “Maybe he thinks being more enlightened than the rest of us is some protection from the law,” Paolo said. He upped his manhandling of Bohemian Chic, causing the boy to wince.

  Ethan groaned. “Why is it the ones who preach anything goes are always the most hard-headed, unyielding assholes of them all? Finding out the hard way the hardest nuts are the easiest to crack.”

  “Maybe an overly-sensitive artistic soul is as dangerous as an under-sensitive one,” Girlfriend muttered feebly, already sounding beaten by the ten years of prison ahead of her. Ethan pondered the point. He had to admit she might be on to something there. God knows, his rough-edged temperament was known to bruise even him.

  ***

  Several mornings after the BART incident involving the planning of a robbery and an entirely unrelated shootout, Drew was back at it, sinking more hooks into Robin, offsetting any thoughts he had of swimming out to sea to join the rest of the fish. He was desperate to hide such feelings from her, but she was what she was.

  “We haven’t had one of our philosophical debates in a while,” Drew said. “Besides, it’ll be your last chance for deep and meaningful until you get home.”

  She had that right. Cops specialized in living life as unconsciously as possible; the fear was that opening up to the deep underbelly of existence might lead to the kind of fruitcake behavior that compelled them to arrest people. Or, God forbid, wake up one morning and grow a dick. Get off it, Robin!

  “For the record, I was entirely okay with your lesbianism,” Robin croaked. “More than okay, speaking of philosophical differences.”

  Drew smiled and adjusted his vest. That three-piece suit, spun of fabric so rare the animals were no doubt protected legally from the poachers who’d fleeced them, was from another era, as was she in a lot of ways. Take away the pecker, and her sensibilities ran rampant through the nineteenth century.

  Drew said, “Now that I have a dick to help me think, I appreciate the sentiment.”

  Smart ass. It was Drew who couldn’t stand the idea of her lesbianism. Somehow that conflicted with the wedding-cake couple image she insisted on presenting to the world. Two women just didn’t look right together in her mind, any more than two men. Which, he guessed, meant he’d been demoted to best friend, paperwork to follow. The things we do for our prejudices. Speaking of which… “I really should be getting to work.”

  “Robert Reich is giving a speech today before the People’s Movement,” Drew said, fastening the knot on her tie. “Unless I miss my guess, on how the age of apathy is over; how the age of justice and personal responsibility is upon us.”

  Tantalizing bait indeed. Robin could stand to get his philosophical groove on before facing the coffee machine at the office, dripping acid into his blood to kill the stench of people going whacko for no good reason. As opposed to the very good reasons he had at his disposal. Without honing his philosophical aptitude, he was never going to survive the challenges to intellectu
al rigidity invited just by walking out the door in the morning in this college town.

  “He’s hopeful,” Robin said. “They’ve already drowned all mention of the People’s Movement out of the media as if it was more fleeting than a fart.” Score one for The Daily Californian, Robin thought, having come by that chestnut by way of it just the prior morning. He didn’t want to leave it at that. He needed to take his game up a level if he expected to follow in the wake of the queen of social sophistication herself, Drew Harding.

  Nearly stammering from nervousness and a sense of inadequacy, he said, “As to the self-righteous holding on to their indignation…” He felt his mind reaching for a juicy morsel, anything… Finally, “there’s nothing to separate them from the other zealots happy to reduce society to flames in advocacy of their personal causes.” From the crisp wording, he was thinking that was one more borrowed anecdote. He seldom waxed so poetically. “Über-liberal Berkeley is the biggest powder keg on the planet. We champion more save-the-world causes per square block than most countries can manage inside their borders.”

  He supposed her taking the liberal position in this argument, and forcing him into the conservative stance, was just as calculated a move in helping him to get over himself. In real life, Drew was the conservative, and Robin the liberal.

  He gathered also, in retrospect, he’d just tried to pass off the obvious as the essence of profundity. But he’d actually managed to string together several insights on his own this time.

  “I’m not so sure,” Drew said. “There’s something about ninety-nine percent of people being discontinued in favor of robotics and software and left without any underlying social support that leaves a lasting impression. I don’t think people are going to be put off this time.”

  “You’d be surprised by the human capacity to put things out of our minds.” He could have been less obvious with the dig aimed at the two of them. “Most of us will gladly ignore the tsunami coming toward shore, knowing we can’t outrun it, when there’s the matter of this delightful mocha cappuccino in our hands well worth savoring.” He gazed into the mug in his hands, happily losing himself to the swirl of foam floating above the coffee.

  “I grant you,” she said, “our innate ability to bury our heads in the sand makes you wonder what genes we share with ostriches and other lower animals.” She made the final fold and cinched down on it, pulling the cravat tight. “There comes a time when denial can make your head explode.”

  On that note, Robin decided he’d better come clean on some of the other matters bothering him in hopes that something could be done about them. “What’s your take on Radon, the guy who caused several multicar pile ups and sent all kinds of people to the hospital just so he could play the part of the good Samaritan?”

  Drew had to stop laughing long enough to say anything. “Sorry, I suppose it’s easy to misinterpret the laughter. Evolution doesn’t just happen in one direction, Robin, it’s spherical, it moves in all directions. So, yes, our humanity grows even as our capacity for evil grows.

  “What’s more, if you want to lose control of a people, make sure enough of them are unemployed or underemployed, leaving them no choice but to get creative. How much of our economy is a black market economy anymore? The best managed populace is one that’s well fed and happy, a good, strong middle class. That’s what history teaches us brings stability.

  “But what if stability is not what we need? What if for this many people to live on the planet without crowding one another off it we have to get smarter in a hurry, more conscious and aware of our impacts on our fellow man and their impacts on us?

  “What if a crash course in accelerated evolution is needed? That’s why things have to get worse before they get better. People have to get torn down, find all their adaptive coping strategies to be maladaptive, they have to experience an inability to thrive in any sense of the word until, like a phoenix standing in the fire, they can learn to rebuild themselves constantly, so that no matter how fast the world changes around them they remain in sync with it.

  “How do you build such a mind except by repeated shock and awe campaigns until you can’t shock people anymore, not because they’re numb but they’ve developed the kind of psychic resistance to ride out any storm?”

  Robin said, “I like what you’re saying. I just wish I was a better student.”

  “Don’t we all. I guess that’s the point, not just to learn but to learn how to learn better, faster. Compressing the learning curve until time no longer matters, we can pull in as much smarts in the moment as we need; it’s a spiritual quality, and it’s the real context for Singularity. The sci-fi kids and techies all talk about it like it’s a strictly technological phenomenon. But the real departure with spacetime starts inside our heads with the proper attitude, with the proper break from reality, and all sense of limitations. By identifying with the God in ourselves and not with the failed human being. Even if we have to keep molting out of successive versions of ‘human,’ each one closer to the ideal of the Godhead; that’s what it means to be the phoenix standing in the fire.”

  “It’s weird, I can’t think on your level yet, or I’d come to the same conclusions, I’m sure, in my own way. But I can intuit what you’re saying is true. Maybe the right side of my brain is more developed than the left side.”

  “Most of us know truth from bullshit when we hear it, unless the lies are just more comforting; it’s only then that we reject the truth.”

  “Yet everyone’s got their own version of it, a partial truth they hold on to as if it’s the entire truth.”

  “Yes, I suppose truth, too, is relative to our limited understanding and our capacity in the moment; the trick is to make that capacity just enough for right now. Tomorrow’s another thing; tomorrow we will be smarter, because we have no choice, and tomorrow we’ll tackle new problems better than the way we tackled today’s problems. So worry not about what you don’t have, just about what you need for right now to see you through.”

  “All this talk of the God within… Are you just using a figure of speech, as when discussing the devil’s role in things? Is it just shorthand for reaching beyond ourselves, and whatever we take to be our limitations for good and evil?”

  “Yes, but the trope works just as well if taken in the literal sense, just depends on your understanding of God. The Buddhists don’t believe in a God, yet their definition for the divine ground is the best definition of God I’ve ever heard; that which is beyond all limitations and definitions. Everything arises from it, all creation. We’re supersaturated in this divine ground, indistinguishable from it. Whether you view this transcendental power as an outcropping of spacetime, a matter of cosmological physics, a mere product of chance and no more, even quantum physicists would be hard pressed to deny it exists.

  “I’d concern myself less with semantics, and even with ultimate truth, and more with what works. If you believe you’re one with and inseparable from absolute empowerment because you’re one with and inseparable from the Godhead, then your mind will reprogram you for success accordingly. And if you think you’re just not worthy, then believing that, you shall truly fail.”

  “Profound to a fault and slippery as a snake, that’s you.”

  Drew laughed. “Guilty as charged, I suppose.”

  Drew put on the finishing touches, accessorized with jewels, belt, and man-purse, and overlaid herself with scarves and a hat in a feat of coordination Robin had no doubt would send a roomful of fashion consultants back to style school. The mirror she was standing before was a Louis XIV mirror, if Robin properly recalled her last attempt to liberate him from his proletarian sensibilities. That was after she explained the meaning of the word proletarian to him.

  “And what about Brimley, the barroom butcher? Or Hotly, the Conflict Diamonds Avenger, as they’re calling him?”

  Drew bit her lip and tried not to laugh this time. She knew he was having trouble associating her sense of humor with a healthy detachment from oth
erwise mind-blowing events. “When you can’t make sense of things up in your head, and the more you try the crazier and more nonsensical the world gets, it gets harder to identify with this part of yourself. The tendency is to shift your sense of humanity to your feelings, the more intense the better. Because the more deeply you feel, then the more alive you are.

  “But getting in touch with our feelings to the exclusion of all else can drive us to rash acts at the moment when taking a step back is needed most. We end up sealing our fates to where no amount of subsequent thinking that should have gone on prior to the fact can really dig us out of the hole we made for ourselves.

  “But maybe that’s the game the unconscious mind is playing with us, driving us to this point in an effort to create an uber-mind, a super-thinker to replace the one that couldn’t hack it. The prisoner inside the cell now has no choice but to find an escape, no matter how impossible, or die trying. And the ones who don’t get caught… well, they have to learn to stay forever one step ahead of the ever-increasing number of posses on their tail…”