Glossary of Project Renaissance Man Terms

Here is a refresher on unique terms and lesser known locations in Project Renaissance Man. If you have not read Project Renaissance Man, STOP. There are spoilers. If you have read it, this list will do more than refresh your memory. It will also provide a few new insights.

• Belt – One of Rich Fox’s anti-surveillance devices. It looks like an ordinary belt, but plays a pre-recorded message that eavesdroppers hear, instead of the actual conversation people are having. Rich cautioned the Circle of Five that the belt will not work on eavesdroppers who are close. They can hear the actual discussion.

• Ball – The Circle of Five’s generic name for the time machine. It was a sphere and naming it the ball allowed them to talk about it without giving away what they were talking about the time machine.

• Baton – For most of Project Renaissance Man, the baton was simply the tube that establishes possession in ComBATON. Whoever holds the baton is on offense. The person with the baton can score by kicking the goal (another baton hovering at chest level at either end of the field). At the end of Project Renaissance Man, David Jackson revealed a new time machine shaped like a baton. Like with the ball, David called it the baton as a diversion to any eavesdroppers. The baton fooled Eric, who did not destroy it. Instead, thinking it was just Matt’s memento for the sport, he gave it to the Circle of Five and Matt was able to use it to time travel out of 2037.

• Café – A small restaurant between the National Mall and the National Archives. The RMs used this location as a restaurant, similar to its use prior to the Storm. Rich and David added a second use and transformed it into the Club.

• Capitol Hill – The residential area east of the United States Capitol, made up mostly of narrow, three-story brick row houses. After the Storm, most of the RMs live in row houses on East Capitol Street, running east from the Capitol, beginning with the Library of Congress and the United States Supreme Court on either side, and ending at Lincoln Park eleven blocks away.

• Charm – An antique, gold, dimpled piece of jewelry given to Sophie’s parents for her after she was born. It contained the initials “MS” on its face. When Matt touched the charm, it popped open to reveal a Disc. David Jackson correctly guessed it was a Disc Writer. When various combinations of the Circle of Five touched it, the charm produced different Discs with additional clues they needed to complete their mission.

• Circle of Five – The name David Jackson gave to their time travel team of Matt, Sophie, himself, Bobby, and Rich.

• Club – After a rain-soaked ComBATON victory, DC3 (Matt’s team) huddled in the café’. After a brief meeting, Rich and David started a dance party. The café quickly became known as the Club, as in dance club. By the time Matt time traveled back to 2021, most of the community went to the club after the Saturday ComBATON games. At the Club, Matt learned to let loose. He also grew close to Sophie there and took the important photo of her at one of the parties, just outside in the Sculpture Garden.

• ComBATON – The community’s chosen sport, combining martial arts, football, and basketball. Eric explained to Matt that it was more than a game. Playing well at the sport would earn the respect and loyalty of the ID. What Eric didn’t explain was that he also used the sport as a diversion from people’s everyday lives, which helped him maintain control.

• Community Interface – The interface that allowed people, through their Neurals, to communicate with one another almost telepathically and helped people access the world’s information.

• Disc – A Small, circular wafer with neurotransmitters baked in. The wafer is ingested on the tongue and the information in the neurotransmitters is transported through the body to the Neural, like inserting a flash drive in a computer.

• Disc Writer – A device that bakes Discs, imbedding information on the Discs to be consumed and loaded to someone’s Neural. In Project Renaissance Man, Matt, Sophie, and David learn that Sophie’s charm is more than jewelry. It doubles as a miniature Disc Writer.

• Glider – Shoes that allow the user to travel quickly through the community. They provide both efficiency and exercise. The user propels forward simply by moving in a skating motion. The shoes repel against magnetic tracks with the same pole, allowing the user to hover inches above the ground. The shoes include stabilizers to help the wearer balance.

• Homeroom—The first class of the day. For this class, a student has the same teacher and the same classmates every day of every school year. Homeroom provided the student and teacher an opportunity to get to know each other, fostering a relationship of trust and openness.

• ID – The nickname for the Intelligence Department, the government department charged with maintaining order. Rich’s father is the director. Matt learned that Eric uses the ID as both his intelligence gathering apparatus and his private army.

• Lincoln’s Cottage – A cottage on the site of the Armed Forces Retirement Home (Soldier’s Home) approximately five miles north of the United States Capitol. President Lincoln used this home as his Camp David during the Civil War and wrote the Emancipation Proclamation there. The Circle of Five used the cottage as a hideout. They built and tested their time machine there.

• Lincoln Park – A rectangular park eleven blocks east of the United States Capitol. It is bordered by a street, into which several streets (some diagonally) feed. Row houses and businesses line the opposite side of the street. Sophie’s parents used Lincoln Park to cultivate crops for their food supply. They modified many non-native plants to thrive in the Mid-Atlantic region. Sophie and Matt wondered why her parents spent so much time there and suspected they had their own mission, although they did not figure out what the mission is.

• Magnometers – David Jackson’s invention to help the Circle of Five use the gliders off the magnetic tracks. They are small discs that, when inserted in the shoes, amplify the magnetic field in the Earth to allow the user to glide anywhere.

• Mall – The long grassy park stretching from the United States Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. Much of the action in Project Renaissance Man takes place on the mile-long section bordered by the Capitol to the east, the Washington Monument to the west, and the United States Botanic Garden and museums of the Smithsonian along the length of either side.

• Neural – Computer implants created with nanotechnology. A Neural is embedded in the head behind the left ear and connects with the brain. It allows the user to access information on its hard drive or through the community interface, record videos through his or her eyes, and perform many other actions a computer can perform, e.g., think print and a remote printer prints a selected file from the Neural.

• Neural stare – The appearance of people reading something on their Neurals, as if they are focused on something directly in front of them.

• N-note – The name for electronic correspondence via Neurals.

• Plan 40—Known to the public as Eric’s plan to maintain civilization after an extinction level event like the Storm. Matt learned that Plan 40 included the post-Storm plan for Eric to take control, kill half the community, and genetically repopulate with DNA from select people. Eric had hidden Plan 40 in a safe in the Oval Office. When Matt found it, he did not take a picture of it. Eric destroyed it, leaving he and Matt as the only people to have seen the plan.

• Project RM – A secret government agency formed in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Joseph Solomon, the first and most brilliant RM and Matt’s maternal grandfather, had come up with the idea. The mission of the agency was to find many RMs and bring them together to maintain civilization in the wake of an extinction level event. Joseph Solomon expanded the role of Project RM to attempting to prevent an extinction level event, in part by working on a time machine. The headquarters was in RM City at the time of the Storm. To read about the formation of Project RM, see the Project RM: Genesis series.

• RM – A Renaissance man or woman who is inducted into Project RM. Before the Storm, only those who were prodigies in multiple disciplines would be considered (think Leonardo Da Vinci). After the Storm, there was not a ready supply of such brilliant people, besides the surviving forty-four RMs. Those in charge of Project RM decided to continue growing the program by admitting one person per year. The best and brightest would be admitted, even if that person was not a prodigy in any discipline.

• RM City – Secret underground headquarters of Project RM, at least prior to the Storm. (After the Storm, the remaining inhabitants moved above ground and lived on Capitol Hill.) The massive facility is located several stories beneath Washington D.C. and stretches from the National Mall up to China Town and between two lines of the Metro (the Washington D.C. subway). Among its features are laboratories, a power plant, apartments for the RMs and their families, a cafeteria, office space, and a several-story-high, several hundred-yard-long assembly hall. The hall included murals of the original Project RM logos, one containing a Vitruvian Man and the other containing a Vitruvian Woman. At the center of the assembly hall stood a three-story mangrove tree with aerial roots intertwining around the trunk.

• RM Monument – A monument depicting several RMs, with Matt’s father Eric front and center. The RM Monument replaced the Grant Memorial in front of the United States Capitol Reflecting Pool.

• Scott Building – One of the residential buildings at the Soldier’s Home. It is located on the same circular drive as Lincoln’s Cottage. Matt hid, and Lori found Matt, at this location after he escaped his father.

• Sculpture Garden – Located just outside the café’, the Sculpture Garden includes a circular water fountain with stone benches surrounding the fountain. At night, several streams of color-lit water shoot into the center. This location is Matt’s place of solitude when he needed to think. It is also the location where he took the picture of Sophie that he brought back in time for his mother to give to him as a child.

• Storm – The extinction level event that wiped out most of humanity. Most people had thought the Storm was a natural event that killed everyone, other than those safely in RM City. Before Matt traveled back in time, Eric confessed he caused the Storm using a death machine. The death machine was a time machine that opened the wormhole on one end, causing the person to be sucked in and travel endlessly in another dimension. Eventually, the person would use up the oxygen in the atmospheric bubble that entered the wormhole with him or her, causing that person to suffocate.

• Veil of Ignorance – Part of a mural in the ceiling of the Jefferson Building Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress. The mural depicts a woman lifting the veil of ignorance. It is surrounded by a mural called the Evolution of Civilization, which has twelve figures that represent twelve civilizations that contributed to the advancement of civilization. These murals were clues that helped the Circle of Five figure out their mission and led Matt to learn about Plan 40. It was replaced by a mural of RMs, depicting them advancing civilization.

Let us know if there is another RM word you would like added to the list. paschoemann@projectrm.com