Transhumanist Wager, The (16 page)

The nearly seventy books ranged in
titles from Dappleton's
Inquiry into the Ethics of a Conscious Machine
,
to Bandon's
The Transhuman Consumer
, to Kilton's
A Complete History
of Human Enhancement,
to Fitzgerald's
The Coming of the Great
Singularity
, to Nathan Cohen's
Longevity Requirements of Sentient
Species
. Langmore’s lectures, given all over the world throughout the past
decade, including those as a professor at Victoria University, were bound in a
three-volume set. Included in the box was even the operational manual of the
NAH—many of its pages bore Langmore’s personal handwritten comments in red ink
next to the print.

Six months later, while cruising
along the Azure Coast of France, Langmore’s secretary sent another package.
This one was much smaller. Jethro picked up the padded envelope in Monte Carlo,
curious about its contents. Jethro and Langmore were engaging in more and more dialogue
via email, often daily now, if Jethro had access to a good Internet connection.
Langmore had failed to mention what the package would contain, however. Inside
was a four-inch portable hard drive.

Jethro took it back to his boat and
uploaded it on his computer. The drive was a virtual archive of the entire
transhuman movement, chronologically assembled. Every major article and news
clip regarding the history of transhumanism and of the modern scientific quest
for life extension was there, in order, easily accessible. Additionally, the
drive contained thousands of webcasts and videos to watch. Finally, there were
downloads of anti-transhumanism posters, critics' reviews of life extension and
human enhancement books, transcribed sermons from Reverend Belinas on the evils
of seeking immortality, and an entire 188-page congressional testimony on the
dangers of the transhuman movement.

Langmore had compiled a bona fide
digital treasure of transhuman information and history on that hard drive.
Jethro was ecstatic to have it, but he also realized there was another six
months of studying ahead of him now. That night, after stocking up at a grocery
store, Jethro pulled anchor and set sail for the northern coast of Ibiza, where
he would tackle the first few months of material. Zoe Bach was no longer
incessantly on his mind, but he still thought of her frequently. Jethro had to
force himself to focus. He quickly lost himself in his studies, spending
sixteen hours a day poring over transhumanism. He embraced the material,
keeping in close touch with Langmore, who occasionally offered advice and also
answered any questions Jethro asked.

************

In all his studies on
transhumanism, Jethro Knights decided he connected most with the work of Dr.
Nathan Cohen. The scientist’s experiments, to combine brain neurons to the
hardwiring of computers in order to download human consciousness, seemed the
most sensible and important direction for the immortality quest. While getting
the human body to live longer was a priority, it was not a long-term solution.
Jethro already assumed that the human body, at least as it was, would only be
around for another half century in its current form. Dr. Cohen's work was where
the real evolutionary jumps could be made. Conscious computerized machines and
their digital content, with proper maintenance, could last indefinitely. They
were so much more durable than flesh. But this thinking was exactly the most
radical as well. Because eventually, perhaps sooner than even many
transhumanists would have it, there would be no need left at all for the human
body.

Even though Dr. Cohen was obsessed
with robotics, his science was steeped in his academic background of organic
chemistry—which by nature is a science that delves in far smaller spaces than
biology, but isn't as abstract as physics. Cohen spent his five-year Ph.D. at a
prestigious London university with an electron microscope, investigating the
atomic properties of carbon, the most common element of life. His fascination
with transhumanism reached as far back as he could remember. His mother, a
prominent black Zimbabwean biochemist, and his father, a dour-appearing French
heart surgeon, endowed him with the drive to conquer death. They raised their
son mostly in Paris, where as a child his mother told him daily about her toils
in biochemistry research. His father shared with him the most complicated heart
surgeries he performed.

Their inspiration and guidance
helped prime Dr. Cohen to make the jump from a promising graduate student to
one of the leading contributors of the transhuman movement. In his late
thirties, he secured a large seven-year grant from a well-known university in
Virginia, where as a tenured professor he carried out groundbreaking
experiments. In a short time, his team became the first to connect
chemically-induced human thought with moving robotic fingers;
laboratory-created instincts with breathing lungs; and electric stimuli with
eyesight focusing. Every mechanized replication of the human body he attempted,
he successfully accomplished.

He was on the verge of developing a
thinking droid that could jump rope, long considered the crowning achievement
of robotic balancing acts—when his funding was quietly pulled. He was told he
could regain the money, and much more, if he shared his research with the
American military, who would be funding and monitoring his scientific efforts
from then on. Furious, he refused. He did not believe in big government and
private education being in bed together.

A week later he found his desk moved
to a small corner of the university campus, where he was given only limited
access to his laboratory. He also discovered that his research funding had been
eliminated entirely. He marched into the office of the president of the
university—a good friend of his—demanding an explanation.

The man covered his face when he
saw his friend storm in.

“Damn it, Nathan. You know I can't
do anything. They'll can me too. Just give in this once, at least for a while.
It's just a bunch of science experiments. I have a family to feed and two
mortgages to pay, plus a sick mother to care for. I'm sorry. I've tried to do
everything I could to prevent this.”

Dr. Cohen discovered they were
blackmailing everyone; that government power after the infamous New York
terrorist attacks and the nationwide economic downturn had grown too insidious.
He resigned, moved west to sunny Arizona, and opened his own scientific
consulting company. He sought investors and donors to continue his work, but it
was hard to find people to fund “science experiments,” as his friend had
trivialized them. Still, he moved forward with his research, albeit much more
slowly. His consulting company's laboratory could only afford to occupy two
rooms hardly the size of a large garage.

Jethro Knights sat on deck, in the
shade of his boat’s awning, reading the latest paper out of Dr. Cohen's Arizona
clinic. Behind him the ocean shimmered. Clearly, the nanotechnology Cohen was
combining with chemistry was the strongest idea going in transhumanism, Jethro
thought. The scientist wanted flesh and machine to match perfectly, to become
interchangeable—to become one and the same in the future. Jethro agreed, seeing
the obvious need to stand up and cast off as an unfit costume the pasty,
outdated biology of his species.

Chapter 11

By the time Jethro Knights motored
through the Straits of Gibraltar on a windless day in November—when all that
was left of his circumnavigation was a forty-day passage to New York City—he
knew all the important ideas, scientists, technologists, and visionaries in the
broad, often disorganized field of transhumanism. He also knew every major
opponent of transhumanism. His research had taught him all the arguments,
victories, failures, and conundrums of the life extension mission, including
the intricacies of the science and technology.

Only Preston Langmore had such a
comprehensive knowledge of the entire movement. The last time Jethro was on
land, in the Canary Islands, he received an email from Langmore inviting him to
be a guest speaker at the coming transhumanism conference. Hosted in New York
City that year, it was the 25th anniversary of the conference and being billed
as the most important transhumanism gathering of the decade. Leaders from all
over the world were flying in to attend it. Every key scientist in the field
would be there. And Langmore wanted to make sure Jethro Knights met everyone.

Jethro accepted the invitation. In
the email, Langmore also pressed Jethro to accept a job as a senior consultant
and writer at the World Transhumanist Institute. It was a unique and
prestigious opportunity, and a solid foundation for further work in the heart
of the movement. After eighteen months of frequent communication and dozens of
lengthy, didactic emails, Langmore considered Jethro his protégé—an unofficial
apprentice. Jethro wrote back, however, saying he was undecided about the job.
He thanked Langmore for his close friendship and the work offer, emphasizing he
would strongly consider it; that his commitment to the conquest of immortality
and pushing transhumanism forward, whether at his organization or not, was
unwavering.

Now that Jethro was almost back
home, he focused specifically on how to approach the rest of his life. He had
already trimmed down the amount of articles he was doing for
International
Geographic,
writing only occasionally when he encountered an exceptional
story. His short journalism career made him a respected writer to any
organization or media company. But five years of traveling—especially his time
in the Kashmir war zone—taught him he didn't belong at a normal job, working
for someone else, following other people's ideas, ambitions, and crusades. He
felt it antithetical to his immortality mission, to directly join any groups or
companies, even if he respected and saw value in them, or knew they were
unequivocally transhuman-oriented.

Instead, Jethro possessed robust,
independent vocational ideas for what he wanted to do in the future and how to
do it. He thought it best to embark on his own entrepreneurial job creation.
His parameters were simple; they were fashioned from the essence of the
transhumanism mission. He wanted to be guaranteed to advance beyond his
biological human limitations and live indefinitely in freedom, security, and
satisfaction. To achieve that, he would do whatever was necessary, as
efficiently as possible. That, he declared to himself, would be his new job
when he got back home.

Of course, creating ways of earning
a reasonable income through the new job would be a priority too, but that snafu
could be overcome in time. The sale of his yacht would give him a comfortable
financial buffer of many trouble-free months to figure it all out.

On the fifth year and second month
of his circumnavigation, the glowing skyline of New York City broke through the
fog and silhouetted the black sea. Jethro wrapped up his sails and motored
quietly past the Statue of Liberty and up the Hudson River, unnoticed at 3 A.M.
This was the man whose every instinct screamed to conquer death—whose instinct
the world would one day challenge and attempt to destroy.

************

At the core of anything Reverend
Belinas did was one dominating tenet, one central philosophy: his impassioned
hatred of modern technology. His earliest memories were of a ghastly car
accident in Africa. His father, the driver, was instantly killed—crushed by an
eighteen-wheel tanker with a front tire blowout that swerved into their
speeding minivan on the highway. Miraculously, Belinas, aged six, survived in
the back seat, intact. His small body was held in place by a jail of crushed
metal all around him. His mother, however, sitting next to him, was ravaged.
Partially paralyzed and no longer able to breathe on her own, she was revived
by medics in an ambulance, and later put on an artificial respirator at the
hospital. For three weeks she showed incremental signs of recovery. Every day,
Belinas wept while watching her slowly, painstakingly improve. In the last
week, he began to feel hope. His mother was going to survive, one of the
doctors finally announced. She might even be able to play with him again in the
future, a nurse told him. Then, during a stormy night in Nairobi, when staff
were overwhelmed tending other emergencies, the power failed in the hospital
and Belinas watched his mother suffocate to death. Her eyes were frozen still,
enraged, staring at the powerless respirator machine.

Born to a Scottish mother and a
Cuban father in the slums of Mobile, Louisiana, Belinas left America as an
infant, to travel with his missionary parents throughout East Africa. Over the
next six years, he lived in squalid AIDS orphanages, special needs clinics, and
mud churches with thatched roofs. At an impressionable age, he saw things a
young mind should never see: emaciated babies starving to death, families torn
apart by disease, child prostitution on the streets, warlords ruling the
countryside and killing indiscriminately. Later in life, these experiences
would grant Belinas the strength to confidently stare down the growing despair
and poverty brewing in America. After the horrors he witnessed in Africa,
nothing could shock or frighten him anymore.

Following his mother's death,
Belinas returned to America. The church of his parents found him a suitable
foster home that immediately started him in school. Belinas quickly excelled in
all his classes and eventually skipped grades. In high school, his test scores
were so impressive that he was accepted to Victoria University on a full
academic scholarship at age sixteen. He majored in religious studies. Four years
later he matriculated into New Haven, Connecticut’s prestigious McKinsie
Theological School for graduate work. There, under Dean Wilderun, one of the
original anti-transhumanism defenders, he blossomed into his full spiritual
self.