Transhumanist Wager, The (25 page)

“That's good, Gregory. Very good
indeed,” Belinas said, jauntily taking a smoke from his cigar and nodding his
shiny, shaved head.

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

Redeem Church’s four terrorists
were dressed in black, armed with handguns, and wearing wire-thin headsets as
they scuttled through an elaborate San Francisco sewer system directly
underneath the Cryotask building. It was precisely 7:00 A.M. on Monday morning,
October 1st. They picked that time because prior surveillance had revealed that
the night security guard often napped then, nodding off in his booth at the end
of a long graveyard shift. For the Redeem Church’s murderous plan to work,
secrecy was essential. Dawn was breaking outside, and Cryotask employees
wouldn't be showing up to work for another ninety minutes. 

The terrorists were led by a husky
Romanian-born boxer named Refia Polzan. With a wrench, he unbolted the
three-foot steel cover of Cryotask's ventilation system above his head. Each
man looked stressed, reeling from the weight of the bombs in their backpacks,
and from the off-chance that one of the bombs might prematurely explode.

In the past, bombing labs and
clinics connected to transhumanism was routine: one or two explosives targeting
either the laboratory and its machinery, or the operating room and its doctors.
This time, however, they aimed to demolish an entire building: a three-story
1910 Victorian mansion, which had recently been converted into Cryotask’s
headquarters. The oversized property graced the south side of Telegraph Hill
and was adjacent to San Francisco’s downtown highrises. The terrorists aimed to
turn the entire structure into a blistering inferno—they wanted nothing
salvageable left inside. This was their largest, most dramatic terrorist attack
yet.

With stealth, the four members
crawled through a tight vent before entering Cryotask's basement. They needed
to be quiet, just in case the armed security guard outside was awake and
decided to wander inside the building. The last member, Johnny Dars, looked
behind him as he closed the vent. He stared for a long time into the darkness.

“Get a move on, Johnny boy,”
whispered a voice from ahead of him.

Johnny shrugged and continued, but
an uneasy feeling swarmed over him that they were being watched.

On the top floor of the Victorian
mansion, in a nondescript storage room littered with boxes and junk, Jethro
Knights watched nine silver video monitors in front of him. Each of them fed
wirelessly to a remote satellite atop a nearby skyscraper. On his waist was a
holster carrying a 45-caliber handgun and two loaded clips.

Jethro’s phone vibrated silently.

“Good morning,” he answered
quietly.

“So what the hell is going on?”
asked an annoyed man. He was a senior producer making the morning news at Los
Angeles-based IMN. “Is this a hoax or what?”

Five minutes earlier, the producer
had been tipped off by Dr. Zoe Bach to a developing live terrorist story
unfolding in San Francisco.

“I assure you, this is no hoax,”
said Jethro. “I just need two more minutes, then I’ll connect you to the live
terrorist footage.”

“Are you sure they’re terrorists?
How do you know all this?”

“I’m absolutely positive they’re
religious terrorists. There will be plenty of time later to answer your
questions—you’ll see everything for yourself in two minutes.

“What other media have you
contacted?”

“You’re the first so far, but we’ll
be streaming everything to other television stations, to multiple websites, and
to network news feeds, so you won’t be alone in scooping this story. I suggest
doing a good job and remaining objective; this is a story of the highest
national importance.”

“Whatever,” snarled the IMN
producer, skeptical. “It just better be worth reporting on.” 

“It will be. You have my word.
Let's talk in a few minutes.”

Once inside Cryotask, the
terrorists split into two groups. The first set of men began hiding timer bombs
on the first floor, putting the ten-inch-long metallic devices underneath
furniture in the main reception area. One bomb went behind a bookshelf filled
with medical and transhumanism books. Another went under a secretary's desk.
Another under a coffee table. Still other bombs went into bathrooms, closets,
and various offices.

The other two men headed upstairs
to the massive, unfurnished great room on the second floor, where thirty
stainless steel cryonics suspension tanks were bunched together. Many of the
machines were flashing green, orange, and blue lights from their digital input
screens. Some were steaming and vibrating softly. Refia winced, thinking they
looked like computerized coffins. He quickly began hiding timer bombs
underneath the tanks and on the inside of the exposed joist beams of the
mansion's ceilings. Explosions along those beams would collapse the aged
structure, according to an engineer who had studied the building’s blueprint
plans.

Refia was in charge of setting the
master timer device, whose countdown would wirelessly instruct all the bombs
inside Cryotask to explode within a few seconds of each other. He eyed it
carefully in his backpack each time he reached for another charge to place. It
was protected in a hard transparent case, separated from the clunky bombs so
that it couldn’t be jostled too much.

Jethro Knights’ secret video
cameras were scattered in every area on every floor of the mansion. Each camera
lens was nearly invisible, hiding behind a tiny hole in a hanging oil painting.
The video equipment had taken days to install, but each lens had a panoramic
vantage point of the space or room it was in. An additional camera was directly
above Jethro to his right, filming his actions and all the images on the
monitors.

In radio contact with Jethro was
Oliver Mbaye, his Paris man whom he had hired a month before from the French
Foreign Legion. Descended from distant royalty in Senegal, and formerly a
captain with combat experience in North Africa, Oliver was extremely reserved
and professional. Despite being only thirty-seven years old, his frizzy
crew-cut hair was solid gray. He helped Jethro organize the Cryotask operation,
advising him on all the possible dangers and outcomes that could occur. He also
took Jethro to the nearby Santa Cruz Mountains to teach him how to handle and
fire a handgun.

Earlier that evening, Oliver sent
the regular Cryotask security officer home and took his place. Dressed in the
officer’s uniform, Oliver spent most of the night pretending to be sleeping in
the little wooden security booth. As soon as the cameras showed that the
terrorists were in the Cryotask basement, he popped through a nearby manhole in
the street and bolted up the entrance vent the Redeem Church men had crawled
through. They were locked in. Oliver returned quickly to his security booth,
and pretended to sleep again while eying the action inside the building.

From the second floor, Refia
whispered into his microphone to his subordinates, “How's it going down there?
I'm about ten minutes from setting the master timer.”

Johnny instantly stood upright. He
was planting a bomb in one of the first-floor offices, and talk of setting the
master timer was unnerving.

“We're over halfway through here on
our end,” Johnny answered. “Eight more charges to set. Let all these
blasphemers die. This place gives me the creeps.”

“Amen,” mumbled Refia, who then
continued setting his bombs.

The first day of every month was
always the scheduled maintenance day for Cryotask, when engineers checked each
of the cryonics suspension tanks for proper functioning by running a wide range
of diagnostic tests. Dr. Zoe Bach, two other cryonics technicians, and other
staff were always on hand in case something went wrong. This was the reason
October 1st was chosen by Redeem Church. Not only did they want to destroy the
frozen bodies in tanks, but also the key employees who had helped put them
there. The terrorists did not expect any survivors.

Jethro Knights telephoned back the
IMN producer and said, “It’s live now for you. Do you see it?”

There was silence on the phone.

Five seconds later, Jethro
repeated, “Can you see it?”

“Yeah, we got it. Sharp and clear.
What the hell's going on? Is this real?”

“Yes, it’s real. We’re filming a
live terrorist act at a cryonics center called Cryotask, in San Francisco,
California, near the downtown district. The armed men dressed in black whom
you're watching are Redeem Church members, and they don’t know they’re being
filmed. My name is Jethro Knights. I’m the founder of Transhuman Citizen, a
new, aggressive California-based organization, which promotes and protects
science that extends and enhances human life. I am a transhumanist.”

“Holy shit,” the producer said,
realizing one of the most important stories of the year was unfolding in front
of him. He quickly flicked between the various video feeds Jethro was
providing. One image was of the terrorists planting bombs; another was of the
cryonics suspension tanks steaming; another was of Jethro standing in front of
video monitors wearing a gun in his holster.

“Don’t move an inch, Mr. Knights.
We’re putting this on—I’ll be right back.”

The producer jumped up and sprinted
from his desk into the filming studio, waving at the IMN anchors hosting the
news hour. The anchorwoman, Patricia Hayes, was in the middle of a live
interview with a paparazzi journalist who had recently photographed a royal
wedding in England.

“Wait, wait a second,” Patricia
said, looking away from the interviewee. “It looks like we have a breaking
story. Mr. Dennlor, I'm so sorry—we're going to have to leave it there. My
sources tell me we're going live to—what's that? To San Francisco, to inside a
cryonics center called Cryotask, where apparently a live terrorist plot is
unfolding.”

Sixty seconds later, the story
began filling in to other major television broadcasters across the country that
were receiving the live video feeds from Jethro. The smaller stations also
caught the live footage, piggybacking off the larger broadcasters. Soon
everyone, from Los Angeles to Denver to Boston, broke from their regular
programming to air images of masked terrorists setting timer bombs at a
cryonics clinic.

On the East Coast, the time was
10:17 A.M. Commuters on trains watched the news on mobile devices in front of
them. People on the streets stared at their phones watching live Web updates.
Taxi drivers blared the story on their radios. A crowd in New York City
gathered near the three-story-high LED television screens fronting the
buildings at Times Square. The terrorists appeared as haunting, black-clad,
twenty-foot figures.

Jethro also watched the story
unfold on a small TV next to his video monitors. He quickly flipped through the
major cable channels following the media’s responses. A wire with a tiny
speaker feeding into his right ear gave him audio. The other ear was empty,
allowing him to hear into the hallway, just in case someone came up to the
third floor where he was broadcasting.

Around the country, television
anchors described what they saw and speculated about who this armed
blond-haired man was, why he was filming terrorists bombing a clinic—and why he
was filming himself broadcasting it live. Occasionally, Jethro whispered
quietly into a microphone and pointed towards a screen in front of him, telling
the viewing audience or the television producers what was happening. He also
briefly described his organization and its philosophy, TEF, a couple of times,
promoting them and the promise of transhumanism to viewers. Digitally
superimposed in the lower right hand corner of all the live images that Jethro
provided were tiny orange-colored words:
Courtesy of Transhuman Citizen.
This was Jethro's proper introduction of his group to millions of viewers.

Zoe Bach, watching a giant flat
screen television from Transhuman Citizen’s Palo Alto office, sent an excited
text to Jethro’s cell phone:

Amazing! The country is
watching and listening!

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

“Belinas, Reverend Belinas! You’re
not going to believe this!” shouted the preacher’s frantic bodyguard, barging
in and disturbing his solitary morning prayer. Belinas was kneeling, his hands
clasped, worshiping in front of a long wooden cross hanging in the community
room at his sprawling 100-acre headquarters in Savanna, Georgia.

Belinas looked up petulantly,
signifying he was never to be interrupted like that during prayer.

“Reverend, I'm sorry. But
something’s wrong—the Cryotask operation is a set-up. It's being aired live on
TV.”

“Aired live? What are you talking
about?”

The man sprinted over to a nearby
television set, grabbed the remote control, and switched on the machine. He
scrambled through channels trying to find IMN to show Belinas the story. He
didn’t have to—the local Savannah news channel was already airing it.

Belinas saw an image of Jethro
Knights on the screen, explaining how the terrorists hoped to destroy the
Cryotask building and murder its employees. The preacher recognized Jethro from
the picture on his kill list. His countenance turned to shock, the peace of
prayer entirely gone from his demeanor. His eyes strained to focus on the
television, and words were not able to flow from his mouth. The full
realization of what was occurring took far longer to register than it should
have.

Finally, he shouted, “Damn it,
don’t they know? Doesn’t Refia know they’re being filmed live on TV? That it's
a trick?”

“No, sir. Shall I call them?”

“Call them? From
here
, you
idiot? From one of
our
phones? From the property grounds? Are you
kidding me?”