Transhumanist Wager, The (36 page)

A vast, haunting sadness descended
upon Jethro while he watched her.

Chapter 22

Two minutes before they arrived at
the hospital, Zoe Bach was administered another shot of epinephrine. She
briefly regained consciousness. Jethro Knights followed her every movement,
carefully squeezing her right hand. Her major wounds were plugged with gauze to
slow the bleeding, and three intravenous lines ran into her. But her condition
appeared far worse now—her skin was turning a light blue, turning cold.

“I…love…you,” she whispered,
shivering, her vocal cords grungy and damaged. The look in her one eye conveyed
a message of farewell.

Jethro spoke quickly. “We can fix
you. You just have to hold on. We'll be at the hospital in two minutes.”

She moved her head slightly to say
no.

“Zoe, we can fix all this.”

She attempted to smile—his forever
optimism, she thought. She knew exactly what could be fixed and what couldn’t.
Half her right leg was almost ripped off. Her bowels were held in by bandages.
Their baby had long ago bled to death. Part of her right eye and face were
gone. Her scalp was cracked open, exposed to brain swelling and certain
infection. Her left arm, discolored by bloody gauze, was missing the hand; it
was still somewhere in the pile of rubble at the conference. There was no
fixing this, she thought.

“Zoe, we can fix all this.”

“Jethro.” she said, her voice
scratchy. Blood dripped from her mouth. “I don’t want…to be fixed. That's your
philosophy. Mine is life…and whatever path it takes. Including this.”

“No, Zoe, don't say that. Not now.”

“Yes…my love,” she said, her voice
cracking. “I’m not going to make it…not going to journey with you anymore. I'm
too damaged. Too damaged…to even be frozen. And right now…I don't want to be. I
only want…to go where I’m going—where my fate is taking me. I feel no desire…to
wake up to a broken body that’s only half mine…half something else. Jethro,
that's your personal mission. I’ve always supported you, always loved your
ideas…your passion. But that is
your
destiny…not mine. Mine is here, at
this moment, right now…with the man I love. Watching him…while I pass to
somewhere else.”

Jethro wanted to scream,
No!
He wanted to shout his disagreement. He wanted to convince her to hold on
longer. Life was passing from her, however, and he knew that the most love and
dignity he could offer his wife was to respect her last wishes.

A spate of dreadful seconds
passed—almost half a minute. Jethro and Zoe continued staring at each other. In
the background, the ambulance’s red emergency lights flashed and sirens
sounded. The vehicle jolted to the left and right as it rushed through traffic.
The brightly illuminated hospital was only a few blocks away now.

“I'll come find you,” Jethro
whispered when he saw Zoe departing life, unable to control himself, speaking
the language she understood.

“Yes…my love…I know you will…I’ll
be waiting.”

She knew his battle to let her go
in peace, and squeezed his hand with what energy she possessed. She faded and
was gone moments later.

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

Jethro Knights was rushed to the
emergency room at the Washington, D.C. City Hospital. Over a grueling five-hour
surgery, all the metal shards and splinters in his body were removed, and his
scores of wounds were stitched up. He passed out on the operating table and
only regained consciousness in his hospital bed forty hours after Zoe Bach’s
death. His head and body were wrapped in thick bloodstained bandages and gauze.
At his bedside was Preston Langmore, sitting in a chair. The man looked aged,
his hair deeply gray. His right foot and leg were bound in a long white cast;
his crutches were resting against a nearby wall. He sat quietly, reading the
latest publication of
Transhumanist Monthly
.

Langmore watched his friend slowly
regain consciousness. Jethro looked, focused on him—and remembered. Langmore
saw his pupils and thoughts withdraw inward, closing off to the world, a flood
of pain consuming him.  

Langmore pulled his chair closer.
They sat in silence for five minutes before Jethro uttered, “She’s gone.”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. At least for a
long time.”

Jethro knew what he meant. But he
didn’t want to think metaphysically now. He didn’t want to imagine what could
happen if multiple realities could be fostered by new technologies in the
future. What a strand of DNA from her blood samples at the hospital could do
later. He just wanted his wife back. Now. As she was. And his unborn child. And
the peace he knew. And the love.

“The body hasn’t been put on ice.
Some organs were preserved to be donated, but almost all were too damaged.
After what happened, she wasn’t a suitable candidate for the cryonics chamber.
The paramedic told me what she said.”

“Yeah,” Jethro whispered, “She
didn't want to try. I disagreed. But it wasn’t my choice.”

“Don’t worry, Jethro. Forever is a
very long time. The doctor says you're going to regain your full health with
lots of rest. Get better and get back out there.”

“Preston…I’m going to need some
time. To get myself together. To decide how to proceed.” Then he added softly,
“To decide
if
to proceed.”

The healing days were slow and exhausting.
Jethro’s body ached all over from the multiple wounds and the nearly 200
stitches holding together his skin. But his wounds did heal, and healed well.
His youth and his body’s robustness helped. 

The loss of Zoe, however, did not
heal. It worsened. It followed him long into the night and into his dreams.
Jethro would imagine he was back in their Palo Alto apartment with scented
candles burning and Mozart playing on the stereo, a vibrant happiness
permeating the air. Zoe’s green eyes shined brightly. Together they painted
colorful animals and robots on the nursery walls.

Then the dream would slowly vanish
as the scent of the stale hospital room filled his nostrils, and he became
aware of the dim beeps of nearby medical monitors. Moments later, Jethro would
jerk forward in the hospital bed, remembering exactly where he was—and the
nightmare that was his.

For hours afterward he would stare
at the walls, softly moaning, tears streaking from his eyes in the night’s
darkness. He desperately missed his wife—her touch, her voice, spooning her
warm body through the night. The soft kicking of his child. He missed the many
hopes and goals they shared together. Their loaded philosophical conversations.
Her smile. The ease of her ideas. The Zenlike nature of her spirit. The wonder
of her confidence about everything.

He reran some of Zoe’s last words
again and again in his head:
I don’t want to be fixed.

Did
he
want to be fixed? It
wasn’t that exactly. He just didn’t want to die. He didn’t believe in endlessly
coasting through the universe as non-organized, unconscious specks of matter
and energy, even if others called it “spirit.” It wasn’t that Zoe thought that
exactly, either; she just wasn’t worried about it. Her confidence and ability
to peacefully accept the universe as it was astonished him. Especially since
his every urge in the past had been to fight for survival and power.

She amazed him now more than ever.
His stomach muscles tightened in agony; the pain from the loss of her was far
worse than the pain from his physical wounds.

On his fourth day in the hospital,
just before he signed the paperwork to cremate his wife, Jethro ordered
extensive DNA, bone, and tissue samples taken from her body. He also arranged
for her undamaged hippocampus—where long-term memories are stored—to be
preserved in an experimental new suspension liquid called Preservatia. He did
the same with the umbilical cord and intact parts of the fetus, for stem cell
potential. Lastly, he made careful digital records of her few donated organs'
destinations. He planned to keep close watch over where they went, and who they
went into.

When everything was complete,
Jethro let her go. She told him once that cremation was her preferred end if
she couldn't be cryonically frozen. In his wheelchair, deep inside the
hospital's musty basement, he watched a mortician load her body into an
incinerator. Sixty seconds later, she was no more.

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

Jethro Knights remained insulated
in the hospital from the hounding press. Day after day, the media smeared
details of the terrorist attack at the Dawson Center across the news. Some
journalists reported Jethro was dying—that transhumanism was losing its
youngest, strongest leader and the last hope of the declining movement. Preston
Langmore visited Jethro every day, telling him he was doing his best to manage
the media circus.

“What’s there to manage?” Jethro
replied testily. “It’s not working here anymore in this ‘nation under God.’
Religious superstition is the human race's nemesis.”

“Of course, but at least you're
still alive. The movement can still continue. There still is some hope,
somewhere. There has to be.”

Jethro wasn’t sure about that. He
wasn’t interested in an organization that couldn’t win, that wouldn’t fulfill
its destiny. Winning was everything when it came to Jethro's immortality
objective.

Over the next days, he spent his
time in the hospital recovering and reading. Langmore brought him the books he
requested. Stories of heroic explorers, of spirited generals, of resilient
scientists, of immovable philosophers, of intrepid founding fathers of nations.
They blew inspiration into the depths of his mind. Jethro desperately needed
it. He felt so dark inside, so outraged. He utterly wanted revenge against
those who killed his wife. So far, the authorities investigating the bomb blast
had found no concrete leads, not even any persons or groups of interest.
Obviously, Redeem Church and other extreme religious organizations in America
were behind it, Jethro thought. With the NFSA carefully watching over the
Dawson Center bombing investigation, however, Jethro knew the police would
never delve too far into the case. Soon, it would be relegated to just another
unsolved murder. 

From his hospital bed, there was
little he could do. Furthermore, there was nothing that could change what had
happened. He tried not to think about it. He observed his thoughts, noting in
his journal that he couldn’t go thirty seconds without thinking of Zoe. When he
forced himself to do it, the forcing seemed more like thinking of her than not.
The sorrow was penetrating and pervasive.

After five days, and at least a few
days earlier than recommended by his doctor, Jethro got out of bed on his own
power and walked to the bathroom. Some of his wounds began bleeding through
their stitches. He relished the pain. It helped him to focus on something other
than Zoe.

Eight hours later, during the
exchange of nurses, he put on some street clothes, limped out of his room, and
began walking towards the main entrance of the hospital. The press was there,
waiting—presumably for him. He quickly turned away unseen, and hobbled out the
back entrance, making his way through an underground parking lot. From there he
walked up to a public street and grabbed a taxi, taking it to a small motel on
the other side of town.

The next day, wearing sunglasses, a
baseball cap, and a long scarf covering his wounds, he walked slowly to a
bookstore with an empty backpack. He filled it, then went to an international
airport and bought a one-way ticket to the Bahamas. Three hours later, he was
airborne.

Shell-shocked and despondent,
Jethro wasn't sure what he should do now with his life, but he knew it was
imperative to figure it out. Thinking on a warm, isolated beach seemed like a
prudent place to begin. 

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

The question that kept returning to
Jethro Knights’ mind deeply troubled him: Why should he continue at all? It was
not a question he could remember ever asking himself. He sat on a pink beach on
the island of Eleuthera, staring at the sea. Wounds were all over his body, and
the sand stuck to his stitches. What he undeniably knew was the loss and death
of Zoe Bach had decidedly dulled his drive for life. Perhaps it was the lack of
sorrow and pain in his life that made him originally want to live so much, he
thought. Perhaps that’s what made him unafraid to transcend any boundary of the
human species to reach the highest in himself. Slavery to emotions so dire was
not why he planned or wanted to live forever. Was life worth living for thousands
of years without her? Without his family? Without the love he came to know,
trust, and believe in? 

His thoughts jarred him. They
filtered through his existence, through his pantheon of memories. Was this just
mourning? Or who he really was now? He looked in the mirror one night after
downing a bottle of wine, feeling that he was changed, feeling that he was
almost afraid of life without her. The firmness and confidence that once filled
Jethro's heart were gone. He questioned if he could ever be the same, if it
could ever be worth it again. The power and certainty that had always made him
different from others had vanished. The force he had relentlessly clashed
against over the years: The unnamed, unformed defeatist ghost strangling the
human spirit’s best potential—the same irrational beast he couldn’t describe
while walking away from Professor Rindall’s class at Victoria University—was
now taking explicit shape. And it dangerously tried to seize hold of him.

Jethro awoke in an old, wooden,
plantation-style hotel. From outside his small room the sound of ocean waves
trickled in. It was exactly two weeks since Zoe had died. His first conscious
thought that morning was of her. Again. He wished he could turn over and feel
her body. But she was gone. Every day, little by little, he forced himself to
understand that. To accept it. His brain wanted to think differently, to dream,
to barter. Nothing, however, was so final as death.