Transhumanist Wager, The (58 page)

“It might as well be,” acknowledged
a radar engineer nearby. The man’s radar screen showed
Trano
encountering and flying right past eight F-22 fighters near the Santa Monica
Mountains. The Transhumanian plane was in and out of sight of the American jets
within five seconds. There was nothing anyone could do. It was too quick a
moment for the U.S. squadron leader to even yell out a reasonable command.

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

Tabno
was the first aircraft
to reach a major structure scheduled to be destroyed: the Royal Palace in
Tokyo. A single Transhumanian-designed Tetronic T-1 missile was launched from
the underside of the aircraft. Japanese citizens could hardly see the drone
stream across the sky before the palace was obliterated by the rocket. In an
instant, a huge light—bearing devastating scatter-bomb technology—incinerated
its target. Nothing was left but an enormous scar upon the land with small
burning fires.

The second aircraft,
Cidro
,
approached India’s Parliament building. In less than ten seconds, another T-1
missile demolished an area the size of four football fields of concrete and brick,
along with hundreds of historical treasures accumulated over centuries by the
British and Indian governments. Jethro Knights warned nations ahead of time
that he was not an archaeologist, but a futurist. And relics of the past bore
little value to him.

Trano
reached America’s East
Coast early in its evening and sent missiles to destroy the White House, the
Capitol building, and the Supreme Court. Centuries of legacy and past triumph
were annihilated by three fiery explosions, gargantuan in scope, as they
engulfed Washington, D.C.’s governmental district. The nearby NFSA headquarters
was also blasted into ruins. Astonished viewers from downtown hotels and
offices stared through windows, observing the carnage where the nation's vital
structures once stood. In the dark, the city went into a panic. People began
leaving for the countryside by the hundreds of thousands, many on foot and
bicycle to avoid the standstill of car traffic.

On television and radio, Francisco
Dante urged people to remain calm, return to their homes, and await further
instructions. He told Americans no more bombing was scheduled in Washington,
D.C. Under recommendation from Jethro Knights, he also advised police and
military guards to shoot looters and agitators on sight.

Kijno
reached Europe early
in the continent’s morning. Its first missile was due to eradicate the Vatican
at 8:20 A.M., local time. Catholic believers by the hundreds remained in the
famous Saint Peter’s Square, praying on their knees for a miracle. They were
repeatedly warned by police and the media to depart the area. Along with the
Pope, who was hiding below ground in the catacombs, all were incinerated by the
single missile, which leveled a half kilometer square of the historical city,
leaving nothing but a smoldering twenty-foot-deep crater.

Cidro
soon crossed to Mecca,
where the Kabba was obliterated. It continued to Jerusalem, where the Wailing
Wall and Temple Mount were demolished; then to the Djennia, West Africa, to
wreck the Grand Mosque. In England,
Kijno
destroyed the Parliament
structure and Buckingham Palace, then continued on to raze Versailles and Notre
Dame in France, ending with the European Union headquarters in Brussels. In
North America,
Trano
brought down Canada's Congressional Palace in
Toronto, then the United Nations building in New York City. It continued until
it reached South America, where it collapsed Brazil's thirteen-story Christ the
Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, and later, Argentina's National Congress
building in Buenos Aires. In China,
Tabno
demolished the Imperial
Palace, then the Kremlin in Russia. Another raid in Australia reduced the
Commonwealth Parliament building to rubble.

The aircraft continued for hours,
wreaking destruction upon the Earth. No populated continent was spared. No
timeless religious monument left unscathed. No famous government building left
standing. When many of the world's most revered institutions stood in ruins,
Jethro Knights implemented the next phase of his plan to put the world in an
informational darkroom. Josh Genear and his team hacked into hundreds of the
most powerful land-based communication towers and Earth-orbiting satellites.
Once they had control of them, they recoded all the software programming so
that only Transhumania could manage the world's media and Internet traffic,
nearly all of which relied on digitally induced airwaves. Over the next few
hours, usually only for fifteen minutes at a time, Genear tormented A10
countries by putting them offline, then online, then offline again. He repeated
the process numerous times. The A10 military and police went into total
disarray.

Next, the Transhumanian team hacked
into traffic light systems, power grids, aviation control towers, and key banks
of major world capitals. City traffic in London, Beijing, and Johannesburg went
berserk. Bangkok, Dubai, and Mexico City became completely pitch-dark at night.
Thousands of planes in flight made emergency landings in remote airports and
crop fields, as their autopilots, digital gauges, and GPS guidance systems
malfunctioned. Bank deposits, loan notes, and equity accounts were zeroed out;
trillions of dollars vanished in seconds.

The world watched, shocked, as if
in a horror movie. Many of its most valuable symbols, possessions, and
twenty-first century privileges were destroyed. Many of its most basic
functions and expectations were no longer guaranteed. People ran to their
kitchen sinks, grateful that water still came out of the faucets when turned
on.

The full moon was high in
Transhumania when the four drones returned, unscratched, ready for refueling
and carrying out more destruction. Jethro possessed enough missiles and fuel in
his city for another fifty flight missions. His military readied the aircraft
for more departures. His next targets were the planet’s core infrastructure:
mega-dams, nuclear power plants, agriculture silos, major bridges, oil tankers,
water reservoirs, busy freeway overpasses, international airports, and
commercial harbors. Enough to send the world's progress back nearly a hundred years.
Jethro told Francisco Dante to report on the potential of the next wave of
attacks—and dozens more like it—and what it would mean to the majority of
civilization.

People were horrified.

Chapter 33

During the ravaged world’s
following hours, as the sun inevitably arched over every nation, mobs of people
emerged from hiding to discover the smoldering ruins where their sacred
institutions had once stood. The places and symbols humans had cherished their
whole lives were now destroyed. Shock and hysteria were ubiquitous.

For the most part, the Internet
still didn't work, and phone calls were almost impossible to get through. Power
blackouts were common. Lines at gas stations were sometimes a mile long. People
waited in traffic for hours, trying to exit cities. No one knew what to do
except gather cans of food, fill canisters with water, and prepare for a long,
intense ordeal. Police and domestic military troops set up checkpoints on major
street corners and roads, urging calm. Rumors spread that another global raid
by the four drones was imminent.

On the command of Jethro Knights,
Transhumania discontinued its intimidation and menace. The blackouts around the
planet stopped. Electricity returned to power grids. Communication servers
rebooted themselves. Satellite and phone systems quickly went back online. GPS
and air navigation systems began to function. Nations regained control of their
utilities.

Fresh news filtered through the
media, instructing people to remain at home or to quickly find suitable shelter
and to wait for more information. Francisco Dante announced that Jethro Knights
would make a speech to the world in exactly two hours. Superimposed at the
bottom of Dante’s broadcast was the transcribed message:
Leadership of
Transhumania to address the future of Earth
. Alongside the message was a
120-minute timer, counting downward.

Billions of people quickly found an
outlet to listen to the speech. They waited anxiously, huddling together very
still, their ears and eyes tuned to a single object in front of them. A butcher
and his family sat cross-legged in Lahore, Pakistan, watching a rusty
black-and-white television on a dirt floor. A commercial fisherman and his crew
listened to a ham radio on a storm-engulfed ship near the southern tip of Australia.
An obese American billionaire philanthropist, whose long-deceased grandfather
had earned the family fortune years before, watched a 90-inch flat-screen TV
from a king bed. A priest, leaning against the altar in a stone Paraguayan
church, listened to a transistor radio. A group of teenagers in Beijing huddled
around a cell phone, staring at the device's tiny screen.

When two hours had elapsed, Dante
solemnly announced, “Ladies and gentleman, the historical moment has finally
arrived. The founder and leader of Transhumania will now officially address the
world—and the prospects for our future civilization. I present to you: Jethro
Knights.”

The image switched to the
transhumanist. He was standing unceremoniously in jeans and a plain white
T-shirt, leaning against a guardrail at the viewing platform of Transhumania’s
Memorial Vista. In front of him was a throng of journalists and their video
cameras. Behind him lay the entire city and its three lit-up skyscrapers. Dawn
was breaking, casting resplendent lights across the obscured clouds, the
gray-blue ocean, and the towers. Transhumania was slowly motoring towards the
Hudson River of New York City, its new home.

Jethro’s face bore the proud
weathered look of a prodigious being. He wore no television makeup, did not
shave the night before, and had no tie around his neck. There were no
artificial camera lights beaming on the man to make him seem younger or falsely
attractive. There was no teleprompter in front of him so that he could read
words written by somebody else. His face and wintry blue eyes were austere,
aesthetic, almost ugly in their pristine naturalness.

It was his voice, however, that
left the greatest impression on people. In its tone there was no mercy, no
weakness, and no hesitation—just commitment, exaltation, and unyielding hope in
the face of turbulent challenge.

“People of Earth, yesterday I spoke
of a choice each of you must make. Today that choice has arrived.

“Your governments have engaged in a
war with Transhumania, and they have lost. As a result of that war, you have
witnessed a glimpse of the hardship, chaos, pain, and destruction my nation can
instill in your lives. The burning piles of your sacred symbols and edifices
all around the world are proof of it.

“Transhumania will not allow your
governments to continue. Your top leaders are all to be replaced. New leaders
from Transhumania will fill the role to govern and lead. A new constitution
based on the goals, philosophies, and responsibilities of transhumanism will
replace your laws. A new society based on transhumanism will replace your own.
If you decide to fight and deny our power over you, then my nation will strip
all your resources and riches from you, and put you and your cities back into
the Dark Ages.

“However, do not fret or be vexed.
This transition can be agonizing and cost all you possess—or it can be
trouble-free and quickly finished, leaving you with the chance to reap a
bountiful future reward. By losing the war and undergoing this great ordeal,
you have gained a chance to remake your world, with Transhumania at the lead.
Together we can rebuild your countries, rebuild your economies, rebuild your
societies, rebuild your wealth, rebuild your values, and rebuild your lives. We
will make it so the fruits of Transhumania can all be harvested together. We
will openly share with you our amazing science, medicine, technology,
innovation, and inventions, as well as our inspiring philosophies and
unfaltering leadership. We can start a better, more promising world together
immediately. Your new lives can start today. You can remain free, raise your
families, pursue happiness, live healthily, accumulate wealth, gain access to
education, work towards personal improvement—and, most importantly, strive to
fulfill the goals of transhumanism.

“Because my people and I still see
value in you, we believe you should be given the opportunity to completely be
integrated amongst us, and to contribute to the shaping of transhuman life on
this planet and beyond. We believe you can become the next and most effective
generation of transhumanists. But in order to join us, you must first make a
choice. The choice comes to you in the form of a wager: the Transhumanist
Wager. The wager and quintessential motto of the transhuman movement states
that if you love life, you will safeguard that life, and strive to extend and
improve it for as long as possible. Anything else you do while alive, any other
opinion you have, any other choice you make to not safeguard, extend, and
improve that life, is a betrayal of that life. It is a betrayal of the wager.
It is a betrayal of the possible potential of your brain. It is a betrayal of
the essence of transhumanism. It is a betrayal of Transhumania and its
philosophy, Teleological Egocentric Functionalism.

“This is a historic choice that
each man and woman on the planet must make. The choice shall determine the rest
of your life and the course of civilization.

“Until this choice arrived to you
today, each one of you was inevitably going to die. No matter how much you wished
otherwise, at some point in the future your flesh was going to rot; your bones
were going to become dust; your thoughts were going disintegrate into arbitrary
subatomic particles. All your future dreams would disappear as unfulfilled
wishes. Every iota of your spirit would vanish into unconscious blankness.
Until this choice arrived to you today, your death would be your final
achievement—the ultimate statement of your life. That is all you are and could
ever hope to be. Nothing more.