Transhumanist Wager, The (7 page)

For Langmore, the forum was both a
disaster and an utter failure. His scientists desperately needed federal
funding to jump-start their fields. They also needed laws and regulations
removed so they could openly do their experiments. Without the ability to
experiment, everything else was pointless. Currently, many transhuman
scientists were secretly working at night on their projects in university labs.
Or in their own garages with inferior scientific equipment bought secondhand
off the Internet. Many used their own negligible funds and resources to try to
accomplish their research. Some were Nobel Prize recipients who were all but
outcasts in their own nation. It was an appalling, embarrassing way to move
their immensely promising fields ahead.

Perhaps, if we all go back to
riding bicycles and living in teepees we’ll solve global warming too, thought
Dr. Cohen, disheartened. He wondered whether the world was teetering on the
brink of a second Dark Ages. His mind flashed to Galileo, Copernicus, and
Giordano Bruno—scientists who were chastised or burned at the stake for their
revolutionary ideas that later propelled civilization forward.

Why are people always so stupid and
afraid? thought Dr. Cohen in dour frustration, running fingers through his
mushroom hair.

Chapter 5

Forty-eight hours after the
Transhumanism Town Hall Forum, Russian oil magnate Frederick Vilimich arrived
via his private jet in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian Kashmir. With his
team of seasoned engineers and geologists, Vilimich planned to spend five days
scouting out the nearby Himalayas to determine their oil production
capabilities. He believed Kashmir might possess an untapped trove of global
crude. The ongoing war in the region meant it was a shrewd time to acquire
resource concessions from governments and landowners.

Vilimich was a huge, boisterous,
middle-aged man with a thick, four-inch-long beard. Standing 6 feet 7 inches
and built of solid muscle that had the ungainly habit of protruding out of his
clothes, the Russian mogul towered over nearly everyone he encountered. He had
to crouch low just to walk through his jet and make it out of the doorway
without banging his head.

Descending the stairs of his plane
to the tarmac, Vilimich was excited about his trip. Discovering new oil fields
was one of the greatest pleasures of his business. As soon as he started
walking towards the airport terminal, however, he began to feel weak and
nauseated. The feeling didn’t surprise him. A week ago he had begun to notice a
strange pain in his lower left abdomen. It was accompanied by short spates of
weakness, dizziness, and headaches. In the terminal, he told his team he had to
sit down and rest for a minute. The lead engineer immediately suspected
something was seriously wrong. His normally vigorous boss was pale and out of
breath. He sent the other engineers to a hotel and took Vilimich to the city’s
main hospital.

In the dated infirmary, Vilimich’s
pain and symptoms grew worse. An Indian doctor with a blue turban came in to
examine him. Before the doctor even uttered a word, Vilimich coarsely asked the
man where he had received his medical training.

“In Delhi, sir.”

Vilimich shooed him away, insisting
that he would only be seen by a Western-trained doctor.

“Sir, we don’t have one here in
this hospital.”

“Well then find one in the city
somewhere.”

The Indian doctor glowered back.
“This is the biggest hospital in Indian Kashmir, with its best doctors. I
assure you, there are no Western-trained doctors for hundreds of miles.”

A nurse standing in the far corner
of the room interrupted the men. “Excuse me. There is one doctor I know of—an
American. She’s in my mother’s village, Kundara, near the Line of Control. She
operates on wounded soldiers and anyone else who comes to her.”

Vilimich was a decorated veteran of
the Soviet-Afghan War, and he possessed a deep respect for war-zone doctors. He
ordered the nurse: “Get this American doctor and bring her here. Go with a taxi
immediately. I’ll pay you whatever is necessary.”

“Sir, she’s four hours away by
car—and very near to the fighting. No taxi from Srinagar will go there.”

“Send her a helicopter then. I want
that
doctor in
this
hospital room in sixty minutes. I’m not a
billionaire for nothing.”

“Sixty minutes? That might be
impossible,” the nurse responded. “What if she’s in the middle of a surgery?”

“
Make
it possible. My lead
engineer will help you.”

Dr. Zoe Bach arrived ninety minutes
later, transported by private helicopter. Vilimich was lucky. Zoe had been
training village nurses that day and was able to leave her medical station for
a few hours without a problem; however, she was irate with the Russian mogul
before she even met him. It was insulting, Zoe felt, to refuse the service of
capable Indian doctors—especially in their own country. It was also annoyingly
presumptuous to expect a Western doctor to ditch her surgery post at a moment’s
notice, regardless that it was at the request of one the richest men on the
planet. To make up for it, upon seeing Vilimich for the first time, Zoe coldly
told the man she required a new 1000-square-foot hospital tent in Kundara as
compensation for her medical services.

Vilimich grunted and instructed his
lead engineer to order one immediately. The engineer disappeared into the
hallway and began making calls on his cell phone.

Zoe was astonished that Vilimich
had accepted her terms so easily. The new hospital tent—instead of the
bombed-out mud hut in which she currently tended patients—would significantly
improve the healthcare of thousands of lives in and around her bullet-ridden
village. Elated, Zoe quickly proceeded to examine the Russian. She gave him a
thorough physical and took numerous blood, stool, and biopsy samples. Ninety
minutes later, after some of the results were in from the laboratory, she
performed a colonoscopy with the hospital’s substandard equipment.

After midnight, when Vilimich had
recovered from the minor sedation of the procedure, Zoe entered his hospital
room and approached his bedside. She looked tired and gloomy.

“I have some bad news for you, Mr. Vilimich.
It appears you have advanced colon cancer. The test results and the visuals I
recorded inside your intestines, while not conclusive, make the diagnosis
highly likely. It’s impossible with the equipment here to determine if the
cancer is metastatic yet, though I’m guessing your lymph nodes are already
affected. Either way, your situation is very serious, and you must go to a
modern hospital immediately—meaning you must leave tonight on your plane. You
need to see a specialist and prepare to undergo surgery, and then
chemotherapy.”

The Russian growled, fuming that he
would have to abandon his Kashmir project without even having started it.

At home in Russia, Zoe’s prognosis
was spot on. Vilimich underwent surgery and began chemotherapy treatments at the
best cancer clinic in Moscow. He was told that even though his cancer was
advanced, he had reasonable odds of surviving and being healthy again.

A week later, a new hospital tent
arrived at Kundara—and a stunning bouquet of flowers for Zoe from Vilimich.

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

After he left the town hall forum,
Jethro Knights returned to the boatyard. He cast his thoughts back on finishing
his yacht. There would be ample time to plan a path in transhumanism and life
extension on his sailing trip. Jethro's boat was almost complete. With only
eight days of college left, he would soon be launching it and starting his
circumnavigation.

On Tuesday of the following week,
clad with paint all over his jeans and shirt, he left the boatyard and rode to
school on his bicycle. It was his final senior seminar class in philosophy.
Students were required to discuss their senior theses, their last papers before
graduation—and the only time when they incorporated their own philosophical
ideas into their work. Jethro wrote a twenty-four-page essay on a radical new
transhuman philosophy he designed over the past two years; it was called TEF,
or Teleological Egocentric Functionalism. The philosophy was the quintessential
guide for all dedicated transhumanists, whom he deemed “Transhuman Citizens”
because their foremost loyalty was defending transhumanist concerns,
irrespective of their backgrounds, cultures, or nationalities.

Deeper than that, his essay
expounded on the elite transhuman champion he called the “omnipotender”:
the
ideal and zenith of the life extension and human enhancement populace. This
person uses TEF to its full capacity, its cold precisionlike morality
determined solely by its functionality. This omnipotender is an unyielding
individual whose central aim is to contend for as much power and advancement as
he could achieve, and whose immediate goal is to transcend his human biological
limitations in order to reach a permanent sentience.

Even though Jethro knew he was
still young and had much to learn, he considered his thesis a revolutionary
call to arms for transhumanists, aimed at instilling a fighting spirit into the
older docile scientists and researchers currently leading the movement. He
wanted his philosophy and words to convince transhumanists of their moral right
and obligation to rapidly push their ambitions forward, regardless of cultural
headwinds or religious interference. The essay was titled
Rise of the
Transhuman Citizen
.

Once on campus, Jethro locked his
bike and walked up four flights of stairs to the top floor of Philosophy Hall.
He stepped quietly into his classroom, lost in thought about a problem on his
boat's keel. The other students, including Gregory Michaelson, sat uneasily,
watching him find an empty seat. Jethro’s paper was scheduled to be the first
thesis discussed. Amongst the intimate gathering of eleven seniors, all were
required to read each others’ papers before that day’s class. They knew
Jethro’s essay was going to clash sharply with the professor’s outspoken
conservative views.

As usual, Professor Rindall strode
into class five minutes late, his red scarf bouncing with his steps. He wore a
spiffy black gentleman’s suit bought on a recent trip to Rome. His mustache was
carefully combed and pointed upward. His dyed brown hair—what little he had
left—was gelled and parted. He looked obviously perturbed. After quickly
greeting the class and mentioning some generalities about graduation, he turned
to the first paper on his desk and hissed a long, annoyed sigh.

“Ah yes, Mr. Jethro Knights—our
imaginary overman,” the professor said.

The classroom chuckled.

“You know, Jethro, I haven’t failed
a philosophy student for fourteen years. The last one thought it coy to not
turn in a paper at all. But this, if you don't mind, this rant of a thesis—this
is not philosophy. Maybe, this is art. No, not even art. This is science
fiction. Bad science fiction. B-rated science fiction. Other times that might
be excusable. After all, being open-minded is a staple in this department.”

The teacher scanned Jethro, looking
for a reaction, perhaps something conciliatory. But the student's face was
neutral. No, not neutral, thought the professor, but indifferent. He was
downright unconcerned.

“Yet this paper, Jethro,” Rindall
said, holding up the manuscript portentously, “this is so highly infectious, so
appallingly antisocial, it's hard to even accept as a reasonable answer to the
assignment. In fact, it's hard to believe it belongs to the human race. Your
so-called ‘omnipotender’ is monstrous, immoral, and inhuman. It goes against
virtually every great principle of civility that society has ever reached. It’s
decidedly evil. I have always encouraged originality, but this is ludicrous. I
don’t know what to say except, hopefully, you didn’t really mean to turn this in,
in light of the fact that your other papers were excellent—at least from a
technical point of view, when reviewing and critiquing other philosophers.”

Jethro stared at the professor,
silently.

“Well, say something, son. This is
very serious. This is Victoria University for God’s sake, and you’re in the
leading philosophy department in the world. It didn’t get to be like that
because of vicious nonsense like your essay.”

During the past two centuries, many
of the world’s most influential thinkers studied or taught in Victoria’s
Philosophy Hall, a nondescript brick building that housed the university’s
philosophy department. It had been nicknamed “The Idea Factory of the West.”
But to Jethro, the pantheon of great thinkers seemed like a worn old club of fools,
pretenders, and religiously biased speculators. They were like so many of the
professors Jethro knew at Victoria: smart, articulate, witty, charismatic—but
with few solid ideas to stand on. And none had teeth to bite anything.
Teeth
,
Jethro thought, silently grinding his own
—
what’s the point if we can’t
bite?

“Well, what do you have to say for
yourself?” the professor asked. "The words in your essay are
unacceptable."

Jethro watched him for a long time,
then slowly answered, “My words define a coming new species. Most humans will
reject them because they feel threatened and don't understand. Most humans are
cowardly idiots."

"Eh?"

"And those other papers I
turned in were extremely painful to write. I didn’t agree with the ideas. But
my job as a student was to follow the assignment and interpret those people. Given
your philosophical parameters, I did the job.”

Surprised, the professor squinted
his right eye and tightened his lips.

“The last assignment was on my
book,
Discourse on Divine Instrumentalism—
a national bestseller, just in
case you've forgotten. That was extremely painful?” the professor asked,
feeling the need to defend himself in front of his students.