The Transhumanist Wager Read online

  The Transhumanist Wager

  by

  Zoltan Istvan

  Copyright (c) 2013 Futurity Imagine Media LLC

  Published by Futurity Imagine Media LLC

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, business establishments, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Cover Design: Zoltan Istvan

  ISBN#: 978-0-9886161-1-0

  Praise for Zoltan Istvan's writing and work:

  "Congratulations on an excellent story—really well written, concise, and elegant."

  Editor, National Geographic News Service

  "Istvan is among the correspondents I value most for his...courage."

  Senior Editor, The New York Times Syndicate

  "Thank you—you did a great interview for us."

  Producer, BBC Radio

  "Travel! Intrigue! Cannibals! Extreme journalism at far ends of Earth!"

  Headline featuring Zoltan Istvan, San Francisco Chronicle

  PART I

  Chapter 1

  The Three Laws:

  1) A transhumanist must safeguard one's own existence above all else.

  2) A transhumanist must strive to achieve omnipotence as expediently as possible—so long as one's actions do not conflict with the First Law.

  3) A transhumanist must safeguard value in the universe—so long as one's actions do not conflict with the First and Second Laws.

  —Jethro Knights' sailing log / passage to French Polynesia

  ************

  Jethro Knights growled.

  His life was about to end. A seventy-foot wall of shifting blue with a million tons of water was veering down on him. It was the largest wave of the hurricane—what scientists and sea captains call a rogue. He watched the wave steepen, the wind lines near the lip combing the sky, painting an arch of dark rainbow hues far above his yacht's mast. He calculated how much time he had left before the wave consumed him. Maybe ten seconds, he thought, aghast. His pupils tightened.

  Around him, the smoky evening sky was burying the day. Frosty white spray tore off the water and exploded with the force of cannoned sandpaper. The 24-year-old sailor felt its sting all over his naked body. He wore only a yellow safety harness, which was attached to a rope wrapped around a cleat on the mast. It was a last resort to keep him tied to his yacht in case the ocean swept him overboard.

  On his face was nine months of Viking-red beard growth. In the soaring wind, it tangled with his salty blond locks. His tall sun-scorched body swung in the motion, hanging between two taut muscular arms. Those arms bore vein-ripped hands, which tightened on the yacht’s twisting wire stanchions. The stanchions stretched through the air like violin strings, bound from the swaying steel island underneath him to the towering mast above.

  The trough of those mountainous, cobalt-blue swells repeatedly charged and swooned, swallowing his boat, then pushing it out, then swallowing it again. Everything was alive, caught in movement, caught in tension—either growing in power or waiting for demise.

  Forty-eight hours before, two Southern Hemisphere storms, an out-of-season tropical depression and a cold front’s low-pressure system, collided 500 miles north of New Zealand. They merged into a superstorm. Last night, the hurricane—named Talupa, or “wind of death,” in ancient Samoan dialect—graduated from Category 4 to Category 5. Islanders in the South Pacific, from Tahiti to the Solomon Islands, were warned to prepare for the century’s worst storm. Winds were forecast to gust over 200 miles per hour.

  Jethro’s thirty-four-foot steel sloop, Contender, was slugging north in the tempest's epicenter. His main and jib sails were reefed to the size of napkins. For the past twelve hours he pushed towards the equator, trying to avoid the hurricane's eye. But the storm grew too large, too quickly. Escape was now impossible. The 1000-mile-wide hurricane caught Contender in its left rear quadrant—known to sailors as the “kill-zone” because it blows stronger than the other quarters; seas were the most chaotic here. Ships of any size and quality rarely survived winds of that speed in the open ocean.

  Until now, Jethro's confidence had waned little. He believed his boat was all but indestructible. His yacht was designed with the same ultimate resolution he held for himself in life: survival at any cost. Three years ago, just before graduating from college, Jethro meticulously welded Contender together for five months in New York City. He knew every millimeter of the sailing vessel, every point of stress, every calculus and geometric equation used to create it. The boat was painstakingly constructed to withstand the greatest of pressures, in the worst of circumstances, while maintaining the maximum integrity of its purpose.

  Earlier that day, Jethro chose not to leave the cabin of Contender. He preferred to huddle inside his bunk, tied in by a net, trying to read a text on transhuman philosophy. Inside the boat, cooking pots rudely flung themselves around, books floated in the bilge, and two galley windows were cracked and leaking badly. His batteries had shorted themselves out in the wetness, rendering his electronics useless and the engine impossible to start. Regrettably, Jethro knew he would have to go topside before nightfall to inspect for cracks in the rigging. Safety checks simply had to be done. Many of the hits the ocean delivered that day were staggering. Damage was inevitable.

  Complicating his pending task was the bloody pus oozing from his face, impairing his vision, swelling his skin. It was the result of an injury sustained two days ago after a massive wave had broadsided the boat and Jethro raced out to inspect Contender. A snapped mast wire swaying in the wind caught the upper left section of his face, slashing it deeply and chipping the cheekbone. He was lucky not to have lost an eye. Hundreds of miles from land, with nothing but a drenched short-circuited radio, there was no one to call, no one to help him. He was alone in the storm, alone in the world.

  He downed two codeine tablets for pain and tried stitching the wound himself. The rocking of the boat made it impossible to sew without the risk of jamming the needle into his eye. He considered supergluing the gash shut, but decided it was easier to fasten a large safety pin through the sliced skin to hold it together. The trickle of viscous crimson pus from the exposed flesh was nonstop. The bandages he had put over it were sliding off, refusing to stick. Going outside now would only rip the skin farther apart, making it flap like a sail in raging winds.

  Despite it all, at 6 P.M., he forced himself out of bed to do the rigging checks. He stumbled down the gangway, then held on carefully to the galley sink and ladder as he lifted himself topside. Before he went out he hoped for a break in the storm, as often happens at dusk. For the first two minutes, while he cautiously maneuvered around the deck of the boat, it appeared he might get it. Then the ocean's horizon revealed where its energy was feeding—fifty meters away a colossal wave, a seven-story anomaly, was peaking and descending on him. His sloop looked like an infant's toy.

  Jethro growled again, his muscles tensing. He was not afraid, just furious. Furious with his luck. With his timing. With his fate. He hated fate. And this moment was exactly why. He could've been anywhere on the ocean, but he was exactly here: the nadir of a sailor’s once-in-a-lifetime storm. Damn the dice of the universe, he cursed to himself.

  With only seconds left before the cresting mammoth wave struck, he packed his lungs full of oxygen, taking three rapid breaths followed by one deep, slow, final inhalation. Then he bit down on his lips to
shut them tight and forced air pressure into his nasal cavity to keep the water out. Lastly, he wrapped his arms and legs like a pretzel around the mast’s stanchions, squeezing every muscle he could around everything his body touched.

  His final thought before the cascading ocean consumed him was: Is survival possible?

  ************

  It was impossible to tell what collided first: the man or the rest of the universe. Everything disappeared under the exploding seventy-foot wave, under the blistering sea, into the crashing storm, into a bursting tempest of various color blues. The mast twitched under impact, then flipped upside down with the boat—the start of a sailor’s death roll.

  Jethro Knights held on, violently clutching the yacht’s stanchions with his hands and limbs. Around him, the swarming ocean tugged on his flexing muscles. Underwater and upside down, gravity vanished. Only the rush of water controlled matter now. The moving mass, like a thundering tsunami, tried to unfasten Jethro’s grip. His fingers told his brain they were slipping; his brain told his fingers he was going to bite them off if they failed. They re-tightened.

  His will was like the yacht's stainless steel stanchions, even stronger. His right to life—to always stay alive—was a right unto itself. There was the universe and then there was that right. This was a man whose overriding sense of self screamed to conquer, to bend the universe around his will. The will was stronger than the storm, the sea, the waves—than fate. He looked like a man whose arm must be severed before the grip could abandon its hold. And even then, the hold would still remain, frozen in place for eternity.

  It was almost ninety seconds before Jethro Knights’ yacht righted itself and the mast burst into the air, thrust by another large wave slamming the inverted keel back into the ocean. Water raced off the decks, off the boom, off the jib pole, off the solar panels. A bucket, a lifebuoy, and radar housing floated nearby, broken off the boat. Ropes, sails, and bumpers dangled from the hull. The dingy engine, a fuel Jerry can, and a spare anchor, all of which had been tied to the transom, were gone.

  The man, however, remained, sucking gargantuan heaps of air into his lungs. The tips of his fingers were bleeding from digging them so hard into the stanchion’s steel. Paint chips were crunched under his toenails from the boat's deck. The safety pin below his left eye was ripped out. Blood streaked across his face in the wind.

  The sailor looked around him and knew the danger was gone. His boat could handle the rest of the storm. He grinned and proceeded quickly with his safety checks. Above him the sky ripened into a vast darkness.

  ************

  Even in New York City, still considered the epicenter of human progress and modern civilization, it was rare to have such a publicly anticipated moment as the Transhumanism Town Hall Forum. If the U.S. Government had really wanted to legally address and contain the issues of the controversial transhuman movement, they would have undergone more congressional hearings and engaged the Supreme Court on the matter—but the White House thought a “town hall gathering” would be less abrasive and trouble-free for the nation. In the worsening global recession and countrywide joblessness, the last thing the President of the United States and his Administration needed was more chaos and lower approval ratings.

  Days in advance, the town hall forum was meticulously planned in the backrooms of Washington. Senior White House officials, Cabinet members, and senators scripted the media-hyped event to produce both concrete results and a politically safe direction forward. The U.S. President felt the meeting’s careful preparation and its public success were a national necessity. Something truly pacifying had to be accomplished now that pro-religious demonstrations and anti-transhumanism terrorist acts across the country were increasing in response to the mounting radical science movement.

  The conflict over transhumanism was straightforward. Futurists, technologists, and scientists touted transhuman fields like cryonics, cloning, artificial intelligence, bionics, stem cell therapy, robotics, and genetic engineering as their moral and evolutionary right—and as crucial future drivers of the new economy and an advancing cultural mindset in America. Opponents said transhumanism and its immortality mantra were anti-theistic, immoral, not humanitarian, and steeped in blasphemous egoism. They insisted that significantly altering the human condition and people’s bodies via science and technology was the devil’s work, regardless of how lucrative it might be for the economy. Many opponents said transhumanism was proof the end times was coming. Others labeled it “the world's most dangerous idea.”

  It was no surprise the town hall venue chosen was Victoria University. Set on the Hudson River in the heart of New York City—and considered one of the finest institutions of higher learning in the world—it was the only American science and educational center whose endowment, upwards of twenty-five billion dollars, was still relatively intact. Other universities had recently found their endowments more than halved in the recent stock market crash, when some of the world’s largest banks failed, European countries defaulted, and China's boom economy faltered.

  Thirty blocks away, Dr. Preston Langmore looked cautiously out his building’s front door, on Canal Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, before walking outside. He was one of the key “immortality players,” as the media liked to call transhumanists, because their principal drive was to reach an unending sentience for themselves. Born to a Mayflower family in Boston, Langmore bore crisp grayish hair and coffee-brown eyes. He was just under six feet, and always dressed smartly and formally. By his mid-thirties, he emerged as a well-respected microbiologist. But his deeper passion lay in applications of science, not its discoveries. Seven years ago, he exploited his extensive social connections to jump to a more practical career. He became President of the World Transhumanist Institute, a nonprofit organization and the largest of its kind—the undisputed leader and go-to network of the life-extension-and-human-enhancement universe. The American-headquartered institute wrapped its arms around the entire transhuman movement, promoting myriad types of research, outreach, and support.

  Langmore’s job was a powerful position that came with unique problems. Death threats against him had recently tripled, and all the most visible members of the transhuman world were now receiving such threats. After the Faxfield, Illinois bombing—where four scientists were killed, including one of his good friends—no one connected to transhumanism felt safe anymore. But this town hall event was critical; Langmore fought and lobbied for three years to have something like it occur. He walked downstairs and hailed a taxi. A yellow car, driven by an Arabic man wearing sunglasses and a turban, turned sharply and pulled to within a foot of him. He got in slowly, carefully.

  “To Sixteenth and Anderson Streets. Victoria University. The back entrance,” he said.

  The taxi drove off into the traffic, and in nine minutes he was near the massive walled campus, which soared over the city’s Upper West Side. Langmore noticed Dr. Nathan Cohen immediately. On the sidewalk stood a man in a brown trench coat, his face half hidden by the latest copy of the USA Daily Tribune. There was a worn leather suitcase at his feet. The tall mulatto-skinned man, bone thin, in his early forties, and still a formidable marathon runner, was hard to miss. His black hair was an unmistakable natural Afro, shooting four inches in every direction.

  I wish he would cut that hair of his, thought Langmore. The most important scientist for the transhuman movement, perhaps the world—a wanted man by all accounts—and he distinguishes himself with that massive hairdo.

  Langmore got out of the taxi and hurried up to Cohen.

  “Ready for today?” he asked.

  “Morning Preston. I’m ready for any day.”

  They entered campus through the heavily guarded East Gate, walking the long way around Falin Hall to get to the imposing nineteenth-century university rotunda where the town hall forum was being held. Their route gave them ample distance between the thousands of expected protestors, many of whom were there on orders from Reverend Belinas, the rising r
eligious star of the anti-transhumanist opposition. The preacher’s advocacy of blatant aggression to anything transhuman was rumored to be triggering much of the recent terrorism in the country. Langmore was visibly paranoid, checking behind him every fifteen seconds to see if they were being followed. Cohen was unfazed.

  “They want to burn us at the stake,” Langmore whispered, when he caught a glimpse of the rowdy masses near the rotunda’s front entrance. Barricaded by dozens of nervous police, an ocean of screaming, faith-touting protesters thrust incendiary posters into the air.

  “Well, we do want to kill their god.”

  “I thought you just wanted to clone it.”

  Cohen laughed out loud. Langmore forced a grin. Two minutes later they walked in through the back entrance of the rotunda, where security cleared them to their seats.

  Chapter 2

  Zoe Bach was a gracious woman. Half Chinese, half English, she had penetrating green eyes and light olive skin. Her thin black hair danced vibrantly around her petite shoulders when she walked anywhere. Her long fingers and fragile wrists were caricatures of precision, her lips the shape of a young tender fig. Her drawn-out body was narrow and aerodynamic.

  Strangely, most people did not consider Zoe beautiful—she challenged too many stereotypical conventions in them for that. Instead, they saw her as an archetype of the exotic: a mix of many worlds, races, cultures. The world’s history beat inside her, its rhythm subtly intoxicating; her every movement breathed that sense. The lingering British accent she possessed furthered the impression. People looked at her and felt slightly bewildered, thrown off by her natural radiance, her unintentional demeanor, and the unspoken nuances of her being. She created the impression that she was lighter than air, a phantom visiting from a foreign planet. When she told them she was an inner-city trauma surgeon, the rabbit hole opened.