The Transhumanist Wager

by Zoltan Istvan

  As part of her five-year residency program at San Aliza Medical Center in San Francisco, the finest hospital in America, her Calcutta-born Chief of Surgery offered her the opportunity to spend two years in a village called Kundara in Indian Kashmir. The six-decade war, the longest in the world, left millions of people in need of urgent medical care. Some villages near the Line of Control had not seen a doctor in a decade.

  “It would be incredible training, Zoe,” said the Chief of Surgery. “You'd be doing a wide range of operations—from cranial bullet removal to delivering babies to landmine blast amputations. Plus, believe it or not, your hours should be a bit easier. You might even find time for some of that poetry reading you complain about missing.”

  “So what's the catch? You look like you're unsure if you should be suggesting the opportunity to me.”

  “I am unsure. Even a few months in this kind of war zone is tough for a military-trained surgeon, let alone a civilian one. There's a lot of needless suffering—and very few medical supplies and staff to do much about it. Then there’s the terrorism, which is often aimed at Westerners. It’s intense, and it can take its toll. But five years ago, I did the same 24-month stretch and loved every minute of it. It was one of the best times of my life. Every day I became a better doctor.”

  “I'll do it,” Zoe agreed impulsively, never the type to back down from a challenge.

  When her parents found out, they scolded her. She was an only child. Her parents had put all their energy and resources into raising her. But they never discovered how to subdue her wild, wanderlusting side. Her father, from northern England, remained an unmarried engineer in the Saudi Kingdom for most of his adult life, until at age fifty-one he met his young wife, Kamakita, aged twenty-seven. She was a Mandarin translator for a royal Saudi family. The two travelers fell in love and moved to London. Kamakita gave birth to Zoe, and the family moved to California a decade later. The father continued working mostly abroad, and Zoe grew heavily influenced by her mother's pervasive Asian spirituality. Especially her deep sense of mysticism, which involves the unity and indestructibility of all life—a classic Eastern concept. Zoe’s other passion was reading. Throughout her childhood and high school years she surrounded herself with books, often preferring them over friends. She spent countless hours in libraries, on deserted beaches, at coffee shops, and in her bedroom with her door locked, tackling the classics and reading poetry.

  She also adored science fiction and transhuman philosophy. A powerful magnetism toward life extension and human enhancement science had always gripped her. For Zoe, it was obvious that humankind was destined to dramatically transform itself in the future via science; however, her perspective was unlike most transhumanists. She reveled in contradictions that many rational and science-minded people deemed intellectual heresy. Zoe saw paradoxical concepts—shades of gray—as a necessary balance to an often unruly universe full of mystery and surprise. Her deep-seated mysticism welcomed complex crossovers of many different ideas, even sweeping metaphysical theories and formal religious beliefs. She liked to think of her personal philosophy as an all-embracing transhuman spiritualism.

  At age eighteen, Zoe started at prestigious Vontage University in Silicon Valley, double majoring in biology and literature. It was during her junior year that she went to El Salvador and came to view the world differently; that battle lines between Western consumerism and humanitarian duties were drawn. When she came back to the States, she no longer cared for modern-day fashion and materialism, such as makeup, handbags, or showy high heels. She was never big on it. But now, after seeing so much poverty—made worse by Hurricane Fitch's direct path of La Liberdad, which ravaged the hospital she volunteered at—she was through with it. Colleagues came to call her “the tennis shoe woman” because she refused to wear anything else on her feet.

  “If you don't like my ass and legs because I don't perk them up with heels and pretend they’re sexier than they really are, then go to hell,” Zoe once told a date, smiling carelessly. “And the same goes for my small breasts and the push-up bras I refuse to wear.”

  Another date, an orthopedic surgeon, once asked her why she didn't wear any mascara or lipstick.

  “For the same reason you don't,” she shot back.

  It was a good answer, he thought, not sure what would ever compel him to stand in front of a mirror and color his face.

  El Salvador planted other ideas in Zoe Bach. In a Third World country where medical supplies are scant, nearly every surgery is trauma to some extent. She thrived on the intensity. Additionally, the field of trauma surgery didn’t have many women in it. How insane, she thought, determined to change that. She spent much of the next year traveling during her senior year school breaks: Bolivia, Yemen, Zambia; she volunteered at hospitals' trauma wards.

  The following fall, she started medical school in New York City at Victoria University. In the beginning it was lunacy: Could she really remember 90,000 five-syllable medical words by the end of four years? She did. But that challenge was nothing compared to her surgery residency schedule at San Aliza Medical Center. Her first two years were spent in a drowsy daze—on call, in the operating ward, half-asleep while standing against a wall, before she was paged for another emergency. Then, running down the hall to meet another incoming ambulance, her stethoscope dancing the rumba around her neck. Everything from industrial accidents to motorcycle crashes to gunshot wounds. Zoe took it all on. Her beeper was the most constant companion in her life, its sharp beep the sound of nightmares. Rarely was any work week under 110 hours. She was one of only three surgeons in the busy residency program who could claim they never fell asleep during a surgery—and was nudged awake by a nurse with furrowed eyebrows.

  “But twice I've fallen asleep in the hospital bathroom, peeing,” she admitted to people.

  Her residency program worked her to exhaustion. Then one morning, after pulling a graveyard shift, she walked out of the hospital in her dirty scrubs. The blaring California sun was almost too bright for her. She went home, changed, and packed her backpack. On the way to the airport, in a taxi, she gulped down an anti-malaria tablet. Two hours later she boarded a plane to Indian Kashmir.

  *************

  Two months before the Transhumanism Town Hall Forum, working amidst the ice and snow caking upper Manhattan, Jethro Knights welded a 100-pound rectangular piece of steel plating to Contender’s hull. He was in a boatyard along the Hudson River. His right hand expertly bore the steady red-hued fire while his left hand fed the molten rod. Jethro’s aged and gritty goggles—like so many of his tools—came from a pawnshop, bought with money he had earned from part-time construction jobs on nearby skyscrapers. Unshaven, he worked through the freezing early spring nights, downing caffeine pills, and welding endless plates together, syncing a metal skeleton that would one day face off with hurricanes and take him around the globe.

  The boatyard manager—a veteran seaman—was certain that Jethro would never finish when he rented the yard space earlier that autumn and had six thousand dollars worth of rusty recycled steel dumped off. The manager wasn’t the only skeptic. Everyone, from boatyard grunts with crooked teeth, to mega-yacht owners wearing thousand-dollar shoes, stopped by to watch Jethro work. Most sneered at his hand-scribed structural drawings tacked on a rickety desk under his space's huge blue tarp. They snickered while he worked—some telling him the boat would not sail, others that it wouldn’t even float.

  Jethro, however, rarely listened to people. Or noticed them at all. Even if he looked a person directly in the eye, he often failed to recognize anything of utility. Jethro perceived their presence, the space they took up, the resources they used on his planet. His brain interpreted the matter and energy they possessed, but unless there was potential for something useful to him, he may as well have been looking at a rock, or a weed, or a broken, outmoded piece of furniture in a junkyard. Jethro only took notice of values, not people.

  Most others quickly recognized this—and d
espised him for it. It was instinctive for them. Few people wanted to be judged solely on their usefulness and then be dismissed because they possessed little or none. They felt immediate enmity and resistance to that type of harsh machinelike objectivity. A person who viewed the world like that, they sneered, was neither compassionate nor very human. Of course, Jethro rarely considered this either—and certainly didn't care. It wasn’t that he was cold, or even aloof. It was his distinct manner of not making the effort to care about people with little or no value.

  Many years ago—he wasn't sure when it happened, or if it even happened at all, or if he was just always this way—Jethro realized he was fundamentally alone in the universe. Even if billions of people and their cultures and moral aptitudes were critically judging, pressuring, and expecting something of him, his demeanor remained totally unaffected. It wasn't that he didn't want to have friends, or like and even care about other people, it was just that he rarely met any person who made him feel like he thought he should.

  Besides, Jethro knew his boat would sail—and sail well. He studied the best nautical engineering designs in the world before building. He spent four weeks at the North Atlantic Yachting Library poring over the most comprehensive boat construction manuals. He spent a long weekend combing over the America’s Cup website and its detailed diagrams of past champion racing yachts. He even bought beers for an old fishing captain who explained what it took to survive a Category 4 hurricane off Rhode Island aboard his dated forty-foot crabbing vessel. Jethro scribed notes of everything important into his journal, methodically devising the ideal sailboat, determining what materials were most suitable, and assessing possible budget issues. When he was ready he proceeded, like an expert, to build the strongest, fastest, most able boat he could.

  Jethro's construction during the past three months was intense—eighteen-hour days. Occasionally he would interrupt his work on the boat, jump on his bike, and peddle for thirty minutes to class at Victoria University, sometimes through snow. He was a senior, so school was less demanding and required only small amounts of his time.

  To gain practical bluewater experience, each Sunday morning Jethro practiced sailing—first by renting dinghies, then twelve-foot Lasers, then J-21s; finally, he only practiced on a thirty-five-foot Swensen sloop, a boat comparable in weight and size to his own creation. He rented it from someone at the prestigious Fillmore Yacht Club, down the road from his boatyard. It was amongst these posh boats at Fillmore, when Jethro was almost finished building Contender, that Gregory Michaelson saw him—and stood astonished, staring crudely, as if looking at an accident with mangled bodies strewn on the asphalt. They were classmates in the philosophy department at Victoria University, where Gregory was taking his degree in preparation to pursue law and, eventually, politics.

  Gregory was dressed in a tight aqua-blue polo shirt, white linen pants, and Italian shoes. His eyes were dark brown, but his skin was fair and silky. His short, chestnut-colored hair was carefully brushed, parted, and gelled. His underwear carried an unpronounceable French brand name on the back of it. He wore a diamond-studded gold watch, which dangled loosely, carelessly on his wrist; a reflection of it often bounced off his mirrored silver sunglasses. Tall, elegant, and bearing a pointy chin, he appeared a preppy, aristocratic figure.

  In the late 1960s, Gregory’s father, an eminent attorney-turned-senator in New York, married a graceful woman from a powerful English family, assuring his namesake a tie to both the European and American social registries. Three years later, the couple conceived Gregory. As an only child, the boy was pampered from infancy up, his every need being catered to by a live-in nanny, private tutors, and personal sports trainers. The world revolved around him, Gregory remembered thinking as a young teenager. It was true, as long as it was others who did the revolving. Without the others, though, Gregory didn't know what to think.

  At age twenty-one, Gregory proved himself a rising star in college—the popular man on campus whom everyone tried to befriend. He was also one of the most accomplished in his class at Victoria University: a decorated track athlete with a penchant for competition; a devoted member of the Alpha Phi Fraternity; a volunteer children’s mentor at his Christian church; a dabbling violinist; an able wingman for his friends when they went to clubs looking for ladies; a connoisseur of fine foods. He once distinguished twenty-six different cheeses blindfolded in a fancy restaurant, winning a contest against peers from another private college. Modishness, flair, and class were in Gregory's every thought and decision—aesthetics before function, pomp before action, style before reason. He epitomized the youthful, modern-day gentleman playboy, with a dash of metrosexuality for good measure.

  Many people who met Gregory for the first time—seeing his bright smile, shaking his firm hand, and hearing him speak eloquently—took for granted that a great American future awaited him. Maybe he would become a powerful CEO. Or a foreign diplomat. Or a politician like his father. Maybe even become President of the United States, they imagined. If anyone possessed that Camelot-type feel, it was eye-catching Gregory.

  In contrast to Gregory’s sleek sailing attire, Jethro Knights wore paint-stained jeans, a torn black T-shirt, and old tennis shoes. There was nothing shiny about him. He didn’t wear sunglasses, a watch, or even underwear. Dirt was pressed underneath his fingernails, and leathery calluses were visible all over his hands.

  He was kneeling down on the concrete dock, unfolding a spinnaker sail, and concentrating on the sewn pattern of its seams, when Gregory walked up to him from behind and tapped him on the back.

  “Jethro Knights—it really is you?” he asked. “What are you doing here?”

  Jethro looked up, staring hard at Gregory, trying to remember who he was. Jethro disliked others interrupting him, and he especially disliked others touching him uninvited.

  “I’m preparing to go sailing, Greg.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know you were a member here?”

  “I’m not a member here.”

  Gregory was sure he meant, I’d never be a member—here, by the tone of his voice.

  “I’m just renting a boat here to learn how to sail,” Jethro explained.

  “Oh, that's right. Someone told me you were building one at the yard down the road. To go around the world or something after graduation. Is that true?”

  “Yeah. Something like that.”

  “Where did you learn to build a bluewater sailboat?”

  “From books and websites.”

  Gregory snickered, looking worse than skeptical. “Books? The Internet? Are you kidding me? Do you think you’ll make it? All the way around—and survive?”

  “I imagine so, if I’m doing it.”

  “What about hurricanes? Pirates? And the hundreds of other dangers?”

  Jethro looked at Gregory. Looked right through him. Jethro was tired from welding until 2:30 A.M. the night before. And now he was already tired of talking to this man in front of him.

  “I’ll overcome them,” he said, and turned back to examine the sail on the ground. He was finished with the conversation.

  Gregory frowned—his pride stung. He stood foolishly above Jethro, watching his back. Being a senator’s son, a star athlete, and one of the most popular men on campus had never made any impact on Jethro. They’d met a dozen times before in classes and seminars, and Gregory still couldn’t get him to have a simple, amicable sixty-second conversation. He shook his head, thinking Jethro was a rude, conceited peasant.

  “Well, in case you're free,” Gregory blurted out, arming to taunt him, “I’m captaining my dad’s Blue Lagoon today in a local race.”

  Blue Lagoon was a magnificent, ninety-two-foot, 1929 wooden schooner that often graced New York City’s harbors. Senator Michaelson’s father bought it and sailed it from Hawaii, after it had served in World War II in the Pacific. Now the historical ship, meticulously maintained, was in all the prestigious East Coast yacht races and regattas. It also served as a magnet for famous figures and im
portant private occasions in New York City. Sometimes the U.S. President quietly spent an afternoon on it discussing issues with Gregory’s father and the leading bankers of Wall Street. Other times, influential ministers like Reverend Belinas, married powerful diplomats, and business tycoons appeared on its foredeck in small, exclusive ceremonies. Occasionally, even Hollywood actors or rock stars borrowed it for their wild birthday bashes.

  “Half my crew is apparently hungover from that huge Greek party last night,” Gregory said. “Were you there? Just off Seventeenth Street near campus? It was a crazy rager—one of the year’s best,”

  Gregory knew Jethro didn’t go to parties. He also knew Jethro would never be invited. “I think most of my crew is a no-show. You interested to join and sail with us? Blue Lagoon could always use a gorilla on board.”

  Gregory watched Jethro carefully, waiting for a reaction, almost hoping for one. He knew the question was loaded. The nautical term “gorilla” was derogatory—a name for a mindless crew member who shifted from one side of the boat to the other to give weight advantage on tacks. Generally, a gorilla wasn’t allowed to do anything else on board due to a lack of sailing skills. Many sailors considered the word a slap in the face. And Gregory felt confrontational today, dishing it out. At 6 feet 4 inches, he was taller and heavier than Jethro, and counted on his longer reach if there was a fight. Plus, his friends and personal security were in the clubhouse behind them, surely keeping watch and ready to jump in.

  Chapter 3