The Transhumanist Wager

by Zoltan Istvan

  The damn 2,000-year-old Bible, Dr. Cohen thought with absurdity, remembering the anchor's popular words; meanwhile, he watched Preston Langmore try to talk sense into the President and the crowd in the rotunda. Cohen already knew the town hall forum wasn't going to make any difference at all. The scientist closed his eyes and rubbed his temples, wondering if anyone could win over these people, if anyone could make the struggling tide of transhumanism wash over the ignorance and fear, and bring about a new world.

  Then, abruptly, a voice shot out and filled the entire building, bouncing off the thick century-old walls. A voice not called upon to speak, but booming, baritone, and sharp—without a hint of respect for its listeners, or pretense of it. It came from the far end of the hall and set a strained silence upon the rotunda. People turned their heads to see who it was.

  “Are all the politicians here totally insane? Or just plain stupid?” the voice asked loudly. “Or maybe just cowards? Trying to patch the NAH to work is a waste of time. What you need to do is abolish the NAH—just totally get rid of it. And let scientists do their research, and let entrepreneurs legally fund it. If you just get out of the way, transhumanism will work out in everyone's best interest; it will benefit our economy and the lives and longevity of every American.”

  The student was Jethro Knights. Fifty cameras turned abruptly to capture him. People nodding off in the room quickly came to attention. Gregory Michaelson’s cool demeanor turned into the confused impression of an idiot. He looked to his left, searching for Jethro's blond head, recognizing his voice. That voice! he thought, shocked. He saw Jethro, standing tall and adamant.

  Two security guards rushed over to the man to stop him from speaking again, but an interested female governor, admiring Jethro’s Vikinglike demeanor, asked him to introduce himself and further explain his point of view.

  “This is supposed to be a town hall forum, after all,” she said, looking at the President with a demanding firm nod of her head.

  Jethro bowed slightly with gratitude and continued.

  “My name is Jethro Knights. I’m a fourth-year Philosophy student here at Victoria. You see, it’s the NAH, like so many government organizations, that has already stunted the growth of this country for over three decades. The NAH started off as a way to monitor and control basic health science issues in the mid-1970s, but then broadened out to control euthanasia, cryonics, cloning, genetics, neurotech, artificial intelligence—eventually all transhuman science and its industry. But the NAH now also has its hands in the food industry, senior citizen learning, logging, environmental standards issuance, and much more. Even obscure things like potato farming. I'm not kidding. There's a three-million-dollar budget for monitoring potato crops in the Dust Belt. A now deceased Senator from Ohio attached it eleven years ago as a hidden rider to a larger congressional bill, and it's been in use ever since.

  “The point is that our country and its scientists can’t make headway against the bickering, conservative, patched together governmental watchdog groups controlling us. We’re professionally asphyxiated already. What U.S. scientists need is the freedom to create and the freedom to implement their advances. And since it's our lives at stake with transhumanism—the very nature of our existence—we need to let science lead the way. Every time someone gets in the way of life extension and human enhancement goals, every time a new anti-transhumanist law is passed, every time you decide to hinder scientific progress, you are knowingly shortening the lives and productive working hours of transhumanists and your own citizens. We have a specific legal term for that type of behavior in this country. It's called manslaughter. And it's not just the individual whose life you are prematurely ending, it's the country's prosperity as a whole.

  "Don't you realize that China, and maybe India too, will surpass us in innovation in just a few years? Only a decade ago, that was unimaginable. Now many nations are quickly catching up with us. Can't you see it was science that made our country great in the first place? And it's what can make our country great again. Especially since we have a game-changer in front of us. Something truly transformational. If we just allow transhumanism to thrive, prosperity from longer and healthier life spans will benefit us all in so many ways—psychologically, biologically, financially. If not, we may dwindle away and die in the remains of our own bureaucratic mess and the former glory of a once-great nation. This is a matter of life and death. Every man and woman in this room wants to be improved and live longer, healthier lives. Every man and woman will directly benefit from this."

  Jethro paused, scanning the audience. He ended with, “Do we really want to remain animals for the rest of our days when we can be so much more? We must disband the NAH and the anti-transhuman mindset in this country. We need to forge ahead and stop being afraid of the unknown—the transhuman unknown.”

  The rotunda was silent for a long time after Jethro stopped speaking. In those moments every person believed in the speech’s common sense, in the potential of transhumanism, in modifying and improving the landscape of traditional human experience. The logic was inescapable. But then—slowly—their minds, egos, and fears lumbered around to the immediate tasks facing them. They remembered about their need to be elected to office; about what their constituents would say; how their churches would cast judgment; how their mothers, spouses, and friends would react; how they would be viewed, tallied, and callously spit out in public. Finally, they remembered their own fears of the unknown.

  Preston Langmore stared at Jethro Knights and contemplated him. Though he'd never seen the student before, he sensed an immediate connection. So did the oil baron, Frederick Vilimich, who sat only twenty chairs away from the student.

  Reverend Belinas also watched Jethro. The preacher unwittingly felt sick. For a moment, he found it hard to breathe—as if he were being choked.

  Langmore turned to the President and broke the silence, blurting out, “Mr. President, that student is exactly right. The NAH must be disbanded. It’s a bullying, nonfunctional entity that’s sinking us all. It's exactly what I suggested eight years ago to Congress and the former administration, and no one listened. Now look where we are.”

  Jethro sat down. The cameras remained on him long after his speech, some zooming in on his intense blue eyes. It was the only noticeable element of his appearance that suggested he’d just given the U.S. President and top government members a hazing. The young transhumanist appeared unfazed, but the emotion in him was raw. He was ready to take a bat to people's heads. Or a pool cue, the university chancellor thought, glaring at him, grateful this particular student was finished with his college next week.

  “This is absurd,” roared Senator Shuman. “The NAH gone? It has a hundred thousand employees. We think it's not strong enough. Which is why there’s such uproar to the transhuman movement. Eliminate it? What a joke! And, by the way, when do we let some random student express his opinions openly without being called on? Especially when he implies we're all murderers?"

  An uncomfortable tension washed over the rotunda. The chancellor continued glaring at Jethro. Senators and religious leaders looked peevish. The transhumanists looked grim. Only Dean Graybury smiled inwardly.

  The President of the United States cleared his throat purposefully, and all attention in the rotunda turned to him. “Ladies and gentleman, I agree with the senator and, I think, most others in this room. Disbanding the NAH is not an option. It’s one of our largest governmental entities with some of our best people in it, like Senator Shuman.”

  The President paused for a moment, his hand circling in the air, preparing to emphasize something important.

  “These are difficult questions we are considering today, and we must take time and make sense to carefully pave a path so the citizens of this country will be content and safe. So healthcare can improve. And religious beliefs can coexist with the modern age. And the American economy can profit. Folks, let’s try to work out some real options that benefit everyone. Let's try to work together and find
a solution so everyone can be happy.”

  The rest of the town hall forum was pointless. The ideas discussed revolved around suggestions that the transhuman scientists make more sacrifices in their research: stopping a controversial project in Wyoming; changing the direction of a study in Minnesota; closing a bionics research center in Rhode Island; leaving a word like “cloning” out of a major upcoming paper from a Florida university—calling it “zygote division” instead. Emphasis was put on pushing the scientific direction as far away from the concept of transhumanism as possible. Jethro Knights left before the forum concluded.

  “Good old-fashioned, basic health,” the President declared. “That's what people really want. Make your movement sound more like transhuman chicken soup. Neutralizing the rhetoric will help everyone and also calm people’s nerves.”

  Ultimately, the government only wanted the polarization of the country and the terrorism to stop, and to take from transhuman science only that which was ethical from a conservative Judeo-Christian point of view—which was very little. The rest of the experimental life extension and human enhancement research would best be discarded, it insisted.

  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 arri
ved 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.