3) Understand that society's mass culture and its reverence for its history is a dominant adversary—and for me not to give it credence or power. I am not fundamentally one with the Earth, its people, or its multitudes of life; I do not view myself as a beholden spawn or child of the universe. I am alone and distinct.
4) Understand that any sense of social pride from others or in myself is another formidable detriment—do not let it manifest in any way. Do not respect others who suffer from it.
5) Understand that I will make mistakes but will accept them humbly, and not justify myself to them; instead, I will learn from them, and will make fewer and fewer mistakes as the years pass.
6) Adhere to these rules and accomplish my goals by always focusing on long-term growth patterns, outcomes, and evolutions of self-worth and value perception—and not necessarily the immediate moment, which may reveal little of reality or my ultimate destiny.
7) I must have zero tolerance for betraying my ambitions and quests or I will quickly lose valuable time and headway attaining my best self. In a closed system like Earth's life-and-death cycle, that lost time and potential progress may be irrevocable and unrecoverable. The universe and one's existence can offer no forgiveness for failed opportunity. Always maintaining and applying the utmost integrity in myself and of my philosophy, TEF, is essential.
8) An omnipotender doesn’t fall in love. I will fail to achieve my goals if I lose myself in another, live for another, or place my happiness and aspirations in another. I am self-sufficient, not needing anything or anyone else.
After more email exchanges, each letter longer and more personal than the former, Langmore asked Jethro how much he knew about the fifty-year history of transhumanism and its immortality mission—the science, the multi-decade clash with religious America, the highs and lows of the movement. Jethro admitted he didn't know the full details, pointing out that he had never joined any groups in his life, nor bothered to know much about them. Additionally, he told Langmore he was often skeptical of groups—even an organized scientific one such as the World Transhumanist Institute—but that a comprehensive history would be appreciated.
Langmore responded in a curt, all-capital-lettered email:
NOT A DAMN GROUP, JETHRO, BUT A BUNCH OF OVERACHIEVING SCIENTISTS FED UP WITH MOB MEDIOCRITY AND PIG RULES, WHO DECIDED TO BAND TOGETHER FOR GREATER EFFICACY. ESSENTIAL BOOKS AND MY LECTURES ON THEIR WAY TO YOU—PICK UP NEXT WEEK AT XAVIER HOTEL IN DOWNTOWN CAIRO.
REGARDS,
PRESTON
Jethro grinned. Langmore’s response contained fire, and he liked that. Perhaps there was more to these gentle scientists than he thought. Perhaps they just needed to be ignited.
Seven days later, Jethro docked Contender in the Suez Canal, took a bus to Cairo, and collected his three-foot-high wooden box at the Xavier Hotel. In it was every important book written about transhumanism and its foes, and every essential lecture and speech that Langmore had ever made.
The nearly seventy books ranged in titles from Dappleton's Inquiry into the Ethics of a Conscious Machine, to Bandon's The Transhuman Consumer, to Kilton's A Complete History of Human Enhancement, to Fitzgerald's The Coming of the Great Singularity, to Nathan Cohen's Longevity Requirements of Sentient Species. Langmore’s lectures, given all over the world throughout the past decade, including those as a professor at Victoria University, were bound in a three-volume set. Included in the box was even the operational manual of the NAH—many of its pages bore Langmore’s personal handwritten comments in red ink next to the print.
Six months later, while cruising along the Azure Coast of France, Langmore’s secretary sent another package. This one was much smaller. Jethro picked up the padded envelope in Monte Carlo, curious about its contents. Jethro and Langmore were engaging in more and more dialogue via email, often daily now, if Jethro had access to a good Internet connection. Langmore had failed to mention what the package would contain, however. Inside was a four-inch portable hard drive.
Jethro took it back to his boat and uploaded it on his computer. The drive was a virtual archive of the entire transhuman movement, chronologically assembled. Every major article and news clip regarding the history of transhumanism and of the modern scientific quest for life extension was there, in order, easily accessible. Additionally, the drive contained thousands of webcasts and videos to watch. Finally, there were downloads of anti-transhumanism posters, critics' reviews of life extension and human enhancement books, transcribed sermons from Reverend Belinas on the evils of seeking immortality, and an entire 188-page congressional testimony on the dangers of the transhuman movement.
Langmore had compiled a bona fide digital treasure of transhuman information and history on that hard drive. Jethro was ecstatic to have it, but he also realized there was another six months of studying ahead of him now. That night, after stocking up at a grocery store, Jethro pulled anchor and set sail for the northern coast of Ibiza, where he would tackle the first few months of material. Zoe Bach was no longer incessantly on his mind, but he still thought of her frequently. Jethro had to force himself to focus. He quickly lost himself in his studies, spending sixteen hours a day poring over transhumanism. He embraced the material, keeping in close touch with Langmore, who occasionally offered advice and also answered any questions Jethro asked.
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In all his studies on transhumanism, Jethro Knights decided he connected most with the work of Dr. Nathan Cohen. The scientist’s experiments, to combine brain neurons to the hardwiring of computers in order to download human consciousness, seemed the most sensible and important direction for the immortality quest. While getting the human body to live longer was a priority, it was not a long-term solution. Jethro already assumed that the human body, at least as it was, would only be around for another half century in its current form. Dr. Cohen's work was where the real evolutionary jumps could be made. Conscious computerized machines and their digital content, with proper maintenance, could last indefinitely. They were so much more durable than flesh. But this thinking was exactly the most radical as well. Because eventually, perhaps sooner than even many transhumanists would have it, there would be no need left at all for the human body.
Even though Dr. Cohen was obsessed with robotics, his science was steeped in his academic background of organic chemistry—which by nature is a science that delves in far smaller spaces than biology, but isn't as abstract as physics. Cohen spent his five-year Ph.D. at a prestigious London university with an electron microscope, investigating the atomic properties of carbon, the most common element of life. His fascination with transhumanism reached as far back as he could remember. His mother, a prominent black Zimbabwean biochemist, and his father, a dour-appearing French heart surgeon, endowed him with the drive to conquer death. They raised their son mostly in Paris, where as a child his mother told him daily about her toils in biochemistry research. His father shared with him the most complicated heart surgeries he performed.
Their inspiration and guidance helped prime Dr. Cohen to make the jump from a promising graduate student to one of the leading contributors of the transhuman movement. In his late thirties, he secured a large seven-year grant from a well-known university in Virginia, where as a tenured professor he carried out groundbreaking experiments. In a short time, his team became the first to connect chemically-induced human thought with moving robotic fingers; laboratory-created instincts with breathing lungs; and electric stimuli with eyesight focusing. Every mechanized replication of the human body he attempted, he successfully accomplished.
He was on the verge of developing a thinking droid that could jump rope, long considered the crowning achievement of robotic balancing acts—when his funding was quietly pulled. He was told he could regain the money, and much more, if he shared his research with the American military, who would be funding and monitoring his scientific efforts from then on. Furious, he refused. He did not believe in big government and private education being in bed together.
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A week later he found his desk moved to a small corner of the university campus, where he was given only limited access to his laboratory. He also discovered that his research funding had been eliminated entirely. He marched into the office of the president of the university—a good friend of his—demanding an explanation.
The man covered his face when he saw his friend storm in.
“Damn it, Nathan. You know I can't do anything. They'll can me too. Just give in this once, at least for a while. It's just a bunch of science experiments. I have a family to feed and two mortgages to pay, plus a sick mother to care for. I'm sorry. I've tried to do everything I could to prevent this.”
Dr. Cohen discovered they were blackmailing everyone; that government power after the infamous New York terrorist attacks and the nationwide economic downturn had grown too insidious. He resigned, moved west to sunny Arizona, and opened his own scientific consulting company. He sought investors and donors to continue his work, but it was hard to find people to fund “science experiments,” as his friend had trivialized them. Still, he moved forward with his research, albeit much more slowly. His consulting company's laboratory could only afford to occupy two rooms hardly the size of a large garage.
Jethro Knights sat on deck, in the shade of his boat’s awning, reading the latest paper out of Dr. Cohen's Arizona clinic. Behind him the ocean shimmered. Clearly, the nanotechnology Cohen was combining with chemistry was the strongest idea going in transhumanism, Jethro thought. The scientist wanted flesh and machine to match perfectly, to become interchangeable—to become one and the same in the future. Jethro agreed, seeing the obvious need to stand up and cast off as an unfit costume the pasty, outdated biology of his species.
Chapter 11
By the time Jethro Knights motored through the Straits of Gibraltar on a windless day in November—when all that was left of his circumnavigation was a forty-day passage to New York City—he knew all the important ideas, scientists, technologists, and visionaries in the broad, often disorganized field of transhumanism. He also knew every major opponent of transhumanism. His research had taught him all the arguments, victories, failures, and conundrums of the life extension mission, including the intricacies of the science and technology.
Only Preston Langmore had such a comprehensive knowledge of the entire movement. The last time Jethro was on land, in the Canary Islands, he received an email from Langmore inviting him to be a guest speaker at the coming transhumanism conference. Hosted in New York City that year, it was the 25th anniversary of the conference and being billed as the most important transhumanism gathering of the decade. Leaders from all over the world were flying in to attend it. Every key scientist in the field would be there. And Langmore wanted to make sure Jethro Knights met everyone.
Jethro accepted the invitation. In the email, Langmore also pressed Jethro to accept a job as a senior consultant and writer at the World Transhumanist Institute. It was a unique and prestigious opportunity, and a solid foundation for further work in the heart of the movement. After eighteen months of frequent communication and dozens of lengthy, didactic emails, Langmore considered Jethro his protégé—an unofficial apprentice. Jethro wrote back, however, saying he was undecided about the job. He thanked Langmore for his close friendship and the work offer, emphasizing he would strongly consider it; that his commitment to the conquest of immortality and pushing transhumanism forward, whether at his organization or not, was unwavering.
Now that Jethro was almost back home, he focused specifically on how to approach the rest of his life. He had already trimmed down the amount of articles he was doing for International Geographic, writing only occasionally when he encountered an exceptional story. His short journalism career made him a respected writer to any organization or media company. But five years of traveling—especially his time in the Kashmir war zone—taught him he didn't belong at a normal job, working for someone else, following other people's ideas, ambitions, and crusades. He felt it antithetical to his immortality mission, to directly join any groups or companies, even if he respected and saw value in them, or knew they were unequivocally transhuman-oriented.
Instead, Jethro possessed robust, independent vocational ideas for what he wanted to do in the future and how to do it. He thought it best to embark on his own entrepreneurial job creation. His parameters were simple; they were fashioned from the essence of the transhumanism mission. He wanted to be guaranteed to advance beyond his biological human limitations and live indefinitely in freedom, security, and satisfaction. To achieve that, he would do whatever was necessary, as efficiently as possible. That, he declared to himself, would be his new job when he got back home.
Of course, creating ways of earning a reasonable income through the new job would be a priority too, but that snafu could be overcome in time. The sale of his yacht would give him a comfortable financial buffer of many trouble-free months to figure it all out.
On the fifth year and second month of his circumnavigation, the glowing skyline of New York City broke through the fog and silhouetted the black sea. Jethro wrapped up his sails and motored quietly past the Statue of Liberty and up the Hudson River, unnoticed at 3 A.M. This was the man whose every instinct screamed to conquer death—whose instinct the world would one day challenge and attempt to destroy.
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At the core of anything Reverend Belinas did was one dominating tenet, one central philosophy: his impassioned hatred of modern technology. His earliest memories were of a ghastly car accident in Africa. His father, the driver, was instantly killed—crushed by an eighteen-wheel tanker with a front tire blowout that swerved into their speeding minivan on the highway. Miraculously, Belinas, aged six, survived in the back seat, intact. His small body was held in place by a jail of crushed metal all around him. His mother, however, sitting next to him, was ravaged. Partially paralyzed and no longer able to breathe on her own, she was revived by medics in an ambulance, and later put on an artificial respirator at the hospital. For three weeks she showed incremental signs of recovery. Every day, Belinas wept while watching her slowly, painstakingly improve. In the last week, he began to feel hope. His mother was going to survive, one of the doctors finally announced. She might even be able to play with him again in the future, a nurse told him. Then, during a stormy night in Nairobi, when staff were overwhelmed tending other emergencies, the power failed in the hospital and Belinas watched his mother suffocate to death. Her eyes were frozen still, enraged, staring at the powerless respirator machine.
Born to a Scottish mother and a Cuban father in the slums of Mobile, Louisiana, Belinas left America as an infant, to travel with his missionary parents throughout East Africa. Over the next six years, he lived in squalid AIDS orphanages, special needs clinics, and mud churches with thatched roofs. At an impressionable age, he saw things a young mind should never see: emaciated babies starving to death, families torn apart by disease, child prostitution on the streets, warlords ruling the countryside and killing indiscriminately. Later in life, these experiences would grant Belinas the strength to confidently stare down the growing despair and poverty brewing in America. After the horrors he witnessed in Africa, nothing could shock or frighten him anymore.
Following his mother's death, Belinas returned to America. The church of his parents found him a suitable foster home that immediately started him in school. Belinas quickly excelled in all his classes and eventually skipped grades. In high school, his test scores were so impressive that he was accepted to Victoria University on a full academic scholarship at age sixteen. He majored in religious studies. Four years later he matriculated into New Haven, Connecticut’s prestigious McKinsie Theological School for graduate work. There, under Dean Wilderun, one of the original anti-transhumanism defenders, he blossomed into his full spiritual self.
With startup funding from wealthy bankers—the fathers of his classmates—Belinas created his own church based on the popular foursquare concept, where all versions of Christian fai
th and devotion to God are welcome. He called it Redeem Church. His motto was simple, powerful, and energizing: Forget what path we take to God, let's just get to Him—and let's do it now. He emphasized the basics: Follow the Bible; treat your neighbors as you would have them treat you; submit to the Lord and ask for forgiveness of your sins. He threw in at the end: Don't trust technology—it gets in the way of knowing God. It’s a form of blasphemy, the original and worst sin. One day Satan will try to overcome us with a “technocalypse.” Beware.
Increasingly, as digital technology dominated every aspect of the twenty-first century—and people linked it with increased governmental control, greater disparity between rich and poor, and withdrawal from nature—Belinas' anti-tech philosophy succeeded. What do you need a cell phone for? Jesus didn't have one. A pacemaker? Pray to God that your heart works; if it doesn't, it's because God may already have something important waiting for you in heaven. The Internet? We don't need instant access to the world’s information superhighway; the Bible has all the truths of wisdom you'll ever need. And microchips? That's just how Satan wants to brand and digitally recognize you; it’s all part of his attempt to control us. The government and greedy corporations are already doing it.
In the complex modern world—full of cyber-realities, Second World profiles, GPS-locating smart phones, and instant video chatting—people too poor to take advantage of the plethora of gadgets, software applications, and upgrades constantly hitting the market, found solace in the simple, unadorned life. Belinas organized communities to buy large tracts of land and build giant churches with attached housing where the poor could live until they found jobs and were able to survive without handouts. At those sprawling compounds, crops were communally grown, daily attendance at church was encouraged, and religion-centric schools for children were offered. Healthcare was provided at no cost to anyone who needed it, by volunteer Christian doctors.
The Transhumanist Wager Page 12