The Transhumanist Wager

by Zoltan Istvan

  On a trip to Washington, D.C., Reverend Belinas met Gregory in the halls of the Capitol building. In front of numerous important politicians, Belinas flamboyantly greeted him, congratulating and embracing him as if he were a close, longtime friend. Gregory was thrilled—and more devoted than ever.

  Belinas promised to meet with him soon, directly after a food drive in the slums of El Salvador. A week later, the reverend’s secretary contacted Gregory, and a date was set for dinner at the Michaelsons’ mansion. Belinas arrived in his white Range Rover, bowing low when he met Amanda for the first time. She was dressed in New York high fashion; a lacy aqua-blue dress draped across her body and revealed enticing views of her bare back. Belinas eyed her carefully, dangerously.

  Dinner was exquisite: Chardonnay-basted duck with cardamom grass shoots. Desert was Li Fu-Plea, a specialty of the Michaelsons’ Parisian live-in chef. Later, in the library, Belinas and Gregory smoked cigars together in private.

  “Next week,” the reverend said, “we're beginning to formalize that new U.S. agency. I want you to head it as we discussed. The President himself will make all the announcements when the time is right.”

  “Sounds fine,” Gregory answered, sleepy from too much wine. “By the way, what is your role in the new agency?”

  “Essential but unofficial. The President has asked that I write the directives of the new agency, and remain as the senior-most advisor. I'll monitor and guide the financing as well. We're going to have special funding.”

  “Oh yeah? How much?” Gregory asked, almost bored.

  “For starters, a hundred billion dollars.”

  Gregory choked on his cigar, coughing like an amateur smoker.

  “A hundred billion dollars,” he shouted, glee in his voice. “That's almost the same as the CIA, isn’t it?”

  Belinas lowered his head condescendingly, thinking Gregory far too predictable—and not dissimilar from putty.

  “Senator Michaelson, the agency I have asked the President to form is of the utmost gravity and vital for the safety of this country. I have handpicked you for it. I still don't think you understand how dangerous I view transhumanism to be. It could tear our nation apart. It could alter how we view ourselves as a society of human beings. I need to know that you understand how significant this is; that the President and I can count on you. And that you have the strength to lead us, to help build an agency from the ground up, that will become as powerful as any other in the United States. We absolutely must win the war against the transhumanists.”

  “I apologize, Reverend,” Gregory said, regaining his composure. “Just, that's a lot of money. Like in the old days before the economic fallout. It shocked me. And, of course, you can count on me. I fully agree with stopping those people from creating monsters out of the human race and harming our American way of life.”

  “That's good to hear, Gregory,” Belinas replied, “because your job will not be for the lighthearted. Ruthless moral strength is required. We may eventually have to use force. We may have to use violence. So far, extreme measures have worked very effectively to accomplish our goals.”

  “What do you mean extreme measures?” Gregory asked cautiously.

  “There are things happening right now in our country, in our cities. Underground stuff. Nothing you need to know about yet, but it has been effective. And we plan to continue being effective,” Belinas said firmly, hinting at the latest attacks on transhumanists being showcased across the media.

  “We will not be dissimilar from the CIA, Gregory—in the public's eye, and out of it. There will be secrets. There will be spies. There will be covert programs and clandestine operations. We must win at any cost. Do you understand? At. Any. Cost. The security of America and the human race are counting on us. God is counting on us.”

  Gregory nodded, acknowledging what he meant. He had little choice but to agree with the man who had done so much for him.

  “Yes, Reverend. I understand and I won’t let you down.”

  “That's good, Gregory. Very good indeed,” Belinas said, jauntily taking a smoke from his cigar and nodding his shiny, shaved head.

  ************

  Redeem Church’s four terrorists were dressed in black, armed with handguns, and wearing wire-thin headsets as they scuttled through an elaborate San Francisco sewer system directly underneath the Cryotask building. It was precisely 7:00 A.M. on Monday morning, October 1st. They picked that time because prior surveillance had revealed that the night security guard often napped then, nodding off in his booth at the end of a long graveyard shift. For the Redeem Church’s murderous plan to work, secrecy was essential. Dawn was breaking outside, and Cryotask employees wouldn't be showing up to work for another ninety minutes.

  The terrorists were led by a husky Romanian-born boxer named Refia Polzan. With a wrench, he unbolted the three-foot steel cover of Cryotask's ventilation system above his head. Each man looked stressed, reeling from the weight of the bombs in their backpacks, and from the off-chance that one of the bombs might prematurely explode.

  In the past, bombing labs and clinics connected to transhumanism was routine: one or two explosives targeting either the laboratory and its machinery, or the operating room and its doctors. This time, however, they aimed to demolish an entire building: a three-story 1910 Victorian mansion, which had recently been converted into Cryotask’s headquarters. The oversized property graced the south side of Telegraph Hill and was adjacent to San Francisco’s downtown highrises. The terrorists aimed to turn the entire structure into a blistering inferno—they wanted nothing salvageable left inside. This was their largest, most dramatic terrorist attack yet.

  With stealth, the four members crawled through a tight vent before entering Cryotask's basement. They needed to be quiet, just in case the armed security guard outside was awake and decided to wander inside the building. The last member, Johnny Dars, looked behind him as he closed the vent. He stared for a long time into the darkness.

  “Get a move on, Johnny boy,” whispered a voice from ahead of him.

  Johnny shrugged and continued, but an uneasy feeling swarmed over him that they were being watched.

  On the top floor of the Victorian mansion, in a nondescript storage room littered with boxes and junk, Jethro Knights watched nine silver video monitors in front of him. Each of them fed wirelessly to a remote satellite atop a nearby skyscraper. On his waist was a holster carrying a 45-caliber handgun and two loaded clips.

  Jethro’s phone vibrated silently.

  “Good morning,” he answered quietly.

  “So what the hell is going on?” asked an annoyed man. He was a senior producer making the morning news at Los Angeles-based IMN. “Is this a hoax or what?”

  Five minutes earlier, the producer had been tipped off by Dr. Zoe Bach to a developing live terrorist story unfolding in San Francisco.

  “I assure you, this is no hoax,” said Jethro. “I just need two more minutes, then I’ll connect you to the live terrorist footage.”

  “Are you sure they’re terrorists? How do you know all this?”

  “I’m absolutely positive they’re religious terrorists. There will be plenty of time later to answer your questions—you’ll see everything for yourself in two minutes.

  “What other media have you contacted?”

  “You’re the first so far, but we’ll be streaming everything to other television stations, to multiple websites, and to network news feeds, so you won’t be alone in scooping this story. I suggest doing a good job and remaining objective; this is a story of the highest national importance.”

  “Whatever,” snarled the IMN producer, skeptical. “It just better be worth reporting on.”

  “It will be. You have my word. Let's talk in a few minutes.”

  Once inside Cryotask, the terrorists split into two groups. The first set of men began hiding timer bombs on the first floor, putting the ten-inch-long metallic devices underneath furniture in the main reception area. One bomb went behi
nd a bookshelf filled with medical and transhumanism books. Another went under a secretary's desk. Another under a coffee table. Still other bombs went into bathrooms, closets, and various offices.

  The other two men headed upstairs to the massive, unfurnished great room on the second floor, where thirty stainless steel cryonics suspension tanks were bunched together. Many of the machines were flashing green, orange, and blue lights from their digital input screens. Some were steaming and vibrating softly. Refia winced, thinking they looked like computerized coffins. He quickly began hiding timer bombs underneath the tanks and on the inside of the exposed joist beams of the mansion's ceilings. Explosions along those beams would collapse the aged structure, according to an engineer who had studied the building’s blueprint plans.

  Refia was in charge of setting the master timer device, whose countdown would wirelessly instruct all the bombs inside Cryotask to explode within a few seconds of each other. He eyed it carefully in his backpack each time he reached for another charge to place. It was protected in a hard transparent case, separated from the clunky bombs so that it couldn’t be jostled too much.

  Jethro Knights’ secret video cameras were scattered in every area on every floor of the mansion. Each camera lens was nearly invisible, hiding behind a tiny hole in a hanging oil painting. The video equipment had taken days to install, but each lens had a panoramic vantage point of the space or room it was in. An additional camera was directly above Jethro to his right, filming his actions and all the images on the monitors.

  In radio contact with Jethro was Oliver Mbaye, his Paris man whom he had hired a month before from the French Foreign Legion. Descended from distant royalty in Senegal, and formerly a captain with combat experience in North Africa, Oliver was extremely reserved and professional. Despite being only thirty-seven years old, his frizzy crew-cut hair was solid gray. He helped Jethro organize the Cryotask operation, advising him on all the possible dangers and outcomes that could occur. He also took Jethro to the nearby Santa Cruz Mountains to teach him how to handle and fire a handgun.

  Earlier that evening, Oliver sent the regular Cryotask security officer home and took his place. Dressed in the officer’s uniform, Oliver spent most of the night pretending to be sleeping in the little wooden security booth. As soon as the cameras showed that the terrorists were in the Cryotask basement, he popped through a nearby manhole in the street and bolted up the entrance vent the Redeem Church men had crawled through. They were locked in. Oliver returned quickly to his security booth, and pretended to sleep again while eying the action inside the building.

  From the second floor, Refia whispered into his microphone to his subordinates, “How's it going down there? I'm about ten minutes from setting the master timer.”

  Johnny instantly stood upright. He was planting a bomb in one of the first-floor offices, and talk of setting the master timer was unnerving.

  “We're over halfway through here on our end,” Johnny answered. “Eight more charges to set. Let all these blasphemers die. This place gives me the creeps.”

  “Amen,” mumbled Refia, who then continued setting his bombs.

  The first day of every month was always the scheduled maintenance day for Cryotask, when engineers checked each of the cryonics suspension tanks for proper functioning by running a wide range of diagnostic tests. Dr. Zoe Bach, two other cryonics technicians, and other staff were always on hand in case something went wrong. This was the reason October 1st was chosen by Redeem Church. Not only did they want to destroy the frozen bodies in tanks, but also the key employees who had helped put them there. The terrorists did not expect any survivors.

  Jethro Knights telephoned back the IMN producer and said, “It’s live now for you. Do you see it?”

  There was silence on the phone.

  Five seconds later, Jethro repeated, “Can you see it?”

  “Yeah, we got it. Sharp and clear. What the hell's going on? Is this real?”

  “Yes, it’s real. We’re filming a live terrorist act at a cryonics center called Cryotask, in San Francisco, California, near the downtown district. The armed men dressed in black whom you're watching are Redeem Church members, and they don’t know they’re being filmed. My name is Jethro Knights. I’m the founder of Transhuman Citizen, a new, aggressive California-based organization, which promotes and protects science that extends and enhances human life. I am a transhumanist.”

  “Holy shit,” the producer said, realizing one of the most important stories of the year was unfolding in front of him. He quickly flicked between the various video feeds Jethro was providing. One image was of the terrorists planting bombs; another was of the cryonics suspension tanks steaming; another was of Jethro standing in front of video monitors wearing a gun in his holster.

  “Don’t move an inch, Mr. Knights. We’re putting this on—I’ll be right back.”

  The producer jumped up and sprinted from his desk into the filming studio, waving at the IMN anchors hosting the news hour. The anchorwoman, Patricia Hayes, was in the middle of a live interview with a paparazzi journalist who had recently photographed a royal wedding in England.

  “Wait, wait a second,” Patricia said, looking away from the interviewee. “It looks like we have a breaking story. Mr. Dennlor, I'm so sorry—we're going to have to leave it there. My sources tell me we're going live to—what's that? To San Francisco, to inside a cryonics center called Cryotask, where apparently a live terrorist plot is unfolding.”

  Sixty seconds later, the story began filling in to other major television broadcasters across the country that were receiving the live video feeds from Jethro. The smaller stations also caught the live footage, piggybacking off the larger broadcasters. Soon everyone, from Los Angeles to Denver to Boston, broke from their regular programming to air images of masked terrorists setting timer bombs at a cryonics clinic.

  On the East Coast, the time was 10:17 A.M. Commuters on trains watched the news on mobile devices in front of them. People on the streets stared at their phones watching live Web updates. Taxi drivers blared the story on their radios. A crowd in New York City gathered near the three-story-high LED television screens fronting the buildings at Times Square. The terrorists appeared as haunting, black-clad, twenty-foot figures.

  Jethro also watched the story unfold on a small TV next to his video monitors. He quickly flipped through the major cable channels following the media’s responses. A wire with a tiny speaker feeding into his right ear gave him audio. The other ear was empty, allowing him to hear into the hallway, just in case someone came up to the third floor where he was broadcasting.

  Around the country, television anchors described what they saw and speculated about who this armed blond-haired man was, why he was filming terrorists bombing a clinic—and why he was filming himself broadcasting it live. Occasionally, Jethro whispered quietly into a microphone and pointed towards a screen in front of him, telling the viewing audience or the television producers what was happening. He also briefly described his organization and its philosophy, TEF, a couple of times, promoting them and the promise of transhumanism to viewers. Digitally superimposed in the lower right hand corner of all the live images that Jethro provided were tiny orange-colored words: Courtesy of Transhuman Citizen. This was Jethro's proper introduction of his group to millions of viewers.

  Zoe Bach, watching a giant flat screen television from Transhuman Citizen’s Palo Alto office, sent an excited text to Jethro’s cell phone:

  Amazing! The country is watching and listening!

  ************

  “Belinas, Reverend Belinas! You’re not going to believe this!” shouted the preacher’s frantic bodyguard, barging in and disturbing his solitary morning prayer. Belinas was kneeling, his hands clasped, worshiping in front of a long wooden cross hanging in the community room at his sprawling 100-acre headquarters in Savanna, Georgia.

  Belinas looked up petulantly, signifying he was never to be interrupted like that during prayer.

  “Reve
rend, I'm sorry. But something’s wrong—the Cryotask operation is a set-up. It's being aired live on TV.”

  “Aired live? What are you talking about?”

  The man sprinted over to a nearby television set, grabbed the remote control, and switched on the machine. He scrambled through channels trying to find IMN to show Belinas the story. He didn’t have to—the local Savannah news channel was already airing it.

  Belinas saw an image of Jethro Knights on the screen, explaining how the terrorists hoped to destroy the Cryotask building and murder its employees. The preacher recognized Jethro from the picture on his kill list. His countenance turned to shock, the peace of prayer entirely gone from his demeanor. His eyes strained to focus on the television, and words were not able to flow from his mouth. The full realization of what was occurring took far longer to register than it should have.

  Finally, he shouted, “Damn it, don’t they know? Doesn’t Refia know they’re being filmed live on TV? That it's a trick?”

  “No, sir. Shall I call them?”

  “Call them? From here, you idiot? From one of our phones? From the property grounds? Are you kidding me?”

  “Of course. I’m sorry.”

  Belinas swiped the remote control away from the man. He aimed the device at the television and began quickly flipping through the major news channels. He stopped on IMN, horrified when he heard his own name spoken by Refia.

  “Belinas, he’s not as great a man as you think,” Refia said to his partner, Brian, while calibrating a bomb. “His authority as a warrior for God has always seemed questionable to me. I don't think he knows how to really fight like we do. I mean, he's not here with us on the frontlines, risking his skin.”

  “Well, come on man,” Brian answered, apprehensively watching his boss handle the device. “That’s why he’s a preacher, not a fighter.”

  “Yeah, but we need a Moses to lead us right now. A King David. A warrior. Not a talker. The time for talking is over. It’s so over, man.”