The preacher brought his sweaty hands together, bowed his head, and promised God that he would find a way to make these things happen.
************
The morning after Jethro Knights’ release, Zoe Bach drove him to his Palo Alto office. Hundreds of roses and other flowers were placed near Transhuman Citizen's front entrance. A pack of supporters waited near the glass doors, facing off with a crowd of anti-transhumanists bearing pickets and signs. Three policemen standing near their motorcycles tensely observed everyone.
Jethro looked at Zoe and said, “So, this is what you've been going through every day.”
She laughed, her hair covering half her face. “Today isn't so bad. We’ll park in the back and enter through the rear. It's safer back there.”
They drove around to the backside of the building. Inside, twenty-five staff members—most hired in the past week by Zoe on Preston Langmore’s recommendations—were looking through paperwork and sitting behind computers, drinking coffee, waiting to finally meet Jethro. They were website designers, publicity directors, communications specialists, fundraisers, business strategists, accountants, secretaries, scientists, and technology experts. Jethro called a meeting and began it by asking everyone to introduce themselves and to explain their backgrounds. He listened carefully and made mental calculations about each employee as they spoke.
When they were finished, Jethro explained to them the organization’s main goals and the importance of their work for the transhuman movement. He ended his short speech with a warning: “Lastly, before you get back to your tasks this morning, I want to make it very clear to everyone in this room what is to be expected from you. If you are not a net positive, here for the mission of Transhuman Citizen, then I will fire you. I will aggressively fire you. Laggards and slackers are not a part of this group. This is more than an organization, more than a paycheck, more than a job in the life extension and human enhancement world. This is a vision—a revolution in transhumanism and beyond. Believe in it, contribute to it, help build it. That's what I expect of you. Now get to work, and over the next few days, I'll sit down with each of you and formulize your personal strategies.”
Jethro's plan was determined by efficiency. He treated his organization like a startup company injected with the fervor of a militarylike campaign. He paid his employees—and paid them well—to do what he hoped they most wanted to do in life: something that directly helped each of them reach immortality and reap the rewards of transhumanism.
It wasn’t easy. For the first few months, before the Cryotask bombing and Nathan Cohen's murder, there was little for Jethro to do but write, try to disseminate his ideas, and search for funding. Now that there was money—and employees working for that money—he was responsible for directing the hires to be productive. It was a novel experience for Jethro. He tried to draw on the diplomatic lessons Langmore had pushed on him, but he still found many moments agonizing. Jethro preferred to leave workers to solve problems and create successful outcomes themselves. Yet, the interruptions at his desk and the knocks on his office door from employees asking inane questions were constant.
“Phillip,” Jethro impatiently told the Web developer, “I can't monitor every bit of content on our seventy-five-page website. Choose for yourself what goes in that corner and what color it is.”
“Jennifer,” Jethro sharply said to the science team's secretary, “you've been here two weeks. Don't ask me about vacation time yet.”
“Frank!” Jethro roared into the phone during a call to one of his fundraisers in Denver. “Never bother me again with your hotel room bullshit. Figure out another place to stay—or quit. You're falling behind quota anyway, and I can easily have you replaced.”
Despite the rough-edged origins of the organization and the menial dilemmas Jethro faced, Transhuman Citizen still grew quickly. Its staff doubled and Jethro rented more office space in his building for the new employees. The content of the website grew threefold. Life extension videos, articles, and interviews were created. Jethro started up a new transhuman magazine called Transhumanist Monthly. He gave lectures around the country about his organization, always searching for additional support and backing. He assembled transhuman demonstrations in public, coordinating events with other transhumanist groups around the United States and abroad. He ran commercials on local radio and television stations about the promise of life extension and human enhancement. He defended scientists when they were harassed, using Transhuman Citizen supporters to protest face to face against anti-transhumanist protestors.
For the first three months, donations and pledges continued to grow, and Jethro continually bumped up his efforts to fight for his goals. But privately, he was disappointed, sensing something deeply troubling with his progress. He noticed that people everywhere listened with excitement to the urgent transhuman message of his group, but that most of them fell far short of wanting to make real changes in their lives. People, it seemed, even the scientists capable of making transhumanism succeed, simply wanted the world that Jethro spoke about to exist. They didn't want to build it or fight for it; it was risky and far too much work. Jethro concluded that it was an uphill battle. Progress was slow. Too slow.
Still, he worked like a machine, often laboring past midnight in his office. Zoe Bach helped him whenever she wasn’t at the hospital performing trauma surgery. During late January, Zoe flew with Jethro to every foreign Transhuman Citizen office, formally opening each one with welcoming events and announcements in local newspapers.
The foreign offices were picked according to a strict formula. They were always small—only two or three rooms—but set in a busy, prestigious building. They were staffed with few people—mainly communications professionals, some fundraisers, and a multilingual country director. The offices were decorated with the same spartan modernity Zoe chose for the Palo Alto headquarters. Inside, automation dominated. When visitors walked into one of the offices, no one was immediately there to meet them. Soon, though, a soothing androgynous computer voice came through a sound system in the wall, welcoming the visitors, asking them to sit down, and letting them know that a live person would soon be out to greet them. A robotic tray carrying refreshments wheeled itself out, offering coffee, tea, and fresh fruit.
Zoe had convinced Jethro to create as futuristic an environment as possible, and to stay with the same theme in all the offices. The furniture looked like it was pulled out of a science fiction movie set. Subtle lighting illuminated when a room was entered. Intriguing postmodern paintings were picked for the reception area and main conference rooms. Interior design photojournalists came and published stories about the offices, lauding the originality. Jethro marveled at Zoe’s creativity and talent for design, loving her more than ever.
After a few months, everything was complete; the international offices, websites, media materials, and the magazine were all linked to the Palo Alto headquarters. Jethro Knights announced that their outreach and ability to dish out mass media—even current international content—had come of age. Now it was time to use those resources to reach a broader swath of society and start turning ordinary people in America and around the world into supporters of transhumanism.
Jethro's other immediate goal, the one on which he had spent the most hours working, was to court the super-rich. They were the most affluent people on the planet—the top one percent. They controlled over half the Earth’s wealth and resources. These were the individuals Jethro needed most. With their money he could launch the next and most important phase of Transhuman Citizen: to directly create and fund radical and large-scale life extension research projects.
************
Jethro Knights was in a race. Reverend Belinas worked tirelessly to secure more power and resources to stop transhumanism, and he was increasingly successful.
A pivotal moment for Belinas arrived when America’s First Lady, a cheerful obese woman, collapsed while attending a presidential fundraiser for her husband’s political party. In
the hospital, she was diagnosed with advanced heart disease and immediately underwent emergency bypass surgery. The bypass was successful, but the doctors discovered her left ventricle was barely functioning and damaged beyond repair. Additional bypasses were risky, as was a heart transplant. Doctors discussed the possibility of an artificial heart to keep her alive for a few extra years, but she refused, saying the idea didn’t fit well with her vision of natural living or with her personal religious perspective. No other treatments were viable. One of the world's top cardiac experts predicted her time alive was limited to twelve months or less.
As her health continued to worsen, and she became more sedentary, the U.S. President increasingly turned to Reverend Belinas for faith and spiritual guidance. The preacher used the opportunity to grind into him how insane it was that tens of millions of public dollars were still going towards transhumanism ideas—like the creation of synthetic brain neurons, human bionics, and genetic cross-species engineering. Instead, he argued, it could all be going towards tackling the country’s worsening health trends, such as heart disease.
“Heart attacks are the most common form of death we have in the United States, Mr. President. Yet, I can't understand why we don't put more of our federal health budget into preventing it and into other ailments like the common flu, which kills thousands every year. Our government still manages to partially fund wacko transhuman scientists looking to download their brains onto computer chips. And it costs us many millions, while your wonderful wife and a hundred thousand God-fearing Americans like her lie there suffering and dying. Education, prevention, and wholesome faith-filled lives are the key to getting our country healthier.”
Even though the amount of government funding going towards transhuman science was less than one percent of the national public research budget, the President agreed to fully terminate it. New forms of transhuman science were not urgently needed, he conceded. All public money should go directly to preventing and curing the basic maladies tormenting society, like heart disease, cancer, influenza, autism, and obesity. He signed over billions of dollars more to expand the ever-growing and far-reaching operations of the NFSA, diverting the very last of the money still going to scientists treading the careful line between transhuman research and mainstream health sciences. Now everything was relegated to basic health education and general medicine via the siphoning power of the NFSA.
Jethro Knights called it asinine. “You don't spend money trying to fix obesity,” he said. “You spend it creating a novel drug that eliminates food addiction, so people with no control don't overeat every day and night. The same with cancer: cures have been elusive for fifty years; it’s time to put tens of billions of dollars towards the creation of a universal vaccine. And heart disease? Don't spend money fixing the heart and its valves. It’s a complicated, trouble-prone organ to begin with. Spend it on developing a totally new nanotechnology-inspired mechanized replacement.” Artificial organs are the way of the future, Jethro believed. Not ethics, nor education, nor preventative healthcare inspired by 2,000-year-old religious mores. This was the government being utterly irrational and wasting money again, what little they still had left. The U.S. federal deficit compared to its GDP was the highest in eighty years. Furthermore, the government had raised income taxes three times in the past decade, exacerbating economic malaise for all its citizens. In all probability, America was spiraling downwards towards bankruptcy.
Jethro wondered for the first time if trying to succeed in America was the best way to proceed with transhumanism and its life extension goals. Maybe the forces here were too overwhelming, too stupid, too laborious for success. Maybe the soil of America was incapable of growing a lasting transhuman movement. Maybe the grand plan included doing the research elsewhere—in a faraway place where real science could be accomplished, unhindered by anti-transhumanist groups or an improvident, cash-strapped government. Maybe there was an isolated place on the planet where such an autonomous nation of transhumanists could be founded. Maybe, Jethro thought, he should leave America behind and go find that place.
PART III
Chapter 19
Over the past year, Amanda Michaelson increasingly grew impatient and dismayed with her husband and his lack of personal strength. Even though Senator Gregory Michaelson appeared exceedingly successful in his life, she knew he wasn't. She saw him as he was: a puppet. Unfortunately, divorce, or even estrangement, was out of the question for someone of her class—at least from her father’s weighty point of view. But she no longer felt any love or respect for her husband, which even in the beginning of their marriage was minuscule. Everything had been handed to him, she thought, through either her connections, or dumb luck, or because he was easy to use. He refused to take anything of his own and make something audacious of it.
Even during his own senatorial campaign, it was others who had won for him. She stood by his side—the trophy wife—smiling, waving to crowds, nudging him forward, insisting he try harder to work longer hours and avoid sleeping. She thought if she were a man, she’d already be running for the U.S. Presidency, and sure to win it.
Amanda even tolerated the trivial affairs she knew Gregory had with the younger nobodies in his Washington, D.C. work scene—so common for politicians these days, she thought condescendingly. Their sex life was never satisfying anyway; she was thankful he rarely bothered her with his libido. But power, as her father always taught her, was essential. And preserving that power was the single most important item for her in life and marriage.
She knew Gregory wouldn't be able to preserve any power once he lost his usefulness or luck. He would pull her down with him in his fall, most likely in complete embarrassment and disgrace. Amanda frowned thinking about it. She sat on her Norwegian pickled oak lawn chair at the side of a four-leaf-clover-shaped pool, tapping her shiny red fingernails against the wood. It was late morning on a Tuesday. She was in her bikini, sunning at her father's vacation mansion in Virginia. She sipped a martini, watching gold handrails penetrate the aqua-blue water of one of the clovers.
The butler hurriedly came outside to her and whispered in a British accent, “I’m so sorry to bother you, Mrs. Michaelson, but there’s someone here to see you. Someone important, I believe.”
She looked at the servant, then towards the French doors on the pool’s veranda. Reverend Belinas was meticulously telling the maid how he wanted his Scotch.
Afterward, the preacher walked towards Amanda. When he reached her, he bowed low, took her hand, and kissed it softly. They had met many times before, but this was their first time alone, without Gregory's hawkish presence.
“Oh, what a wonderful surprise,” Amanda said gaily.
She got up slowly and put on her white lace robe. Belinas eyed her blatantly, grinning. A rush of sexuality caught them both.
“I didn’t know how exquisite you were, Mrs. Michaelson,” Belinas said, never one to speak lightly.
Belinas was not an unattractive man, Amanda thought—albeit his baldness and exotic complexion were peculiar. He was similar to the Portuguese army captain in whose embrace she had once spent many summer nights of her late teens.
“How nice of you to drop by, Reverend Belinas. I’m sure you know Gregory isn’t here. I’d love to offer you a drink anyway and steal away some time with you alone.”
Reverend Belinas' life was incredibly public. The press—his own and others—followed him nearly everywhere. Little was ever reported about the women in his life. Even though he could have courted women and married according to his religious dictates, he chose not to. He never entered relationships or was caught in compromising moments. He considered himself above sexuality. On occasion, however, it stung him—like now.
“I’ve already put in my order,” he replied coyly, watching the maid walk out with his drink. “And please, there’s no reason to refer to me as ‘reverend’ right now, especially as I’m about to enjoy a drink with a beautiful woman on a hot summer day.”
The mai
d, eying the preacher suspiciously, handed him his Scotch and walked away.
“How is your drink?” Amanda asked, smirking. “Just like at home?”
“Better,” he answered, sipping the drink provocatively.
“And where exactly is home for you these days? I know it's not that sprawling compound of yours in Georgia.”
“You’re right, it's not,” he retorted, softly tasting his drink, swirling it slightly in his mouth. “My home is everywhere and nowhere.”
Amanda wasn’t satisfied with that answer, but she knew it wasn’t wrong either.
“I believe you make your home wherever you are,” she stated, beginning a loaded conversation.
Belinas swallowed and pulled the drink from his mouth. He turned to her, blatantly observing her again: the long lines of her body; the lacy robe covering her thin shoulders; her perfect curvaceous breasts—the recent creation of one of the best plastic surgeons in the country.
“That seems the best way,” he answered, “especially when there are so many wonderful places out there to call home.”
“If I had to guess, I'd say your real home is power, Belinas. But where exactly does that live?”
It was Amanda’s turn to deliberately toss her eyes on him. She cast them up and down the length of the man, examining carefully without caution, imagining what bounty was under the white robe. He nodded slightly, knowing she liked what she saw, knowing why she was looking. They both relished the process.
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