The Transhumanist Wager

by Zoltan Istvan

  For hours afterward he would stare at the walls, softly moaning, tears streaking from his eyes in the night’s darkness. He desperately missed his wife—her touch, her voice, spooning her warm body through the night. The soft kicking of his child. He missed the many hopes and goals they shared together. Their loaded philosophical conversations. Her smile. The ease of her ideas. The Zenlike nature of her spirit. The wonder of her confidence about everything.

  He reran some of Zoe’s last words again and again in his head: I don’t want to be fixed.

  Did he want to be fixed? It wasn’t that exactly. He just didn’t want to die. He didn’t believe in endlessly coasting through the universe as non-organized, unconscious specks of matter and energy, even if others called it “spirit.” It wasn’t that Zoe thought that exactly, either; she just wasn’t worried about it. Her confidence and ability to peacefully accept the universe as it was astonished him. Especially since his every urge in the past had been to fight for survival and power.

  She amazed him now more than ever. His stomach muscles tightened in agony; the pain from the loss of her was far worse than the pain from his physical wounds.

  On his fourth day in the hospital, just before he signed the paperwork to cremate his wife, Jethro ordered extensive DNA, bone, and tissue samples taken from her body. He also arranged for her undamaged hippocampus—where long-term memories are stored—to be preserved in an experimental new suspension liquid called Preservatia. He did the same with the umbilical cord and intact parts of the fetus, for stem cell potential. Lastly, he made careful digital records of her few donated organs' destinations. He planned to keep close watch over where they went, and who they went into.

  When everything was complete, Jethro let her go. She told him once that cremation was her preferred end if she couldn't be cryonically frozen. In his wheelchair, deep inside the hospital's musty basement, he watched a mortician load her body into an incinerator. Sixty seconds later, she was no more.

  ************

  Jethro Knights remained insulated in the hospital from the hounding press. Day after day, the media smeared details of the terrorist attack at the Dawson Center across the news. Some journalists reported Jethro was dying—that transhumanism was losing its youngest, strongest leader and the last hope of the declining movement. Preston Langmore visited Jethro every day, telling him he was doing his best to manage the media circus.

  “What’s there to manage?” Jethro replied testily. “It’s not working here anymore in this ‘nation under God.’ Religious superstition is the human race's nemesis.”

  “Of course, but at least you're still alive. The movement can still continue. There still is some hope, somewhere. There has to be.”

  Jethro wasn’t sure about that. He wasn’t interested in an organization that couldn’t win, that wouldn’t fulfill its destiny. Winning was everything when it came to Jethro's immortality objective.

  Over the next days, he spent his time in the hospital recovering and reading. Langmore brought him the books he requested. Stories of heroic explorers, of spirited generals, of resilient scientists, of immovable philosophers, of intrepid founding fathers of nations. They blew inspiration into the depths of his mind. Jethro desperately needed it. He felt so dark inside, so outraged. He utterly wanted revenge against those who killed his wife. So far, the authorities investigating the bomb blast had found no concrete leads, not even any persons or groups of interest. Obviously, Redeem Church and other extreme religious organizations in America were behind it, Jethro thought. With the NFSA carefully watching over the Dawson Center bombing investigation, however, Jethro knew the police would never delve too far into the case. Soon, it would be relegated to just another unsolved murder.

  From his hospital bed, there was little he could do. Furthermore, there was nothing that could change what had happened. He tried not to think about it. He observed his thoughts, noting in his journal that he couldn’t go thirty seconds without thinking of Zoe. When he forced himself to do it, the forcing seemed more like thinking of her than not. The sorrow was penetrating and pervasive.

  After five days, and at least a few days earlier than recommended by his doctor, Jethro got out of bed on his own power and walked to the bathroom. Some of his wounds began bleeding through their stitches. He relished the pain. It helped him to focus on something other than Zoe.

  Eight hours later, during the exchange of nurses, he put on some street clothes, limped out of his room, and began walking towards the main entrance of the hospital. The press was there, waiting—presumably for him. He quickly turned away unseen, and hobbled out the back entrance, making his way through an underground parking lot. From there he walked up to a public street and grabbed a taxi, taking it to a small motel on the other side of town.

  The next day, wearing sunglasses, a baseball cap, and a long scarf covering his wounds, he walked slowly to a bookstore with an empty backpack. He filled it, then went to an international airport and bought a one-way ticket to the Bahamas. Three hours later, he was airborne.

  Shell-shocked and despondent, Jethro wasn't sure what he should do now with his life, but he knew it was imperative to figure it out. Thinking on a warm, isolated beach seemed like a prudent place to begin.

  ************

  The question that kept returning to Jethro Knights’ mind deeply troubled him: Why should he continue at all? It was not a question he could remember ever asking himself. He sat on a pink beach on the island of Eleuthera, staring at the sea. Wounds were all over his body, and the sand stuck to his stitches. What he undeniably knew was the loss and death of Zoe Bach had decidedly dulled his drive for life. Perhaps it was the lack of sorrow and pain in his life that made him originally want to live so much, he thought. Perhaps that’s what made him unafraid to transcend any boundary of the human species to reach the highest in himself. Slavery to emotions so dire was not why he planned or wanted to live forever. Was life worth living for thousands of years without her? Without his family? Without the love he came to know, trust, and believe in?

  His thoughts jarred him. They filtered through his existence, through his pantheon of memories. Was this just mourning? Or who he really was now? He looked in the mirror one night after downing a bottle of wine, feeling that he was changed, feeling that he was almost afraid of life without her. The firmness and confidence that once filled Jethro's heart were gone. He questioned if he could ever be the same, if it could ever be worth it again. The power and certainty that had always made him different from others had vanished. The force he had relentlessly clashed against over the years: The unnamed, unformed defeatist ghost strangling the human spirit’s best potential—the same irrational beast he couldn’t describe while walking away from Professor Rindall’s class at Victoria University—was now taking explicit shape. And it dangerously tried to seize hold of him.

  Jethro awoke in an old, wooden, plantation-style hotel. From outside his small room the sound of ocean waves trickled in. It was exactly two weeks since Zoe had died. His first conscious thought that morning was of her. Again. He wished he could turn over and feel her body. But she was gone. Every day, little by little, he forced himself to understand that. To accept it. His brain wanted to think differently, to dream, to barter. Nothing, however, was so final as death.

  He looked in the mirror, watched himself repeat the words: “Dead. She's dead. Zoe is dead. Your wife is dead.”

  During the past few mornings, Jethro had taken long swims in the ocean for exercise, but today at dawn he put on his running shorts and walked out onto the sandy beach. His body could now take the jarring, and so he began to jog—slowly at first, then faster. He ran until his knees felt like buckling, until blood trickled from his stitches. When he was overwhelmed with pain, he began the long walk back to his hotel. Jethro returned right before noon, sweaty and limping to his room. Blood dripped down his arms and legs.

  Inside the transhumanist, pain swelled. He used it like a drug. The same with his books. He reread
the most important ones from his sailing trip: the novels or nonfiction books that motivated him; that moved him; that had helped form much of his perspective on life. He launched into stories of philosophical depth, of challenge, of acceptance. He sat on the beach, watched the waves surge against the shore, watched them wash away the sand. Likewise, he tried to wash away his agony. He succeeded for an hour, then returned to his room and collapsed on his bed, lost and crying about Zoe.

  Another week went by. The swimming and running brought his body into shape and toned his muscles. He checked his email once. There were 1226 new messages. His cell phone’s voice message inbox was full. Instead of answering, he texted his secretary and copied Preston Langmore on it:

  Safe. Healing. Need another week. Please absorb emails and calls.

  Thanks kindly,

  Jethro

  He wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to say, how long it would last, when he would be back, what he would do, why he should go back.

  Jethro considered the heart the all-encompassing instrument of passion and determination. There was such obsession there, such danger, such potential grief. He didn’t regret loving Zoe. He saw it as a calculation he had once walked away from in Kashmir, but knew better than to do so ever again. He lacked the understanding to see how he could feel so lost now, so directionless. He could no longer see a map of his life in front of him.

  On the nineteenth day after the bombing, he awoke to splattering rain on the rusty tin roof of his hotel. He was surprised. He had slept five hours straight—almost through the whole night. It was the first solid sleep he could remember getting since Zoe was still alive. He walked to the window and immediately knew that day was going to be different. Something inside him was mounting.

  Outside on the beach, he stood and watched the waves. On the previous day, the swell had begun to grow large and powerful. By this day, the waves were giants—nearly three stories high. A late seasonal hurricane was passing only a few hundred miles offshore. Coconut trees were arching from heavy winds. Jethro wanted to bodysurf, but he wasn't sure if it were possible. It was dangerous, potentially suicidal. It reminded him of Zoe’s fall in the Himalayas.

  Recklessly and impetuously, he jumped up and walked into the ocean. After ten minutes of fighting the white, foamy, tumultuous soup, and swimming furiously to get beyond the surf’s impact zone, he finally made it out to deep blue water. For a few minutes the ocean went suspiciously quiet. He turned on his back and floated. He let the rain pelt his face. Deep inside he had an ominous feeling—the same kind he felt the morning before Zoe was murdered.

  On the horizon an immense wave materialized, sweeping towards him. It was far larger than the others he had watched from the beach and not dissimilar to the rogue wave that had once threatened his boat, Contender. He turned to it and thought, this is the one to bodysurf. Let me be damned. Let the ocean consume me. Let the reef, fishes, and sharks tear my dead flesh to shreds.

  When the heaving wave arrived and began to hit the reef, he swam into it using all his strength. A moment later the surging wall of water caught him, and he slid down the top of the crest, bodysurfing with one arm in front of him. He kicked hard and tried to turn down its face to angle into the barrel. But the breaker sucked inward; its thick lip shot out and sent Jethro skimming twenty-five feet to the bottom, partly in the air, partly on the water's surface. His body was like a flat, skipping rock. Soon the tube—big enough to fit a small house inside—enveloped him.

  There was no riding this wave out; bodysurfing always involved wipeouts. Jethro felt the barrel begin to close, the wave begin to roll forward, the power begin to squeeze every inch of air out of itself. It launched him weightless for an instant, as water surged against the reef. He felt the energy all around him, felt his body tighten up, preparing to be pummeled by the ocean and into the razor-sharp volcanic rocks underneath him. An instant later, the force of thousands of tons of water catapulted him into a wall of erupting whitewash.

  Twirling upside down, Jethro Knights cringed at the ruthless pressure on his wounds, on the twisting anatomical structure of his bones. He tried fighting his way to the surface, but the force of the wave pulled him deeper, exploding repeatedly upon itself. Finally, like a canon going off, it jettisoned him directly into the reef. His left torso ripped on a coral head, tearing off his flesh. Next, he slammed his shoulder upon a boulder the size of a refrigerator. Then he was dragged upon the reef, his knees banging against toothed rocks. His face grimaced upon the impacts, a noise emanating from the pressure in his air pipes each time he was battered.

  The unrelenting wave dragged and tossed him, slashing him apart against the coral. Eventually, it pulled him over a hundred feet across the bottom, finally trapping him, cramming him into a tight crevice, claiming him its prisoner. Jethro direly needed oxygen in his lungs. But there was no way to the surface. Instead, the swarming water pressure around him began forcing seawater into his esophagus. His brain flashed panic, his mind screamed. His subconscious freakishly began repeating the clicking noise of a landmine. It echoed in his ears. The wave and the ocean were not going to release him. Dizziness engulfed him. His equilibrium failed. His mind told him the end was coming. The end of everything.

  At that exact moment, from the most elemental part of his existence, from the deepest reaches of his being, from the very fabric of his DNA, something reignited in Jethro Knights. Something profound, intrinsic, and ancient. Like a flame that shoots and expands across the thick surface of gasoline, exploding into every molecule around it. This flame challenged the greatest danger of his life—and soundly defeated it. The pain and confusion in him caused by Zoe’s death was smothered by it. The hurt and sadness were muted by it. They each began receding, dissipating. A far-reaching primal force found its way back into his psyche, back into his spirit, back into every cell of his body. Jethro desperately yearned for life, for power, for air into his lungs, for his mind to control and triumph over his physical surroundings—for the universe that only his own will forged.

  The feeling to die of non-effort, to tap the void, to embrace pain, of confusion and loss, and of directionless paths, was now dead in him. After almost two minutes underwater, he discovered the strength to overcome the pressure of the waves, to free his body from the vicelike grip of the tiny cave in which he was stuck. Reaching his hands outside the crevice and grabbing onto the jagged reef, he flexed every muscle of his fingers to secure a sure grip—then slowly, painstakingly, ripped his entire body out. Blood, from the tearing of his skin on rocks, colored the water. When his legs were finally free, he used them to push himself off the reef, and swam towards the light. The tumbling of the ocean’s breakers joined him, aiding his burst to the surface. His first breath was an announcement to the Earth, to the universe, that he was back; that he was going home to embrace his evolution, to wage his war, to fight for something that was as innate as life itself.

  On the shore, he felt his wounds reopen. He licked his blood, felt his sweat mix with the rain and salt. He thought it should remind him of Zoe, but it didn't. It reminded him of something else, of something more important. Far more important. It reminded him of himself. Of his own mortality. Of his own life and death.

  He thought, I'm healing. I’m being restored.

  Eight hours later, he boarded a plane for Silicon Valley, ready to engage in his transhuman quest again. He wasn’t sure how he was going to win his battle against mortality and the anti-transhumanists, but that wasn't important just then. The only thing that mattered, he promised himself, was that he wasn't going to give in—not for one more goddamn second.

  Chapter 23

  Back in Palo Alto at Transhuman Citizen's headquarters, Jethro Knights pushed himself with renewed vigor, working twenty-hour days. He rarely slept in his apartment anymore, only in the office. He kept a sleeping bag under his desk. It was just easier, especially because the sheets and pillows at home still smelled like Zoe Bach. Sometimes his secretary would find him at 8:0
0 in the morning, bundled on his couch. She would brew him coffee. He would rise and immediately start working again, saying only, “Thank you, Janice.”

  A third of Jethro’s fifty-person staff had quit immediately after the conference bombing. The NFSA contacted his remaining employees a week later, warning them that criminal charges might ensue if they continued working at Transhuman Citizen or for any other transhumanist group. This forced many workers to reconsider their loyalty to transhumanism. Even if some employees chose to stay, each worried about whether Transhuman Citizen would survive another six months—and if it did, whether they would still have a job with it. Jethro promised each of them they would, emphasizing that their organization still had plenty of money for operations and workers’ salaries. He also assured them the NFSA would need to go through a lengthy legal procedure to arrest anyone or shut down their group.

  Despite his assurances, every day more of his team chose to quit. Jethro individually pulled many of them aside, asking them to bear with him a little longer until the plan to move abroad was finalized and launched. But over the next month, threats of jail time, pressing home mortgages, health insurance bills, and safer job opportunities ultimately took most of his employees away. Some NFSA officials stooped so low they called his employees in the middle of the night and threatened them. The editor of the Transhumanist Monthly quit after he found a picture of his family taped to a hand grenade in his mailbox.

  The government made hostile efforts to bring down the operational side of Transhuman Citizen too. They publicly canceled federal contracts and grants with scientists and their universities who were in any way linked with Jethro’s group. Those transhuman associates and their establishments then canceled their own agreements with Transhuman Citizen, saying that work and research were impossible to accomplish. Jethro asked those clients and colleagues not to quit just yet, explaining that an exciting new plan for transhumanism was being developed. Many wouldn’t listen. The pressure was too intense. People complained loudly, telling him outright they didn’t want to end up like him—with their loved ones murdered.