To Be a Machine

by Mark O'Connell

  “Roen Horn,” he said. “Do you want to live forever?”

  “I’m not sure that I do,” I said, feeling the slender bones of his hand as I received it in my own.

  “Well, why not?” he said. “Do you want to die? Do you think death is a good thing?”

  “These are tricky questions,” I said. “Can I think about them on the bus and get back to you?”

  This Roen Horn, I learned as we walked down the eerily deserted main street, was a volunteer for Zoltan’s campaign, a zealous advocate of radical life extension who was also making a documentary about the Immortality Bus. This latter vehicle of transcendence was currently moored in the parking lot of a nearby Bank of America. The immediate plan, Zoltan told me, was to drive out into the desert to White Sands Missile Range, the largest military installation in America, where he intended to stage a protest highlighting the need to divert public money away from weapons spending and into life extension.

  The Wanderlodge was an even odder spectacle than I had anticipated—a great brown absurdity with the words “IMMORTALITY BUS WITH TRANSHUMANIST ZOLTAN ISTVAN” neatly hand-painted in white across the length of its midsection. On the rear of the bus were painted the words “SCIENCE VS THE COFFIN.” To the roof was affixed a construction of inward-slanting wooden boards, likewise brown, on top of which in turn rested an elaborate arrangement of synthetic flowers. The effect of all this was not un-coffin-like, but it helped to know what you were supposed to be looking at.

  Within were all the trappings and creature comforts of a mid-range 1970s bachelor pad: a kitchenette equipped with ice machine and microwave oven, a dining table, ample bench-style seating for on-road lounging, and, toward the rear, two narrow bunks and a bathroom (nonfunctional). Orange shag pile carpeting featured throughout.

  The thing was roadworthy, more or less—as long as you didn’t drive it uphill at too steep a gradient, and as long as you pulled in every ninety minutes or so to change the engine oil, which leaked out the side at a truly dramatic rate. This steady leakage was a concern for Zoltan, not just with respect to the long-term health prospects of the Immortality Bus, but more urgently the likelihood of our getting pulled over on the freeway by a traffic cop, something that, given the conspicuousness of the vehicle, seemed a nontrivial prospect.

  The difficulties began about half an hour outside Las Cruces. As the freeway slung a wide loop around the jagged foothills of the Organ Mountains, the sound of the engine, striving to haul us uphill, had become an alarmingly shrill rasp. We were maxing out now at about 35 mph, and Zoltan’s hulking form was bent low over the wheel, as he eyed the dashboard’s archaic array of mysterious dials.

  “We look to be overheating pretty bad,” he said. “I’ve never seen it this far into the red. And this isn’t even a particularly big hill. We could have a problem here, gentlemen.”

  It was Zoltan’s custom to address Roen and me, collectively, as “gentlemen”—a verbal gesture that was more comradely than formal.

  Upward trajectories were best avoided, he explained, on account of a cruel little paradox at work in the ancient mechanics of the Wanderlodge: the longer you went uphill, the harder the engine had to strain to move the bus at even a sluggish pace; and the slower you went, the less air circulated from outside to cool the engine, thereby perpetuating the vicious circle of overheating.

  Another, simpler, way of putting this would be to say that the radiator fan was fucked.

  We crested the hill and began to pick up speed on the downward slope. The engine’s whining descended somewhat in pitch, and I was newly confident that we were no longer about to grind to a halt in the desolate heat of the desert.

  “That’s a relief,” I said.

  “Actually,” said Zoltan cheerfully, “it’s far more dangerous coming downhill, because we’re relying on forty-year-old brake pads here. This bus, you have to just take it slow, because there’s no way to guard yourself against bad brakes.”

  In the light of this new information, I felt we could have been taking it a fair amount slower than we were. I recalled with some discomfort that the man driving the vehicle had invented the sport of volcano boarding, presumably as a way of solving, in one deft move, the problems of the insufficient riskiness of both snowboarding and hanging out on the slopes of active volcanoes. Although I was not sure that I wanted to live forever, I was sure that I didn’t want to go down in a blaze of chintzy irony, plunging into a ravine strapped into the passenger seat of a thing called the Immortality Bus.*

  Between the driver and passenger seats there was a large, raised, shag-pile-carpeted area, which I was using to lay out my various writerly impedimenta—voice recorder, notebook, pens, and so forth. This, it turned out, housed the Wanderlodge’s actual engine. At one point, Zoltan decided that it might ameliorate the overheating issues if he opened this up to “let the engine breathe.” Due to its busted air-conditioning unit, the cabin of the Wanderlodge was already pretty hot, but as soon as we lifted the lid of this housing, the whole interior was quickly transformed into a sort of hellish, hurtling sauna, heated by the searing petroleum fumes that emanated from the roaring shag-pile maw of the open engine unit.

  I unbuckled myself from the passenger seat, and went to sit on one of the couches, where the blast of heat and smoke from the engine compartment was slightly less intense.

  “I KNOW IT’S NOT PLEASANT!” bellowed Zoltan affably over the near-deafening roar of the engine, “BUT IT’S REALLY HELPING WITH THE OVERHEATING!”

  At length we pulled in to let the engine cool awhile, and Zoltan went outside to change the oil. Roen was recumbent on the long couch to the rear of the driver’s seat, staring impassively at the ceiling, his hands cradling the back of his head. This was to become his default attitude throughout the trip.

  I craned around in my seat and asked him how he’d wound up volunteering for Zoltan’s campaign.

  “I just really don’t want to die,” he said. “I can’t think of anything that would suck more than being dead. So I’m just doing what I can to ensure that life extension science gets the funding it needs.”

  “So what is it you do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean work-wise. When you’re not volunteering for Zoltan.”

  “I run the Eternal Life Fan Club,” he said. “It’s an online organization for people who are serious about living forever. Not, like, five hundred years like a lot of transhumanists. Forever.”

  Like many transhumanists, he was deeply convinced of the importance of Aubrey de Grey’s SENS project. Aubrey was, for Roen, a figure of near-messianic dimensions. Most of what little money Roen raised as a life extension advocate went to supporting SENS.

  He was, too, a huge fan of Laura Deming. When I said that I’d met her, he reacted as though I’d mentioned a film star.

  “She’s a hero to me,” he said. “I love her. She’s out there fighting against death. I use a lot of her quotes as memes.”

  He opened up his laptop and clicked around a while and, by way of evidence, presented me with an image of Laura, posted to his Facebook page, with a quote beneath it: “I want to cure aging. I want to make us all live forever.”

  Roen was twenty-eight, and lived in Sacramento with his father, a recently retired insurance claims adjuster, and his mother, who worked in a movie theater. His parents were devout Calvinists who believed in eternal life in paradise for the elect, and in eternal damnation for the unchosen. His father, who was especially hard-line, was vocal in his conviction that his atheist son was destined for the infernal torments of hell.

  “How does he feel about this whole Immortality Bus thing?” I asked.

  “He’s actually okay with it,” said Roen. “He thinks it’s cool I’m getting to be on TV news and all.”

  —

  The military testing area at White Sands, New Mexico, is a forlorn and silent place, unfurling eastward from the Organ Mountains into the desert solitudes of the Tularosa Basin. It was here tha
t the boundaries of technological possibility, the boundaries of fear, were redrawn by men of science in the last days of the Second World War; it was here, in July of 1945, that the first atomic bomb was detonated, the prototype of the Fat Man plutonium device that was two weeks later delivered from the heavens to the mortals of Nagasaki.

  Just past the security checkpoint at the entrance to the facility, there was a kind of open-air munitions exhibit that featured a squat replica of the Fat Man, along with dozens of other decommissioned rockets and bombs. In the undulating heat of the desert, these slender tilted obelisks loomed like the inscrutable monuments of an ancient thanatopia, a henge of metal phalluses thrusting skyward in ecstatic communion with the cosmic powers.

  Zoltan removed from his backpack a banner he’d had printed for the occasion and, positioning himself in front of one of the larger rockets, instructed Roen to take a series of photographs of him bearing the unfurled message: “TRANSHUMANIST PARTY PREVENTS EXISTENTIAL RISK.” The intention of the protest, such as it was, was to create a series of images and short videos to be uploaded to Zoltan’s various social media accounts and shared among his many thousands of followers. It was a self-conscious simulacrum of protest; it was politics as content, content as pure form.

  Leaning self-consciously against the Fat Man replica, I scribbled in my notepad. Roen took out his phone, and filmed a six-second Vine video of Zoltan saying “Stop nuclear war! It’s a devastating existential risk!” Then he filmed Zoltan giving another brief speech on the central theme of his campaign: the need to divert government spending away from war and into research on life extension.

  In my notebook, I scrawled Oppenheimer’s famous quotation of Vishnu, preserver of the cosmos: “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”

  Here at White Sands, science made its nearest approach to divine likeness, divine knowledge. Here, with these experiments in celestial violence, humanity came closest to transcending itself, fulfilling itself.

  It was Oppenheimer who gave these nuclear tests the code name Trinity. Asked, years later, why he had chosen this theological designation, he said that he was not entirely sure, but that he felt it had something to do with his love of the metaphysical poetry of John Donne.

  Later that evening, we pulled in off the Interstate and checked into a motel; I stood in the doorway waiting for Zoltan and Roen to get their stuff from the Wanderlodge, and browsed through a stand of leaflets by the entrance. Most of these advertised sites of general touristic interest—the International UFO Museum & Research Center at Roswell, for instance, and PistachioLand, “home of the world’s largest pistachio.”

  There was also a small assortment of Christian pamphlets, and of these I selected one that was simply entitled “Eternity.” It was a prospectus of the apocalypse, published by an outfit called the Gospel Tract and Bible Society. Standing in the empty lobby of the motel, I read of God’s decree that all things shall cease to exist—that “the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up”—and I thought again of the unearthly monument I had walked around that day, the ceremonial circle with its ranged machineries of death.

  I read on, and learned of how I, or my soul, might survive the death of my body and all other worldly things by submitting myself entirely to the Lord. “In all of creation,” I read, “only man, clothed with a changed and immortal body, will make the transition from time into eternity. Man is the only creature who has the ‘breath of life’ (Genesis 2:7), which lives forever as God does.”

  I remembered asking Roen, earlier that day, about how his evangelical upbringing might have informed his belief that he would live forever through science. He’d said there was no longer any need for gods.

  “Science is the new God,” he had said. “Science is the new hope.”

  —

  The Immortality Bus continued its slow, straining progress toward Austin. Now and then we passed a hand-painted sign standing in a field, a gesture of anonymous pride or defiance. A MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN: DEPORT OBAMA. A DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS. Mostly, we passed roadkill. For miles at a stretch, the only landmarks were corpses—foxes, raccoons, armadillos in various states of putrefaction on the margins of the Interstate.

  “Dead animals everywhere,” I scrawled in my notebook. “Vultures omnipresent. (Over-literal?)”

  Both Zoltan and Roen had grown up in deeply devout families, Catholic and Calvinist respectively. Their fervent atheism, their rationalist zealotry, was both an effacement and a continuance of those religious backgrounds. Theirs were souls on fire for science, ablaze with the love of reason and all its works.

  But the cold insistence of science was that nothing was permanent, nothing would last, that everything was ultimately roadkill, including the road itself. The second law of thermodynamics insisted that the universe was in a state of ongoing and nonnegotiable decline. The pen I held in my hand, I noted, was running out of ink. The body with which I moved it was being drawn slowly but inexorably toward death. The Immortality Bus was literally falling apart. The cold insistence of science was that America would not be made great again, and that the sun would one day explode and engulf the Earth, and everything would be vaporized, and Texas would finally and irrevocably be messed with.

  The earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.

  This belief that science would offer us an exemption from our place in this vast panorama of disintegration—of which the rotting armadillos and raccoons, the circling vultures, were only the most immediate manifestations—was a displacement of a fundamentally religious instinct. I thought of the psychoanalytic concept of transference, whereby the patient’s childhood relationship with his or her parents was redirected onto the figure of the analyst. Wasn’t transhumanism precisely that: a wholesale projection of the formative relationship with God onto the figure of Science? Wasn’t all of it—brain uploading, radical life extension, cryonics, the Singularity—a postscript to the oldest of narratives?

  I wrote in my notebook: “All stories begin in our endings.”

  —

  Roen’s austere calorie-restrictive diet, oriented as it was toward maximum longevity, was ill-served by the truck stops and gas stations and drive-thru hamburger repositories of West Texas. And his abstention from alcohol and all other drugs seemed at odds with the general vibes he emanated, his wide-eyed and dreamy affect having given me the initial impression of an archetypal So-Cal stoner type.

  I was coming to see him now as a transhumanist ascetic, a young man who had largely withdrawn from the world so that he might never have to leave it.

  He was a figure out of Dostoevsky. He was, specifically, Alyosha Karamazov, of whom we are told the following in the early pages of The Brothers Karamazov: “As soon as he reflected seriously he was convinced of the existence of God and immortality, and at once he instinctively said to himself: ‘I want to live for immortality, and I will accept no compromise.’ ”

  I learned that, in his parents’ house in Sacramento, Roen slept on the floor of his bedroom, partly because he didn’t want to buy a bed when what little money he had might better be spent on supporting life extension research, but mainly because of an obscure hostility to soft surfaces. (This self-avowed aversion was roundly contradicted by his near-fanatical dedication to couch-based recumbence, as outlined above.)

  We pulled in at a truck stop some hours west of Fort Stockton, took a booth at an all-you-can-eat buffet. At the table next to ours, an immense man, vastly Stetsoned, sat hunched over a Bible, opened to the Book of Job, while working his way methodically downward through a pile of miscellaneous viands, a flourishing ecosystem of meats and slaws and assorted carbs. While Zoltan fielded a call from his irate wife about an overflowing toilet he had failed to repair before setting off across the country to promote immortality, I took the opportunity to quiz Roen about his lifestyle choices.

  “I have to ad
mit,” I said, “I find this whole immortality thing difficult to get behind. Doesn’t your obsession with living eternally actually amount to your being totally imprisoned by death?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But aren’t we all? Isn’t that kind of the whole idea?”

  I told him that I took his point, and we both laughed, a little awkwardly perhaps, and ate our lunches in silence for a while, listening in on Zoltan’s terse exchange with his wife.

  Roen ate with ruminative care, as though apportioning to each mouthful of salad the optimal measure of mastication. Aside from being a strict vegetarian, he seemed to keep his dealings with food to a bare minimum. He rejected meat solely for health reasons, but I couldn’t help but wonder whether on some deeper level it was also a further manifestation of his rejection of death itself, of the animal nature of his body.

  “What are we to make,” asked the psychoanalyst Ernest Becker in his book The Denial of Death, “of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types—biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one’s own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue. Everyone reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to him.”

  It was a deathly business, being alive, being an animal. Nature, for want of a better word, was evil.

  It was late October, and the truck stop was lavishly bedecked with the ghoulish paraphernalia of the season—with miniature plastic jack-o’-lanterns, cotton spiderwebs, wall-mounted witches on broomsticks, and other festive gewgaws. Dangling from the ceiling directly behind Roen’s head was a rubber statuette of Death himself, his skeletal form shrouded in a ragged black cowl, a plastic scythe clutched in his bony little hand. This cartoonish figurine twirled slowly on its nylon string, distracting me with its overblown enactment of bargain-basement ironic foreshadowing.