To Be a Machine

by Mark O'Connell

  “What we’re trying to do,” said Zoltan, “we’re trying to promote using science to end aging and death. We work with some scientists who are really close to stopping the progress of aging. It sounds crazy, I know, but it’s true. I’m actually one of the leading third party candidates in America. Our party is called the Transhumanist Party.”

  “What does ‘transhumanist’ mean?” asked Shane.

  “Well, it means a lot of things. Not dying is one of them. A lot of us want to evolve into machines. My father, for instance, had four heart attacks in quick succession quite recently. That sort of thing wouldn’t happen to people if we were machines.”

  “Right on,” said Shane, politely. “I could get behind that.”

  He talked and listened a little longer, then excused himself to continue his journey eastward. He couldn’t linger too long at any rest area, he explained, because his progress and speed were closely monitored by an onboard computer in his vehicle, which reported back to his employers, alerting them if he had stopped for longer than the permitted time, or if he was going faster than the permitted speed to make up for those lost minutes and hours. I thought for a moment that he might have been making a subtle point about the extent to which capitalism had already evolved many of us into machines, or even alluding to an imminent future in which his aforementioned employers would replace him with self-driving technology, but as he hauled himself into the cab of his truck and waved back at us, I decided that he had probably not been making any such finely insidious point. He seemed like more of a straight-shooting type of guy.

  —

  “What do you say,” asked the newsman, “to people who accuse you of trying to play God?”

  We were standing in a lavishly tree-lined street in the upscale residential neighborhood where the campaign event was about to take place, and Zoltan was being interviewed for Austin TV news. He was dressed in a shirt and slacks, his hair combed meticulously back from his high-domed forehead.

  “I would agree that we are, in fact, trying to play God,” he said.

  It was to me that he said this—or at any rate it was at me he was looking when he said it. The bearded and lavishly perspiring cameraman, who was double-jobbing as a reporter, had requested that I stand to one side of him as he did so; Zoltan would, in this way, appear to be addressing a dedicated news reporter, rather than a guy who, presumably because of budget cuts, had been forced to do two jobs simultaneously.

  And so although it was me he was looking at, he was, more properly, speaking to the television viewers of Austin and, beyond that, to the people of the Internet, the unseen demos of clicks and engagements. The experience was vaguely uncanny, as though I myself had ceased to exist, had dissolved into a vacancy through which the world itself could be addressed.

  This was a thing that had been happening to me lately. I had started to see myself as a mechanism through which signals were passed. I would be sitting on the bus, jotting down snatches of conversation in my notebook, details of scenery or sensation, and I would see myself as a primitive device, a machine for the recording and processing of information. I would be at the checkout in a cavernous Walmart, paying for snacks, and I would see myself as one of many millions of mechanisms in a vast and mysterious system for the upward transfer of wealth. I knew, of course, that this was the result of my overexposure to mechanistic ideas, but on some level I recognized that I had always seen myself in this way. Nothing is stranger to man, as Čapek put it, than his own image. Nothing is stranger than that which is most familiar.

  “And what made you decide to run for president?” asked the cameraman who was also a reporter.

  “I believe,” said Zoltan, “that we should take technology as far as it can take us.” His hand gestures had the practiced decisiveness of a real-deal politician; in the presence of the camera, as he gazed unblinkingly into my eyes, he had taken on a plausibly presidential aura; he seemed, suddenly, a vast physical presence, a great hollow monument to his own significance.

  “And that includes,” he said, “becoming technology ourselves. At some point, we are going to become more machines than human beings. That’s what my presidential campaign is advocating for. That’s the conversation I’m trying to start.”

  A cluster of young men approached us. They were part of the Austin biohacker group, and they were here for the campaign event. They had names like Alec, Avery, and Shawn; they were, for transhumanists, a startlingly frat-brovian contingent, all laid-back Texan vibes, loose-fitting vests, hypertrophied upper bodies.

  Roen received them in his usual manner, by avoiding traditional greetings in favor of immediate interrogation as to their stance on eternal life.

  “I’m down,” said the guy called Alec, as though Roen had just asked him if he wanted to go in on an ounce of weed. “Let’s do it. Let’s make it happen. Life is awesome.”

  “Right?” said Roen. He glanced meaningfully at me, a look that I took as mild admonishment for previous exchanges in which I’d expressed reservations about absolute judgments on the awesomeness of life.

  “Got a lot to accomplish, man,” said Alec. “I can’t be dying at eighty. I need at least two hundred years to get my shit done. Maybe two-fifty.”

  “Right? I mean, when you see a really old person, what do you think?”

  “I think it sucks, is what I think,” said Alec. “I think that can’t be very enjoyable.”

  We went through into the house where the event was to take place, a small split-level open-plan that was almost entirely devoid of furniture. I was given to understand that the place was shared by a loose cohort of biohackers; it was not apparent who did and did not live there, but it seemed to be a kind of transhumanist commune, or futurist frat house. Even for an event of this sort, the gathering was overwhelmingly male.

  As we entered the sunken living area, we squeezed past a tall and powerfully built man wearing a baseball cap and tightly fitted T-shirt. He was swigging a beer, talking to a smaller man with pink-striped hair and multiple facial piercings. The tall dude had a lazy drawl, and was leaning against the doorframe with the informal facility of a ranch hand taking his ease against a fence.

  “Man,” he was saying, “the dude was just real stoked about the code, so I totally let him into the GitHub.”

  A long-haired young guy wearing an intricately embroidered Indian-style shirt introduced himself as the organizer of the Biohack Austin group. His name, he said, was Machiavelli Davis, though we were warmly encouraged to call him Mac. He was originally from Singapore, and he was a biology graduate student at the University of Texas.

  While Zoltan went through the particulars of the evening’s speeches with him, I wandered over to a table where a man in flip-flops and a T-shirt with a cartoon of a beer wearing sunglasses was futzing with a complicated-looking device. The device was composed of a small aluminum suitcase, and featured many wires and electromagnetic relays, along with amorphous lumps of magnesium and plastic cups of water. The man, whose name was Jason, told me that the whole setup was a prototype of a product he was developing called Heliopatch, which he described as a “functional life extension pod.” In combination with the user’s body, he said, the device functioned as a battery, with the magnesium patch acting as an anode and the user’s body as a cathode. When the patch was applied, the magnesium corroded, he said, releasing electrons and positive ions into the body, thereby neutralizing the free radicals that caused cell damage, and reducing the aging process. A while back, he told me, he’d implanted a small magnesium patch into the inside of his left cheek, and kept it there for a month. He then asked a bunch of friends which side of his head had less gray hair. “They were all like, definitely the left side,” he said. “Every single one of them.”

  The living room was getting crowded now, and Machiavelli had started giving a speech. He was saying something I didn’t quite catch about having spent some months in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand. Then he said something else about how the time in which we
were living would see one of the most massive changes in human history; everything, he said, was “set up and ready to fall.” The rise of the biohacking movement, he said, of people’s ability to edit genes and augment their bodies, would be the defining influence on this generation, and the generations to come. A couple of weeks from now, he said, he was organizing a trip out to the desert with the Biohack Austin group. The plan was for everyone to take a vision-enhancing eyedrop solution—a special formula made from a molecule called chlorin E6, found in the eyes of certain deep-sea fish, which amplified photonic signals to the brain by a factor of two—and to gaze at the light of the stars with superhuman sight. This experiment, he said, had been successfully conducted with rats, and he and his fellow biohackers would be the first humans to experience it.

  “What humanity does,” he said, “is experiment with itself. It’s something we have a birthright to do. That, to me, is what freedom means: to practice liberty with your own body and mind.”

  Zoltan picked up this thread in his own fluent and apparently unscripted speech. History was being created, he said, with this movement, with this campaign, which was not about getting votes, but about raising awareness of the coming Singularity, and the importance of living long enough to experience it. He believed, he said, in morphological freedom—in the absolute and inalienable right of people to do whatever they wanted with their bodies, to become more than human.

  “I look forward,” he said, “to the day when we can use technology to make ourselves more machinelike.”

  We hung around for an hour or so afterward, and Zoltan spoke to some people who were making a documentary about transhumanism, and a woman from a magazine who’d come to interview him. At some point Roen gave an impromptu speech of his own. He delivered this oration “in character” as a generic hipster, wearing a pair of black-framed glasses, and a slightly strained knowing smirk on his face. This was a role he’d been tinkering with in the videos he’d uploaded to the Eternal Life Fan Club’s Facebook page over the course of the campaign.

  “You guys aren’t mainstream,” he said to the assembled biohackers, most of whom seemed mildly perplexed by the performance. “You still have your childlike imaginations. If you want to take your non-mainstream-ness to the next level, you’re gonna have to live forever. You know what the most mainstream thing ever is? Dying. Dying is totally mainstream. Being dead in the ground is totally mainstream. Vote for Zoltan if you want to live forever!”

  I’d seen this performance of Roen’s before, and had advised him that it was a little too broad in its depiction of the hipster trope—that it seemed like more of a caricature of a caricature than a representation of any actual person, and that, furthermore, the injection of performative irony into his delivery tended to obscure the absolute earnestness of his message. But right now, perhaps because of the unusually strong homebrew beer I was drinking, I was enjoying it immensely, and I felt a strange tenderness for him swelling in my chest, an almost fraternal instinct of protection, very much at odds with any properly journalistic imperatives.

  I had agreed with practically nothing that had come out of his mouth in the entire time we’d spent together. He was as strange a person as I had ever met, and I had met a great many strange people over the past year and a half. I found myself hoping that he would not be disillusioned, that he would maintain, as long as he lived, the sense of his own exemption from death. His very belief that existence was rendered meaningless by death was, I thought, precisely what seemed to afford his life a sense of purpose, a sense of direction. This, in the end, was why humans would always look for meaning, and would always find it in some or other variety of religion. You do what you can with the strangeness of being here, for the time being.

  As soon as the media people had moved on, Zoltan wanted to hit the road; the party was still building momentum, but he had an early flight the next morning to Miami, where he had a corporate speaking engagement, and he needed to pilot the Wanderlodge to a place across town where he’d arranged, through the good offices of Machiavelli, to park it until the next leg of the tour. And so he completed a valedictory round of handshakes, and then we boarded the Immortality Bus once more.

  An hour or so later, we were in the backyard of an empty house on the far outskirts of the city, waiting for a cab to come and take us to our respective hotels. Zoltan and I were drinking the last of the Immortality Bus’s booze stash, a bracingly potent vodka whose bottle featured a flashing digital display, a Jetsons-like vision of the future of vodka bottles. I was feeling a little light-headed from the booze, and from the small amount of weed I’d smoked at the party before remembering I hated smoking weed, and so I climbed down into the yard to take the air. The night was warm and fragrant, and alive with the gentle chirping of crickets. I stared up at the stars, feeling pleasantly out of it. It was good to be outside, to be in the world, to be a living animal.

  The more I listened, the more urgent the chirping of the crickets seemed to become. I remembered then having read something in the news a couple of weeks previously about a cricket infestation in the plains of the southwestern states that had been particularly intense in the area around Austin. The swelling of the insects’ numbers had to do with the summer having been unusually cool, and unusually wet. Crickets were impelled to mate, apparently, by a cooling of the air, which forewarned them, on some primordial level, of their own impending death. The chirping I was listening to, I now realized, was the sound of thousands of male animals expressing their urge to reproduce, in the instinctive knowledge of their own approaching demise. The sound seemed to be intensifying, and to be coming at once from everywhere and nowhere, to be generated by the night itself.

  I heard the chirp of Zoltan’s phone from across the yard. Our cabdriver calling, probably. I breathed in deeply, assimilating the warm and complicated air, the fragrant night. In my tipsy state, it seemed outright implausible that all of this would one day be beyond my reach, that one day I would die and never again breathe this air, or hear these sounds—crickets, traffic, words, vibrating phones: the interwoven signals of animals and machines—or feel the hopeful surge of alcohol in my blood, the world advancing its uncertain promise. It seemed ludicrous to think that this was it: just this once, and never again.

  I heard the hollow slam of the Immortality Bus’s door, and Zoltan calling my name. Our cab had pulled up at the curb. I took a last look at the looming apparition of the bus, the great brown sarcophagus of the American highway, and was momentarily taken by the facile charm of its standing as a metaphor for life itself: an incomprehensible and futile journey, in a vast coffin-shaped recreational vehicle, out of one nowhere into some other. I walked toward the street, toward Zoltan and Roen, deciding to tell them about this life-as-coffin-bus idea, and to tell them that I was glad to have been on this journey for a while, whatever it meant or did not mean. But by the time I got to the car and slid in beside Roen, Zoltan was already sitting up front, passionately laying out the coordinates of the posthuman future to our cabdriver, and the moment had passed.

  * * *

  * Some version of this thought occurred to me several times a day throughout my time on the bus. For all that Zoltan railed against the tyranny of death over human lives, and for all that his political platform rested on the conceit that physical immortality was within our grasp as a species, his attitude toward basic road safety was at times wildly cavalier. The fact that he was piloting a forty-three-foot coffin bus through West Texas did not, for instance, stop him from checking his phone every couple of minutes—responding to texts and emails, checking the social media analytics on his latest piece for TechCrunch, etc. There was even, one evening, a brief and spirited burst of drunk driving, from the parking lot of a Fort Stockton fast-food restaurant (where he’d enjoyed several generous whiskeys with his evening meal) to our nearby motel. This infraction—of both federal law and the spirit of life extension—he justified by pointing out that the steering on the bus was so unresponsive that e
ven if your driving was somewhat erratic, the vehicle’s trajectory tended to remain relatively steady anyway. For his part, for a guy who was motivated in everything he did by an overwhelming terror of death, Roen seemed weirdly reluctant to put a seat belt on. He spent most of our road trip lying faceup on the couch behind the driver’s seat, which position seemed to me to fly in the face of not just basic road safety, but also his own frequently stated life goals. I found myself thinking of a New Yorker profile of Peter Thiel that noted his failure to wear a seat belt while driving his sports car around the freeways of the Bay Area. All of this seems especially odd, given the seat belt’s well-known efficacy as a life extension technology.

  A Short Note on Endings and Beginnings

  IT SO HAPPENED, not long after my time among the transhumanists had come to an end, that I was lying on a hospital gurney and gazing at a large computer screen on which the interior of my body was displayed. I was looking, specifically, at the fleshy lining of my colon, and I was pleased, in a detached sort of way, to note its cleanliness. The twenty-four hours I had endured without food, and the barbarously effective series of laxatives I’d been prescribed, had established my interior surfaces as ready for prime time. I was in a position to note these things with detachment, rather than horror, because I had just been given a dose of an extremely potent synthetic opiate.

  “Could you turn on your side please? Toward the screen, yes. And pull your knees up toward your chest. There we go.”

  I had been told that this dosage would cause me to sleep throughout the colonoscopy, but this was not the case. I felt I could have slept had I wanted to, had I just closed my eyes and allowed myself to drift, but I found that I was not unhappy to be awake. I was looking at the inside of myself on a screen, and I was feeling at peace for the first time in weeks—for the first time since seeing the blood in the toilet bowl; since hearing my doctor say I needed a colonoscopy; since being confronted with the possibility of bowel cancer—the possibility that, far from being midway on the journey of my life, I might in fact be nearing its end.