Transhumanist Wager, The (2 page)

“To Sixteenth and Anderson Streets.
Victoria University. The back entrance,” he said.

The taxi drove off into the
traffic, and in nine minutes he was near the massive walled campus, which
soared over the city’s Upper West Side. Langmore noticed Dr. Nathan Cohen
immediately. On the sidewalk stood a man in a brown trench coat, his face half
hidden by the latest copy of the
USA Daily Tribune
. There was a worn
leather suitcase at his feet. The tall mulatto-skinned man, bone thin, in his early
forties, and still a formidable marathon runner, was hard to miss. His black
hair was an unmistakable natural Afro, shooting four inches in every direction.

I wish he would cut that hair of
his, thought Langmore. The most important scientist for the transhuman
movement, perhaps the world—a wanted man by all accounts—and he distinguishes
himself with that massive hairdo.

Langmore got out of the taxi and
hurried up to Cohen.

“Ready for today?” he asked.

“Morning Preston. I’m ready for
any
day.”

They entered campus through the
heavily guarded East Gate, walking the long way around Falin Hall to get to the
imposing nineteenth-century university rotunda where the town hall forum was
being held. Their route gave them ample distance between the thousands of expected
protestors, many of whom were there on orders from Reverend Belinas, the rising
religious star of the anti-transhumanist opposition. The preacher’s advocacy of
blatant aggression to anything transhuman was rumored to be triggering much of
the recent terrorism in the country. Langmore was visibly paranoid, checking
behind him every fifteen seconds to see if they were being followed. Cohen was
unfazed.

“They want to burn us at the
stake,” Langmore whispered, when he caught a glimpse of the rowdy masses near
the rotunda’s front entrance. Barricaded by dozens of nervous police, an ocean
of screaming, faith-touting protesters thrust incendiary posters into the air.

“Well, we
do
want to kill
their god.”

“I thought you just wanted to clone
it.”

Cohen laughed out loud. Langmore
forced a grin. Two minutes later they walked in through the back entrance of
the rotunda, where security cleared them to their seats.

Chapter 2

Zoe Bach was a gracious woman. Half
Chinese, half English, she had penetrating green eyes and light olive skin. Her
thin black hair danced vibrantly around her petite shoulders when she walked
anywhere. Her long fingers and fragile wrists were caricatures of precision,
her lips the shape of a young tender fig. Her drawn-out body was narrow and
aerodynamic.

Strangely, most people did not
consider Zoe beautiful—she challenged too many stereotypical conventions in
them for that. Instead, they saw her as an archetype of the exotic: a mix of
many worlds, races, cultures. The world’s history beat inside her, its rhythm
subtly intoxicating; her every movement breathed that sense. The lingering
British accent she possessed furthered the impression. People looked at her and
felt slightly bewildered, thrown off by her natural radiance, her unintentional
demeanor, and the unspoken nuances of her being. She created the impression
that she was lighter than air, a phantom visiting from a foreign planet. When
she told them she was an inner-city trauma surgeon, the rabbit hole opened.

As part of her five-year residency
program at San Aliza Medical Center in San Francisco, the finest hospital in
America, her Calcutta-born Chief of Surgery offered her the opportunity to
spend two years in a village called Kundara in Indian Kashmir. The six-decade
war, the longest in the world, left millions of people in need of urgent
medical care. Some villages near the Line of Control had not seen a doctor in a
decade.

“It would be incredible training,
Zoe,” said the Chief of Surgery. “You'd be doing a wide range of operations—from
cranial bullet removal to delivering babies to landmine blast amputations.
Plus, believe it or not, your hours should be a bit easier. You might even find
time for some of that poetry reading you complain about missing.”

“So what's the catch? You look like
you're unsure if you should be suggesting the opportunity to me.”

“I
am
unsure. Even a few
months in this kind of war zone is tough for a military-trained surgeon, let
alone a civilian one. There's a lot of needless suffering—and very few medical
supplies and staff to do much about it. Then there’s the terrorism, which is
often aimed at Westerners. It’s intense, and it can take its toll. But five
years ago, I did the same 24-month stretch and loved every minute of it. It was
one of the best times of my life. Every day I became a better doctor.”

“I'll do it,” Zoe agreed
impulsively, never the type to back down from a challenge.

When her parents found out, they
scolded her. She was an only child. Her parents had put all their energy and
resources into raising her. But they never discovered how to subdue her wild,
wanderlusting side. Her father, from northern England, remained an unmarried
engineer in the Saudi Kingdom for most of his adult life, until at age
fifty-one he met his young wife, Kamakita, aged twenty-seven. She was a
Mandarin translator for a royal Saudi family. The two travelers fell in love
and moved to London. Kamakita gave birth to Zoe, and the family moved to
California a decade later. The father continued working mostly abroad, and Zoe
grew heavily influenced by her mother's pervasive Asian spirituality.
Especially her deep sense of mysticism, which involves the unity and
indestructibility of all life—a classic Eastern concept. Zoe’s other passion
was reading. Throughout her childhood and high school years she surrounded
herself with books, often preferring them over friends. She spent countless
hours in libraries, on deserted beaches, at coffee shops, and in her bedroom
with her door locked, tackling the classics and reading poetry.

She also adored science fiction and
transhuman philosophy. A powerful magnetism toward life extension and human
enhancement science had always gripped her. For Zoe, it was obvious that
humankind was destined to dramatically transform itself in the future via
science; however, her perspective was unlike most transhumanists. She reveled
in contradictions that many rational and science-minded people deemed
intellectual heresy. Zoe saw paradoxical concepts—shades of gray—as a necessary
balance to an often unruly universe full of mystery and surprise. Her
deep-seated mysticism welcomed complex crossovers of many different ideas, even
sweeping metaphysical theories and formal religious beliefs. She liked to think
of her personal philosophy as an all-embracing
transhuman spiritualism
.

At age eighteen, Zoe started at
prestigious Vontage University in Silicon Valley, double majoring in biology
and literature. It was during her junior year that she went to El Salvador and
came to view the world differently; that battle lines between Western
consumerism and humanitarian duties were drawn. When she came back to the
States, she no longer cared for modern-day fashion and materialism, such as
makeup, handbags, or showy high heels. She was
never
big on it. But now,
after seeing so much poverty—made worse by Hurricane Fitch's direct path of La
Liberdad, which ravaged the hospital she volunteered at—she was through with
it. Colleagues came to call her “the tennis shoe woman”
because she
refused to wear anything else on her feet.

“If you don't like my ass and legs
because I don't perk them up with heels and pretend they’re sexier than they
really are, then go to hell,” Zoe once told a date, smiling carelessly. “And
the same goes for my small breasts and the push-up bras I refuse to wear.”

Another date, an orthopedic
surgeon, once asked her why she didn't wear any mascara or lipstick.

“For the same reason you don't,”
she shot back.

It was a good answer, he thought,
not sure what would ever compel him to stand in front of a mirror and color his
face.

El Salvador planted other ideas in
Zoe Bach. In a Third World country where medical supplies are scant, nearly
every surgery is trauma to some extent. She thrived on the intensity.
Additionally, the field of trauma surgery didn’t have many women in it. How
insane, she thought, determined to change that. She spent much of the next year
traveling during her senior year school breaks: Bolivia, Yemen, Zambia; she
volunteered at hospitals' trauma wards.

The following fall, she started
medical school in New York City at Victoria University. In the beginning it was
lunacy: Could she really remember 90,000 five-syllable medical words by the end
of four years? She did. But that challenge was nothing compared to her surgery
residency schedule at San Aliza Medical Center. Her first two years were spent
in a drowsy daze—on call, in the operating ward, half-asleep while standing
against a wall, before she was paged for another emergency. Then, running down
the hall to meet another incoming ambulance, her stethoscope dancing the rumba
around her neck. Everything from industrial accidents to motorcycle crashes to
gunshot wounds. Zoe took it all on. Her beeper was the most constant companion
in her life, its sharp beep the sound of nightmares. Rarely was any work week
under 110 hours. She was one of only three surgeons in the busy residency
program who could claim they never fell asleep during a surgery—and was nudged
awake by a nurse with furrowed eyebrows.

“But twice I've fallen asleep in
the hospital bathroom, peeing,” she admitted to people.

Her residency program worked her to
exhaustion. Then one morning, after pulling a graveyard shift, she walked out
of the hospital in her dirty scrubs. The blaring California sun was almost too
bright for her. She went home, changed, and packed her backpack. On the way to
the airport, in a taxi, she gulped down an anti-malaria tablet. Two hours later
she boarded a plane to Indian Kashmir.

*************

Two months before the Transhumanism
Town Hall Forum, working amidst the ice and snow caking upper Manhattan, Jethro
Knights welded a 100-pound rectangular piece of steel plating to
Contender’s
hull. He was in a boatyard along the Hudson River. His right hand expertly bore
the steady red-hued fire while his left hand fed the molten rod. Jethro’s aged
and gritty goggles—like so many of his tools—came from a pawnshop, bought with
money he had earned from part-time construction jobs on nearby skyscrapers.
Unshaven, he worked through the freezing early spring nights, downing caffeine
pills, and welding endless plates together, syncing a metal skeleton that would
one day face off with hurricanes and take him around the globe.

The boatyard manager—a veteran
seaman—was certain that Jethro would never finish when he rented the yard space
earlier that autumn and had six thousand dollars worth of rusty recycled steel
dumped off. The manager wasn’t the only skeptic. Everyone, from boatyard grunts
with crooked teeth, to mega-yacht owners wearing thousand-dollar shoes, stopped
by to watch Jethro work. Most sneered at his hand-scribed structural drawings
tacked on a rickety desk under his space's huge blue tarp. They snickered while
he worked—some telling him the boat would not sail, others that it wouldn’t
even float.

Jethro, however, rarely listened to
people. Or noticed them at all. Even if he looked a person directly in the eye,
he often failed to recognize anything of utility. Jethro perceived their
presence, the space they took up, the resources they used on his planet. His brain
interpreted the matter and energy they possessed, but unless there was
potential for something useful to him, he may as well have been looking at a
rock, or a weed, or a broken, outmoded piece of furniture in a junkyard. Jethro
only took notice of values, not people.

Most others quickly recognized
this—and despised him for it. It was instinctive for them. Few people wanted to
be judged solely on their usefulness and then be dismissed because they
possessed little or none. They felt immediate enmity and resistance to that
type of harsh machinelike objectivity. A person who viewed the world like that,
they sneered, was neither compassionate nor very human. Of course, Jethro
rarely considered this either—and certainly didn't care. It wasn’t that he was
cold, or even aloof. It was his distinct manner of not making the effort to
care about people with little or no value.

Many years ago—he wasn't sure when
it happened, or if it even happened at all, or if he was just always this
way—Jethro realized he was fundamentally alone in the universe. Even if
billions of people and their cultures and moral aptitudes were critically
judging, pressuring, and expecting something of him, his demeanor remained
totally unaffected. It wasn't that he didn't want to have friends, or like and
even care about other people, it was just that he rarely met any person who
made him feel like he thought he should.

Besides, Jethro knew his boat would
sail—and sail well. He studied the best nautical engineering designs in the
world before building. He spent four weeks at the North Atlantic Yachting
Library poring over the most comprehensive boat construction manuals. He spent
a long weekend combing over the America’s Cup website and its detailed diagrams
of past champion racing yachts. He even bought beers for an old fishing captain
who explained what it took to survive a Category 4 hurricane off Rhode Island
aboard his dated forty-foot crabbing vessel. Jethro scribed notes of everything
important into his journal, methodically devising the ideal sailboat,
determining what materials were most suitable, and assessing possible budget
issues. When he was ready he proceeded, like an expert, to build the strongest,
fastest, most able boat he could.