Transhumanist Wager, The (30 page)

Gregory sighed again, his voice
drained. “I have to go and take Amanda to a public function. My jet is waiting.
I can’t get dragged into all your spiritual grudges. I only got four hours of
sleep last night.”

Gregory was beat. Belinas knew
better then to pursue the matter now. He backed down, muttered some
generalities, told Gregory to stay healthy, and then hung up.

Inside, the preacher was livid. His
anger had been growing for days. But pushing Gregory at this moment was not the
strategy for defeating the transhuman movement. The senator was still only a
puppet. The immediate strategy for the reverend was to personally achieve more
power. Left unchecked, Belinas knew transhuman science and technology could
unravel the course of humanity. It seemed amazing to him that others didn't
recognize the profundity of that possibility and treat it accordingly. Belinas
needed more power so he could use the NFSA to increase pressure on the
transhumanists, to make them live in the unwanted and unproductive state of war
and fear.

The preacher walked outside his
headquarters and crossed the driveway to his impressive seven-story church,
which resembled a cathedral. Inside, he knelt down in the pews. He was alone.
He stared at a life-sized crucifix overlooking a giant white marble altar. His
hands were spread apart, aggressively gripping the bench in front of him. He
focused his mind and began strategizing new ways to implement his war. Most
importantly, he needed the U.S. President to give Senator Michaelson, the NFSA,
and him more resources and legal control to fight the transhumanists. Once that
happened, Belinas decided his primary aim should be to lead the new agency to
entirely outlaw the field of transhumanism—to make it criminal to be a part of
the science and the movement in any way. Just like Jethro Knights believed with
his philosophy, Belinas knew there could be no middle ground.

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.