The Transhumanist Wager by Zoltan Istvan Copyright (c) 2013 Futurity Imagine Media LLC Published by Futurity Imagine Media LLC This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, business establishments, or locales is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Cover Design: Zoltan Istvan ISBN#: 978-0-9886161-1-0 Praise for Zoltan Istvan's writing and work: "Congratulations on an excellent story—really well written, concise, and elegant." Editor, National Geographic News Service "Istvan is among the correspondents I value most for his...courage." Senior Editor, The New York Times Syndicate "Thank you—you did a great interview for us." Producer, BBC Radio "Travel! Intrigue! Cannibals! Extreme journalism at far ends of Earth!" Headline featuring Zoltan Istvan, San Francisco Chronicle PART I Chapter 1 The Three Laws: 1) A transhumanist must safeguard one's own existence above all else. 2) A transhumanist must strive to achieve omnipotence as expediently as possible—so long as one's actions do not conflict with the First Law. 3) A transhumanist must safeguard value in the universe—so long as one's actions do not conflict with the First and Second Laws. —Jethro Knights' sailing log / passage to French Polynesia ************ Jethro Knights growled. His life was about to end. A seventy-foot wall of shifting blue with a million tons of water was veering down on him. It was the largest wave of the hurricane—what scientists and sea captains call a rogue. He watched the wave steepen, the wind lines near the lip combing the sky, painting an arch of dark rainbow hues far above his yacht's mast. He calculated how much time he had left before the wave consumed him. Maybe ten seconds, he thought, aghast. His pupils tightened. Around him, the smoky evening sky was burying the day. Frosty white spray tore off the water and exploded with the force of cannoned sandpaper. The 24-year-old sailor felt its sting all over his naked body. He wore only a yellow safety harness, which was attached to a rope wrapped around a cleat on the mast. It was a last resort to keep him tied to his yacht in case the ocean swept him overboard. On his face was nine months of Viking-red beard growth. In the soaring wind, it tangled with his salty blond locks. His tall sun-scorched body swung in the motion, hanging between two taut muscular arms. Those arms bore vein-ripped hands, which tightened on the yacht’s twisting wire stanchions. The stanchions stretched through the air like violin strings, bound from the swaying steel island underneath him to the towering mast above. The trough of those mountainous, cobalt-blue swells repeatedly charged and swooned, swallowing his boat, then pushing it out, then swallowing it again. Everything was alive, caught in movement, caught in tension—either growing in power or waiting for demise. Forty-eight hours before, two Southern Hemisphere storms, an out-of-season tropical depression and a cold front’s low-pressure system, collided 500 miles north of New Zealand. They merged into a superstorm. Last night, the hurricane—named Talupa, or “wind of death,” in ancient Samoan dialect— graduated from Category 4 to Category 5. Islanders in the South Pacific, from Tahiti to the Solomon Islands, were warned to prepare for the century’s worst storm. Winds were forecast to gust over 200 miles per hour. Jethro’s thirty-four-foot steel sloop, Contender, was slugging north in the tempest's epicenter. His main and jib sails were reefed to the size of napkins. For the past twelve hours he pushed towards the equator, trying to avoid the hurricane's eye. But the storm grew too large, too quickly. Escape was now impossible. The 1000-mile-wide hurricane caught Contender in its left rear quadrant—known to sailors as the “kill-zone” because it blows stronger than the other quarters; seas were the most chaotic here. Ships of any size and quality rarely survived winds of that speed in the open ocean. Until now, Jethro's confidence had waned little. He believed his boat was all but indestructible. His yacht was designed with the same ultimate resolution he held for himself in life: survival at any cost. Three years ago, just before graduating from college, Jethro meticulously welded Contender together for five months in New York City. He knew every millimeter of the sailing vessel, every point of stress, every calculus and geometric equation used to create it. The boat was painstakingly constructed to withstand the greatest of pressures, in the worst of circumstances, while maintaining the maximum integrity of its purpose. Earlier that day, Jethro chose not to leave the cabin of Contender. He preferred to huddle inside his bunk, tied in by a net, trying to read a text on transhuman philosophy. Inside the boat, cooking pots rudely flung themselves around, books floated in the bilge, and two galley windows were cracked and leaking badly. His batteries had shorted themselves out in the wetness, rendering his electronics useless and the engine impossible to start. Regrettably, Jethro knew he would have to go topside before nightfall to inspect for cracks in the rigging. Safety checks simply had to be done. Many of the hits the ocean delivered that day were staggering. Damage was inevitable. Complicating his pending task was the bloody pus oozing from his face, impairing his vision, swelling his skin. It was the result of an injury sustained two days ago after a massive wave had broadsided the boat and Jethro raced out to inspect Contender. A snapped mast wire swaying in the wind caught the upper left section of his face, slashing it deeply and chipping the cheekbone. He was lucky not to have lost an eye. Hundreds of miles from land, with nothing but a drenched short-circuited radio, there was no one to call, no one to help him. He was alone in the storm, alone in the world. He downed two codeine tablets for pain and tried stitching the wound himself. The rocking of the boat made it impossible to sew without the risk of jamming the needle into his eye. He considered supergluing the gash shut, but decided it was easier to fasten a large safety pin through the sliced skin to hold it together. The trickle of viscous crimson pus from the exposed flesh was nonstop. The bandages he had put over it were sliding off, refusing to stick. Going outside now would only rip the skin farther apart, making it flap like a sail in raging winds. Despite it all, at 6 P.M., he forced himself out of bed to do the rigging checks. He stumbled down the gangway, then held on carefully to the galley sink and ladder as he lifted himself topside. Before he went out he hoped for a break in the storm, as often happens at dusk. For the first two minutes, while he cautiously maneuvered around the deck of the boat, it appeared he might get it. Then the ocean's horizon revealed where its energy was feeding—fifty meters away a colossal wave, a seven-story anomaly, was peaking and descending on him. His sloop looked like an infant's toy. Jethro growled again, his muscles tensing. He was not afraid, just furious. Furious with his luck. With his timing. With his fate. He hated fate. And this moment was exactly why. He could've been anywhere on the ocean, but he was exactly here: the nadir of a sailor’s once-in-a-lifetime storm. Damn the dice of the universe, he cursed to himself. With only seconds left before the cresting mammoth wave struck, he packed his lungs full of oxygen, taking three rapid breaths followed by one deep, slow, final inhalation. Then he bit down on his lips to shut them tight and forced air pressure into his nasal cavity to keep the water out. Lastly, he wrapped his arms and legs like a pretzel around the mast’s stanchions, squeezing every muscle he could around everything his body touched. His final thought before the cascading ocean consumed him was: Is survival possible? ************ It was impossible to tell what collided first: the man or the rest of the universe. Everything disappeared under the exploding seventy-foot wave, under the blistering sea, into the crashing storm, into a bursting tempest of various color blues. The mast twitched under impact, then flipped upside down with the boat—the start of a sailor’s death roll. Jethro Knights held on, violently clutching the yacht’s stanchions with his hands and limbs. Around him, the swarming ocean tugged on his flexing muscles. Underwater and upside down, gravity vanished. Only the rush of water controlled matter now. The moving mass, like a thundering tsunami, tried to unfasten Jethro’s grip. His fingers told his brain they were slipping; his brain told his fingers he was going to bite them off if they failed. They re-tightened. His will was like the yacht's stainless steel stanchions, even stronger. His right to life—to always stay alive—was a right unto itself. There was the universe and then there was that right. This was a man whose overriding sense of self screamed to conquer, to bend the universe around his will.