I will have more to say at the end of the year (which will be 52 stories, not 50) about my thoughts and feelings on the body of work I’ve put together so far. For now I’ll just say that 50 stories does feel like a big number, and that I am extremely grateful for every reader I have, and especially for those who read every week, and especially especially for those who like, comment, and share. Your time and attention mean an inexpressible amount to me. Now, enjoy!
Ship of Theseus
Today, I will become Transcendent. This day is one hundred and four years in the making, and I can remember all but the first three. Those are fully gone but the rest have been recovered and I have them, like shells picked up from a beach stored on a mantle in a glass jar for the admiration of all who pass. What a life it has been, and it is only beginning. As a fully Transcendent being, there is no reason I could not live another thousand years and beyond, barring civilizational collapse. One day I will die, of course. Even Transcendence cannot stop time, cannot stop entropy, cannot give more fuel to the stars.
No matter. Not Forever is still a very, very long time, enough for many jars full of shells above the fire.
*
It started on Highway 1, the PCH, or Pacific Coast Highway, a ribbon of concrete stretched alongside the most beautiful coastline in the world, and also a road course of legend for bikers everywhere, who have been proving their mettle on its twists and turns since it was built.
Hunter S. Thompson wrote about riding on this highway, whiskey-drunk, turning the front lights off and steering by the wind in his face and pure instinct. I read that passage in high school, and it came off the pages at me like a blast of hot summer central California air, and I knew then that one day, I would blaze down that highway, just like Hunter had.
Ten years later I was on a Triumph Speed Twin 1200, pure adrenaline on two wheels, thrumming like a savage jungle cat between my legs, roaring out of turns almost before I throttled like it knew what it was made to do. I wasn’t thinking about Hunter because I wasn’t thinking about fuck-all but the hundred yards in front of me and keeping it between the lines. There’s no describing the level of focus you can achieve when you’re that close to death but fully expect to live if you don’t fuck up.
This was late at night, almost the witching hour, way south of San Fran past Pescadero, the straightest and emptiest part of the highway. Easy riding, even if the highway’s never as empty as it was in Hunter’s day. I think that’s why I eased up a little, let that jungle cat have its head more than I should have.
And as cats everywhere can attest, just when things are going well, there’s always a dog to come along and ruin an otherwise decent day. This one happened to run out into the road in front of me, picking that moment for no apparent reason when there was any other moment on any other day it could have picked. It was a street dog, with that characteristic mixed-breed look, small in the hindquarters, no body mass wasted so it could survive on minimal calories.
I didn’t have the lights off, in fact I always thought Hunter must have been lying about that, but still, the damn thing never saw me. I sure saw it, though. I tried to hit it square and just plow through to stay upright, but my hands twitched to the side on instinct, saving its life without me even thinking about it, and I passed a dick-length away to the outside, before oversteering back into the oncoming lane.
Street dog ran away to poop another day, as far as I know. I laid it down right in front of an oncoming truck, which itself swerved off the road to avoid me and got into an accident that resulted in the truck being totaled and my insurance company compensating the other driver for resulting neck pain.
It seemed to go so slow past me, I had plenty of time to think. My head got past without getting smashed into gravy, and I figured I lucked out this time. But then the little part of the truck’s rear fender that sticks out the side caught me in the ankle. I didn’t even feel it, just heard this sick cracking sound and a sort of ripping that I won’t describe in more detail. The force of it spun me around, and I concussed myself pretty good hitting the ground next to the highway.
By the time they got an ambo there and took me to Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz, it was way too late for the foot. They managed to put a bunch of blood in me and save my life, but they amputated four inches above my left ankle that night.
At that time, Bionautics had just developed what turned out to be game-changing innovations in foot prosthetics. They were starting clinical trials, and I was young enough, healthy enough, and already rich enough to make sure I got to the front of the line. Six months after I didn’t have a foot anymore, suddenly I had one again. No more phantom pain, no more limping around, no more cripple-pity from anybody.
That was the best part—looking people in the eye and telling them truthfully that my new foot wasn’t just as good, it was better. I’m glad it happened. I wish I could find that dog and adopt it to repay the favor it did me.
*
In ancient Greece there was the legend of the Ship of Theseus, which carried the hero Theseus and the children of Athens to safety after Theseus entered the labyrinth and slew the Minotaur. After this, the Athenians kept the ship in perfect working order, and sailed it every year to Delos in pilgrimage to the god Apollo. When an oar or a plank would wear out, the Athenians would make a new part of their finest wood, and lovingly repair the craft.
Of course, at some point, they had replaced every single part of the craft, every plank and oar and sail and deckboard. This gave birth to a profound philosophical puzzle—once every bit of the original craft had been replaced, was it still the Ship of Theseus at all? Or was it a new craft, built over the course of generations?
My answer is simple: Of course it’s the same craft, because the Ship of Theseus is not any of its boards or bits of rope, but a dream in the hearts of the Athenian people, which could not be replaced by any physical process.
After the accident, I became a spokesman for Bionautics, first de facto and then officially as their prosthetics—excuse me, their *bionics*—became successful to the point that they could pay me more than my programming job had. I went around the country, always traveling and arriving on my rebuilt Triumph Speed Twin. When they were rebuilding it they replaced every part, and they said I should just get a new one, but I insisted on the repair. Like the Ship of Thebes, the Triumph was a dream that lived within my heart, and thus could never die.
I wrote a book and signed copies like my idol, Hunter Thompson, had done. I wore cropped pants and a boot of clear poly material, eschewing the aesthetic skin that so many others wore over their bionics, so that everywhere I went the crowds could see the bionic that had started it all. I traveled the US and then went to Europe, shipping my Triumph all the way there, and toured to show off my transformation.
Sometimes, when I was out there on the freeway late at night, I’d think about crashing again, to see if I could lose another limb. The hand bionics were as good as real hands by then, better even with the augmentations like built-in lighters and thumbs that were opposable in both directions.
I started splitting lanes at speed whenever I encountered traffic, but I was such a good rider by then that it never actually cost me. I’d think about sticking out a hand or a foot and catching the bumper of another passing car. The French call this l’appel du vide, The Call of the Void—the sudden urge to do something catastrophic in someone who is not otherwise suicidal, just because the opportunity presents itself.
I didn’t actually do it though. I knew on some level that the chances were much higher that I’d die or get a traumatic brain injury, than specifically just needing one more limb amputated. Crashing a motorcycle was a terrible way to go about that.
Instead I started fantasizing more targeted ways to lose a limb. I’d stare at garbage trucks as they passed and wonder how easy it would be to get a hand caught in the compacter. I watched a samurai movie, fascinated by how those swords severed necks, and wondered if I could do that to a wrist while holding the sword in the other hand.
I didn’t buy a sword. But what I did do during this time was plastic surgery. In my fifties and sixties, I had my nose done, and my jawline, and I got lip fillers and botox. I got my ears pinned and my cheeks heightened and my already-full hairline transplanted. Anything that was legal to change about yourself, I changed it. I started out as a handsome man, and after all the surgeries I was admittedly less handsome, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that I wanted people to know that I had changed myself. I was committed already at this point to the idea of myself as a sort of trans-human being, and it made me proud the looks people gave me, even if they were based in revulsion.
But it wasn’t enough. I changed everything about my face until there was nothing left of me, and I wanted more. I can admit now, all these years later, that I was addicted to the change. I was becoming something. I didn’t have the courage to toss the dice in a motorcycle crash or the self-hatred to chop something off myself, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
So I sued the government for the right to alter my own body as I saw fit.
*
It seems impossible to imagine now, but at that time the U.S. government expressly, legally forbade people from replacing parts of their own body with bionics. Patients could be committed for soliciting the service, and doctors could be jailed for providing it. When you live as long as I have, I guess it’s inevitable that you look back on how things used to be and wonder what the fuck everybody was thinking. That’s still a head scratcher, though—it’s your body!
So I sued them in federal court. Bionautics filed an amicus brief and the Pope personally commented to call me an abomination and there was lots of press and I wrote another book. I got the best lawyer in America to represent me, and I passed a battery of voluntary psych tests and all the head-shrinkers came in and said I wasn’t fucked in the head, and when it came down to it nobody could quite say why I shouldn’t be able to do what I wanted with my own flesh. So they let me.
I took both my arms off at the shoulder. Or rather, I didn’t have to, thankfully. I just went to a hospital and they put me to sleep and a robot took my arms off at the shoulders, and when I woke up I was some calibration away from having better arms. They were three times stronger than my old arms, and a whole lot more durable. I got skin over one of the arms at Bionautics’ request—they liked the flashiness of the bare bionics but also wanted their customers to be able to envision what different versions of the finished product would look like, which made sense to me.
With my new arms, I rebuilt my Triumph by hand before my next tour, changing out every single part down to the screws and tires. It was the same bike when I was done, just also brand new. I wrote another book and toured the world. This time I went to Asia as well. I rode around India and China and people pointed and stared at me.
Five years later I did both my legs at the hips, then rebuilt my Triumph again and rode from the Arctic Circle to Southern Chile, then from Southern South Africa to Siberia. I was one of the most famous people in the world by this time. I still sometimes felt that l’appel du vide when I was out late at night—“what if I just jerked it across the center line and into oncoming traffic”—but it was a passing thought now. I didn’t need to do that to become what I was becoming.
I tried to have relationships between stints on the road, but it never worked. I wondered about the shipwrights who were responsible for keeping the Ship of Thebes in working order. Did they get married and have children? How could they focus on that when their job was so important? For me, blazing this trail through medical science felt like riding down the PCH with no lights in the middle of a Wednesday night—the focus it engendered turned the volume down on anything that wasn’t that rush, and no woman could be exciting enough to divert me for long.
I stayed at the forefront of the technology. My father had died of a heart attack at fifty-three, so I preemptively had my heart replaced. That was easy, already a mature technology by the time I did it. The heart is just a big pump, really. I’d developed a drinking habit during my many book tours, which had worn out my kidneys and liver, so I had those replaced as they became available. Seventy came and went, and then eighty, though I still looked forty-five with enough time under the knife. I didn’t want a partner anymore. I was becoming my own partner, still myself and yet a stranger.
I started picking things off that were left, just finding excuses. I had my veins ripped out and replaced with synthetic ones. I had my skin peeled off and was wrapped instead in an advanced plastic that could camouflage into any background on command. I achieved capabilities that my younger self could not have dreamed.
By ninety-five I was a nervous system powering a set of bionics. The nerves and neurons were my only original parts left. That’s when I started to slip. I was at a book signing and realized I couldn’t remember my own fucking name to sign a book with it. I got it after a few seconds, but that was the first warning sign. Dates, conversations, names, faces, it all started to go. I could remember the past and I could remember how to rebuild my Triumph by hand, but the rest had sunk below the surface.
This was the hardest time, the most terrifying, even more than the moments after that first accident when I knew I had destroyed my foot but couldn’t yet feel it. I felt the lack of a partner acutely then. The Bionautics executives were sympathetic but I could see in their eyes they didn’t care deeply, not beyond the bottom line anyway.
But I’ve always been lucky. That’s one thing I’ve come to accept about myself—I am fucking lucky. That is not currently illegal, thank goodness, but I’ve learned to keep it up front in my consciousness as a way of disarming people and putting them at ease. Of course, it’s also just true.
I’m lucky because just before things really started to slip, but after I’d had enough bad conversations with the Bionautics CEO that I didn’t really feel quite the same loyalty, their main competitor patented the first artificial neuron. I heard they were starting clinical trials, had my agent call, and of course they were interested in working with someone of my stature. I looked awesome for age 100, I had the famous name, and they wanted the publicity—I was in.
*
So here I am now, about to be the first human to completely deny the empire of mere flesh. In just a few minutes they will put me under, and one by one, they will start replacing my neurons, and they will start replacing the nerves buried inside my spinal cord and other places that have not yet been upgraded to Bionics. The brain stem is the hardest, and I am told that I will need to be monitored for a good long while after this is done to make sure that my automatic functions like heartbeat and sleep-breathing are not interrupted.
My mind has already been digitally stored, backed up before this process commences. As long as the computers that store the copies of my neuronal state are not destroyed, there always exists the possibility of re-uploading my mind to new neurons if the ones I have now are compromised for any reason.
After my recovery, I will start rebuilding the Triumph for another tour in the spring. My body feels great, better than a few decades ago, and I expect the tour to be a long one. My publisher likes the presales numbers for this book, which makes sense considering it’s the payoff to a story that started in a different century.
I wonder though, when I’m riding between those tour stops, if it will mean the same thing it used to. I wonder if I will feel l’appel du vide, or if, now that even a fatal motorcycle crash only means a reset from my stored digital mind, I will no longer be fascinated by the possibility of such an event.
People ask me all the time if I’m still human. I say that’s the wrong question. I feel the same things, I want the same things, or at least human things like sex, fame, all that bullshit. I even still crave delicious food—an artificial tongue was one of the things I held out longest on, until they could credibly guarantee me I could still taste with it.
The question isn’t am I still human. The question is, am I still me? I have the same name as that squalling baby boy they pulled out of a woman all those decades ago, but not one part of my body is the same.
And I know that in the strictest sense all our cells get replaced every seven years, so a fucking pedant could insist that this was happening to us all constantly anyway, that whatever philosophical questions exist about my identity after all these bionics could have been asked about every unaltered human body before bionics ever existed. But let’s be real—it’s not the same thing.
I’ve changed in a completely different way. But am I still me?
My answer is simple: Fuck yes. I am a dream that lives inside my own soul, the part they can’t swap out because they can’t even find it. It’s the story, not the book. The Ship of Thebes left ripples in the same water even with different parts, served the same purpose no matter who sailed it.
As Hunter once wrote: “Freedom is something that dies unless it’s used.” I fully fucking intend to go out there and keep using mine, and by never letting it die, I can never die myself. I’ll bet when I’m flying out on that Triumph, I still get the urge to swing it into the oncoming lane from time to time, because freedom lives in the soul as well, and freedom doesn’t care if what you do to serve it is sick or twisted or self-destructive. Nor should you care. It’s the last refuge of basic humanity, well worth dying for or hurting for or chopping your limbs off for.
They’ve come to get me for surgery now. These are my lastwords, my last thoughts before I Transcend. I am become Thebes. I am ready.
END
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this story, please do help me out by liking, commenting, and sharing with friends. Have a great week, and I will be back next week with something fun.
I like the idea that we can keep our humanity even if we turn ourselves into robots.