Maitreya One, a black futurist and hip-hop artist living in Harlem, steps off the Greyhound bus on a warm morning in Montgomery, Alabama. Wearing sunglasses and a backwards-facing baseball hat, he eyes the film crew covering his arrival. I walk up to him and give him a hug. I’m excited he’s here.

Maitreya is a civil rights link from the past to the future—and one of the few African-American transhumanists I know. He is stepping off one bus in Montgomery—whose roots are tied to the spectacular Freedom Riders who challenged segregation laws in the early 1960s—and onto another: the Immortality Bus, whose mission is to spread radical science and promote transhumanist rights. READ MORE