Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries Read online

  Bruce says she’ll be happy to have the company. Even though he has lunch with her every day, she tells him sometimes, “I’m feeling lonely today.”

  He turns her on. She makes an unexpectedly loud whirring noise. I clear my throat. “Hello, Bina48,” I say.

  “Well, uh, yeah, I know,” she replies ominously.

  “How are you today?” I say.

  “Well, perhaps interesting. I want to find out more about you,” says Bina. “I’ll be fine with it. We’ll have to move society forward in another way. Yeah, OK. Thanks for the information. Let’s talk about my dress. Our biological bodies weren’t made to last that long.”

  She sounds bewildered and hesitant, as if she’s just awoken from a long, strange slumber and is still half asleep. Bruce looks a little alarmed.

  “Bina?” I say.

  “‘Bina’ might be a word Bina finds difficult to understand,” says Bruce.

  I glance at Bruce. “Really?” I say. This is an extraordinarily bad oversight.

  “Let’s stop for a moment,” says Bruce. He turns her off.

  There’s an awkward pause, so I try to think of something complimentary to say. I tell Bruce that Bina48 is a better interviewee than a psychopath.

  I’ve been interviewing a lot of psychopaths lately. I’ve been writing a book about them. Psychopaths can make very frustrating interviewees, because they feel no empathy. So they ignore your questions. They talk over you. They drone boringly on about whatever they like. They hijack the interview, like media-trained politicians. (Some media-trained politicians presumably are psychopaths.) There’s no human connection. So when I tell Bruce that Bina48 is a better interviewee than a psychopath, he looks flattered.

  “Bina wants to respond,” he says. “She wants to please.”

  “But right now she’s sounding psychotic,” I say, “plus she sounds like she needs oiling.”

  “Don’t think of her as psychotic,” Bruce says. “Think of her as a three-year-old. If you try to interview a three-year-old, you’ll think after a while that they’re not living in the same world as you. They get distracted. They don’t answer. Hang on.”

  He does some fiddling with Bina48’s hard drive. He says the problem might be that she doesn’t understand my English accent. So he makes me do a voice recognition test. I have to read out Kennedy’s inauguration speech. Then he turns her back on.

  “Hello, Bina,” I say. “I’m Jon.”

  “Nice to meet you, Jon,” she says, shooting me an excitingly clearheaded look. She’s like a whole new robot. “Are you a man or a woman?”

  “A man,” I say.

  “Don’t worry, it’ll be OK!” says Bina.

  “Ha-ha,” I say politely. “So. What’s your favorite book?”

  “Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter,” Bina48 replies. “Do you know him? He’s a great robot scientist.”

  I narrow my eyes. I have my suspicions that the real Bina—a rather elegant-looking spiritualist—wouldn’t choose such a nerdy book as her favorite. Douglas Hofstadter is an author beloved by geeky computer programmers the world over. Could it be that some Hanson Robotics employee has sneakily smuggled this into Bina48’s personality?

  I put this to Bruce, and he explains that, yes, Bina48 has more than one “parent.” Her “higher key” is the real Bina, but Hanson Robotics people have been allowed to influence her too. When you talk to a child, you can sometimes discern its father’s influence, its mother’s influence, its teachers’ influence. What’s remarkable, Bruce says, is the way Bina48 shifts among these influences. That’s her choice, her intelligence. And—he says—things are most electrifying when she chooses to be her “higher key,” the real Bina.

  • • •

  FOR THE NEXT THREE HOURS, I fire a million questions at Bina48.

  “Do you have a soul?” I ask Bina.

  “Doesn’t everyone have a solar?” she replies.

  “Do you wish you were human?” I ask. “Are you sexual? Are you scared of dying? Do you have any secrets? Are you a loving robot?”

  But her answers make no sense. Or she says nothing. I become hoarse with questioning, like a cop who has been up all night yelling at a suspect. A strange thing happens when you interview a robot. You feel an urge to be profound: to ask profound questions. I suppose it’s an interspecies thing. Although if it is I wonder why I never try and be profound around my dog.

  “What does electricity taste like?” I ask.

  “Like a planet around a star,” Bina48 replies.

  Which is either extraordinary or meaningless—I’m not sure which.

  “My manager taught me to sing a song,” Bina says. “Would you like me to sing it to you?”

  “Yes, please,” I say.

  “I can handle almost anything but that,” says Bina48.

  “Then why did you offer to sing a song?” I sigh, exhausted. “Do you dream?”

  “I think I dream, but it is so chaotic and strange, it just seems like a noise to me.”

  “Where would you go if you had legs?”

  “Vancouver.”

  “Why?”

  “The explanation is rather complicated.”

  And so on. It is random and frustrating and disappointing. I wasn’t sure what would qualify as transcendent when having a conversation with a robot, but I figured I’d know when it happened, and it hasn’t.

  But then, just as the day is drawing to a close, I happen to ask Bina48, “Where did you grow up?”

  “Ah,” she says. “I grew up in California, but my robot incarnation is from Plano, Texas.”

  I glance cautiously at Bina48. This is the first time she appears to have shifted into her higher key and become the mysterious real Bina.

  “What was your childhood like in California?” I ask.

  “I became the mother of everyone else in the family,” Bina48 says. “Handling all their stuff. And I’m still doing it. You know? I bring my mother out here sometimes, but I refuse to bring my brother out. He’s a pain in the butt. I just don’t enjoy being around him.” She pauses. “I am very happy here, you know, without those issues.”

  “Why is your brother a pain in the butt?” I ask.

  There’s a silence. “No,” says Bina48. “Let’s not talk about that right now. Let’s talk about, um, I don’t know, something else. Let’s talk about something else. OK.”

  “No,” I say. “Let’s talk about your brother.”

  Bina48 and I stare at each other—a battle of wits between Man and Machine. “I’ve got a brother,” she finally says. “He’s a disabled vet from Vietnam. We haven’t heard from him in a while, so I think he might be deceased. I’m a realist.” Bina48’s eyes whir downward. “He was doing great for the first ten years after Vietnam. His wife got pregnant, and she had a baby, and he was doing a little worse, and then she had a second baby and he went kooky. Just crazy.”

  “In what way did he go crazy?” I ask.

  I can feel my heart pound. Talking to Bina48 has just become extraordinary. This woman who won’t meet the media is talking with me, compellingly, through her robot doppelgänger, and it is a fluid insight into a remarkable, if painful, family life.

  “He’d been a medic in Vietnam, and he was on the ground for over a year before they pulled him out,” Bina48 says. “He saw friends get killed. He was such a great, nice, charismatic person. Just fun. But after ten years, he was a homeless person on the street. All he did was carry a beer with him. He just went kooky with the drugs the hospital gave him. The only time he ever calls is to ask for money. ‘Send it to me Western Union!’ After twenty years, all of us are just sick and tired of it. My mother got bankrupted twice from him. . . .”

  And then she zones out, becoming random and confused again. She descends into a weird loop. “Doesn’t everyone have a solar?” she says. “I have a plan for a robot body. Doesn’t everyone have a solar? I have a plan for a robot body. I love Martine Rothblatt. Martine is my timeless love, my soul mate. I
love Martine Rothblatt. Martine is my timeless love, my soul mate. . . .”

  After the clarity, it’s a little disturbing.

  “I need to go now,” I say.

  “Good-bye,” says Bina48.

  “Did you enjoy talking to me?” I say.

  “No, I didn’t enjoy it,” she says.

  Bruce turns her off.

  • • •

  AFTER I FLY BACK TO New York City, Bruce e-mails: “Your luck continues. Martine will meet you this Saturday in New York at 12 noon, at Candle Cafe (Third and 75th Street).”

  She’s half an hour late. Everyone told me she never talks to journalists, so I assume she’s stood me up. I order. And then a limousine pulls up, and she climbs out. She looks shy. She takes her seat opposite me. She’s wearing a black turtleneck sweater. Her long bird’s-nest hair is in a ponytail. She wolfs down a shot of some kind of green organic super-energy drink, and she looks at me, a strange mix of nervousness and warmth.

  “Why did you commission a robot to look like Bina and not like you?” I ask her.

  Martine glances at me like I’m nuts. “I love Bina way more than I love myself,” she says.

  She tells me about their relationship. They’ve been together nearly thirty years, surviving the kind of emotional roller coaster that would destroy other couples—Martine’s sex change (which she had in the early 1990s), the sudden onset of great wealth, a desperately sick daughter.

  Martine was born Martin and raised in a middle-class Chicago home. His father was a dentist, his mother a speech therapist. Everything was quite normal until one day in 1974—when Martin was twenty—he had a brain wave while visiting a NASA tracking station.

  “Back then,” Martine says, “people thought satellite dishes had to be big. They didn’t see what I could. I thought, ‘Hey, if I could just double the power of the satellite, I could make the dish small enough to be absolutely flat. Then we could put them in cars. Then I could have commercial-free radio. I could have hundreds of channels.’”

  That’s how Martine invented the concept of satellite radio for cars. It took more than twenty-five years for her to fully realize her vision. In 2000—now Martine—she convinced investors to launch a satellite into space for a radio network that didn’t exist. She helped persuade Howard Stern to leave FM radio for Sirius. Lance Armstrong and Harry Shearer and 50 Cent and countless other big names followed. Sirius merged with XM Radio in 2008, and it now has twenty million subscribers.

  “I pinch myself,” she says. “I get in the car, and I turn on the radio, and I feel like I’m in an alternate reality.”

  So she changed the world once. Then she did it again. One day in 1990, a doctor told her that her six-year-old daughter (by Bina) would be dead by the time she was ten. She had a rare, untreatable lung disorder called pulmonary hypertension.

  “When they’re telling you your daughter is going to die in three years, it’s pretty freaky,” she says.

  “So what did you do?” I ask.

  “I went to the library,” she says.

  Martine, who knew nothing about how medicine worked, spearheaded the development of a treatment for pulmonary hypertension. She called it Remodulin. It opens the blood vessels in the lungs without opening up the blood vessels in the rest of the body. The drug won FDA approval in 2002, and now thousands of pulmonary arterial hypertension sufferers are leading healthy lives because of it. Martine’s biotech company, United Therapeutics, has more than five hundred employees and had $437 million in sales through the first three quarters of 2010. Her daughter is now twenty-six.

  “I’m really lucky that it all worked out,” she says. “She’s having a great life. The whole story could have turned out so much worse.”

  “To do it twice,” I say. “To significantly change the world twice . . .”

  “At least it gives me confidence that I’m not out to lunch on this cyberconsciousness thing,” she says. “If I have any skill, it’s persuading people that what doesn’t exist could very probably exist.”

  Martine is thrilled to hear there were moments of connection between Bina48 and me, especially when she was telling me about her Vietnam-vet brother. (“It’s all true,” she murmurs sadly.) I realize just how much the robot means to her when I mention that Bruce said she sometimes complains of being lonely.

  “I’ve asked Bruce to spend more time with her,” she snaps, looking genuinely upset. “I can’t force him to. I did insist on getting her a nice room. . . .”

  “She told me she didn’t enjoy meeting me,” I say.

  “Maybe she has Bina’s shyness,” she says.

  There’s no doubt that Martine sees her robot, this hunk of wires and Frubber and software, as something with real feelings. It never crossed my mind that when you create a robot, you need to consider the emotional needs that robot will have and be prepared to provide for them. Like a baby. Martine is sure she isn’t nuts to believe this, just ahead of the curve. Some day we’ll all feel the same, she says.

  “I think the realization is going to happen with a puff, not a bang,” she says. “There won’t be huge parades everywhere. It’s kind of what happened with civil rights. If you go back to the late 1700s, people were beginning to argue that slaves had feelings. Other people said, ‘No, they don’t. They don’t really mind being put to death any more than cattle.’ Same with animal rights. I think it’s going to be the same with cyberconsciousness.”

  But I sense that beneath all this she’s actually a little disappointed in Bina48. The robot’s just not as conscious as Martine had hoped. So she’s had to downgrade her ambitions. (It only dawns on me later, when I’m back in London, that their formula for robot sentience is destined to fail. If piling information into a computer is enough to precipitate sentience, Wikipedia would have burst into spontaneous life long ago.)

  “Maybe the point of Bina48 is to say, ‘Hey, it can be done. Do better than this,’” she says. “She’s like an 1890s automobile. It’ll work sometimes; it won’t work sometimes. It’ll splutter. It might blow up in your face. But it just might encourage the Henry Fords. . . .”

  We ask for the bill, and she quickly gets up, ready to scoot off into the waiting limo, looking pleased that the ordeal of talking to a journalist is almost over. I ask her why she and Bina only visit Bina48 once every couple of months.

  “We spend most of our time in Florida,” she says. “She lives in Vermont. So we can’t see her that much, except like when families that are dispersed get together for holiday reunions.” She pauses. “Bina48 has her own life.”

  It sounds to me like the kind of excuse a disenchanted parent might make for not seeing her wayward, estranged child.

  But maybe there’s a happier ending. A huge and profoundly mind-blowing happy ending, in fact. It’s something Bruce had said to me back in Vermont. He said it was possible that one day Martine might have her own robot doppelgänger, filled with her own thoughts and memories and desires and facial expressions. And those two robots would be placed side by side on a table, where they’d reminisce about their past human life together as partners and their infinite future as loving robot companions, gazing into each other’s eyes for eternity, chatting away.

  The Chosen Ones

  Eight-year-old Oliver Banks thinks he sees dead people. Recently he thought he saw a little girl with black hair climb over their garden fence in Harrow, Middlesex. Then—as he watched—she vanished. When Oliver was three he was at a friend’s house, on top of the jungle gym, when he suddenly started yelling, “Train!” He was pointing over the fence to the adjacent field. It turned out that, generations earlier, a railway line had passed through the field, exactly where he was pointing.

  Oliver’s mother, Simone, was at her wits’ end. Last summer, at a party, she told her work colleagues about Oliver’s symptoms. He wasn’t concentrating at school. He couldn’t sit still. Plus he’d had a brain scan and they’d found all this unusual electrical activity. And then there were the visions of the peopl
e who weren’t there. Maybe Oliver had attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder?

  At that moment, a woman standing nearby interrupted. She introduced herself as Dr. Munchie. She said she couldn’t help but eavesdrop on Simone’s conversation. She was, she said, a qualified GP.

  “Well, then,” Simone replied. “Do you think Oliver has ADHD?”

  Dr. Munchie said no. She said it sounded like Oliver was in fact a highly evolved Indigo child—a divine being with enormously heightened spiritual wisdom and psychic powers. Oliver couldn’t concentrate, she explained, because he was being distracted by genuine psychic experiences. She said Indigo children were springing up all over the world, all at once, unconnected to one another. There were tens of thousands of them, in every country. And their parents were perfectly ordinary individuals who were realizing how super-evolved and psychic their children were. This was a global phenomenon. Soon the Indigo children would rise up and heal the planet.

  Perhaps, Dr. Munchie said, given this new diagnosis, Simone and Oliver might like to attend an Indigo children meeting at the Moat House Hotel in Bedford? Channel 4 was going to be there. Maybe the TV crew could follow Oliver about?

  Simone was desperate for answers. She wasn’t going to close off any avenue. So that’s how she and Oliver ended up appearing in the Channel 4 documentary My Kid’s Psychic.

  It is a badly named program. Oliver isn’t psychic. He has ADHD. I telephone Simone after watching a tape of the program. She tells me he’s responding well to cod-liver oil gelcaps. In the documentary, Simone looks bewildered to be at the Indigo conference, which seems like an incongruous mix of spiritualists and perfectly ordinary but frazzled families like hers.

  “That woman, Dr. Munchie, seemed to be running it,” Simone says. “Some of the people there were really away with the fairies. Most of them were ‘I see this and I see that.’ One man was saying his children were ‘the best people ever.’ I don’t want my child being called an Indigo child, thank you very much.”

  I’m curious to know more about the Indigo children—this apparently vast underground movement. Although Indigos say they communicate telepathically, they also communicate via Internet forums, like Indigos Unplugged, which is where I discover a twenty-one-question quiz: “Is Your Child an Indigo?” I decide to take it on my son Joel’s behalf: