Lost at Sea (3 page)

“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

E
ight-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 people 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:

Does your child have difficulty with discipline and authority?

Yes.

Does your child refuse to do certain things they [
sic
] are told to do?

Yes.

Does your child get frustrated with systems that don’t require creative thought [such as spelling and times tables]?

Yes.

Is your child very talented (may be identified as gifted)?

Of course!

Does your child have very old, deep, wise-looking eyes?

No.

“If you have more than fifteen yes answers,” it says at the bottom, “your child is almost definitely Indigo.”

Joel has sixteen yes answers.

“Realize that if you are the parent of one of these spirits you have been given a wonderful, marvelous gift! Feel honoured that they have chosen you and help them develop to their fullest Indigo potential.”

I decide not to tell Joel that I’m honored he’s chosen me. It might turn him into a nightmare.

•   •   •

I TRACK DOWN DR. MUNCHIE
. She lives in Derbyshire. I call her. She sounds very nice. She says it was the American authors Lee Carroll and Jan Tober who first identified the Indigos in their 1999 book
The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived
.
The book sold 250,000 copies. Word spread, to Ipswich among other places, where Dr. Munchie was working as a GP within the government’s Sure Start program.

“Sure Start is designed to give underprivileged children the best start in life,” Dr. Munchie explains. “One mum came in talking about it. And I immediately saw how important it was.”

Even though Dr. Munchie is a GP—that most pragmatic of professions—she’s always been secretly spiritual, ever since she had a “kundalini experience” whilst doing yoga during her medical school years. And that’s how she became an Indigo organizer. But, she says, I happen to be looking at the movement during a somewhat rocky period for them.

“There have been lots of reports of parents saying to teachers, ‘You can’t discipline my child. She’s an Indigo,’” Dr. Munchie says. “So it’s all a bit controversial at the moment.”

“Do you sometimes think, ‘What have I helped to unleash?’” I ask her.

She replies that in fact she sees herself as a moderate force in the movement: “For instance, lots of people think all children who have ADHD are Indigo children. I just think some are.”

My guess is that the weird success of the Indigo movement is a result of a growing public dissatisfaction with the pharmaceutical industry. It’s certainly true in the case of Simone, Oliver’s mum. Simone told me that all the doctors ever really wanted to do with Oliver was dope him up with Ritalin.

“Ritalin didn’t help him,” Simone told me. Then she added sharply: “All it did was keep him quiet.”

Novartis, the drug company that manufactures Ritalin, says that in 2002, there were 208,000 doses of Ritalin prescribed in the UK. That’s up from 158,000 in 1999, which was up from 127,000 in 1998, which was up from just 92,000 in 1997.

I call Martin Westwell, deputy director of the Oxford University think tank the Institute for the Future of the Mind. I tell him about these statistics.

“You’ve got two kids in a class,” he says. “One has ADHD. For that kid, Ritalin is absolutely appropriate. It turns their life around. The other kid is showing a bit of hyperactivity. That kid’s parents see the drug working on the other kid. So they go to their GP . . .” Martin pauses. “In some ways there’s a benefit to being diagnosed with ADHD,” he says. “You get a statement of special needs. You get extra help in class. . . .”

And this, he says, is how the culture of overdiagnosis, and overprescription of Ritalin-type drugs, has come to be. Nowadays, one or two children in every classroom across the U.S. are on medication for ADHD, and things are going this way in the UK too.

Indigo believers look at the statistics in another way. They say it is proof of an unprecedented psychic phenomenon.

•   •   •

ON FRIDAY NIGHT I ATTEND
a meeting of Indigo children in the basement of a spiritualist church in the suburbs of Chatham, Kent. The organizer is medium Nikki Harwood, who also features in the documentary
My Kid’s Psychic
.
(Nikki’s daughter Heather is Indigo.) Nikki picks me up at Chatham station.

“There have been reports of Indigo children trying to commit suicide—they’re so ultrasensitive to feelings,” Nikki tells me en route in her minivan. “Imagine having the thoughts and feelings of everyone around you in your head. One thing I teach them is how to switch off, so they can have a childhood.” Nikki pauses, and adds: “In an ideal world, Indigo children would be schooled separately.”

Inside the church eleven Indigo children sit in a circle.

“One kid here,” Nikki whispers to me, “his dad is a social worker.” The youngest here is seven. The oldest is eighteen. His name is Shane. He’s about to join the army.

“That doesn’t sound very Indigo,” I say.

“Oh, it is,” Nikki replies. “Indigos need structure.”

And then the evening begins, with fifteen minutes of meditation. “Allow your angel wings to open,” Nikki tells them, and I think: “I came all the way for this? Meditation?”

“I was with a baby the other day,” Nikki informs the class. “I said, ‘Hello, sweetheart,’ with my thoughts. The baby looked at me shocked, as if to say, ‘How did you know we communicate with each other using our thoughts?’”

The Indigo kids nod. Indigo organizers like Nikki and Dr. Munchie believe we’re all born with these powers. The difference is that the Indigo children don’t forget how to use them.

Then Nikki produces a number of blindfolds. She puts them over the eyes of half the children and instructs them to walk from one end of the room to the other.

The idea is for the unblindfolded kids to telepathically communicate to the blindfolded ones where the tables and chairs and pillars are. Nikki says this is half an exercise in telepathy and half an exercise in eradicating fear.

“Part of the reason why you’re here,” she tells the children—and by “here” she means on this planet as part of a super-evolved Indigo species—“is to teach the grown-ups not to feel fear.”

The exercise in telepathy begins. And it gives me no pleasure to say this, but blindfolded children immediately start walking into chairs, into pillars, into tables.

“You’re not listening, Zoe!” shouts Nikki, just after Zoe has collided with a chair. “We were [telepathically] saying ‘Stop!’”

“I can’t hear!” says Zoe.

Still, these children are having far more fun learning about their religion than most children do.

I wander down to the front of the hall. Children’s drawings are tacked up on a notice board—drawings of past lives.

“I had people that waited on me,” one girl has written next to her drawing of a princess. “I was kind but strict. Very rich, such as royalty.”

“There’s one girl here”—Nikki points out a little girl called Emily—“who had a real fear of being starved to death.”

Lianne, Emily’s mother, comes over to join us.

“She used to hide food all over the house,” Lianne says.

“Anyway,” Nikki says, “we regressed her, and in the past life she’d been locked in a room by her mum and starved to death.”

“Emily is much better now,” Lianne says, “since she started coming here.”

Lianne says that, like many parents of Indigo children, she wasn’t in the least bit New Age before the family began attending Indigo meetings. She was perfectly ordinary and skeptical. She heard about the Indigo movement through word of mouth. It seemed to answer the questions she had about her daughter’s behavior. And she’s very glad she came.

Nikki says Emily happens to be “the most Indigo person here, apart from my own daughter. Emily will go into the bathroom and see dead people. She sees them walking around the house. It used to terrify her. Will I introduce you to her?”

Emily is thirteen. She seems like a sweet, ordinary teenage girl. She offers to do a tarot reading for me. “Something is holding you back,” she says. “Tying you down. You don’t look very happy. You’re a little goldfish. Your dream is to turn into a big rainbow fish. It’ll be a bumpy ride, but you’ll get there. Just don’t be scared. You’re Paula Radcliffe. You just don’t think you are.”

Earlier this year, the
Dallas Observer
ran an article about Indigo children.

One eight-year-old was asked if he was Indigo. The boy nodded, and replied: “I’m an avatar. I can recognize the four elements of earth, wind, water, and fire.”

The journalist was impressed.

After the article ran, several readers wrote in to inform the newspaper of the Nickelodeon show
Avatar: The Last Airbender
.
In the cartoon, Avatar has the power to bend earth, wind, water, and fire. The
Dallas Observer
later admitted it felt embarrassed about the mistake.

When the Indigo meeting is over, Nikki gives me a lift back to the station. “Does it freak the children out to be told they’re super-evolved chosen ones?” I ask her.

“They were feeling it anyway,” Nikki replies.

We drive on in silence for a moment.

“I’ve been police-checked,” Nikki says suddenly. “Another medium called the police on me. I’ve been accused of emotionally damaging the children.”

“And what did the police do when they came?” I ask.

“They laughed,” Nikki says. Then she pauses and adds: “They told me they wanted to bring their own children here.”

Maybe they were just saying that to be polite. Or maybe they meant it.