Lost At Sea Part 6

Martine was born Martin and raised in a middle-cla.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce 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 doppelganger, 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, Middles.e.x. 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 pa.s.sed 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 doc.u.mentary 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 doc.u.mentary, 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.