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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