The God Patent

by Ransom Stephens

  PRAISE FOR THE GOD PATENT

  “What distinguishes this classic battle between faith and free will is its unusually deft infusion of legitimate but accessible science… An ambitious first novel that uses Stephens’ experience as a particle physicist, director of patents, public speaker and single father in a narrative that sings of the heart and the scientific method as two parts of the same song.”

  –San Francisco Chronicle

  “The God Patent tackles the biggest question in the universe in a brand new way. Who knew science could be this entertaining? Stephens takes on technology, existentialism, and confronts religious dogma, in a novel that will provoke the ultimate water cooler conversation.”

  –Kemble Scott, bestselling author of The Sower and SoMa

  “When software engineers ruled the world… The heart of this tale is a science-versus-religion battle over a couple of patents that promise to unlock the secrets of the universe and turn the power of God into an ExxonMobil wet dream… Ransom Stephens skillfully weaves together multiple plot lines and characters in a fast moving story that kept me hungry for the denouement and some baby back ribs. I loved hating the bad guys in The God Patent…. Ransom Stephens got it right.”

  –Book Case

  “The God Patent really drew me in, not just because of the hard-charging plot and the vivid characters but also because this story is wrapped around one of the central conflicts of our time: faith in science versus faith in religion. Ransom, to his credit, avoids easy or didactic answers. Instead he pulls readers into a dense and nuanced argument that leaves us buzzing with questions.”

  –Tamim Ansary, bestselling author of Games Without Rules and Destiny Disrupted.

  “This story of life, physics and spirituality will blow your mind. You won’t put it down until the last page, and when you look up, you will see the world in a totally different way.”

  –Joe Quirk, bestselling author of The Ultimate Rush and Exult

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2009 by Ransom Stephens

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781611099126

  ISBN-10: 1611099129

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012951473

  For Karen, who both loved and tolerated me the whole time I wrote this.

  In memory of Uncle Sherman, whose tail went thump, thump, thump after every revision…except this one.

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  The constable set the arrest warrant on the counter between them.

  Ryan, stalling for something to say, scraped dirty oil from under his thumbnail with a screwdriver. Jail meant he had no other options. It was tempting to relax in this pool of defeat, but no, he never wanted to be that man again.

  The constable said, “Don’t make sense to me how jailing you helps anybody. If you can’t pay your child support changin’ oil, how you gonna do it from jail?”

  “Officer, the judge won’t reduce my child support, and there aren’t any jobs that pay anything close to what I was making when Linda threw me out.” His words flowed together. “I’m not allowed within a hundred feet of my son, I want my wife back, I want my family back, but I can’t even—”

  The constable, well over six feet tall, had to lean forward on the counter to make his eyes level with Ryan’s, and, as he did, his eyes narrowed in recognition. “Ryan McNear. Didn’t you used to coach peanut league football?”

  “Um, yeah.” Struggling to recover some poise, Ryan forced himself to speak slowly. “I coached my son’s team two years ago, the Shorthorns.” He licked his lips into a smile. Framed by his chisel-cut jaw, and in the light of blue eyes and auburn wire-brush hair, his smile looked calm and warm, and sometimes it was, but not now. Ryan’s wet-lipped grin was his response to stress. As a boy, he used that smile to soften arguments between his sisters; in school it broke up fights; in business it brought opposing sides together. It gave the appearance that he saw humor in the situation, that he couldn’t be rattled, and, in so doing, it disarmed conflict. Pretending to look down at the counter, he stole a glance at the name tag above the constable’s badge. “Holcomb? Bill Holcomb?” And as he spoke the name he remembered, “Your son—Willie, right? Didn’t he get hurt in our first game?”

  “Yes sir, he did.”

  Ryan leaned back on his heels and set the screwdriver next to the cash register. Along with his smile, the movement gave the illusion of confidence, but the memory of Willie Holcomb screaming in pain felt like another count against him.

  “After the cast come off, my boy wanted nothing to do with football,” Holcomb said. “Nothing I could say would get him back on the field—until you called. I don’t know what you said, but he’s turning into quite a linebacker.” He squinted at Ryan’s name tag. “Assistant manager? I thought you were an engineer. What happened?”

  Ryan shut the door to the garage, directed Holcomb to the waiting room, then sat next to him and told the story. Not the complete story—that would have sent him straight to jail—but he couldn’t have described all his failures in ten minutes anyway. Holcomb nodded occasionally and barely blinked. Ryan finished with the words he’d said to a judge six months ago. They hadn’t helped then. “I made plenty of mistakes, but all I can do is keep trying to fix them.”

  “And I’m here to arrest you.” Holcomb, with his elbows on his knees, rested his face in his hands and started speaking. He didn’t stop for fifteen minutes. He talked about what it takes to break a man. Maybe he’d seen it in his job, but it sounded to Ryan as though he had walked close to the line himself. For Ryan, it had been a line of white powder, a line that he’d crossed. As the constable spoke, he looked out the window past the cars waiting to have their oil changed to the used car lots down the street, and by the time he focused on the tired cinder-block saloon next door, he was talking about his wife and children and how the smallest decisions can destroy the greatest dreams.

  Finally, he looked at Ryan. “Sometimes it just don’t seem like justice is very just.” He stood, handed Ryan the arrest warrant, and ran his hand along his belt, over his sidearm, past t
he radio module. “I have to cuff you,” he said and stared deep into Ryan’s eyes.

  Ryan’s smile disappeared.

  “You see, I have to handcuff you,” Holcomb continued, “but danged if I didn’t leave my cuffs out in the cruiser. I’ll have to go back out and get them and, before I come back in, I think I’ll call my wife just to hear her say she loves me, just to check in. A man only gets so many chances in life, you know what I’m sayin’?” He paused for a second, shook his head, and added, “What you’re going through scares hell out of me.” Then he tipped his hat as though offering a farewell, turned his back, and stepped toward the front door.

  Ryan looked down at the arrest warrant and wondered if he’d ever get a chance to put his life back together. For the hundredth time that day, like every day, he recalled the last time he’d seen Sean, his son, and how the look of disappointment on the boy’s face had turned to scorn and then to tears. Only one thing could dull the pain of that memory, but Ryan had sworn he’d never surrender to that desire again.

  He looked up, out the shop window, and saw Holcomb open the cruiser door and climb in.

  Ryan did a double take.

  He could see Holcomb’s handcuffs dangling from his waist as he climbed into the car.

  Ryan set down the screwdriver, picked up the arrest warrant, took a deep breath, and decided to make his second chance count.

  Driving away from everything you love is hard. Driving away in a Ford Probe with over two hundred thousand miles on it is almost impossible. A tire blew fifteen miles from Oklahoma City. It was hot and dirty on the side of the interstate but a good place to stop and think. When he got to Interstate 40, he’d have a decision to make.

  The two relevant things to keep in mind when you run away are, first, you have to choose a direction and, second, since you can’t run away from your problems, you might as well run toward their solutions.

  Ryan had enough gas money to get to the coast, either coast, but not enough for a deposit and first and last months’ rent on an apartment. It was autumn of 2003, and unemployment in high tech was over 25 percent nationwide, higher back in Dallas and with more layoffs being announced every day.

  He could go back east to Andover, the Boston suburb where he grew up. They all still lived there—Mom, his sisters, and the huge marginally functional network that is every Catholic kid’s birthright. He wouldn’t have to pay rent for a while, and Andover was sort of a mini Silicon Valley. He could probably land some contract work hacking software and build from that when things turned around. It wasn’t a bad idea. Mom would be happy to see him too. But he’d have to tell her what happened, and she’d get that look. Her chin would crumple, her eyes would sink, and her hands would reach out and shake—the same look that had burned into his memory when he was ten years old and she’d told him his father was dead.

  After installing the donut spare tire, he stood off the highway in the shade of an oak tree and fidgeted with an acorn. He pictured himself driving into his hometown. When he got in trouble as a boy, he used to run to his grandma’s house. If she were still alive, he’d go there now. He tugged the acorn from the branch, and a funny thing happened—a simple, obvious thing, but it startled Ryan. He knew exactly what Grandma would say. He could even hear her light Irish brogue, “What sort of man would you be then?”

  Grandma always made these decisions easy. He smiled up to the sky and winked at her.

  In Oklahoma City he sent a postcard to Mom: “I love you. Try not to worry, I’m healthy and strong. Sean and I will visit after I fix things.” As he wrote it, he even believed that last sentence, could almost picture Sean smiling up in admiration the way he’d done before it all went to hell.

  He went west on I-40—headed for Silicon Valley, the electrical engineer’s mecca.

  Two days after leaving Texas, Ryan emerged from the fertile valleys of central California to the San Francisco Bay Area. He landed in a semipermanent traffic jam at the junction of four different freeways. A new VW Beetle whose license plate read “D BUGGED” sat in the next lane. The driver, a man in his early thirties, about the same age as Ryan, glared back.

  Ryan knew the look of a software jock whose code was crashing. The familiarity was comforting.

  Ryan couldn’t know it, but that little distraction would change everything.

  He had been to Silicon Valley for conferences and customer meetings. He thought he knew his way around, but he went north when he should have gone south, and an hour later, instead of arriving in mecca, he was stuck in a traffic jam in Oakland.

  The sun was setting across the bay beyond the Golden Gate Bridge. It really was gold, and it really did look like a gate—a gate to a better place.

  Before everything collapsed, Ryan had a buddy named Foster Reed. Foster always insisted that everything happens for a reason. Ryan wasn’t sure whether it was born of stupid hope or divine revelation, but he now believed that the little quirks in life are more like guideposts than accidents. The version of Ryan McNear who had visited Silicon Valley on business would have cussed and turned around. The revised version smiled inside and followed the signs to the Golden Gate.

  By the time he pulled onto the Golden Gate Bridge, a cool blanket of fog covered the great suspension cables rising up to the towers. When he got to the other side of the bridge, he just kept going. The highway narrowed through rolling hills and, as the distance between each town grew, Ryan started to wonder about the “reason” for that wrong turn. Before the guy in the Beetle glared at him, his destination had at least been vague, but now it was a total mystery, and he was also on his last tank of gas. After a long stretch between off-ramps, he pulled onto a dark, rough road and parked between two big rigs. Lights in the distance reflected from a river flowing parallel to the road.

  Ryan reclined in the front seat, the only hotel he could afford.

  Rays of sunlight pushed Ryan’s eyes open. The big rigs were gone, the muddy river rolled south, and the sun was rising over a mountain ridge clothed in a plaid of vineyards. With fingers crossed, he turned the key—it started on the first try. A steady stream of cars drifted in the opposite direction: a few expensive sedans, lots of minivans and SUVs, but mostly Japanese imports driven by sleepy white people—it looked like the California version of his commute back in Dallas.

  The street curled under the freeway along the river. He passed a sign: “Petaluma City Limits, Pop. 55,900.” The density of buildings increased, old Victorians on the left and warehouses on the right. He drove up to a park with public restrooms. The feeling that everything was arranged came back—the wrong turn that led him to the Golden Gate was one thing, but having the fuel light come on just as he pulled up to “McNear Park” clinched it.

  He ducked into the restroom with a change of clothes and his shaving kit and emerged ten minutes later looking and smelling civilized.

  He found a coffee shop among the mid-nineteenth-century buildings, got a cup of black tea, and sat at a table near a boulevard-facing window. A man sat at the table next to him reading a newspaper. He had long gray hair tied in a ponytail and was wearing sandals with socks and a purple T-shirt that read “Keep Sonoma Grapes Monsanto Free.” Ryan looked out the window, then back at the man. He fidgeted with the teaspoon, tapping it against his thumb and then against his chin. When he started tapping the table, the man grunted and handed Ryan the sports section and classifieds.

  He looked at a small map in the apartment rental section. Most apartments were within three blocks of town. Most of the jobs were across the river. There were a handful of engineering jobs farther north in Santa Rosa, a few back south in San Francisco, but of course most were down in Silicon Valley.

  With the paper tucked under his arm, Ryan headed out to find an apartment. He passed McNear’s Restaurant and Saloon and walked up McNear Avenue toward McNear Landing. That tenuous hint that he had been drawn here for a reason was getting out of hand. God might as well have put up a billboard: “Ryan McNear! Rebuild Your Life in P
etaluma.”

  Filled with confidence he hadn’t felt in years, he walked the tree-lined streets. A woman with long dark hair on an old bicycle that had shiny chrome fenders waited next to him at a stoplight, muttering to herself. The darkness of her ankle-length black skirt was amplified by her pale skin. When she pedaled away, her hair and skirt swirled behind her.

  At an apartment manager’s office, Ryan discovered that his lack of immediate cash would be a greater impediment to getting housing than he’d hoped. Plus, rents were twice what they’d been in Texas. Finding a hole in that soft blanket of arranged destiny was strangely comforting. Ryan didn’t want the solutions to be handed to him.

  An “apartment for rent” sign hanging from an expansive but drooping porch on one of the old craftsman-style mansions directed Ryan to an elderly lady sitting at an iron table. He filled out a rental application and licked his lips into that disarming smile. She was apologetic but wouldn’t take a renter without the standard deposit plus first and last months’ rent. Instead, she offered a suggestion. “Go up Liberty Street to the black-and-red Victorian. Dodge Nutter might rent you something.”

  Ryan walked up a short, steep hill to a Victorian with fire-engine-red siding and twin black turrets topped with conic spires. The carpenter’s lace trim sparkled in gold with tiny but screaming slivers of lime green.

  Most of the other Victorians at the top of the hill were partitioned into apartments too, but they had multiple entrances and tasteful paint. The red-and-black monstrosity at the corner towered over them and had just the one entrance, ten-foot-high double doors. An “apartment for rent” sign was duct-taped to the porch’s iron railing. As he climbed the stairs, Ryan decided that the place must be haunted, and, by the time he reached the porch, he could picture Grandpa Munster resurrecting Herman in the basement.