The God Patent

by Ransom Stephens

  “Does Evangelical Word University ring a bell?”

  “No.”

  Ryan lay awake in his sleeping bag that first night in Nutter House. When cars drove by, lights flashed off the tarnished copper work on the ceiling. It reminded him of the day GoldCon’s CEO had presented a plaque to each of them. That the patents were granted had caught Ryan by surprise. At first he’d felt uncomfortable cashing the big checks—the company split the $5,000 for each patent between them; together they had four checks for $2,500—but it didn’t bother Foster. He said they should trust the patent office, that it had happened for a reason. They were skiing off that blue boat the following weekend.

  Ryan listened to the sleepy old house creak and settle. It was hard to get comfortable, not just because the foam under his sleeping bag was lumpy, but because he wanted to go home.

  He started dozing off, and a vision of Linda and Sean woke him. He thrashed around, trying to think of something else, anything that could shake off the melancholies. It was harder at night. These internal battles always ended the same way: an image of Sean—half daydream, half nightmare. He’d be thirteen by now, wearing cleats, pads, and a helmet, walking home after being cut from the team and blaming his absent father for not being there to teach him football’s Xs and Os. Ryan couldn’t stand the fact that he had abandoned Sean, just like his father had abandoned him. Linda had thrown Ryan out when Sean was about the same age Ryan had been when his father died.

  Someone coughed down the hall. Ryan got up, put on his pants, and stepped toward the door. He opened it and looked down the dim hallway, up at the ornate crown molding, and realized what he was doing. Without even considering it, something lurking in his brain, the monkey on his back, was requesting a few hits of meth to make everything all better.

  He hung his head and sighed. Would it ever get any easier?

  Stepping inside his apartment, he closed the door and paced in front of the window. He listed everything in his life that was getting better. Every step that took him closer to a life where he could be with Sean and make a living solving technical puzzles was a good step. Any step out that door in search of a chemical nightmare was a bad step. When he finished, one thing stood out: he had a room in a nice house in a good town and, if not a bed, at least a soft, warm place to sleep.

  Ryan lay back down and pulled the sleeping bag around him. Visions of the past mixed with hope for the future. He thought of his old friend and wondered where Foster was now. Probably sleeping peacefully with his wife—he ended up marrying the aerobics instructor. Ryan wondered if Foster knew that a university had bought the rights to their patents.

  The way that mathematical symmetry appears in nature is as elegant and beautiful a thing as there is in the universe.” Professor Emmy Nutter loved teaching the first term of senior-level quantum physics. Thirty of the University of California’s finest faced her in an auditorium with a capacity for three hundred.

  “We’re going to take our time with this derivation, okay? I want you to feel this. It’s what art students feel when they study Renoir, what music students feel the first time they play Brahms, what computer science students feel when they learn—I don’t know—queuing theory?” Emmy smiled, giving the class permission to laugh. Turning back to the board, she tossed her long wavy hair out of her eyes. Her hair was currently brown with blonde streaks. She’d been dyeing it different colors since she was ten and wasn’t sure what its natural color might be—blonde like her mother’s, brown like her father’s, or black like her brother’s.

  She drew symbols on the whiteboard with a black pen, symbols in a language as arcane to most people as druidical runes, but this really was the language of nature. It was this mathematical purity that had drawn Emmy to physics.

  “We start with a general wave function.” She scribbled a Greek letter on the whiteboard. “Let this symbol describe the evolution of a system in space and time. It could be a hydrogen atom, a black hole, the mold growing on your roommate’s pillow, anything you want. Now watch, multiply it by this function of time.” She turned back to face her class. Two young men, Mike and Rob, sat in the front row, overachieving A-students wearing Society of Physics Students sweatshirts with an image of Einstein and the caption “I’d have written this in four dimensions, but I didn’t have the spacetime.” To Emmy’s left, Tran, a thin, pale Asian man in a pressed Oxford shirt with a razor-sharp part in his hair, stared back. A month ago Tran had been tentative, afraid to demonstrate ignorance. Now, when he had a question, he blurted it out as a challenge without even raising his hand. Lori, the only female student, sat ten rows back in the center of a cluster of young men. Lori disappointed Emmy. No stranger to being the only woman in a room of men, she hoped Lori would grow into a scientist. Instead, she sat there playing soap opera games with her boyfriends.

  Emmy said, “The function of time resets the clock. That’s all. You can think of it like daylight savings time. Can you think of a reason that the system should behave differently by resetting the clock?” She watched the class, encouraging them with a smile here, a little nod there.

  Mike and Rob whispered to each other.

  Emmy turned back to the board. “Let’s see what happens when we apply the principle of least action—remember from last year? The universe is lazy. In going from one state to another, a system takes the easiest way possible. Balls roll downhill, frat boys barf at parties, stars cool as they expand.”

  Mike and Rob nodded. Lori stared at her notes, pencil poised, and Tran pulled a second notebook from his briefcase.

  Emmy wove calculus and algebra across three whiteboards. Most of the students copied it to their notes verbatim, but a few raced her to the result. Finally, the symbols boiled down to a compact equation.

  This was it.

  She could feel her students’ minds working. A wave of affection welled up. She spoke softly so that they had to strain to hear. “Consider how everything simplifies.”

  “Whoa,” Mike mumbled. “Conservation of energy?”

  Emmy danced up on her tiptoes and clapped. Mike’s eyes flashed understanding. She wanted to hug him. “You’ve just accomplished one of the most noble goals of humanity. You derived the first law of thermodynamics: energy is neither created nor destroyed, it merely changes form.”

  She waited, staring at Tran. He took a little longer than the others, but when comprehension came to him, it was so complete that he could reformulate and expand a theory in ways that few others could. She skipped across the room to the first symbols she’d written. “We’ve related the single most fundamental law of nature directly to the way that time passes.”

  Tran’s brow furrowed and he scribbled furiously. Rob leaned over to Mike and whispered. Across the room, some of the students flipped through their notes, some stared intently, and one read a newspaper.

  Finally, Tran raised his hand. Tran hadn’t raised his hand in a month. Emmy held her arms out to him. He said, “Dr. Nutter, does this mean that it’s not energy that’s special, but time?”

  Emmy felt the familiar thrill, the reason she taught. He got it. She scanned her kids, waiting for them to look up. “Yes, the laws of nature are not dictated by the matter that fills the universe, but by the geometry of space and time.” She leaned against the center of the whiteboard and spread out her arms. “Look what we did: we’re just a bunch of organic matter, but we proved—proved!—that the law of conservation of energy, that the total energy in a system is fixed, is a direct consequence of the fact that if we do an experiment on Tuesday, we’ll get the same results on Thursday, or Saturday, or next year.”

  Emmy bounced up and down. “This special relationship between energy and time is a mathematical symmetry. Energy and time are like mathematical reflections of each other. Any questions?” She made eye contact with every student.

  Tran interrupted. “Does this mean that for every mathematical symmetry there is also a fundamental law of nature?”

  Emmy wondered if you could pas
s out from joy.

  Mike whispered, “Wow.”

  In full lecture form, she said, “Let me give you an example where it doesn’t work—you’re going to love this.” She erased a section of whiteboard and drew a stick figure looking at itself in a mirror. “What do you see when you look in a mirror?”

  Tran said, “Your reflection with left and right reversed.”

  “Exactly. Switching left and right is a symmetry transformation. If we were to study the mirror image of the universe, which amounts to switching the positive and negative x-axes, would anything change? If not, then there is an unbroken symmetry, and for every unbroken symmetry, there is a corresponding law of nature.

  “Think of time as a line, one dimension stretching from past to future. That the geometry of time itself is the same anywhere on that line leads to the law of conservation of energy.” She walked up the aisle and leaned toward Lori as if to share a secret. “Our universe is symmetric between the past and future, but it’s not symmetric under a switch of right and left. If it were, there might be equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Trying to understand how this works is the point of my research across the bay at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center—SLAC.”

  The clock ticked to 10:50. The student in the top row tossed aside his newspaper and walked out of the room. The other students packed their notebooks and laptops into their backpacks.

  Fifteen minutes later, Emmy was in her office on the hill over the Cal campus at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. She had three offices around the Bay Area; this one, where she spent most of her time, one in the physics department on campus that she only visited to hold office hours, and one at SLAC. She set her notes between the latest edition of Physical Review Letters, the premier research journal, and a prototype circuit board and saw her phone’s message light blinking.

  She picked up the phone and punched in her PIN. The message was from her brother, Dodge. She could guess that he’d called for a favor. Dodge was almost fifteen years older than Emmy and somewhat of a mystery to her. Though he had doted on her since the day she was born, her parents always tried to keep them separate. She was aware that he’d had some trouble with the law but didn’t know any of the details. Dodge would only joke about it when asked. He once told her that he considered suicide every day, that everyone should consider it, and that most people ought to act on it. He was a weird guy, all right, with that gun out on his desk. He was always up to some ridiculous, though mostly harmless, plot to generate wealth. She’d been caught in her share of his schemes over the years, but at thirty-four she thought she’d matured beyond his reach.

  Dodge answered on the first ring and didn’t waste time with pleasantries. “Can you read a couple of patents for me?”

  Instead of replying, she sipped her coffee and relaxed at her desk. She was pleased to hear his voice but knew better than to encourage him.

  After a few seconds, Dodge launched into the sad story of his new tenant: a good guy but down on his luck, a talented engineer burned by his employer who had a couple of inventions whose rights had been purchased by a university.

  When he finished, she said, “So you conned this poor guy into giving you a piece of the action on patents that he doesn’t even own.” She dropped down a few octaves when she said “a piece of the action,” mimicking her brother.

  “The contract hasn’t been written that doesn’t have a hole that I can’t find,” Dodge said. “Between the four winds of menace, fraud, undue influence, and mistake, I’ll find a way to get a piece of the action.” He went up an octave to mock her. “It’s a great case.” Then his voice took a different turn, a turn that she’d heard before and should have recognized. “Especially if I can get it in front of a jury.”

  “What university bought them?”

  “Now I’ve got you.” Dodge chuckled. “See, that’s the weirdest thing about it—Evangelical Word University, somewhere in Texas.”

  “Evangelical Word University? Never heard of it. Okay, Dodge, I have real work to do…”

  “Five minutes, that’s all I want. A quick look at these patents, no more.”

  Emmy groaned but brought up a web browser and surfed to the patent office web page. Dodge told her the patent numbers. She downloaded the text and started skimming. “Dodge I’m not an engineer, I don’t know what this—wait a minute. This is kind of interesting. No.” She started to giggle. In contrast to her brother’s raspy chuckle, Emmy’s rang with the song of a schoolgirl, but the overall effect, mixed with her sharp blue eyes and accompanied by just the wisp of a smile, conveyed the same sense of ironic amusement. “Okay, here’s the giveaway line: realization of the symmetric conditions of the Big Bang allow energy release through vacuum fluctuations.” She stopped laughing. “Please tell me this is a bad joke.”

  Dodge said, “Why would anyone invest in them?”

  “Remember cold fusion?”

  “What about it?”

  “It was totally debunked over fifteen years ago, but people still invest in it.” The memory of the cold fusion debacle brought a flush of embarrassment. She had been a first-year graduate student at Caltech when Pons and Fleischman announced their results: unlimited cheap energy produced by nuclear fusion at room temperature on a tabletop. At that point in her career, she had known enough to understand how it might work but hadn’t yet developed the scientific acumen to question the important details. In the excitement, she designed an experiment to reproduce the results. Then she manipulated a fellow graduate student into putting her on the Physics Department Colloquium agenda. She proposed her experiment with unvarnished naïve confidence to the entire department. A Nobel laureate professor, obviously impatient, had interrupted her: “Why have you no gamma-ray detectors?” She would never forget standing in front of all those distinguished men floundering for an answer. She had missed the point. And it was the only point that mattered: nuclear fusion is characterized by emission of gamma rays, essentially ultra-ultraviolet light. No gamma rays meant no fusion. It was the most embarrassing moment of her life. After the colloquium, he had come to her and said, “The beauty of physics is that you can understand it yourself. You don’t need faith in anything, but you have to think it all the way through.”

  Emmy dispelled the memory by focusing on the patent. “These guys were totally clever. This one on energy creation—the name alone should have set off alarms at the patent office. I like the other one better, it’s subtle.” She took her time reading through the preferred embodiment section of the patent disclosure. “In a way, it’s brilliant. If I’d read it without seeing the energy creation one first…it’s a delightful idea for a neural network.” Then she laughed—a real laugh, not her version of the family chortle. “Except for this one line: ‘Further sentience is created through conception of another intelligence, for example, by insemination of one network, by said original network, resulting in, as detailed below, a proliferation of intelligences, each possessing the ability to choose with progressively greater liberty.’ I’ve heard about engineers toying with the patent office like this.”

  “But why a university?”

  “Dodge, please call me sometime when you aren’t scheming, okay? Please?”

  “Will you testify as an expert witness if I go to court?”

  He said it with that tone again, and this time Emmy noticed, but instead of amplifying her suspicion, she was distracted by the image of herself in court teaching the legal system that science is beyond political interpretation. “If you get that far, I’ll testify—for sure. But listen, Dodge, no meetings in smoke-filled rooms. I will only participate to prevent those charlatans from deceiving the scientifically illiterate.” She paused for a second to make sure he was listening and then spoke loud and clear: “Everything I say has to be public. Do you understand?”

  Dodge liked to think of himself as a card shark, and what he liked best in life was to stack the deck. The trick was to assure that nothing, no change, no nuance, not the slightest fluctuation, occurred
without his knowledge, therefore allowing him to react with the appropriate check or bet. Over the years, he’d played lots of hands; not only had he developed a wide network of associates, he was an expert at developing new sources of information.

  He made calls to Evangelical Word University until he found something that resembled the science and engineering department. A woman with a thick Texas twang answered. Dodge sensed that this woman, Mabel Watson, wore a constant nervous smile. When he asked about the patents, she directed him to a company called Creation Energy. She gave him the number and laughed as she hung up. Dodge dialed it, and the same woman answered the phone—still laughing. Creation Energy wasn’t just related to Evangelical Word University, it was wholly owned and operated right there in the Department of Earthly Science.

  Dodge asked about investment opportunities, and she gave him the phone number of the chief financial officer, a guy named Blair Keene. He thanked her but then, instead of hanging up, cultivated her as an informant. The first step was to ask her about the weather. She went on a long boring trek along the lines of “if you don’t like the weather ’roun’ here, jus’ wait ten minutes.” Then he got her talking about family and found out she had a son who was some kind of modern cowboy on a ranch between San Antonio and Austin.

  Dodge liked the idea of hiring some muscle in the neighborhood, so he told her a lie about being interested in buying a West Texas ranch. He said that he needed a consultant and asked if her son might help. Dodge tried not to chuckle as she gave him her son’s contact information; his name was Dale Watson.

  Since the cards were hot, he went with the direct approach. Seeing as he was “investing down there,” he told her that he’d need some information periodically. She took the hint literally and spewed university gossip covering rumors from the chancellor to the janitor. It took a good hour, but he learned that she was Foster Reed’s secretary—Dodge skimmed his notes to double-check the name of Ryan McNear’s old pal. He managed to resist laughing at that tidbit.