The God Patent

by Ransom Stephens

  She poked a finger in his belly and said, “You’re mind isn’t hard to read.”

  “You know,” Ryan said, looking to the left and then right. “This is the first time we’ve ever been alone, unchaperoned.”

  “You better behave. My big brother is right down the hall.”

  “Dodge?”

  She nodded with a closed-mouth smile. They stared at each other for a few seconds and then started laughing.

  “It’s hard to believe that you’re related to him.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “What’s the deal with him, anyway?” Ryan asked. “The gun, the obsessive neatness, and why would a guy like that have a business like Skate-n-Shred?”

  “Well,” Emmy said, “my brother is a walking contradiction. I think the gun is there for some kind of bravado, but I’m not sure.” As she spoke, her forehead furrowed in a way that made her eyes look even bigger. “He’s always had a strange fascination with suicide. My parents worry about him a lot. So do I.” She lifted two paper cups of coffee and her mug and motioned for Ryan to take the cup with lots of milk. “He’s much older than me, and I don’t know him well.”

  Ryan said, “He’s not really a knowable kind of guy.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing about him that you might not have realized yet.” She stepped into the hall. “When it comes right down to it, my brother will always do the right thing.”

  “What? Dodge?”

  “I know, he seems mean sometimes, and he’s always scheming, but when someone needs help, he helps them. He’s helping you, isn’t he?”

  “It’s hard to tell. It seems more like he’s helping himself than doing me any favors.”

  “That’s his way.”

  Ryan could hear Dodge’s voice from the conference room.

  Emmy said, “Speak of the devil.”

  “Devil seems like an accurate description,” Ryan said. When they were a few steps from the door, he said, “What are you doing later?”

  Emmy stopped. “After our meeting?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Then she turned away, her hair brushing against him again, and walked ahead into the conference room. Ryan noticed an extra swing to her walk that he hadn’t seen before.

  While Ryan and Emmy were getting coffee, Tran had asked Kat how she’d learned QED. “Emmy gave us the book and we read it.” The answer didn’t seem to satisfy him. He asked a lot more questions, mostly about math—not math in particular but how she’d learned the math. She repeated, “It was in the book.” It confused her and made her feel like an imposter. How could she help Tran? He really belonged at SLAC, and she didn’t even know if she had a social security number.

  Kat recognized a voice hollering down the hall. “Emmy? Where the hell are you? Nutter? Anyone seen Emmy Nutter?”

  She went to the door and yelled, “Shut up, Dodge—we’re in here!” She could hear Ryan and Emmy laughing from the other direction.

  Dodge sat at the head of the table, set down an old, scratched aluminum briefcase, and took out a yellow legal pad. Ignoring Tran altogether, he looked at the whiteboards and asked Kat what they’d been talking about. As she told him, he wiggled a wooden pencil between his fingers and bobbed his shiny head. Kat concluded by saying, “You need a haircut—it’s bozoing around the sides. You look like the pointy-headed guy in Dilbert.” She laughed but Dodge didn’t respond. Tran smiled into his hand.

  Ryan and Emmy returned with coffee a few minutes later, and Dodge greeted them with, “Can you prove that the inventions are bogus?”

  Emmy looked at Tran. He shuffled the marked-up patents to the surface.

  Ryan started to speak, but Emmy stopped him by resting her hand on his arm. He looked at her hand, and his eyes seemed to soften in a way that Kat had seen before.

  In his sharp tone and considered manner, Tran said, “The first patent, Application of Fundamental Uncertainty to the Generation of Energy, blatantly violates the first and second laws of thermodynamics and therefore violates patent law. It is illegal to submit a patent for a perpetual motion machine. I should think that any patent attorney could successfully dispute it.”

  Dodge broke in, “Who is this guy?”

  Tran looked up sharply. “My name is Tran Than Nguyen—graduate student in physics at Cal. Dr. Nutter asked me to review these patents for physical consistency.” He glanced at his notes and continued, “The second patent, Method of Multiple Feedback for Neural Network Self-Generation of Artificial Intelligence, being a software algorithm rather than a machine, is less problematic. One might expect the term intelligence to be defined before claiming artificial intelligence, and the wording seems intentionally obscure…”—he looked at Ryan, who shrugged—“…the description of the behavior of the ‘asymptotic generations of self-replicated neural networks’ is fascinating.” He smoothed the pages of the patent.

  Dodge said, “Can it work?”

  Simultaneously, Tran said, “Maybe,” and Emmy said, “No.”

  “Yes,” Ryan said, louder than was necessary. “It’s software that writes other software. The result will make decisions that resemble the way people make decisions—free will. Hey, this isn’t my first rodeo.”

  Tran added, “I suspect that Mr. Nutter’s question is asking whether the whole system will create energy and—”

  “And the answer is no.” Emmy stood up.

  Kat sighed in such a way that it caught the attention of Emmy and Ryan. Emmy said, “What is it, dear?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Dodge hit the table with his fist and let loose a coughing chortle. “Thank you, Kat.”

  Ryan went to the whiteboard, erased it, and drew a grid of rectangles with a black marker. “Think of a neural network as a bunch of boxes that you can ask yes or no questions—each box gets a vote. The boxes are called neurons. They’re kinda like neurons in our brains, and a bunch of them makes a neural network. Neural nets are good at recognizing patterns, sort of like how you recognize a cup of coffee.”

  Above the grid, he drew a cloud and then a web of lines from different parts of the cloud to each box in the top row. “Think of each of these lines as sensory input, like color, shape, smell—the stuff that your brain assembles without you having to think.”

  “First you process the senses. Is it the right color? Does it have the right smell? If it passes those tests, then there are higher-order questions.” He drew lines from each box in the top row to each box in the second row. “Does the cup look like a coffee cup? Is it in a conference room, a kitchen, or on a desk, where you could expect to find coffee?” He drew lines to the next row. “And so forth until each of the boxes in the last layer votes on whether the data are consistent with what the network has been trained to recognize.” He held up his cup. “All the assumptions and prejudices that you learned in order to intuit that this is a cup of coffee had to come from somewhere.”

  He took a sip, set down the cup, tossed the black marker toward the tray—it bounced off and landed on the floor—and picked up the red marker from the table next to Emmy. “Training starts by showing the network coffee: with and without milk, hot and warm, but probably not cold, in different types of cups and environments, and then forcing the net to identify each data set as a cup of coffee.” He circled the bottom row, but there were so many black lines you couldn’t really see the new red one. “Some boxes might only recognize black coffee, or coffee in a Starbucks cup, but the network will weigh each box’s answer so that the network as a whole says, ‘It is coffee.’”

  Kat drew her own version of the neural net in her notebook. Instead of using lines between the boxes, she used tubes so that she could fill them with stick figures, names, and diagrams like she did in her murals. She turned to a blank page and redrew her version of the neural net, this time replacing the boxes with little dragons—that didn’t feel quite right either, but it was close, really close. She had that satisfied feeling s
he got when she figured something out mathematically but didn’t know exactly what it meant.

  Ryan drew red lines from each of the lower boxes back to every one of the boxes above them—the result was a mess of black and red lines. “My invention is a population of networks. Think of each network as an individual mind on its own computer.” He stepped back and shook his head at the indecipherable drawing. “Start with a single computer running a neural net. Every net will have a bunch of sensory inputs—the ones Creation Energy implements will have input from every wire that comes out of the collider. Of course, the main purpose of each net is to operate the collider, but they will also have another purpose: to reproduce.”

  He took the eraser and pulled it across the whiteboard, making a black and red smear. “Remember, I was trying to patent the soul, so I mixed biblical and biological ideas. Eve came from Adam’s rib, right? So to get the second net, take half the boxes from Adam and configure them on another computer. This way you have two unique nets—every net in the system must be unique.” He stepped to the side, behind Kat, to a blank region of whiteboard. He drew a black box and a red box and then a green box below the two. “So Adam and Eve make a baby.”

  Emmy said, “Baby?”

  Kat didn’t like the dismissive tone in her voice. Ryan’s eyes squinted—he didn’t like it either. They both ignored her.

  Tran chimed in, “The patent uses the phrase ‘begets a neural network.’”

  “Exactly, and kinda like people sharing chromosomes, their baby is made by copying half the neurons of each parent, which means half the properties of each parent.” He drew another cloud above the parents, lines from the cloud to the baby, and lines from the parents to the baby and back. “The baby has inputs from both the collider and its parents. The trick to making sure that each net is unique is that they must have limited lifetimes. If they don’t die, eventually they’d learn all there is to know about whatever they’re trained to do, and then they’d become identical—I got that from either Saint Thomas Aquinas or Saint Augustine, something about everyone’s soul being unique. Plus, since the parents have to train their babies, they can’t reproduce until they’re a certain age.”

  Kat said, “So you end up with like, a whole mess of neural networks, making decisions and criticizing each other, having babies, growing old, learning and dying.”

  Ryan said, “Yeah, each generation starts with the knowledge of the previous generation, trains the next generation, and then, over many generations, the legacy of decisions, preferences, and assumptions lead to increasingly sophisticated nets. Each net has the wisdom and prejudice built from a sort of cultural evolution. It is that combination of wisdom and prejudice that gives them an intuitive sense of right and wrong and the free will to act on that higher-order sense. In other words, they develop morality and make decisions that are indistinguishable from the way that something with free will would make decisions.”

  Tran opened a thick file and flipped about halfway through. The Creation Energy logo was at the top of each page—it was a printout of Foster’s book. He cleared his throat and said, “They think that a godless universe would be deterministic—the antithesis of free will and therefore sentience.”

  Dodge said, “But it still wouldn’t work.”

  Emmy nodded to Dodge and said, “I find this description wonderfully ironic. You’ve built a model of how complex systems, like a human brain, can be mechanical but not deterministic.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Dodge asked.

  “Free will doesn’t require superstition,” Emmy said. “The vast number of inputs and the way we process them combine with the fact that the tiniest differences in external conditions can lead to huge variations in behavior. The result is that we are biochemical machines with free will.” She turned to Ryan and took his hand. “In other words, your patent describes how free will can be achieved without a soul at all. Perfect irony. I totally love it.”

  Ryan obviously couldn’t think straight while she was touching him. He was incapable of pulling away too. He mumbled, “Yuh-huh.”

  Emmy said, “Of course, some stimuli leave fewer options than others,” and let go of his hand.

  Kat drew a little baby neural net, stared at it, and then said, “Two thinking things think a third thinking thing into existence. Doesn’t that make you God?”

  Emmy laughed, leaned back in her chair, and said, “It sure does—and that should bother Foster Reed more than the fact that nothing spiritual is required.”

  “This makes sense now.” Tran flipped to a dog-eared page of Foster’s book. “That’s it. I get it. They’re not playing God, they’re maintaining symmetry. It’s the inverse of Creation. If man creates a soul, spiritual energy is created on the physical side. During Creation, physical energy was created on the spiritual side.” Tran ran a hand through his hair, mussing his part. Kat thought he was going to jump out of his chair. “The window would have to open. There’s no telling what could happen. An energy source is the obvious guess. Or it could be an energy sink. It could suck all energy out of the universe, it could—”

  Emmy groaned and, as though it were a command, Tran stopped.

  Kat broke the silence. “So what came first? The soul or energy? Consciousness or matter?”

  “Okay, I need to say something,” Emmy said as if she were in pain.

  Tran looked embarrassed. “It’s just a model, I didn’t mean that…”

  Emmy stared at the table. “You have taken a large step away from reason. I’ll grant you that the process you described could result in a network that would appear irrational and make decisions similar to the way that people make decisions. The decisions might not be predictable and in that sense could be indistinguishable from free will. But please, you don’t need anything like a soul, and you certainly don’t need God. Is that totally obvious to everyone?”

  Ryan’s jaw clenched the way it did when he was confused. “If it looks like a soul, acts like a soul, smells like a soul, then it’s a soul. If you believe in God, then…”

  “And if you bind yourself to blind faith, you’ll never encounter truth,” Emmy said. “Remember when I visited you guys in Petaluma and we talked about assumptions and leaps of faith?”

  Katarina said, “We said that the scientific method is just watching our step.”

  “Right. We need to identify our assumptions and make careful steps of faith rather than huge leaps.” She turned back to Tran. “If the software is indistinguishable from a soul, is that sufficient to identify it as a soul?”

  Tran said, “If, just for the sake of argument, their primary conjecture is true—the symmetry of spiritual and physical energy—then that is exactly what they are testing. If indistinguishability is sufficient, their power generator would work.” Then, with a smile that looked almost devilish, he added, “If something is indistinguishable from an electron, it is by definition an electron. According to Saint Thomas Aquinas, free will is the defining property of a soul.”

  Emmy held up her arms and laughed as though it were a joke. It was real, songlike laughter; she really thought it was funny. It reminded Kat of her new friend at school, Marti. Marti laughed all the time, especially when Kat said something intelligent that Marti didn’t understand. In fact, Marti laughed every time Kat spoke like a mathematical physicist. Kat puzzled for an instant. In a way, Marti made it easier for Kat to be a geek.

  “Good one.” Emmy had a big smile. “I knew you’d say that.”

  How could Emmy have seemed so angry and then all of a sudden be amused?

  Ryan laughed too. Even Dodge smiled. Emmy was sort of like Marti—when she laughed, other people always laughed with her. That’s how Marti affected people. She had a happiness feedback loop, but it was weird to see the same thing in serious, brilliant, badass Emmy. It didn’t make sense.

  Kat looked at her notebook and concentrated, visualizing herself as a neural network with lines from her five senses to a row of boxes. The next row connec
ted to her mother and had severed lines to her dead father, with a new box connected to Ryan and another with a thin line to Emmy.

  She looked at Ryan’s coffee—a paper cup with a little heat-ring around it and a white plastic cover. Traces of steam curled out of it. Emmy’s was in a big mug with a dancing penguin cartoon. It didn’t have any steam now, but it had a few minutes before. Kat watched everyone interact but concentrated so that their voices were no longer words, just sounds, as though she had erased the input line from her ears to her mind. Even though Emmy thought everything Ryan said was wrong—really totally wrong—she still touched him every time he spoke, and Ryan leaned toward her like a happy puppy. Kat didn’t understand why Emmy would help Ryan. They seemed so mismatched—Ryan the big fuckup and Emmy the great scientist. What other feedback loop needed to be drawn in? Could it just be that Emmy thought Ryan was hot? Ryan was hella cute and funny, and he was smarter than most boys, but…

  A thought hit Kat from a different angle, as though the severed line to her father had just solidified. Her father would say that Emmy is simply a nice woman who wants to help a nice man.

  Dodge stroked his chin and glared at Emmy. Emmy’s brow furrowed deeply—the same way that Dodge’s did when he was angry, but now Emmy didn’t seem angry, just adamant. And every time Dodge made his annoying raspy not-laugh, Emmy exhaled. She looked like a little girl when she exhaled.

  Kat turned to Ryan. He was looking back at her and had that smile on his face that he sometimes got when she was working at the whiteboard.

  At once, as though all her little boxes lined up in agreement, she recognized the look on Ryan’s face. It was her look. It was her special look for when she really liked something. That little closed-mouth smile, lips turning up and eyes wide open.

  Kat tapped her pencil on her notebook. “Each network has an effect on the others, right?”

  Ryan nodded. The others didn’t notice that she’d said anything.

  “What if two of them started out identical, and you put them with a bunch of others—eventually the two would be different, right?”