The God Patent

by Ransom Stephens

  “Yep, in fact, that’s a good debug test. If two started out as identical but had different inputs and remained the same, it would mean something was wrong.” Kat had to strain to hear Ryan over Dodge and Emmy’s arguing.

  Kat noticed that Tran had started listening to them.

  “What would happen if you killed one of them?” Kat twirled her hair around her finger. “The decisions made by the other nets are still affected by the dead one. So it’s not really dead, is it? It has just stopped changing.”

  “Sort of, for a while I guess. But the others keep changing, so eventually there’s no trace of the dead one.”

  “No.” At some point, Emmy and Dodge had gone silent. Everyone was staring at Kat, making it hard to think. She sat up a little straighter. “No. Each net that was ever affected by the dead one continues to be influenced by its, um, its affection. And every affected decision affects other nets until the effects of the dead one are distributed evenly over all the others. So the longer you wait, the more the dead net affects the whole system. Even though it’s dead.”

  Tran added, “Though the longer it was alive, the greater its total impact on the others—just by sheer number of decisions.”

  Kat wondered why he’d bother to say something so obvious. His eyes had narrowed some; he was obviously concentrating. Kat had never believed that she was smarter than other people. When she acted smart around her friends, it seemed to bother them, seemed uncool, at least until Marti laughed, so she usually acted the way they did: a little clueless, unconcerned, uninterested—you know, cool. She figured they had been doing the same thing. But that look on Tran’s face made her uncomfortable, though not in a bad way.

  She turned to Ryan.

  He spread his hands and said, “You’re way past me now…”

  “What if, before it died, you recorded everything about it and then, right after you turned it off, you loaded it onto a different computer?”

  “It’s software. It would be the same on any box.”

  She could hear Ryan’s foot tapping against the table leg. “So the others would never even know that it had died.”

  “But if you rebooted another computer with the same net, then it’s not dead,” Tran said. “What’s the significance?”

  Kat realized how tightly her ankles had been crossed. It felt like she was looking for something but was blinded by the light of everybody staring at her. Her shoulders slumped. She felt out of place again—an imposter. “Nothin’,” she said. “I was just thinking about identical particles. Never mind.”

  Emmy said, “The only effect that a well-trained neural net could have on an electron-positron collider, or even a real power generator, would be to optimize its output and get it closer to the thermodynamic efficiency limit or even the Heisenberg limit. It could never get over that.”

  Dodge said, “Can you convince a jury that it won’t work?” And the two of them were arguing again.

  “Wait,” Ryan interrupted. “Dodge, you said that we just have to be able to convince the investors that it won’t work.”

  Dodge jerked his head from side to side, and his eyes got so big they looked like they might pop out. “No, no, we want Emmy to prove the patents are worthless.”

  “What?” Ryan said.

  But Kat understood. It shouldn’t have surprised her. Dodge was lying to Emmy or Ryan, probably to both.

  Before Ryan could say anything else, Dodge said, “Okay, Emmy—how are you going to prove the patents are worthless?”

  “They violate the first and second laws of thermodynamics,” Emmy said.

  “You’ll have to do better than that.”

  “Dodge, there is nothing better than that,” Emmy said but then calmed down and turned to Tran. “Is there anything obvious in Foster Reed’s dissertation…” She said dissertation as though it were a dirty word.

  Ryan turned in his chair to face Emmy and said, “You haven’t read Foster’s book? I believe we had a deal, ma’am. I read Feynman’s QED.”

  She smiled a guilty but playful smile. “I tried to read it, but every time I picked it up I got queasy.” Then, to Dodge, she said, “I can destroy this dissertation sentence by sentence if that’s what it takes.”

  “Good,” Dodge said. “If it works, Ryan gets to see his kid; if not, Sean McNear continues through life thinking his father is a bum.”

  Emmy said, “I guess I’ll have to read this thing.” Then she faced Ryan again. This time she was serious. “I want to destroy these charlatans, and I’d like to help you too, Ryan.” Her stare dwelled on him an instant longer and then turned to Tran on her other side. As she turned, her hair swirled near Ryan’s face. He inhaled deeply.

  Kat wondered how things would change after Ryan fixed his life. He’d probably move back to Texas, probably forget all about her. The thought sent a little jolt through her. She wouldn’t admit to herself that it was fear. Instead, she insisted that it would be better for Ryan to leave her alone. On the other hand, as long as he kept looking at Emmy the way he was now, he wouldn’t be going anywhere. Kat looked at the whiteboards and the clock, then back at Ryan and Emmy. Ryan was still staring, and Emmy, obviously aware of it, was preening her hair and glancing at him occasionally.

  Kat stood up. “Shit, I forgot something. Dodge, you have to drive me home.”

  Without turning away from Emmy, Ryan said, “Don’t say shit. I’ll take you home after dinner.”

  “I have to go home now. I forgot to pick up my registration packet at the school, and it’s due tomorrow.”

  Ryan finally dragged his gaze away from Emmy. “I’ll take you.”

  Kat stared at him, willing him to get the completely obvious point—this is how you get to be alone with Emmy, idiot!

  Emmy looked at Kat and nodded subtly—she got it. Emmy said, “Ryan, we need to talk, okay?” She stood and pointed a finger at Dodge. “You take Kat home.” And then to Kat, “Thank you for coming, Katarina. You are an amazing young woman.”

  Kat didn’t know how to respond, so she tossed her notebook into Ryan’s open briefcase.

  Dodge carefully set his pad back in his. Everyone else followed suit except Tran, who said, “One other thing, Mr. Nutter. In my research, I noticed something odd. Both of these patents were reviewed by the same officer at the US Patent and Trademark Office—it struck me as anomalous because of the terrific gap between the intellectual properties described.”

  Dodge asked, “Did you get the guy’s name?” Tran quoted the name. As Dodge wrote it down, he made several slurping noises as though he were drooling.

  “Sushi?” Ryan made a face. “Can’t we have food that’s cooked?”

  Emmy poked a playful finger into his chest. “Have you ever had sushi?”

  “No.”

  “Come on, I’ll drive.” She walked out her office door, leaving Ryan behind. “Sushi is the food equivalent of sex. If you don’t like it, I won’t be able to date you.” She walked away from him but glanced back.

  Ryan caught himself letting loose a held breath and straggled behind a little longer. How could someone be so intelligent, opinionated, and cute all at once?

  She turned a corner, and he rushed forward to keep her in view. She peeked back at him and laughed. Her long strides pulled her blouse up, exposing her waist. Ryan lagged farther behind. When they got to her car, she turned, still laughing, and said, “Stop staring at my butt.”

  He said, “Stop having such a nice butt.”

  “Men are such simple creatures,” she said and got into the car.

  Emmy worked the stick shift with the same precision she did everything. Main Street in Palo Alto was lined with freshly painted older buildings, like a refined version of the boulevard back in Petaluma.

  Ryan held the door and Emmy approached the hostess, a tiny Japanese lady in a gold kimono. Emmy pointed at the sushi bar and said she wanted to sit in front of the owner, whom she indicated by name.

  Staring at the different colored raw fish, little
piles of fish eggs, and the tentacles of octopuses, Ryan caught himself making a tsk sound. The chef set wooden blocks before them, each with a pink heap of ginger and a green pile of wasabi. Emmy took a bit of wasabi on the end of a chopstick and motioned for Ryan to follow suit. Then she held it up. “Here’s a toast. To you, Ryan McNear—be a good father to all of the kids who look up to you.”

  Ryan considered her words and thought of Katarina, then Sean. Seeing himself through Emmy’s eyes was a little scary. Being a good father had somehow become his entire goal in life. He’d been aware of it before but never with Katarina and Sean in the same thought. He raised a stick with a wad of green stuff at its end and put it in his mouth. So did Emmy. His eyes started to water, and his nose felt like it might fly off his face. Emmy’s eyes opened wide and she held one delicate hand over her mouth.

  Emmy ordered a few pieces of sushi and showed Ryan how to concoct a mix of soy sauce and wasabi perfect for dipping. The raw fish tasted clean, like a deep blue ocean, not at all like the fishy harbor he’d expected.

  When Emmy started to write on the little sheet of paper to order more sushi, Ryan said, “Let me order.” She looked at him quizzically. He covered her hand with his and set the pencil down. Ryan got the chef’s attention and leaned forward, holding a hand to his mouth as though concealing his speech from Emmy. “Would you please help me impress her? Please pretend like I’m ordering something sophisticated…” His eyes rolled between Emmy and the chef. Emmy straightened up and appeared tickled. Ryan gave the chef an exaggerated wink and the chef bowed. A minute later, the chef pulled two big octopus nodules from a toaster oven. They were bursting with warm, tangy oil that exploded in their mouths.

  Between servings they told each other stories from their past. Ryan started with the story of the night his father died. Then he asked about Emmy’s childhood.

  “With Dodge around, it was like having three parents,” she said. “I was like such a cocky little girl, and I wanted to be a ballerina—but my bones were too fragile, and I had asthma, so I went with my fallback—math major at UC San Diego, then PhD in physics at Caltech.” Then, in a clear but quiet voice, “Ryan, what happened between you and your wife?”

  Ryan looked away, waiting for words to come. “She wasn’t like you. She wasn’t strong, and I didn’t give her the support she needed. I loved her more than anything, probably too much. Everything I did was in some way for her—building our life, our home, our family. I was preparing for sixty years together, but I worked too much. I let her slip away, let her fall out of love.”

  Emmy’s stare slowly dropped from Ryan’s eyes to somewhere around his arms and chest, then she looked away. “I loved a man once, a good man, a carpenter and an artist. I loved him more than I could have imagined. But one day, I came home, and he was sitting on the couch waiting for me. He said that he’d packed up his tools two weeks before and moved out—I was working so much that I didn’t even notice he was gone.”

  Ryan started to run his tongue along his lips but stopped. This instant between them had to be authentic. He didn’t want to think back to this night and worry that he’d bullshitted her in any way. He wanted her to know; it seemed fair.

  “What happened was this.” He ate the last piece of sushi, chewing slowly so he could think. “It started the morning after Foster’s bachelor party.” Emmy’s eyes flickered. “Yeah, the same guy I’m going to sue. Anyway, the party was a Dallas tradition at a gentleman’s club. One of the strippers put a note in my pocket. I was barely aware of it. The next morning, Linda, my wife, found it, and it upset her so much that she asked me to sleep on the couch, so I did. I would have done anything for Linda. Then, at Foster’s wedding, she wouldn’t dance with me, wouldn’t even talk to me—she danced with everyone else, though.

  “I slipped love letters under the bedroom door every night. She pushed them back out, but I kept writing them. The last Saturday that I lived in that house, I tried to serve her breakfast in bed. She pushed it back and started crying. She let me in our room, and we finally talked. She told me that she couldn’t get the image of that note with the phone number out of her head—I never saw it; I don’t even know what it said. I told her that I couldn’t bear to sleep on the couch anymore, and we agreed that I’d stay at a hotel for a week or so. We just needed a break, and then we’d work it out. I told her that I’d always be her knight, and she kissed me. That was the last kiss…”

  Struggling under the memory’s weight, Ryan tried a matter-of-fact tone. “I buried myself in my work, of course—twelve-, sixteen-hour days.” Emmy was sitting still, open but expressionless. “Linda stopped answering the phone when I called, and she wouldn’t open the door when I came over, wouldn’t talk to me when I sat next to her at PTA meetings. I guess eventually something had to give, right?”

  He felt his teeth grinding together. “One afternoon, I went to visit Sean. I parked the car, and Linda walked out the front door. She turned away from me, down the street. I called her and walked along behind. Three doors down, she got in a big Mercedes with one of our neighbors—a guy I used to go fishing with, Howard. Actually, she didn’t just get in, the old bastard kissed her—she knew I was there, knew I was watching.”

  A waitress picked up the last few dishes, and Ryan handed her the pile of twenty-dollar bills he’d stashed away just for this event.

  Emmy started to gather her things.

  Ryan said, “I’m not finished.”

  She turned back to him.

  “Six months after that, we got divorced. A month later I got laid off. You have to understand that I’d just lost everything I’d ever wanted. Everything. All I wanted was to be an engineer with a nice family.” He took a deep breath and said it: “I started taking methamphetamine and got mixed up with a, well, with a meth-whore. It’s hard to explain. I’d lost everything…”

  Emmy stared at him, betraying no emotion. She took her keys out of her purse and stood. Ryan helped her with her coat. Her back to him, he couldn’t gauge her reaction. Had he blown it? It was okay, he decided, if honesty blew it; that had to be okay.

  She stepped toward the door. He took a quick step to get ahead of her. “Did you say something?”

  She didn’t stop until she was out on the sidewalk. Then she looked up at him. He put his hands in his pockets and looked at the ground. The sidewalk was clean and smooth. Trepidation wrapped around his heart like a fog.

  She reached up and gently tugged him down to her as though she were going to kiss him, but the look on her face was more resigned than affectionate. She whispered, “You’re a good man, Ryan. People make mistakes. Thank you for telling me. It was hard to say, wasn’t it?”

  He exhaled. “It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t really come up by itself, you know? And I didn’t want you to find out in a year or two and feel deceived.”

  “A year or two?”

  “Yes, a year or two, maybe fifty.” He rubbed his nose against hers and said, “I could use the help of a genius like you.”

  She punched him lightly in the chest. “Keep me up on that pedestal, McNear. I like it up here.” As she took a few steps along the sidewalk, she laughed her oh-so-feminine version of that raspy cynical chuckle.

  Ryan said, “You know, you and Dodge have a few really uncomfortable similarities.”

  Emmy drove Ryan back to the lab. “Okay, now it’s my turn.” She got him into the restricted area by having him flash a graduate student’s ID to the guard. Spotlights from the corrugated warehouse-like building reflected from huge pieces of rusting iron that cast eerie shadows. Inside, two men in their late twenties, both wearing jeans and T-shirts, looked up from computers. One immediately picked up three beanbags and started juggling. The other greeted Emmy with a too-enthusiastic smile and, when she introduced Ryan, said, “Oh, never mind,” and turned back to his computer.

  She guided Ryan down two flights of stairs below ground level to a long, gracefully curving tunnel. A steel pipe, about a foot in diameter, ra
n through the center of the tunnel. “This is the beam line. The electrons come from that direction and the positrons from there.” Continuing along the tunnel, she led him to a metal apparatus standing nearly six stories high with thousands, maybe millions of cables. It looked vaguely similar to the calorimeter in Foster’s lab but much bigger. “This is the detector. We call it BaBar, after the cartoon elephant. The electrons and positrons annihilate at an energy that produces mostly b and anti-b quarks.” She smiled up at him, bounced on her tiptoes, and said, “We don’t even need an artificial soul!”

  Ryan couldn’t help but think of her as a ballerina. He leaned down, placed his arms around her waist, and kissed her. Her lips responded to his by opening slightly, and as she drew him closer, she looked into his eyes. He nibbled her lower lip. Her eyes were dark blue and clear, and very, very moist.

  She pulled away a few inches. “I’ve been working on this experiment for twelve years. We’re figuring out why the universe is made of matter instead of antimatter.”

  He put his arm around her, and she led him out of the brightly lit cavern, back up the stairs to her car. They drove up a dirt road to the top of a hill. She stopped in the moon shadow of an oak tree. They got out and sat on the hood of her car under the stars. Emmy leaned against Ryan, and he hugged her close.

  After a few minutes, Emmy said, “This is why I don’t need superstition to be impressed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Speaking in a soft voice full of wonder, Emmy said, “People always want more. They want haunted houses and ghosts, ESP and horoscopes, gods and martyrs; they want to jump off the diving board of faith. But look, look at this galaxy where we live. Why would anyone want more than this?”

  Ryan wrapped his coat around her when she shivered, and she giggled when he kissed the back of her ear. When he moved his lips to hers, she pushed him back and said, “Let me look at you in the starlight. Ryan, why do you need more?”

  Ryan said, “You mean God? A soul?”