The God Patent

by Ransom Stephens

  Ten minutes later, Ryan and Jane entered the waiting room at juvenile hall. Sunbeams worked their way through floor-to-ceiling blinds. Ryan put Jane in one of the plastic chairs. She stared at her hands in her lap. Ryan tried to sit still, tried to mind his own business, but couldn’t help but realize that this is where parents go to worry. Even the parents with gang-logo tattoos sat quietly, some crying softly, some whispering to each other in anger.

  At 8:30, a man in a short-sleeved shirt with a badge on the front pocket pinned two sheets of paper to a bulletin board. Ryan followed the line of parents to look at it. Katarina would appear before the judge at 9:20.

  At nine, they were ushered into juvenile court. The orange carpet, blue walls, and modest mural of happy children among flowers gave the appearance of a court desperately trying to deny its identity. Ryan walked Jane to the bailiff who was checking identification and matching parents to juveniles. Then the two of them sat in the front row. A few minutes later, Katarina was led in with a dozen other teenage girls. Katarina made eye contact with Ryan first, then leaned her head to the side, indicating her mother, as if to say, “What’s she doing here?”

  It was good to see her, to see that she wasn’t a monster, that she was just his youthful ward, Katarina. He braced himself and checked Jane. She was staring at Katarina. When he looked back, Katarina was staring at him, no longer smiling. He mouthed the words, it’ll be okay, to which she mouthed, What. Ever.

  When Katarina was called forward, Ryan and Jane met her at the table facing the judge just as the other parents and teens had. The judge had short gray hair and a strict expression dampened by smile lines, the sort of woman you’d expect to wear sandals with socks. After reviewing the police report, she called Miss Ariadne’s parents forward. The judge explained the charges. As she spoke, her gaze lingered on Jane, who was looking at the wall behind the judge. Finally, the judge spoke directly to Ryan. “Katarina must appear in juvenile court in two months.” She gave Ryan a list of things to bring, including letters from schoolteachers or community leaders, “anything that can testify to her character.” The gavel came down, and ten minutes later, the three of them were in the parking lot.

  Ryan said, “What the fuck were you doing?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  With his frustration rushing out, he was comfortable ignoring Jane. “You’re going to a doctor.”

  Katarina got in the backseat. Jane stood by the door with Ryan still holding it. He pushed her in, less gently than he meant.

  Katarina asked, “Why?”

  “You’re going to a gynecologist to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases and to see if you’re pregnant.” Ryan slammed the door shut and walked around the car. He settled in and started the car, afraid to say too much. The silence on the drive back to Petaluma was broken only by an old Bruce Springsteen CD.

  As they drove up the boulevard, Katarina said, “I’ve never wanted a shower more in my life.”

  Jane made a strange sound, like a sigh mixed with laughter. Ryan heard the intake of Katarina’s breath and looked at her in the rearview. He raised his hand. “Stop!”

  But it was too late.

  “You fucking bitch—”

  Ryan said, “Don’t say fuck,” but he couldn’t hear himself over Katarina.

  “You are nothing, NOTHING!” She took another breath. “Ryan, stop this car.”

  But he already had.

  Katarina said, “Let me out.”

  When Ryan got out of the car, Katarina started to fight her way out of the backseat. He leaned in and grabbed her shoulder. With a glare and tone that offered no compromise, he said, “I just bailed you out of jail, and you will behave. I can take you back.”

  She leaned back in her seat.

  Ryan walked around to the passenger side and opened the door. Jane stretched her legs, stood, and smoothed her skirt. She looked up at Ryan with a calm smile and said, “She’s almost grown up now.”

  Katarina raised her eyebrows and flashed him a you’re-wasting-your-time smile.

  He took Jane by the hand and guided her away from the car. Katarina climbed into the front seat.

  Out of Katarina’s hearing range, Ryan said, “Your daughter is in serious trouble.”

  “Kat finally had sex,” Jane said. Her forehead wrinkled into something that looked like concern. “She’s a woman now.”

  “No, Jane, she’s a stupid little girl in trouble with the law.”

  Jane looked back at Katarina. Katarina was staring at Ryan with an odd expression.

  Jane said, “I’m almost finished.”

  “No!” Ryan yelled in her face. “You’re not almost finished, you haven’t even started. Do you know how lucky you are? That beautiful, brilliant child needs you and you—”

  But Jane wasn’t listening. What he’d thought was concern had been confusion, and now it smoothed into serenity. She stared north, toward the cemetery.

  Ryan understood. Jane was a tweaked husk of humanity, and he knew that he couldn’t help her. He walked back to the car. Katarina was still watching him. He shrugged.

  Jane said, “Your father loves you, Kat,” and walked away.

  Katarina smiled at Ryan, really smiled, like she’d won something. Ryan didn’t get it, but he did feel the presence of his grandma, a soft, gentle presence like a wrinkled palm against the flesh of his cheek assuring him that he was doing the right thing.

  Ryan got in the car and let go of a sigh. He and Katarina leaned against each other. Ryan said, “That’s one fucked-up individual.” This time, the feeling of his grandma chastised him.

  “You’re telling me,” Katarina said. “Like I was saying about that shower?”

  Ryan turned to her, shaking his head. “That’ll have to wait.” They drove through town and up a windy road. Katarina didn’t ask where they were going. Outside of town, the road curved over hills and through canyons, past vineyards, olive groves, and cattle. In a lush valley, Ryan turned onto a bridge that had been painted purple.

  Katarina mumbled something.

  “What?” Ryan asked.

  She was facing him. A tear struggled loose from her eyelashes, and she tried to hold back a sob. Ryan pulled the car onto the dirt shoulder and wrapped his arms around her. He gently squeezed the sobs out. The words thank you and I’m sorry didn’t come out very clearly and, truth was, they embarrassed Ryan—as though he’d done her a favor, as though she didn’t deserve to be cared for. They drove along a bay and then up onto a ridge. Wisps of moisture, more like baby clouds than fog, passed over the car and left mist on the windshield. They passed lots of cows and the occasional barn. When they came to a clearing at the top of a hill overlooking the ocean, Ryan stopped the car. Katarina leaned forward, and Ryan said, “Be quiet, okay? Just look for a few minutes and then follow me.” He got out of the car and walked into a field as far as a barbed-wire fence. A few minutes later, Katarina came and stood next to him.

  Ryan said, “See how the ocean stretches all the way across the horizon?” He waited for a couple of minutes and then turned around. “Now look inland. You can barely see any buildings, and what you can see are really small—they don’t amount to much.”

  It was the first time Ryan had ever seen Katarina do as she was told. It was a good thing. Part of him wanted an excuse to whack her a good one, but most of him wanted her to see something bigger. “Katarina,” he said, facing the ocean again, “if we started swimming, we’d get to Japan.” Then he turned inland and said, “If we started walking, we’d get to New York.” He stepped in front of her. When she looked up at him, he said, “Right now we live in a town over there somewhere. The stuff in that town—Skate-n-Shred, your friends, school, the cops, Dodge and his ridiculous house, even your mom—those are temporary details in the grand scheme.”

  He stepped to the side. Katarina turned toward the ocean. The breeze picked up. Her hair blew in the wind, the way her mother’s did when riding her bike. The resemblance was s
uperficial, though. Katarina was darker in skin tone and much deeper in countenance than her mom. Ryan hadn’t given much thought to Katarina’s father but, right then, realized that he must have been a special man.

  Ryan put his arm around Katarina’s shoulders and held her tight against him. Waving his arm across the entire horizon, he said, “This is the world. Live in it.” Then he let go and walked back to the car.

  Katarina looked out to sea a few minutes more.

  They drove down into a canyon and parked in a lot next to an outhouse, which they each used. Ryan took an old beat-up sweatshirt out of the trunk and tossed it to Katarina. It fit her like a dress. The two of them walked down a sandy winding path between dormant wild sage, ice plant, and daisies. A little brook meandered along, occasionally dropping into a creek. As they got closer to the ocean, the clouds grew thicker, and when they got to the beach, they could only see a few hundred feet in any direction. The only prints in the sand were from seagulls and sandpipers. They took off their shoes and walked toward the surf. The beach was boxed in by rocky reef formations to the north and south. Violent waves smashed into the beach leaving whirlpools in their wake, the signature of rip currents so brutal that even sea lions avoided them.

  “Well?” Katarina asked, looking up at Ryan.

  He didn’t look away from the ocean, just kicked the sand in response. He didn’t know why he’d brought her here, just that she wasn’t ready to go home yet. He knew that she needed something, but he didn’t know what it was or where to find it.

  At the end of the beach, waves pounded a rock formation where thousands of sea anemones opened and closed as the water washed back and forth. Ryan climbed up on a boulder, out of the direct line of sea spray but close enough so that when he inhaled, he could taste the salt. He sat where he could lean against a rock that was smooth and dry. Katarina looked up at him, pulling her wind-whipped hair out of her eyes. He patted the rock next to him.

  “I don’t think I can get up there.”

  He shrugged as though he didn’t care, and she started climbing. When she was close, he offered a hand. At first she didn’t accept it. Ryan narrowed his eyes in anger that surprised him. She took his hand and he pulled her up.

  They sat together and stared out over the ocean. A squadron of pelicans flew up the beach about ten feet over the sea and, just off the reef where Ryan and Katarina were sitting, broke formation. Most of them veered up at an angle so that they could examine the water for fish. One after another, they tucked their wings and dove into the water. They landed upside down, splashing with no grace whatsoever. Most of them returned to the air empty-beaked, while a few struggled to fly under the weight of water and fish in their gullets.

  Ryan laughed.

  “What are you laughing at?”

  “Look at them. We always think of animals as so damn perfect. Like a lion hunting a zebra or an eagle against a snake, a bear and a fish—but pelicans, my God, look at them! They flop on their backs, splash all over the place, and then almost always come up empty. Look at that one over there.” He pointed to a pelican perched on a rock thirty feet away. “He’s got a potbelly. The way his beak pokes way out—look at the expression on his face, did he just burp? I think he burped.”

  Katarina laughed and pulled herself closer to Ryan. He put his arm around her so that his coat draped around her shoulders and said, “I feel like I should ask you what happened last night, but I’m not sure I want to know.” He looked toward the ocean. A sea lion’s bearded face bristled over the back of a wave for a second. “I’ve never been so scared in my life. I don’t want this,” he struggled for words. “I don’t want this to have happened to you.”

  “No duh. I’m the stupid McBonehead this time.” She sighed and then looked up at Ryan. “I wanted to get crazy. I wanted to forget everything. When the band was playing, I got lost in the music. And when they finished, it all came back—all the stupid reality of my stupid life.”

  As the sun climbed up the sky, the fog burned off, and they could see the other end of the beach. They still had it all to themselves.

  Katarina dozed for a while, her face nestled against his chest. As she slept, her mouth fell open, and a little bit of drool leaked onto his shirt. He had to smile.

  The pelican took a few steps toward them and poked its head into a tide pool. When it looked up, its beak was covered in sand. It waddled closer.

  Katarina mumbled.

  He looked down. Her eyes were open, and she rubbed her mouth on Ryan’s shirt. He said thanks and she giggled.

  She said, “When I was sitting in that little steel room last night, my gray matter, like, caught on fire. Remember that stuff we talked about when we went to SLAC—neural networks? If you take two computers and load them both with the same neural network, they’d be identical at first, remember?”

  Ryan was still staring at the pelican. It took him a few seconds to switch gears. “Okay, we start with a neural network—a computer program—and load it on two identical computers. Yeah, of course they’d be the same.”

  “But they’ll get different, right?”

  “If they have different inputs then, yes, in a few seconds, their internal parameters will change, and the more input they get, the more different they’ll be. Eventually, they’ll look totally different.”

  “Totally?”

  Ryan thought for a few seconds. He caught himself staring at the pelican. “Why doesn’t he take off?”

  “Because he’s interested in what I’m saying. Unlike you.”

  Ryan stared at a patch of sand so he could think. “No, they won’t be totally different, especially if they both get some of the same inputs. I mean, they’ll be the same the way that twins are the same—the same hardware and the same software, but the longer they run, the more distinguishable they’ll appear to anyone who is using them.”

  “What if you had a whole community of neural networks, and you took one off to the side and copied it onto another computer and then put the copied version back in the community—could you tell the difference?”

  Ryan picked some grains of sand off a rock and started a little pile on his thigh. “You mean, could I tell that it was a copied version? No, of course not, they’re identical.”

  “Just like identical particles, right? The only thing that makes them different is the situation they’re in. Like electrons, the only thing that makes one different from another is their quantum numbers.”

  Ryan loosened his grip on Katarina so that she could raise her head and he could see her face. “What are you driving at?”

  “What if you kidnapped someone and cloned him. Then you somehow made the clone grow really fast so that the clone would be the same age as the guy. Then you copy everything from the guy’s brain to the clone’s brain. You couldn’t tell the two apart, right?”

  “I guess the clone wouldn’t have any scars or freckles—”

  “No, the clone gets all those too, so that they’re identical. The same body, the same brain, and once you copy all of the guy’s memories into the clone there’s no way you could tell them apart.”

  “Okay, if you somehow make two identical people, then no, you couldn’t tell them apart. So what?” Ryan tried to push the little pile of sand on his thigh into a column, but it crumbled apart.

  “Think about it. The clone would have the same physical body and the same memories. It would believe it was the real guy, right? The real guy and the clone wouldn’t know which was which.” Katarina wiped the sand off Ryan’s thigh. “Okay, but since I cloned him, I know which is which.” She raised her eyebrows to indicate the brilliance of the point she was about to make. “Okay, so what if I kill the original guy and put the clone back in the community. No one would know the difference, right?”

  “I guess. Except for you, the murderer.”

  “The clone is exactly the same in every way to the original guy, and he believes that he’s the original guy because, well, why would he believe anything else? Now, sin
ce we have to include all possible combinations of processes that lead to the same outcome—just like when you add up Feynman diagrams—then he is the original guy.”

  “No he’s not. He’s the clone.”

  “This is the point. This is why my brains almost vaporized in my head last night while I fermented in that little cell. If someone had done all this to me—mapped my brain into my clone and then killed me—when I came out of that cell, there is no way you could tell the difference. But even better, I wouldn’t know the difference either.”

  “Hmmm.” Ryan started another little pile of sand, this time on her leg.

  “It would be like a virtual process. The cloned Kat is the real Kat.”

  “Sounds like Schrödinger’s cat to me—”

  “Shut up.” She started adding grains of sand to the pile. “Here’s the totally weird part—I swear to God, I wanted them to get you on the phone so I could tell you—check this out: since the cloned Kat is exactly the real Kat, then the real Kat never died.”

  “But you killed it,” Ryan said. “What about the body?”

  “They never find the body; it’s burned and the ashes are thrown in the river—it doesn’t matter because Kat is still alive. And—shut up—I haven’t gotten to the best part.” She flicked the pile of sand off her thigh. “Does the cloned Kat have a soul?”

  “Good one. Why not? At least she thinks she does.”

  “Well, everyone thinks they have a soul—that’s what makes it a soul. But does it have the same soul as the original Kat?”

  “This is really confusing,” Ryan said, “and leave my sand alone.”

  “Put it on your own leg then.”

  “Yours is flatter.”

  “Are you saying I’m fat?”

  “No, I was just…” Ryan stretched out his legs.

  “If it happened, I’d never know it, you’d never know it, no one would ever know it.” She was speaking really fast. “It wouldn’t even matter. It’s like a virtual process—”

  “Wait. Hang on a second,” Ryan said, “there’s something wrong with that. It’s like you’re saying that when you copied the original Kat’s experiences, memories, and stuff onto the cloned Kat that you copied the soul along with it.”