The God Patent

by Ransom Stephens

Foster yelled, “You’re hired!”

  Blitzer said, “Dr. Nutter? You have the last word.”

  “This is disgusting,” Emmy said. “I have nothing to say.”

  The cameras went off, and Wolf Blitzer turned The Situation Room to another situation. Emmy quietly walked out of the studio.

  Ryan followed several steps behind. He turned a corner as the stairway doors closed. He pulled them open and ran down the stairs. He called to her, “What’s wrong?”

  Without turning around, Emmy said, “Leave me alone, Ryan. I don’t want to see you, I don’t want to hear you, and”—her voice cracked—“I don’t want to know you’re there.”

  Emmy hit second gear hard. The tires chirped, and she zipped through a yellow light onto the freeway. Doing ninety at the Petaluma off-ramp, she remembered that she needed to talk to Kat and had to double back.

  What a total fool Ryan had turned out to be. Did she have a twisted need to be the smarter one in relationships? And why was the world so scientifically illiterate? Only about 20 percent of the population reads books, and less than 1 percent even knows calculus—what an ignorant species.

  She parked behind Ryan’s car and was tempted to scratch the damn thing, as though he could identify one more scratch. By the time she got to the porch, a lump had formed in her throat. How could he betray her like that? But inside, a soft voice, edged with Ryan’s sense of humor, pointed out that Ryan hadn’t betrayed anyone, hadn’t taken sides at all. He was just being Ryan, trying to sprinkle the world with peace and humor. She could picture him now making wisecracks on the bus ride home. The vision brought another wave of anger.

  Kat’s skateboard was under the bench. Emmy took a seat. She needed a clear head, needed to focus on Kat. What would she say? This wasn’t a graduate student who’d lost sight of the future while struggling to make rent.

  Growing up is so hard. How much harder must it be without parents? She shuddered at the thought of her father dying. Even at thirty-seven, she didn’t want to think about the inevitability. How could she have survived if he’d died when she was ten?

  At least Kat had Ryan—stupid lunkhead that he was. One thing about Ryan: he had an incredible capacity to love, and he loved Kat. Emmy pushed away thoughts of Ryan’s love by standing and going inside.

  Emmy knocked on Kat and Jane’s apartment door, but no one answered. Hopefully Kat would get home before Ryan did. She went and got a book from her car, came back inside, and took a seat at the top of the stairs. She could hear Dodge puttering around but didn’t want to talk to him. She sat on the stairs for an hour trying to read her book, but she was just looking at words; she couldn’t get her mind away from Ryan and Kat and CNN.

  The door opened, and Emmy started, ready to hide if it was Ryan. She immediately felt stupid. It was Kat.

  Kat didn’t look up. Whispers of music leaked out of her headphones. Her hair was longer than Emmy remembered. She looked so grown-up that Emmy sighed, and the sigh came as a surprise.

  Shuffling slowly up the stairs, kicking each one in rhythm before stepping, Kat ran her hand along the banister and paused at the landing. She looked back at the front door, did a little pirouette, and kicked the next step. She finally looked up and saw Emmy. She yanked out her earphones, rolled her eyes, and laughed.

  Emmy compared the version of Kat the day they’d met with this young woman. Her analysis compensated for the makeup and eyeliner and used all her other images of Kat to interpolate from that first day to this one.

  Emmy stood and offered her a hug and had to swallow another lump in her throat. She’d missed it. It had totally escaped her. Kat’s soft round cheeks had straightened, emphasizing the shadows of her high cheekbones. The dimples of that little girl were now hints of mirth in the beauty of a young woman.

  “Emmy! What are you doing here?”

  “I was in the neighborhood, thought I’d say hi.”

  Kat looked over Emmy’s shoulder, down the hall. “Where’s Ryan?”

  Emmy sighed. “He’s probably on a bus between here and Santa Rosa.”

  “Ooookay?”

  Kat hugged Emmy lightly, but Emmy latched her arms around Kat and held her tight. Kat was taller than Emmy—when did that happen?

  Emmy loosened her grip enough to lean back and look Kat in the eye. “What happened to you this weekend?”

  “Oh,” Kat said, “that’s why you’re here.”

  Emmy felt Kat withdrawing and pulled her close again. The more Kat stiffened, the closer Emmy held her. “Yes, that’s what I’m here for. I’m sorry I’ve never come and visited just to be with you.”

  “Not like you could change anything.”

  Emmy laughed at herself. “That’s not it, Kat. I wish I’d spent more time with you because—well, look at you.” Emmy released Kat from her hug. “When did you grow up?”

  Kat looked at her feet. “I don’t know.” For an instant, she looked like a child again.

  The front door opened. Emmy said, “Let’s go inside.”

  She led Kat down the hall. Kat opened her door, and just as Ryan came up the stairs, they went into Kat’s apartment.

  Emmy closed the door.

  Kat looked confused.

  Emmy realized she’d never been here before. “Where’s your room?” But it felt like a stupid question. The living room was decorated with a mural of a dragon exhaling a cloud of little symbols. A stack of dirty dishes sat on the coffee table, and there was a pillow and comforter on the couch.

  Kat moved toward a closed door, shrugged, and said, “If you think this is a mess, we probably shouldn’t go in my room.”

  While Kat carried the dishes into the kitchen, Emmy folded the comforter and set it and the pillow to the side. The two of them sat on the couch next to each other, Kat with her legs curled under her and Emmy on the edge at an angle, facing her.

  Staring at the ceiling, Kat said, “Okay. It was just really lame. My stupid not-friend Marti was making out with my equally stupid not-boyfriend Alex. The world started falling apart, and then the band played. I danced in the corner all by myself—right in front of the speakers—and I didn’t care, it was just hella copasetic, you know? Then, when the band stopped playing, the guy guarding the stage door asked if I wanted to go backstage.”

  Emmy took Kat’s hands in hers. Kat looked forward, and Emmy nodded that she should continue. “So I partied with the band, and that’s pretty much it.”

  Emmy waited, staring at Kat. When she didn’t say anything, Emmy squeezed her hands. Kat said, “So we got together, so what?”

  “Please,” Emmy said, “you’re too good for that.”

  “Too good?” Kat pulled her hands away. “I’m not a stuck-up bitch, I’m not too good for those guys. God.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not what?”

  “Why aren’t you a stuck-up bitch? I am.”

  Kat’s expression changed. She looked for an instant as though a window to her heart had just opened.

  Emmy put her hands on Kat’s shoulders and looked her up and down. “You should be a stuck-up bitch. It’s better to be respected than wanted. Besides, the more respect you have, the more you’ll be wanted.”

  “That’s rude!”

  “So what? When did you capitulate to someone else’s rules? Your friend Marti, the guy you think was your boyfriend, your teachers, the cops, even Ryan—when did you give them permission to judge you?”

  “Ryan doesn’t judge me.”

  “Kat, you have a choice. It’s a choice that you can either make yourself or let the world make for you. If you decide to be a stuck-up bitch—if that’s what you want to call it—then you can take the world on your own terms. You can decide whether what Marti thinks matters, you can decide whether you want to have sex or not.” For a second, Emmy’s lecture voice had taken over, and a shadow fell across Kat. She restrained her tone. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to come off like I totally know what you’re going through or what your life is like or any
thing like that.” Then she spoke louder, but just for the one sentence: “And me too—you can choose to respect my opinion or not. Everything is up to you.”

  Kat looked confused. Emmy pulled her forward as if to hug her but stopped short. “Kat, I want to shake you and pour some of me into you because, right now, you seem a little empty. What happened to that cocky, brilliant thirteen-year-old? No—don’t answer. Just wait.”

  This was a talk Emmy had never expected to have. She ran through different approaches to the subject, finally sighed, and said, “Okay, this is the only way I can think of to say it: If you want to have sex with a man, then do it. But do it the way you do everything else. Do it intelligently. Do it with the whole life calculation included. You don’t have to take stupid risks. Men are simple creatures; they’ll do whatever you want them to. It’s obvious, but most women never figure it out. But women like you and me—”

  “I’m not like you.” It came out barely louder than a whisper.

  “You are too—for sure you are.” But even as she said it, Emmy knew it wasn’t true.

  Kat shrugged. “Have you met my mother?”

  “Kat, you’re smart enough to, um, the way you think says more about who you are than your relationships.”

  “Nuh-uh, it does not.” Kat raised her arms, breaking Emmy’s grip. Her eyes flashed, and she spoke with authority as though she were unveiling a discovery. “All we are is our relationships. How can you talk about character or personality and leave out the people who gave it to you?” Her eyes sparkled, and her voice was strong and direct—this was who Emmy wanted Kat to be. “I don’t like my mother. I don’t respect my mother, but sometimes I like to wear her clothes and perfume. I don’t want to be her, but it’s stupid to deny that I’m made up of pieces of her—I’m made up of you too. And Ryan, probably mostly Ryan these days. I catch myself all the time doing Ryanisms. Making faces and stuff—saying stuff all the time and—you know, I never bit a pencil in my life before I met him.”

  “Kat, you’re not tied down by these relationships. The only limit you have is your health and your intellect, and I don’t think you’ll ever find the limit to your intellect. Take control of your life.”

  “I am in control of my—”

  Emmy couldn’t resist the lecture voice, and it came out strong. “People manipulate you and use you and you don’t even know it. Your mother does it all the time—look where and how you live? And Dodge…” They made eye contact and the ice broke.

  Kat burst into laughter. “Dodge is the worst.”

  Emmy chuckled. “You’re right about how we’re made up of the people we know. Dodge taught me a lot. He’s always been like that, a manipulative bastard. He taught me to recognize it, so even when he manipulates me, at least I know it. Do you see? You learn from people, but you’re the judge. It’s your life. You have to—”

  “Ryan said that.”

  “What?”

  “He bailed me out of that juvenile dungeon and drove up to the top of a hill and said,”—she lowered her voice, imitating Ryan—“‘This is the world, live in it.’” She paused and looked Emmy up and down. “You and Ryan are perfect for each other. He’s so comfortable and easy, but he pays closer attention than anyone. And, Em-ster, you need a lot of attention.”

  At the mention of Ryan, Emmy looked away, toward the dragon mural. “He needs to learn about taking control too.”

  “You broke up didn’t you?”

  Emmy sighed. “How did you know?”

  “Kind of obvious, Em. He walked in and you almost started crying.” Kat took Emmy’s hand. “Don’t worry, you’ll get back together.”

  “I don’t think so. Sometimes the parts just don’t fit all the way together.” Emmy took a breath to collect herself. “We don’t need men. Except maybe for sex and, as you’ve probably discovered, we can get sex whenever we want it, and listen to me, we can have it on our terms.”

  “Someday, someday you’ll get back together, but you’re so stubborn, it might—” Kat stopped abruptly and looked down as if she’d lost something.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Never mind.” Kat looked worried. “I think I know what you mean about being a stuck-up bitch. You don’t care what other people think, do you? I don’t know if I can do that.”

  “It does matter,” Emmy said. “What’s wrong? What happened just then?”

  “Oh, it’s just stupid Ryan. Without you, there’s no reason for him to stay here. He’ll move back to Texas where his son is. That’ll be good for him. He belongs there.”

  “He probably is moving back—so stupid—he agreed to work for those fools, charlatans, idiots. He’s betrayed everything that we were…” Emmy stopped. Kat looked like a little girl who had let go of her balloon and was watching it drift up into the clouds. “Oh! Kat, oh my God, Kat. Ryan loves you. Even if he moves back to Texas, he loves you, he’ll want to bring you with him…”

  Kat smiled with her lips sealed shut. It was perhaps the most obvious forced smile Emmy had ever seen. “It’s okay, Emmy, you’re right, he’ll keep in touch.”

  “Of course he will,” Emmy said, wondering if she was telling the truth. If Ryan moved, she’d have to check in, remind him that he was still a father figure to Katarina. Then it occurred to her that he’d never quite admitted that he was her father figure. It all piled on top of her anger with Ryan. No, Kat was wrong. They wouldn’t get back together. Emmy was finished with him.

  “Kat, I need you to promise me something.”

  “Sure, Em-ster, I’ll promise you something.”

  “Promise to keep working, keep studying, not just because you’re talented, but because your talents can take you to a better world. Remember the note I sent you along with the whiteboard and Feynman’s book?”

  “The one where you said that you hoped you’d get to work with me someday?”

  “You do remember.”

  “I’m not a doofus.”

  “I meant it. You have a wonderful life in front of you. Like Ryan said, it’s a big world, much bigger than this town or your school. Don’t forget that, okay?”

  “I guess.”

  The ringing phone woke Ryan. It was Foster.

  “So you were serious,” Ryan said.

  A month had passed since the CNN interview—a lonely month of recovering from the breakup with Emmy.

  Typical, the guy could crank out Feynman diagrams but couldn’t calculate the time difference between Texas and California. The sun hadn’t even come up yet.

  “Yes, but it’s a little tricky,” Foster said. “You’ll have to work under Jeb Schonders’s radar for a while. Jeb’s still livid that I offered you a job on national TV. That’s why it’s taken me so long to get back to you.”

  Ryan leaned back against his pillow. It had been a tough month. Foster hadn’t returned his calls, so he was back trying to figure out how to get a pile of cash without having his name appear on that deadbeat-dad registry again. “Foster, if you hire me and I telecommute from here, is there a way to accumulate my salary so I could get paid in one big chunk—you know, without having my name show up on any federal employment rolls?”

  “Yes,” Foster said. “I tell you Ryan, the way things fit together—yes, that makes everything easier. You see, Blair is going to pay you from a separate account. Stashing your pay and keeping you off campus assures that Jeb won’t find out until I want him to. Let me call you back.”

  Ryan hung up the phone and rolled over so he could watch the sunrise. Working for Creation Energy would destroy any last chance with Emmy, but it could solve his big problems. Oh well, he mused to himself, if you love something, let it go; if it doesn’t come back, then simulate it in software.

  Foster called back a few minutes later. “Ryan, we can do it, no problem. And there’s one other thing: in exchange for your rights to the patents, we want to offer you stock options.”

  “Options too?” Ryan asked. “Are they worth anything?”

  Foster l
aughed. “Not yet, but you’ll vest immediately at the current value. You know the drill.”

  Foster yammered from circuitry to faith, and Ryan pulled him back to software. When Foster told Ryan that they had been modifying a neural network they’d downloaded from CERN, Ryan laughed and asked for a raise.

  When Ryan hung up, he felt the upswing of the yo-yo that his life had become.

  Downstairs, Dodge hung up the phone too.

  When Ryan started developing the new software, he was struck by the volume of necessary research. He commuted to the UC Berkeley Engineering Library each day and sat at a table next to a window where he could see the Golden Gate Bridge. From that perch, he worked through textbooks and journal articles on neural networks and fuzzy logic. The more he learned, the more he realized how close his patent had been to a workable method. Sometimes you guess right, and back in those days, he’d been on a roll with good fortune. Since he couldn’t check out books and take them home for her, he brought Katarina with him on weekends. She blitzed through the mathematical formalism and then corrected Ryan’s software designs. Their partnership cut the development time in half.

  Being at UC Berkeley had other temptations, though. He e-mailed Emmy, telling her what he was up to. She replied once: “The love we had is a noun.” He went to her office and asked her to lunch. She made courteous excuses, but he persevered, stopping by at the same time each day. She finally agreed so that he could “have closure.” Ryan asked her to meet him at a bench near Sather Gate.

  Ryan wasn’t there when she arrived. She sat on the bench, and just down the hill on a patch of grass near a creek—the place where they’d made out like drunk freshmen—dozens of roses were scattered. A guitar chord resonated from behind her, the same street musician broke into the Beatles’ “Here, There and Everywhere,” and Ryan walked up the path. When he got to the bench, he knelt in front of her, licked his lips into a melancholy smile, and said, “I want our love to be a verb.”

  Emmy started to take his hand but stopped. The music and the roses on the grass may have been enough, but when he licked his lips, she fell apart. She couldn’t go through this again.