The God Patent

by Ransom Stephens

  Ryan worked fourteen hours every day. On those days that he had to drive to Fort Worth for counseling and drug testing, he debugged software on his laptop in waiting rooms and did all-nighters in the lab to catch up.

  Foster put in twenty-hour days six days a week. When he wasn’t on the road speaking at churches, he used the Sabbath to sleep.

  Ryan called Katarina from the lab every day after school. The day Katarina’s laptop computer was delivered, Ryan e-mailed her a document. She opened it while on the phone: a patent submission for their neural network algorithm. It listed Katarina as an inventor.

  The calls settled into a routine. First, Ryan would ask about school, what she was up to, whether she was getting in trouble, what was up at Skate-n-Shred, that sort of thing, and Katarina replied in information-free single syllables. With that out of the way, Ryan would e-mail her the latest software and put her on the speakerphone so Foster could join them.

  At first, Foster had a hard time accepting a fourteen-year-old girl as a consultant, but then she recommended they use separate neural network communities to control the focusing magnets. He said, “But they’re both doing the same thing—separate nets will be redundant; it’s a waste of resources.”

  “Foster,” Katarina said, her voice straining with condescension, “are they identical? Of course not. There are an infinite number of small differences, right? You should also be aware that using feedback loops in a nonlinear system means that even infinitesimal differences in the boundary conditions can have large effects on the results. Remember that little nugget of chaos theory? Separate networks will respond in different ways to small variations of stimulus. They will compete to get the right answer, increasing the efficiency of the system. Have you ever heard of survival of the fittest? Evolution? Oh, that’s right. You don’t believe it.” She finished with, “Do what I tell you and bitch at me if it doesn’t work—but wait, oh yeah, that’s right: it will work, so shut up.”

  Ryan expected an instant dose of Foster smugness, but instead, he asked for details on how to implement the new system. It seemed completely out of character, especially letting the crack about evolution slide. Watching Foster closely, Ryan recognized the look on his face. It was the same as when Rachel was short with him. He never questioned his angel. In exchange, Katarina granted him a hint of patience—from her, the ultimate expression of largesse.

  The next day, Foster reported that this single change had increased the power output by a factor of two.

  A month later, on one of their daily conference calls, Ryan told Katarina that he missed her. He said it every time he called, but this time it slipped out, and the fervor he said it with surprised him. “I feel homeless without you around. I just don’t belong here.”

  Foster looked away as though giving them privacy.

  Katarina said, “Ryan, Foster can confirm that we’re not plants! We don’t grow roots, and the more we interact with others, the more we become a part of each other. It’s how we develop character.”

  Ryan said, “What about genetics?”

  “Genetics is the biological history of our ancestors, the foundation or canvas, and character is the paint that goes on that canvas—that’s what the soul is.”

  Foster interrupted, “Katarina, there’s another piece. Don’t forget the symmetry between the physical and the spiritual.”

  “I’m just thinking out loud,” Katarina said. “You know that feeling when you can tell you’re about to understand something but haven’t yet?”

  Ryan said, “Not really.”

  “Figures. Well, I’m close to understanding something, something major.”

  Foster said, “Really? You’re about to get it?”

  “Pretty soon.”

  “Katarina, listen to me,” Foster said. “Follow that feeling. You are being guided to the truth.”

  “Foster,” Katarina said, “you are freakishly weird.”

  Ryan said, “We better figure out something major soon and get this thing going or I don’t think they’ll let me go home.”

  “Ryan, you are home,” Katarina said. “Accept it. You live in Texas where you belong, near your son. Don’t waste your time worrying about me. I’ve got it goin’ on.”

  Ryan oozed into semipermanent residence in Foster and Rachel’s guest room. Rachel apologized for being judgmental the night that Ryan confessed how he’d wrecked his life. More than that, she seemed to think he was the cavalry come to save her husband’s reputation.

  Every morning, precisely six hours after Ryan went to bed, Rachel would open his door, draw back the curtains, and wake him with a smile, showcasing frighteningly white teeth. A cooked breakfast and a full pot of tea would be waiting downstairs, and she’d sit across the table to chat. Her favorite subject was Emmy. Rachel convinced Ryan that he shouldn’t assume that Emmy had betrayed him—talking to your brother about someone you care for is not betrayal. She also talked him into sending her e-mail. “Just pop a note to her whenever you think of her, whatever is on your mind. She’ll be flattered.”

  After he’d been there a month, Emmy finally replied—a short note asking about Katarina. Rachel helped him invest the correspondence with significance, and the two of them wrote to Emmy and invited her to visit. The note concluded with a line that took them an hour to compose: “Katarina told me that you and I are meant for each other, and I believe her. Do you?” Emmy didn’t reply to this one.

  Ryan also sent a note to Ward, the guy back in the neighborhood who’d been sending occasional notes about Sean. Ryan told him that he was back in Texas and building a legal case to resume joint custody. Ward responded with more frequent updates—things like, “Sean’s stepfather is teaching him how to drive” and “I bumped into Linda and Sean at the Piggly Wiggly yesterday. He’s a well-mannered young man.”

  It took six weeks for Ryan and Katarina to get the power output of the collider back on track. It had increased tenfold and was still rising. A month later, Katarina introduced a new idea.

  “Is this it?” Foster asked. “Is this what you were talking about? Have you figured it out?” He lingered on the word it as though choosing the word carefully.

  “Huh?” Katarina said. “Oh that. No, probably not, but this should be good enough for you.” She told them to attach the parameters of all the neural networks that had died of “old age” onto a superstructure connected to every “living” network—Katarina called it a “cloud of death.” Over the lifetimes of eleven generations of neural networks, which was a couple of hours in the lab, energy output increased by a factor of a hundred. They were producing a ten-thousandth as much power as they were using—an important benchmark to NEG.

  The three of them spent the next week analyzing how the energy output had changed during those eleven generations. They found a little bump in a graph of output energy as a function of beam energy. Ryan and Foster wrote it up as “Observation of a New Electron-Positron Resonance in the Presence of Heavy Nuclei”—hardly an earthshaking discovery, but it was accepted for publication in the Physical Review, the first peer-reviewed academic publication from EWU.

  Emmy sent Ryan an e-mail when the paper came out: “Congratulations on some nice work and a fine discovery.”

  Ryan replied immediately, “I miss you.”

  By the end of spring, after three months of peeing in cups, writing checks, visiting psychologists, and writing software in waiting rooms, Ryan had successfully disappeared into the system. Ms. Robins contacted him on the first of May to tell him that she had filed for joint custody. Ryan asked how she thought it would go. First, she praised his behavior over those months, but then she expressed doubt: “I find it extraordinary that your ex-wife has managed to have that restraining order renewed every ninety days. I trust that you have told me the whole story.”

  “I’ve told you everything.”

  “If there’s anything you need to say, now is the time, because it will come out in court.”

  The court date was set for
the middle of June.

  In Petaluma, Kat took Emmy’s advice as a recipe for life. She asserted control of her destiny and used the force of her intellect to command others. That the people she had thought of as friends now called her a stuck-up bitch reinforced her new self-image. Sure, she was the only one who didn’t have a cell phone or a best friend or a ride to school when it rained, but that was just more evidence that she wrote her own rules.

  After being arrested, she ignored the cliques, and as the months passed, she gained a reputation for being aloof and weird but artistic. Word got around that she was some kind of mathematical genius. The others only knew for sure that she painted murals wherever she could put a brush. The murals mixed mathematical symbols with fantastic images of dragons and wispy ghost-looking people. And clouds. Above every image she painted great thick clouds—some looked like thought bubbles, some like fog or dragon breath. If you looked closely, though hardly anyone ever did, you could see that the clouds were laden with shadowy images, small drawings of people, names, and diagrams.

  One thing was certain: Kat was cool—really cool—not an idiot like the kids who tried to be cool or the kids who didn’t bother to be cool. Kat was hella cool.

  On the last day of school, she felt a surge of emotion, a sort of aggressive loneliness—for three months, she wouldn’t have teachers to talk to, no one to bother her at all.

  She went straight to Skate-n-Shred, skipping Ryan’s call for the first time ever. A clique blocked the entrance. She strode toward the center door without pausing, and every kid stepped out of her way, dissipating like fog burned off by the sun. Kat glowed inside. Emmy had nailed it. This was the way to live.

  She glanced back, pretending to examine an early piece of work and caught a boy checking her out. She started to look away—but no. No way. She turned to him, fixing him with a smile; he jerked aside and mumbled, “Sorry.”

  She watched him for a few minutes. His self-consciousness was obvious. He stood just so, holding his skate all poised to take off so that his bicep was tense. It was as ridiculous as it was cute. She waited until he looked back at her, then she held up her hand and motioned with her index finger for him to walk toward her.

  He obeyed. “What’s up?”

  “I want to show you something,” Kat said. “Stay right here and wait for me.” She indicated an old couch just inside the theater. He shrugged and did what she said.

  Someone from the clique called after him, “Dragon girl breathe on you?”

  He looked back with a self-conscious smile. Kat pointed at him and mouthed the word stay.

  She walked down to a pharmacy and bought some condoms. She took her time walking back, detoured along the river, watched a pair of ducks, and listened for a few minutes to a bunch of old men playing jazz. Ryan would call it “geezer jazz.”

  Leaning against the railing over the river, the geezer jazz behind her and the sun reflecting off the still water, she let the warmth course over her. A breeze started to pick up, and its scent reminded her of when she was little and her dad used to walk her along the river. She remembered the strain of holding her arm up to meet his hand. It felt good to not need him anymore, to not miss him, but in a way that she just hadn’t quite figured out, it still didn’t feel like he’d left. It was a whimsical thought, but somehow it felt as though he were still holding her hand.

  When she got back to Skate-n-Shred, the boy was still on the couch. Two girls sat next to him, one on the armrest. As Kat approached, he looked up with a twinkle in his eye. She ignored the other girls and just stopped in front of him without speaking.

  He said, “T’sup?”

  The two girls made humph sounds and, as far as Kat could tell, disappeared. She offered her hand. He took it, and she led him outside and up the hill two blocks to the black-and-red house.

  The next day, she felt like a superhero. Emmy was right. She could do anything she wanted. She put her laptop in her backpack, stuffed a blanket on top, went down to the boulevard, and stuck her thumb out. Within two minutes, a man driving an old Volvo pulled over. She got in the car and laughed at the stereotype: he was wearing a tie-dye shirt, had a gray beard, and immediately started lecturing her on hitchhiking because “the world’s not safe like it was when I was your age.” He wasn’t even headed in that direction, but he drove her all the way out to Point Reyes anyway, just to keep her from hitching another ride.

  Kat walked down the sandy trail to the fog-enshrouded beach and headed north to the rock outcropping and its tide pools, the place Ryan had taken her. She climbed up the rocks and sat in the same place as before. She took out her laptop, opened a file, and started typing. She took out a pad of paper, scribbled down some equations, and sketched some diagrams. When she got back to typing, she typed furiously. She was so engrossed that she didn’t notice the wind pick up, didn’t notice when her notes were torn from the pad and blown back up into the rocks. She didn’t notice a pelican waddling across the rocks toward her either. He waddled a few steps closer every few minutes. Maybe he was attracted by the pages from her notebook rattling in the breeze, maybe by the cloud of deep concentration that surrounded her.

  Kat stopped and scrolled through the document, nodding at each paragraph. Without looking away from the screen, she reached for the pad, for scratch paper to check the result. Her hand touched something wet and soft. The pelican was perched on her notebook. It flapped one wing and the other hung lifelessly.

  “You!” Katarina said. The pelican didn’t move. “I remember you, poor thing.” She leaned toward the bird and the bird leaned toward her. It pecked at her keyboard as she examined his broken wing. It had healed in such a way that he could only move it laterally but not flap at all.

  She nudged his beak away from the computer, half wondering if he’d typed a message to her. Of course it was gibberish, but she saved it in a different file anyway and labeled it “ramblings of a pelican.” She pushed the pelican gently away from her pad and started scribbling. When she finished, she scrolled through her work again. Her eyes didn’t blink. She looked at the calculations a third time and again scrolled through.

  The pelican relaxed against her arm and pecked around her backpack. His big chin-wattle caught on the zipper. She untangled him and then rammed her things into the backpack and climbed down to the beach. The pelican took her place on the rock, perching in the warmth she left behind.

  A mile up the road, she was picked up by a dairy tanker headed for a creamery in Petaluma.

  Kat sat quietly in the apartment looking across the dark valley. It looked different than it had the day before. Everything looked different. Everything felt different, as though nothing mattered, nothing solid anyway, just interaction. There was no cool, no image, no bullshit; just time passing and energy changing form.

  An hour later, she broke out of the reverie and, just to make sure, went through her work a fourth time. There was nothing left to question.

  She started shoving clothes into a second knapsack.

  No one answered the phone at Ryan’s lab, and the other number, where he was staying with those crazy Christians, was answered by an overly cheery woman who said Ryan was out of town. Kat remembered that he and Foster had gone to a physics conference to present a paper. She called his cell phone, but it went straight to voice mail without ringing, so she left a message. At least no one had to endure Ryan’s lame ringtone.

  Ryan had to reschedule a counseling session so that he could accept an invitation to attend the Washington meeting of the American Physical Society where Foster would present their paper. It was the only blip that Ryan made on the deadbeat-dad system radar.

  They flew into the nation’s capital and stayed at the same hotel as their science establishment colleagues. Wisecracks about Creation Energy’s power generator circulated among the tables of the conference banquet but didn’t prevent anyone from attending their session. The auditorium aisles overflowed into the lobby. Ryan stood next to the stage as Foster gave the pres
entation.

  Foster’s nerves were on fire when the session chair introduced him. His confidence in the presentation was strong—the paper was accepted for publication; it had been through the wringer—but he felt like a spy. An honored spy, though. It was a prestigious forty-minute talk, long enough to show the details of the collider and control software. Foster went through the slides the same way he taught undergraduate physics at EWU. He concluded with the graph of the observed output energy as a function of the incident positron beam energy and left it on the overhead during the question-and-answer period.

  In the pause before the first question, he looked at the crowd, and that feeling of espionage took hold. Right here, before the full faculty of the scientific establishment, he had unveiled his greatest weapon. Demonstrating a weapon before it was operational was a strategic move.

  A group from Fermilab quizzed him on focusing magnets, and a group from CERN asked about software control—Ryan’s neural network. When no more arms went up, Foster stared across the auditorium for a few more seconds, surveying the enemy. Things were falling into place—just as they always had.

  Then a recent Nobel Prize winner in a fifth-row aisle seat raised his hand. A graduate student rushed over and held a microphone. Behind thick wire-rimmed glasses, the swarthy man spoke slowly with an Italian accent, ending most of his words with an ah sound. “These results you show are the most precise, agreeing with the QED theory since Harold Lamb calculated the hydrogen hyperfine structure—elegantly precise.” He held his hand up, fingers together as though savoring a glass of wine. “Bella, you make the day beautiful, but, ah, I have the one question.”

  Foster felt like a general watching his opponent enter an ambush in the decisive battle of a great war.