The God Patent

by Ransom Stephens

  Dodge knew that the DOE funded her research. She stirred some milk into her tea and took a sip, trying to withhold her response.

  Dodge continued his con. “All you have to do is fight the mock-science—you’re doing that anyway.”

  “And you?”

  “As Mr. McNear’s attorney, I’ll file a suit naming Creation Energy in a conspiracy to defraud Mr. McNear of the income resulting from his intellectual property.” He looked away from her and added, “At the trial, you’ll be my star witness—think about it, the perfect stage for you to tear them down.”

  “You’re leaving something out.” She waited until he looked at her. “Dodge, those patents will never produce income.”

  “Then why is Creation Energy investing in them?”

  “Simple: they believe their own propaganda. They’re like, so greedy—whether for money or fame or maybe just recognition—that they talk themselves into absurdity. Pons and Fleischman are still pushing cold fusion. There’s a doctor named Robert Miller who doesn’t understand the basic principles of physics, and he’s gotten over twenty million in venture capital to produce energy by forcing hydrogen atoms into energy states below the ground state. If he remembered his freshman chemistry, he’d know how absurd the idea is.”

  She sipped her tea, and it occurred to her that she might be using this opportunity to dispel the ghost of embarrassment she had suffered when she proposed that cold fusion experiment in front of the whole physics department back when she was a student.

  She said, “I’ll testify,” and stared at Dodge. He looked back at her. She knew that he wasn’t telling her everything. “Dodge, everything I say is on the record.”

  “Emmy, we’ll do it however you want. Have I ever led you astray?”

  She laughed. “Please. If you try to trick me…”

  Dodge poured himself another cup of tea, stirred in some sugar, and spoke very softly. “Ryan believes they can do it. In fact, just before I called you, he said that he’s worried Creation Energy will start a matter-antimatter reaction that will get out of control…”

  Emmy could tell that he was lying, but his words were so well chosen that they touched all her buttons—buttons that, mostly, he had programmed. She sighed. “Don’t say it, please, don’t.”

  “…he thinks they’re going to start the apocalypse, and he’s worried that he won’t have a chance for repentance. Of course, he’s impressionable, what with his string of bad luck. It’s really a shame to see a gifted engineer, a former company director, a handsome man, fall for something like that.”

  “Someday I’m going to visit you and we’re going to talk about our lives, things that actually matter to us.” She finished her tea, amused by her own reaction. “Okay, I’ll talk to him. Where is he?”

  Dodge let loose his raspy chortle. “I control you.”

  Emmy reached over and pretended to slap him. “I hate you.”

  Ryan started up the stairs, but a sound stopped him. He noticed a light, sweet fragrance, like honeysuckle. Dodge was in the kitchen talking to someone. He’d never heard Dodge actually laugh before. Laugh as if he were happy. He went the rest of the way upstairs to his apartment. The notes he’d scribbled from Foster’s book the day before were piled next to Katarina’s scratch paper. He caught himself musing on an image of Katarina: her dirty brown hair tied in a series of random ponytails and a pencil dangling from her mouth, her feet tapping along without any rhythm in those goofy black sneakers. He mentally kicked himself, stood up, dipped into his rapidly waning savings for a twenty, and headed back out.

  The bookstore had three used calculus textbooks, including a really old one for three dollars. Bound in red and just under three hundred pages, it was written by an Oxford professor in a formal style that concentrated on theorems with short, elegant proofs—a purist’s math book. After paying for it, Ryan walked along the river. Wind blew the clouds south, and the river carried away the morning rain.

  Three blocks from the river, he walked onto the courtyard of a Catholic church. The creamy white steeple reached into the sky, and stained-glass windows told the story. He went inside. It was quiet and cool and smelled of frankincense and myrrh, the smell of Sunday morning. He sat in a center pew. There were candles burning, and someone sat at the bench of a pipe organ. Other than that, he was alone.

  The calculus book’s red binding was worn at the corners, and cardboard showed through. He pulled a prayer book from the back of the pew in front of him and weighed the two books, one in each hand. Each book was filled with short passages—prayers and theorems, hymns and proofs. The arcane symbols and language of each was perfect and elegant. Ryan wondered about mathematical prayers. Was that what Foster’s book was?

  He set the prayer book back in the stand, tapping it down with affection, then tucked the math book under his arm and walked outside.

  Crossing the street in front of a brand-new BMW, he felt a familiar pang. He should be at work in a cubicle pounding a software program through a debugger, not wandering around town in the middle of the day.

  Katarina was walking home from school, dragging her skateboard and lugging her backpack. Meandering up the hill, she stopped every few feet to look at flowers or birds or trees or the little concrete statue of an owl at the old school that had been converted to condos. She saw Ryan waiting. When she passed, he fell in step with her.

  Half a block later, he said, “Nice day at school?”

  It sounded more like something to say than a question. She looked up at him, squinted in the sunlight, and turned away.

  His arms swung as he walked, and he had a book tucked under one of them. His square chin had little red stubble on it. He glanced down at her and put his hand on her shoulder as though it were a reflex. It was the sort of thing her father used to do. Katarina avoided thinking about her dad and Ryan at the same time. She didn’t want to jinx Ryan. There was always that nagging feeling that if she’d done something different, avoided cracks in the sidewalk or something, that her father wouldn’t have died.

  “Can I carry your backpack for you?”

  “No.”

  They passed a shiny red Acura parked next to Ryan’s beat-up car and went up on the porch. Ryan said, “I got you a book.” He handed it to her.

  She opened it close to her face and took a deep breath. It smelled like old paper and floor wax, the way a library smells, the smell of cool and quiet, like something separate from life and death and people. She set her skateboard under the bench and let her backpack slide off. Flipping through the pages, she paused on symbols she’d never seen. She wanted to inhale them, and she would too. The great thing about math books, the thing that makes them better than any other kind of book, is that when they prove something, that’s it. She looked in the first chapter. Under the proof of the first theorem, it said quod erat demonstrandum. To Katarina it meant “end of discussion.”

  “Isn’t it weird how math works?” she said, but Ryan obviously didn’t understand what she meant. Big surprise. She tried to define it for him. “If people spoke mathematically, there wouldn’t be any arguments. Just long proofs with tons of scratch paper and then one guy going ‘See?’ and the other guy going ‘Well, I guess,’ and that’s that.”

  Ryan shrugged. “You’ll love this book. Old math books are way more elegant than new ones. Nowadays they try to spoon-feed people as if everyone’s afraid of math.”

  “Hate that.”

  “Me too. Mathematical wusses.”

  “Word,” Katarina said and opened the door. “Know what’s best about math?”

  “What?” Ryan said, holding the door for her.

  “It’s neither alive nor dead.”

  Ryan’s eyes took a second to make the transition from daylight to Nutter House dim. He noticed that smell again. Not like honeysuckle after all, more like those purple flowers that hang from wisteria but with a bit of earth to it, almost salty.

  Dodge was sitting on the couch next to a woman. “McNear, this is
my sister. She’s a real physicist at a real university, and she has offered to help you.” At the word help, the woman cast a quick glance at Dodge. He added, “She’ll tell you how full of crap your Bible-thumping pal is.”

  She looked almost frail but had a serious countenance, as though she knew what you were thinking and didn’t care. She had thick, wavy black hair with brown streaks that framed her broad forehead and long sharp nose—very much like Dodge’s, but that was the extent of their resemblance. She wore jeans, white tennis shoes, and a tight black T-shirt with the image of a galaxy and an arrow pointing to a spot with the words “you are here” that drew Ryan’s eye to her right breast and then, naturally, to her left breast.

  She held out her hand. “I got a kick out of your patents.” In the time it took her smile to form, she transformed from a serious professional to one of God’s cutest creatures. “It was some of the most amusing nonsense I’ve ever read.” Her voice was strong and direct, a total contrast to her fragile-looking self.

  “Thanks. I guess.” Ryan felt his face start to heat up. Hopefully it was dark enough in the room that she wouldn’t notice.

  “My name is Emmy.”

  Ryan realized that she’d been holding her hand out to him for far longer than was socially acceptable.

  Katarina punched him lightly in the back.

  He leaned over and took her hand. “Ryan McNear. Nice to meet you.”

  Dodge said, “And this is Kat.”

  Emmy nodded to Katarina with the look of someone who had little time for children. Ryan felt immediately defensive. Katarina responded by walking across the room, taking a seat at the opposite end of the couch, and opening the book.

  “Your colleague, Foster Reed, has formed a company that claims to be able to develop a power generator, right?”

  “My friend Foster is a pretty sharp guy.” He took a quick look at Dodge, who didn’t seem to be listening. “He sent me a book based on his PhD thesis—I don’t really understand it, but it sure looks like Foster knows what he’s talking about.”

  “Do you understand that he’s trying to violate the first law of thermodynamics?”

  Ryan dug through his brain. Thermodynamics covered temperature, heat, energy, and entropy, but he couldn’t remember the first law.

  Katarina rescued him. “You say that as though we all know about this so-called first law of thermodynamics.”

  “I’m sorry,” Emmy said. “The first law states that energy is neither created nor destroyed, it can only change form. It means that there’s no way to create energy; it has to come from somewhere. For example, the energy released by burning wood comes from the energy that was required to form the chemical bonds that make up the wood.”

  Ryan pulled a chair closer to the couch and sat down. Standing in front of him, Emmy was only a few inches taller than he was sitting, but when she spoke, she looked larger. Katarina had the math book in her lap, conspicuously pointing the spine in a direction so Emmy could see it.

  Katarina said, “Then where does it come from?”

  Dodge said, “Stay out of this.”

  Almost simultaneously, Emmy and Katarina said, “Shut up, Dodge,” and then looked at each other. Dodge let loose a raspy chuckle and, for an instant, Ryan felt very much at home.

  “Energy,” Katarina said. “It has to come from somewhere.”

  “Matter began forming from the energy of the Big Bang.” Emmy talked to Katarina the same way that Ryan did, not like an adult to a kid, but as two people with similar interests. The difference was that Emmy sounded like a professor giving a lecture. Then, to Dodge, she said, “Do you have a whiteboard or something that I can use?”

  “A whiteboard? Sure Emmy, right next to the lecture hall over by the bowling alley.”

  Ryan said, “He’s got a huge desk blotter.”

  Emmy motioned to Katarina to lead the way.

  “Hold it,” Dodge said. “We don’t all find physics so damn fascinating. Can you just give me the punch line?”

  Emmy stopped. “If you don’t understand it, how can you—”

  “Because the judge won’t understand it either—no one understands it. The executive summary, please?”

  She looked at Katarina and then Ryan.

  Ryan said, “I’m interested.”

  And Katarina, “I’ll understand it.”

  Then Emmy turned to Dodge. “Okay, this is all you need to know: They claim to be able to make a power generator that converts spiritual energy to physical energy. They will say that it proves the existence of a deity. It would also violate several established principles of physics.”

  Dodge leaned back and turned on the TV. “That’s all I need.”

  “That’s it?” Ryan said. “You’re dismissing Foster, just like that?”

  “That’s like, all you really need to know,” Emmy said. She motioned for Katarina to lead them to Dodge’s office. “Come on, you’ll love the physics, and once you understand, you’ll see why your friend’s idea can’t work.”

  Ryan followed them down the hall, immediately mesmerized by the wiggle in Emmy’s walk.

  Katarina flipped the light switch on the wall. A nightlight near the floor went on. Ryan turned on the desk lamp and quickly grabbed the revolver. He set it on top of a bookcase, hoping that Katarina hadn’t noticed it.

  Emmy stood next to Katarina, across from Ryan. “Okay, the basic idea is this: everything was everywhere—all at once.”

  Katarina looked baffled too. She said, “Huh? If everything was everywhere…”

  Emmy smiled. “Without a universe, there is nothing anywhere or anywhen—without a universe, there is no space or time. It gets tricky without the math—”

  “Then use the math.” Katarina stepped closer to Emmy.

  Emmy put a hand on her shoulder. “It took me ten years of college to learn this. You can learn the whole story and more, but it will take a long time.”

  “I am learning it.” Katarina set the calculus book on the desk.

  Emmy picked it up. “You’re only thirteen and already doing calculus? I didn’t get to calculus until I was seventeen.”

  Ryan said, “Katarina and I do math together. It’s kind of a hobby, huh Kat?” Saying it out loud to this woman felt like a pickup line. Okay, it was a pickup line. His face heated up.

  Katarina cocked her head at him. Emmy looked from one to the other. Ryan could feel another blush coming on and had to defuse it. “Is anyone else hungry?”

  Emmy said, “I can make Dodge get us a pizza.”

  “Pepperoni and shroomage,” Katarina said.

  “And beer,” Ryan added.

  After Emmy walked out, Katarina said, “Ryan McPlayer. You’re hitting on her.”

  Ryan responded, “Duh.”

  Emmy came back in. “Pizza in half an hour.” She picked up her pencil. “Whenever language is used instead of math, we have to be careful to distinguish questions that are worth asking from those that sound interesting but don’t make sense. For example, the question ‘what was there before the origin of the universe?’ is meaningless. The word before implies that time was passing, but without a universe, there isn’t any time. When I say everything was everywhere all at once, what I mean is that at the instant of the Big Bang, the universe formed and whatever space and time it contained was all the space and time that there is, ever was, and ever will be. The Big Bang is a great burst of energy expanding outward. The character of the universe has changed with time, but it settled down within a few minutes and has been expanding for almost fourteen billion years now.”

  Katarina tapped her shoe against the desk, much the way Ryan did when he was nervous. “And that’s forever.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Forever. If there was nothing before, no time or space, then however old the universe is, that’s forever.”

  “Yes! Exactly,” Emmy said.

  Katarina perched herself on the corner of the desk where the revolver and gavel pad had been, the calculus
text in her lap.

  Emmy faced both of them. “At the beginning, there was an incredible amount of energy concentrated at one point.” She took a mechanical pencil from her jeans pocket and carefully put a dot in the center of the blotter. “When I say a point I mean an infinitely small spot, so small that it doesn’t take up any space at all.” Then she wrote E=mc2 at the top of the sheet. “You’ve seen this before. It’s Einstein’s energy-mass relation. It means that energy can be converted to matter and that matter can be converted to energy, okay?”

  Katarina said, “If it doesn’t take up any space, does it take up any time?”

  Emmy’s eyebrows arched. She stared at Katarina for an instant. “Something only exists in time if it also exists in space. If so, then it exists in time the same way that we do, always in one spot, its present.” She indicated the dot. “The Big Bang describes how the energy expanded into space, how it evolved into matter, and how stars and planets formed.”

  “And again, where did that energy come from?” Katarina asked.

  Emmy set the pencil down. “It is what formed the universe. There was no universe before the Big Bang—no from and no before. It’s impossible to talk about anything outside of spacetime.”

  Katarina nodded. It didn’t look like a sincere nod to Ryan. Katarina would never accept being shut down like that. Had it been just she and Ryan, her response would have been loud and fast.

  Emmy seemed to pick up on it too. “Okay, maybe it would help if I point out something about how science is done and how it differs from religion. When we do anything, we start with assumptions. If the assumptions are wrong, then everything we do is probably wrong too. If they’re right, then, since we use this perfectly consistent language—mathematics—the results must also be right. So it’s the assumptions we have to worry about. In science, we demand that our initial assumptions be as simple as possible because that’s where we’re investing faith. In religion, people start with faith—huge leaps of faith, belief in gods and ghosts, saints, resurrection—things for which there is no physical evidence. In physics, we have to start with something, at least the belief that our senses aren’t lying to us. I think of this as a small step of faith rather than a leap.”