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The God Patent

Page 16

by Ransom Stephens


  Ryan said, “I signed an NDA.”

  Dodge took the page and put it in an empty legal-sized manila folder. “Irrelevant.” Then he set his elbows on the desk and touched the fingers of one hand to those of the other. He stared at his hands for a few seconds. “Ryan McNear, I’ve told you this before and I’ll tell you again. I’m an attorney, and I am an expert on these things. You’re lucky that they didn’t hire you. Lucky.” He looked across the desk at Ryan. “Listen closely. Getting a job in Texas will not help you. You must have a large sum of money, enough to pay a substantial fraction of your child support debt. Only then can you go to a Texas court and hope they will grant you an audience with your son. Having a job and making payments is not enough. Do you understand?”

  “Dodge, I know. Okay? I’m here, I’m ready to sue my former friend.”

  “Just so we understand each other.” Dodge began reading Ryan’s notes. He laughed and coughed and set them aside.

  “They might be able to pull it off,” Ryan said. “They’re not a bunch of hillbillies denying evolution. They have a particle collider in their lab and some serious computing power. They’re a long way from producing energy, but at the rate they’re going, it could happen in a year or two.” Ryan took a sip, and when he set the glass down, a bit dribbled onto the desk. “Dodge, they’re on to something. I know how Emmy feels about it, but you should see this place. They’re not fucking around. I’m talking about hardware that functions now. Once the software, the soul, is installed, it’s going to take off.”

  “Ryan McNear, your stupidity impresses me.” Dodge pulled a bar towel from a drawer and wiped the desk. “You should have told me when your pal called. I could have prepared you to get the information we need.” He tapped Ryan’s notes. “The key to winning this is to remember that whether or not they develop a power generator doesn’t matter. All that matters is that they’re attracting money. As long as money flows, we can skim our share.”

  Ryan leaned back and crossed his legs. “No, Dodge, if they can produce energy by combining science and spirituality, it will be worth much, much more.”

  Dodge started to laugh. It started deep in his belly and resonated upward. It wasn’t sincere laughter, but it was loud. “I don’t know whether to feed you more or less whiskey.” He shook his head for a few seconds. “McNear, try to stay with me. All that matters is the money. Okay? Spell it for me—m-o-n-e-y—are you with me?”

  Ryan took Foster’s book out from under the stack of notes. “I’ve been studying QED for months. Foster’s theory fits together, and his argument makes sense.”

  “McNear, you’re an idiot. Why do you think Foster can’t get anything published where the real physicists, like my sister, put their work?”

  “No offense to your sister, but if Foster is right, there’s no way that the scientific establishment would give him a chance to prove it. Dodge, come on, the existence of the universe proves that energy has to come from somewhere. Those guys could be onto the biggest discovery in history. Free, unlimited energy—and they might not be able to control the reaction. They don’t even care. Unleashing that energy could cause total destruction. Their redneck chancellor thinks it could cause the Rapture, and it’s fine with him. Don’t you see how dangerous they are? An obscure research lab tapping into a new type of energy with no one in the government, the media, or at mainstream labs paying attention. They could destroy the world.”

  “McNear, you’re killin’ me. The Rapture—I’ve been waiting for someone to play the goddamn Rapture card. What’s next? You about to be reborn? If you are, don’t do it in here, I don’t want to clean up the re-after-birth.” Dodge sipped from his glass and squinted at Ryan. “Or do you think there’s a way to get more money from them by pretending we believe it?” He stroked his chin.

  Ryan flipped open Foster’s book to the diagram with the Heisenberg mirror separating the physical from the spiritual. He set it in front of Dodge.

  Dodge pushed the book aside, rubbed his hands together, and said, “Let me explain how this is going to work.” He swiveled around to a filing cabinet and pulled out several thick files then set them, one by one, in a neat stack on the desk. “This is case law, a dozen examples where companies defrauded inventors of their rights. Every one is an example where the court voided a patent waiver and awarded an engineer rights to income derived from his invention. Half the cases are just like yours, where the company changed the terms of the agreement without the inventor’s permission.” Dodge started to sip from his glass but stopped. “Ryan? Where’s that boat you two bought with your patent money?”

  “I guess Foster has it. There was a picture on his desk with his wife posing on it.”

  Dodge looked up at the ceiling, a full-toothed grin spreading across his face. “So your friend Foster got all the money. You didn’t actually get any.”

  “I don’t know if you could say that. The boat is half mine.”

  “Really? Why do you keep it in Texas?” Dodge leaned forward, resting on his elbows. “Okay, as I was saying, the value of those patents is strictly tied to the profit that can be derived from them. Creation Energy believes that the profits will be huge—that’s all that matters. We will threaten to sue them, and then we will demonstrate that we can convince their investors that the so-called technology is bullshit. They will offer to settle.”

  “What? That’s convoluted, even for you.”

  “Listen carefully, I’ll speak slowly.” He spoke so slowly it was hard to pay attention. “We don’t need to convince Creation Energy that their product is bullshit, okay? What we have to do is convince Creation Energy that we are capable of convincing their investors that it’s bullshit—and that’s easy. My sister lives for opportunities to expose scientific fraud.”

  “If she proves that the patents don’t work, they’ll cancel the project.”

  “That is why we have to make our play at exactly the right time, right after they’ve gotten a good-size investor, right when they have dollar signs in their eyes.” Dodge snickered. “Trust me, they won’t leave money on the table.”

  “What if they don’t settle?”

  “They will settle.” Dodge cackled. “Didn’t I say that already?” Dodge swallowed the rest of his whiskey and poured another.

  “You think Emmy will go along with this?” Ryan sipped from his glass and swallowed. “I got the impression that she was more interested in blowing the whistle on them than in making money for you and me.”

  “Ryan, sharpen your fuckin’ pencil. You are in a precarious position. I am your attorney; what we say in this room is confidential. No one has a right to know what is said here. Not even my sister; especially not my sister. I know you like her, but you don’t have a chance with her until you have crawled out from the hole you’re in. Do you understand?”

  Ryan watched the green-tinted light from the desk lamp scatter from the glass-covered desk. Another rationalization added to the pile. Ryan couldn’t ask Emmy to jump into the hole he’d made of his life. He had to fix it first. If fixing it required deceiving her, well, hopefully it wouldn’t.

  Dodge said, “Now we wait. The instant they get major funding, I’ll know and we’ll file.”

  Two months later, Emmy was making last-minute preparations for a trip to CERN, the big lab in Europe. Her new graduate student, Tran, who had been one of her favorite undergraduates, knocked on her door. Tran had been working on hardware for the experiment at SLAC. She asked, “Do you need anything before I go?”

  He said, “Did you see what Bob Park reported in the latest What’s New?”

  “What did the old curmudgeon come up with this week? Another tree fall on him?” The weekly news update from Washington, DC, by Robert Park, a physics professor at the University of Maryland, served as the first line of defense against politics and religion encroaching on the pure empiricism of physics in particular and science in general.

  “The company that holds those patents you had me read last year, Creation E
nergy, is getting a big investment from National Engineering Group. They claim that it’s an alternative energy source.”

  “No.” Emmy’s smile evaporated. “Total cynics.” Her voice mixed irony and disdain. “By investing in alternative energy that won’t work, they neither threaten their oil interests nor the interests of their investors, all of whom are big oil men. What greater way to solidify their Christian Coalition base, kowtow to public demand, and avoid threatening their core business.”

  Tran said, “Oil? I thought they were a defense contractor.”

  “They’re the biggest nonmissile defense contractor in the world, but historically, they’re an oil industry infrastructure firm.”

  Emmy grabbed her briefcase and walked out of her office, leaving the door open.

  Tran followed, offering her a sheet of paper. “I designed the preamplifier for the new photon counters.”

  She took the page in her free hand but didn’t look at it. “Okay, I get it. They can claim to be developing a whole new technology. What’s the first application of every technology?”

  “Weapons and porn.”

  She did a double take but managed to hold back laughter. “If only it were as harmless as porn, but no. Their audacity is amazing. They can get everything Creation Energy does classified under a DOD contract and then tell whatever lies they want, and no one will be able to access the truth.”

  “D-O-D?”

  “Department of Defense.” She stopped in the hallway and looked at the diagram.

  He looked over her shoulder and said, “I’m on the agenda to present the design at the next collaboration meeting.”

  “Okay,” she said. It was his first project, and it wasn’t perfect. She needed to baby him along. Tran was strong and direct in class. His utterly out-of-date short, parted hair, black-rimmed glasses, and pressed shirts complemented his sharp features, making a fashion statement of pure confidence. She knew better. If he presented this design to the three hundred PhD physicists that made up the collaboration, they could destroy him.

  She rested her hand on his shoulder and pointed out the design flaws. His confidence evaporated. She said, “Wait until I get back from CERN to present this. I want you to build one first and see how it works—remember, you don’t need their approval if you know you’re right.”

  Tran sighed.

  Emmy reached up and patted him on the back. He took back the sheet of paper. Emmy loved watching students mature. People are at the most dynamic stage of growth from age twenty to twenty-five. In a few years, Tran would be able to deliver on the promise of his confidence.

  Thinking about the patents reminded her of Ryan. She caught herself thinking of him as a graduate student of life, growing the way Tran was. The way he persevered, how he cared for Kat, his good nature and dogged optimism, all pointed to his potential to be a really wonderful partner. He just needed one little growth spurt to put his life together and graduate to her level. She caught herself smiling at the thought and made a mental note to send him an e-mail next time she logged on.

  Tran walked with Emmy as far as the next door and then ducked into the lab.

  Emmy chuckled to herself. Suddenly she was all in favor of Ryan suing Creation Energy for all he could get. She turned around, walked back up the hall, and leaned into the lab door. “Hey Tran, could you pull those patents up from the US Patent and Trademark Office site again?”

  Ryan’s college textbooks were scattered across the apartment floor. After all this time, he still hadn’t performed a successful QED calculation without having Katarina breathing down his neck with step-by-step instructions. He stared at the new Feynman diagrams Katarina had drawn on the whiteboard. She’d scribbled in the mathematical expression for each diagram below them.

  She sat behind him at the desk huddled over the big red paperback, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume III. “Richard weirdo Feynman writing weirdocity.”

  Without looking at her, he said, “It says lots of weird things in volume three.” She grumbled in reply. Staring at the whiteboard, Ryan wondered how the hell Katarina had figured out the math. He sneaked a look at her. She was concentrating so hard that he could almost see beams of cognition bouncing between the book and her eyes. This child was hungry for knowledge and needed to be fed. She needed a decent computer. She used his all the time, but it took ten minutes to boot up, and the disk drive whined in the same tone as his car’s transmission. Ryan resolved that he’d buy her a new computer next time he had any money.

  Ryan had another realization about the knowledge-hungry child: she was looking less and less childlike.

  Her feet rested on Sean’s football, shuttling it back and forth. Her legs were longer than they used to be, and when had she grown a waist?

  “Identical particles,” she said, “identical, the same, no diff. Too weird.” She went to the whiteboard and took the eraser from the tray. “Look at this.”

  “Wait!” Ryan said, “Don’t erase—” It was too late.

  “That?” She slowly erased the diagrams and equations. “Was one of us still working on it?”

  “Yeah, the one with a math degree hasn’t figured out how to evaluate a propagator.”

  She put two dots on the board, labeled one “electron-a” and the other “electron-b,” then drew two Feynman diagrams describing different ways they could interact. Under each diagram, she wrote an equation. “This is no help. There’s no way to tell them apart. Duh. They’re identical.”

  “Why are you freaking out? An electron’s identity is given by its quantum numbers.”

  “Ryan, you’re missing the point. They are identical, yes. The only thing that makes one different from another is where it is and what’s around it—don’t you see?” She was angry that he couldn’t keep up. “Identity is all anything has, but if we switch the circumstances of one with the circumstances of the other, their identities switch too.” She tapped the whiteboard with a green marker, putting polka dots around each electron. “It’s like there’s nothing to them; they have no character.”

  “Their character is that they are electrons,” Ryan said. “Why is that weird?”

  She tossed the marker onto the tray. It bounced out and landed on the floor next to a couple of others. Relaxing her legs, she slid down the wall and sat on Sean’s football. “I don’t know, but there’s something. I mean everything, everything is made of these particles and…” Katarina cocked her head, listening, then Ryan recognized the sound of someone clomping up the stairs.

  Katarina said, “Oh shit, what the hell does he want?”

  “Damn, Katarina, you talk like a sailor.”

  They listened as Dodge worked his way up the stairs. Ryan said, “There’s a bounce in the geezer’s step—that can’t be good.”

  “Could he be happy?”

  “God help us if he is.”

  The clomping made it to Ryan’s door and, for the first time ever, Dodge knocked. His knock, the shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits “dun da da daa dun, dat dat” riff, was somehow more maddening than when he barged right in. Ryan didn’t say anything; the door was unlocked.

  A beat later, Dodge opened the door. He wore an evil smile. Ryan braced himself—rent was due today, and he’d have to postdate a check.

  “Mr. McNear,” Dodge said, letting the second syllable of mister glide off his tongue. “I am about to become your best friend.”

  Ryan leaned back in the beach chair as if to put distance between them. “Dodge, the last thing I need—”

  Dodge walked forward until he stood directly over Ryan, nearly drooling the words. “The pot just got bigger; check or bet to us.”

  Ryan let the chair fall forward. “Why now?”

  Dodge told him that NEG was the Fortune 100 investor. Ryan went to his desk and pulled a spreadsheet up on the computer. “How much do you think I can get?”

  “We, partner—how much can we get.”

  “Not funny, Dodge. I need to know. I’ve got outstanding debts.”
>
  “There are three key players in this game: their attorney and original investor, a guy named Blair Keene—”

  “That’s Foster’s father-in-law.”

  “You’re shittin’ me.” Dodge’s faced folded into a smile that emphasized the length of his nose. “Nothing I like more than taking the silver spoon from the baby’s mouth.” He rested his arm around Ryan’s neck. It felt like a big hairy insect crawling across his shoulders. “The other principals are the university chancellor, Jeb Schonders, and the director of alternative energy research at NEG, fellow by the name of Bill Smythe. Keene and Schonders will want to meet with us before alerting National. Think about it. What better way to show they can run their company than to present a problem after it’s been solved?” His breath smelled of Listerine. “Listen carefully, we’ll bring Emmy along, and within a week they’ll make an offer. Then we have options. We can blackmail them—they either pay or we expose them to NEG. If that doesn’t do it, we blackmail NEG. The price to keep us from exposing them as idiots to their shareholders might even be higher than Creation Energy would pay.” Ryan shrugged out from under Dodge’s arm.

  It felt like having the school bully on his side.

  As though reading his thoughts, Dodge added, “Ryan, I’m your last chance. It won’t be long, six months at the most. You’ll get your kid back. All better—and all I get is fifty-five percent of the proceeds.”

  “Fifty-five?”

  Dodge took a sheet of paper from his back pocket. It was a copy of a page of their rental agreement. “Yeah, you signed off on twenty-five and, as your attorney, I get forty percent. Twenty-five percent of your sixty is fifteen plus my forty—voila! But forget about it, last thing you need to worry about. Plenty of money to go around. What you need to worry about is getting my little sister on our side. Do you want to call her or should I?”

  Ryan sighed. “I’ll call her.” He wanted to call her. It had been a while since they’d spoken, and he wanted to hear her voice. He thought that if she were on his side, it had to be the right side. “One thing, though, she’s only doing this because she thinks she’ll get to testify.”

 

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