The God Patent

by Ransom Stephens

  “No,” Kat said, slower now, “I’m saying that the soul is all that stuff in your mind: experience and sentience—that’s what gives us the context for making decisions, and from that comes free will.”

  “Doesn’t that mean that when you die you’re just snuffed out, including your soul?”

  “That’s what I was thinking when they drove us to that courthouse—by the way, I saw you, and your car is spewing white smoke.” She flicked Ryan’s leg. “Why can’t there be two identical souls? Do souls all have to be different? Does God have to assign them? Isn’t it their own awareness that makes them magic? What is a soul if not the sum of someone’s experiences and feelings and sensations, dreams and nightmares, everything that a person has ever thought or sensed? All that stuff that we copied onto the clone’s mind?”

  “Foster told me that the Bible says something about God breathing a soul into each person when He creates them—just like He must have done with the Divine Spark that started the Big Bang.”

  “Yeah, so God’s breath would be part of consciousness and, just like everything else, it’d get copied—but I don’t think you need the spark.”

  Ryan stood and climbed down to the beach. “I bet none of the other little criminals on the bus were thinking about how souls work. I hope you didn’t catch anything. Has anyone ever told you about condoms?”

  “Oh, gross, I didn’t even think of that last night. Yuck, I’m like maximo disgustized.” She slid off the rock, kicked off of a boulder, and grabbed Ryan’s arm before landing on the beach. “What am I going to say to those people?”

  “Katarina, it was a nightmare. You were all naked and meth and…” He hugged her again.

  Katarina shook her head, shook as though she were trying to get out of her own skin.

  “Are you worried that everything’s going to change now? I guess it’s already changed, huh? All the time I spend with Emmy, you did most of the path-integral stuff without me…”

  “I like Emmy. I like you with Emmy.”

  “Katarina, you’ll always be my best friend. Nothing’s going to change that. Now that I can fix my life and see my son again, it’s just going to get better. You’ll really like Sean.”

  “How would you know? The last time you saw him he was eleven years old. Now he’s fifteen—you’re not even gonna recognize him.”

  The check was drawn on the corporate account of Creation Energy at Bank of America. Ryan signed in front of the teller, a woman who looked about eighteen. Immediately after the deposit slip was stamped, Dodge, elbowing his way up to the teller, instructed Ryan to request a cashier’s check for the entire $1 million. The teller called over the branch manager.

  Since it was an interstate check, though drawn on the same bank, the manager said it was subject to a seven-day holding period. Dodge asked for a photocopy of the check and asked the manager to guarantee that the check would clear. Unfazed, the manager repeated the seven-day hold policy.

  While Dodge threatened the manager—“It’s illegal to write a bad check, so why not guarantee it?”—Ryan whispered to the teller, “Is there some way that you can confirm that the check will clear?”

  The teller did a double take at the manager, who was occupied with Dodge, and then typed away at her keyboard. A few seconds later, she looked up, first at Ryan, then at the manager. She caught his eye and motioned him over. Ignoring Dodge, the manager leaned down to see the computer screen.

  He stood back up and, with traces of glee, said, “This check has been canceled.”

  Dodge went silent.

  “What?” Ryan’s heart raced. “No. This can’t happen. You mean it’s not worth anything?”

  The manager, looking at Dodge, said, “That’s right. This piece of paper has no value.” Then, to Ryan, “There is also a thirty-dollar invalid deposit fee. I’ll just subtract it from your account.”

  He looked at the teller, pleading. She mouthed the word sorry.

  Dodge said, “Give me the check.”

  The manager denied him and Dodge added, “Then make a photocopy.” He spoke in a breathy tone, not unlike the hiss of a snake. The manager started to speak, thought better of it, and took the check from the teller. A few seconds later, he returned with a copy.

  Dodge marched out of the bank with no sign of his frumpy waddle.

  Ryan called the manager over and asked what he could do. The manager, still obviously angry from his interaction with Dodge, walked away. The teller printed the bank’s canceled check policy and handed it to Ryan. It had the usual legalese denying any responsibility of the bank and quoting the thirty-dollar fee for invalid deposits. It didn’t say anything about how to find out why the check was canceled or how to redress the issuing bank. As he walked out, he crumpled it up and threw it in the trash.

  Here he was again. It was like Groundhog Day. The world seemed to be designed to keep him from making any progress.

  Ryan walked along the river, turned up a street, and after a few blocks found himself standing in the courtyard under the twin bell towers of the Catholic church. The doors were unlocked and candles lit the inside. He sat in a pew next to a stained glass window portraying Jesus in His moment of doubt. Ryan muttered, “Got any extra nails?”

  Dodge weighed his options. Unleash Emmy? Absolutely. But Ryan still had rights to the patents. The problem had always been that without a way to prove that the patents had generated profit, he couldn’t go to court. Since the patents were worthless, they would never generate profit. Perhaps that had changed, though. If NEG contracted Creation Energy to deliver technology, then profit should follow. If he went to court, he’d be fighting the legal team of a huge corporation. They would delay the process and would no doubt call an expert witness like Emmy, maybe even Emmy herself, who would convince the court the patents had no value. NEG would then argue that the contracts were unrelated to the patents. Dodge coughed the taste of defeat into a tissue.

  He picked up the phone and called Creation Energy’s administrative assistant, Mabel Watson. She was her usual cheery, pestering, gossip-packed self but was caught surprised that Creation Energy had canceled Ryan’s check. Rather than sit through her drivel, Dodge hung up on her.

  Then he called Emmy at her office in Berkeley. She didn’t answer so he left a message: “Let the shit fly where it may.”

  He set the phone gently in its cradle and turned off the green desk light. His fingers crawled across the desk to the gavel pad where the revolver sat. He picked it up, pulled the chamber out so he could see all six slugs. He locked the chamber back in place, spun it, and pulled back the hammer. It made a satisfying click. He rubbed the end of the barrel against his temple.

  With his finger ever so lightly touching the trigger, he silently asked himself a question, then he spoke out loud, “Not today,” and set the gun down.

  Ryan sat in the church long enough to calm down.

  Back in his apartment, he paced. What’s next? Did he have rights to the patents or not?

  He popped the cap off a bottle of beer and looked at the whiteboard. It still had Katarina’s work from the night she was arrested. Damn, it was just yesterday that he’d gotten her out of jail. It seemed like a month ago.

  Why had the check been canceled?

  He picked up the phone. Foster answered on the second ring.

  Ryan expected Foster to sound distant and cold, but he seemed almost happy to hear Ryan’s voice. Ryan thanked him for settling the case, for getting Ryan the check, and reminded him that the money would help him reunite with his son. Foster warmed to the gratitude. Glad to take credit, he pontificated for a few minutes on reasons and angels.

  Ryan waited for Foster to finish and then said, “So you don’t know that the check was canceled?”

  “We bought your rights. We had to,” Foster said. “Ryan, I wanted to help you, I really did. Hold it—canceled?”

  Ryan explained what happened at the bank. As he told the story, his anger wound down to despair.

  �
�Ryan, I’m sorry,” Foster said. “Something must have changed.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Ryan said. “Everything changed the night before your wedding.”

  “I don’t know what happened, then or now, and I can’t do anything about then, but listen Ryan, I’m going to try to help you. Just hang in there. It’s going to get better. You have to have faith.”

  “Faith in what? Faith that you’ll fuck me over again?”

  Foster sighed. “Ryan, I’ve tried to help you, that’s all I’ve ever done. Your lack of faith is what’s holding you back.”

  Ryan hung up.

  Foster toggled the on/off button on the phone and dialed Blair Keene’s office in Houston. “Blair, did you cancel Ryan McNear’s check?”

  Foster could hear Blair working a keyboard.

  “It was canceled Friday,” Blair said. “Jeb must have done it. He was dead set against settling.” His words were sharp and clear but, strangely, not angry. “This is a shame. We require Ryan’s rights, and we won’t get a better price. I told Jeb it was a bargain.” He sighed and added, “Jeb Schonders is convinced that Dodge Nutter is an agent of Satan.”

  Foster stared at his desk, at the pictures of Rachel, and, for the thousandth time, felt the wound in his heart that had been opened when he discovered that his angel had been engaged before him. He still hadn’t exorcised that demon.

  The bachelor party.

  He thought through it again. The bachelor party was a crisis rite, his final temptation, the thing that the best man is supposed to do, a guy thing. It was also what had sent Ryan’s life into a tailspin. The bachelor party and the wound in his heart—they had to be related. If he could help Ryan, he could exorcise that doubt.

  Blair finally spoke. “There is one way around this that might solve two of our problems.” He took a breath. “How is the software side of the project coming?”

  “We’ve got code running,” Foster said. They were using a neural network they’d downloaded from the CERN website. “Why?”

  “Six months ago, you said Ryan was the best person to direct the software.”

  Foster looked down. The latest graph of power output versus time stared back at him. The first neural net they’d implemented had increased the output power, but since then it had been flat—no increase for the last month. The team of software engineers he’d hired had gotten nowhere.

  Blair interrupted his thoughts. “Ryan needs money. He’s a neural network expert, and if he were on our payroll, with an ownership interest—like stock options—then he’d be exercising his patent rights. Think about it. This is the right way to solve our problems.”

  Foster smiled at himself. He even licked his lips the way Ryan always did. Another stepping-stone set along the path. Blair needed Ryan for political reasons; Ryan needed Creation Energy to fix past mistakes; Creation Energy needed Ryan’s talent; and Foster needed to be rid of that demon. Uncanny. God’s will would be done.

  Foster said, “Will Jeb let me hire him?”

  “No, but I can work around that. You’ll have three months to make serious progress; that’s when Jeb will see the books. Jeb can’t see him around campus either, but if Ryan can help you increase energy output, Jeb won’t be a problem.” Foster could hear Blair scratching notes on paper. “Do you think he’ll take the job if you offer it?”

  “He’s pretty angry,” Foster said. “I’m not sure. This could be a serious problem. You’re right, Blair, we need Ryan. Doesn’t Jeb understand that?”

  “Jeb has a completely different concept of what success looks like than you or I have. He’s not a scientist or technologist, Foster. He’s a warrior and he thinks Ryan is the enemy.”

  “Ryan is not a man of faith, but he’s not a bad man,” Foster said. “He could help us.”

  “I get that. I’m a pragmatist. I’ll see what I can do and let you know.”

  Emmy posted Foster’s dissertation on the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory website, then she sent a note to Bob Park describing the “scientific travesty that National Engineering is propagating in the name of alternative energy.” Park sent an unprecedented Monday edition of What’s New to the thousands of physicists who read his weekly newsletter.

  Within an hour, the LBL web server was struggling under the demand to download Foster’s dissertation. Graduate students, professors, research associates, and lab rats from coast to coast opened the document. Many thought they’d been duped by the physics equivalent of an urban legend; most stopped reading after the fifth Bible quotation, around page twenty. Some religious physicists were offended by the work, but others quietly hoped that Foster was on to something.

  The next morning, as she sat down to prepare a lecture, Emmy logged on to her computer and found a slew of e-mails complaining that the dissertation had been pulled from the website. She skimmed down to an e-mail that had been sent late the previous night from the laboratory director. He explained that he had been ordered by the Department of Energy to remove the dissertation from their site. She stashed the message in a folder, switched to another window, re-posted the dissertation, and ran upstairs to the director’s office.

  As Emmy marched through the office suite, the director’s administrator said, “He’s expecting you.”

  Emmy pulled open the door, stepped in, and slammed it behind her. “What are you doing?”

  He spoke with a Belgian accent. “Running a national laboratory.”

  “Okay, fine.” Emmy wagged her finger in the director’s face and spoke loud enough to be heard down the hall. “If you deny that dissertation scientific scrutiny, I’ll resign right now. Are you so weak, so timid, so totally afraid of doing the right thing that you’ll buckle under to the first wave of complaint? Is this who you are? Do you consider yourself a leader?” Her voice got louder with each word, and she knew inside that she was screaming and ranting, knew that this was not the way to motivate him, but she couldn’t stop. He leaned back in his chair and nodded to everything she said. Finally, she said something so out of character that it gave her pause: “When did you have your balls cut off?”

  As though to emphasize that she had been ranting, he spoke just above a whisper. “The secretary of energy called me at home last night, after midnight on the East Coast, and ordered me to remove a classified document from our website. I had no idea what it was or why it was there but agreed to remove it.”

  “Okay, no problem. It’s back up. Sorry to bother you.” She turned to leave, a bit shocked at her own behavior.

  “Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is not going to break federal law,” he said. “I am not going to risk our funding for your scientific jihad.”

  Emmy’s temper rushed back in, but this time she was ready. She stared at him and spoke very clearly. “Remember this day. This is the day that you destroyed your career. Claude, I remember when you were a physicist. You’re not a physicist anymore, you’re a corporate pawn.”

  She left, and when she got back to her office, sure enough, Foster’s dissertation was no longer linked from the website. She called Bob Park in Maryland.

  “It’s classified?” Bob growled into the phone. “First they classified their mistakes to keep them out of the press. Now they’re classifying their campaign contributor’s mistakes.” Emmy could almost hear him scowling. “I read that piece of hogwash yesterday. My stomach was turning by the fifth page. I thought you were putting me on, then I checked the press release.” At the end of a long sigh, he added, “All right, this is what I’m going to do—and I hope they charge me with treason—I’m sending it out as an attachment. Over ten thousand PhD physicists will have it in their inboxes within an hour.” He chuckled, a gravelly chuckle that reminded Emmy of her father. “Talk about peer review. Then I’m calling the New York Times science editor.”

  A second What’s New special edition was transmitted with Foster Reed’s dissertation attached. Copies were printed and shelved in the libraries of every major lab—SLAC, Fermilab, CERN in Switzerland, Tsukub
a in Japan, DESY in Germany, Rutherford in England, and others.

  But when Park called the science editors at the Washington Post and New York Times, he got the same message that Emmy got when she called the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News—the science correspondents were in meetings. In fact, they were on a conference call with the chief technological officer of National Engineering Group.

  That evening, NBC news led with a report of “perhaps the most significant investment in science ever made by a private corporation. It could bring about both energy independence and the completion of President Reagan’s dream of a Star Wars antimissile system.” CNN’s was somewhat vague: “A new way to harness subatomic energy reported by an obscure Christian university in Texas has caught the attention of major energy and military investors.” Fox reported, “The Bible has overtaken science.”

  A television interview with NEG CTO Bill Smythe was careful to maintain that it was “an alternative energy source with great potential, whose specifics can’t be discussed because of their potential national security applications.” He described Foster and Ryan as “inventors in the great American tradition of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard,” who brought “good old American know-how to the biggest problems facing America and the world.” He told America to expect skepticism. “From Einstein’s relativity to the invention of the personal computer, great ideas always bring out naysayers. This technology will be no different. National Engineering doesn’t invest in fads—this is not some elitist theory without applications. It’s good hard technology. Once again, a couple of guys working for a small company in the heart of America did an end run around government-financed labs. We’re just doing what private enterprise has always done, investing in promising solutions to make an honest buck for our shareholders.”