The God Patent

by Ransom Stephens

  Foster said, “Bless her soul.”

  “Bless my ass.”

  Foster didn’t respond.

  They knocked back their drinks.

  Dodge filled the glasses again. He pushed Foster’s glass over and took the revolver from the gavel pad. He twirled it around on his thumb. He could feel his face twisting into grief and tried to shake it off, shake off his whole association with life on Earth.

  Foster shuffled the edge of one of the legal pads like it was a deck of cards. “That’s it then. That was the last chance.”

  “What?” Dodge’s mouth fell open. This guy couldn’t be serious. “No. No, you piece of shit, don’t tell me—”

  “She had the answer. She could have made it work.” Foster sipped from the glass, set it down, and shrugged. “I was so sure. Where did I make the wrong turn?”

  In a life that could be described as brimming with repulsion, Dodge had tasted a lot of bile but never this flavor. He smiled at Foster and spoke gently, with a tone of understanding and compassion. “You think it’s about you?” Dodge pointed the gun at Foster.

  Foster looked at the revolver. “Hold it.”

  “Don’t worry. I just want to help. I can tell that you don’t get it.” Dodge pulled the hammer back, clicking it into position, poised a quarter of an inch from the chamber. “You can prove right now that there’s a God.” He set the gun, cocked and loaded, on the desk between them, pointed at Foster.

  Foster drank the whiskey and set his glass carefully against the end of the gun, as if it could block a bullet. “I apologize. I was wrong.”

  Dodge refilled Foster’s glass.

  Dodge stared at Foster, daring him to make eye contact. He didn’t. “First you want to bless her, and then you want to damn her because she got herself killed before she could make you rich. Is that right?”

  He drank half the glass. “It boils down to the precept of faith. God wants faith, but all along I thought He was guiding me so that I could show the world the nature of His power.”

  “Tell me this, Foster Reed, PhD, are you being presumptuous?” He clinked his glass against the gun, as though in a toast. The gun spun on the desk.

  The light that reflected from the gun seemed to capture Foster’s gaze. “But everything lined up perfectly. I couldn’t have been completely wrong. I’m missing something.”

  Dodge said, “No one cares about you.”

  “I know that,” Foster said. He tapped his glass. “I honestly believed my wife was an angel, that she was sent to guide me. Me, yes, to guide me to some kind of glory. I truly believed that those patents were written with divine guidance—”

  Dodge moved the gun up against Foster’s hand. “I thought you wrote those submissions to get a down payment on a boat.”

  “The boat—that’s right. Yeah, it was a boat.” Foster laughed and then drank. “I thought it happened for a reason. I thought Ryan’s misfortune was meant to happen so that my destiny could be fulfilled.” His shoulders sunk together. “Why would God break down the Heisenberg barrier to satisfy my ego?”

  Foster swallowed more whiskey, choking slightly as it went down.

  Dodge spun the gun again. He knew just how hard to touch it to get the effect he wanted. He did it again and again. Foster couldn’t take his eyes off of it, and each time it stopped spinning, it pointed at Foster. Dodge asked questions the way that a cat toys with its victim, questions designed to stoke Foster’s doubts. “When you demand that God create energy for you, isn’t that using the Lord’s name in vain?” Then he’d spin the gun again, wait for it to stop, and ask another question. “If you would have no God before Him, then where do you get off demanding that He expose Himself to you? Why you?” And like an injured mouse, Foster grew weaker. “You did it for a boat. The patents were bogus and you knew it. You stole, you coveted, you gave false witness…”

  Dodge refilled Foster’s glass less often as time passed and managed to synchronize spinning the gun with moments where Foster’s doubts were boiling to the surface. When Foster started to nod off, Dodge poured a capsule into his drink. He didn’t even try to hide it, just popped open a capsule—a mix of caffeine and ephedrine—and tapped it into the glass. The powder floated over the surface of the amber liquid, and Foster drank it. As the sun rose, Dodge began to find the game tedious.

  “You see, Foster,”—Dodge topped off the glass and Foster took it—“you keep saying that you’re doing God’s work, but this time you’d actually be helping Him out.”

  “How?” Foster said. “What do you mean? I can’t help Katarina, and it’s too late to help Ryan. What can I do?”

  “You could kill yourself…” Dodge picked up the gun and stared at it. The greenish light from the desk lamp reflected off the dark blue steel. “You know why I leave this gun here?”

  Too drunk to focus, too wired to pass out, Foster shook his head as though he hadn’t heard clearly.

  “I leave this gun out to remind myself that being alive is optional. Truth is, no one else really cares whether you live or not.” He worked the hammer loose and set it gently on the chamber, spun the cylinder, and cocked it again. The gun made a satisfying click. Dodge held it up to his head, placing the barrel just in front of his ear, pointed so that the projectile would travel through his brain and out behind the other ear. “Every night, I hold this gun up to my head like this and ask myself a question.” He smiled. “You want to know what the question is?”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “I ask myself if I want to see tomorrow. Do I really want to go through it again? And so far, I’ve decided to keep going.” Dodge took the gun away from his head and offered it to Foster, handle first. “You should try it. Go on, do God’s work. Just what you need, really. And don’t worry, I’ll be happy to clean your mortal remains from my walls.”

  Foster took the gun and held it in his palm as though weighing it.

  Dodge sipped from his glass. “You’ll feel better. We’ll all feel better.”

  The cold metal in his hand seemed to rouse Foster’s consciousness, so Dodge took another swipe. “When you think of sin: theft, murder, adultery—those are the easy ones. But you went for the big one, didn’t you? Idolatry, name in vain.”

  “He was right,” Foster whispered. “The Nobel laureate was right and Ryan knew it. He knew it and didn’t tell me because he knew I wouldn’t listen.”

  “That’s right. Tell me what happened. Tell me how you failed your God.”

  “I gave a talk last month at a physics meeting, and a man asked a question.” He looked at Dodge, and his eyes focused for the first time in hours. “I answered it. I thought it was a good answer too. He told me that I’d done something wonderful. And I did do something wonderful but not divine.”

  Foster went quiet. His hand drooped to the desk under the weight of the gun.

  “Do you want to see tomorrow? Do you?” Dodge whispered. “Why?”

  Foster looked at the gun, and as he looked, his hand rose and tightened.

  “Don’t worry,” Dodge said, “it’s cocked, ready to go. Just ask yourself the question.”

  Foster looked at the gun. His hand slowly rotated so that he was looking down the barrel.

  “Let’s add it up, Reed. Why would you want to see tomorrow? First, you ripped off everyone you know. Your wife loved you, and instead of returning her love, you made her into a fucking angel—how hard do you think it was for her to live up to that? Second, you fucked over your best friend. The way I heard it, you could have said one word to Ryan’s wife and she wouldn’t have thrown him out. Wasn’t that your bachelor party? Third, you betrayed your God and religion. Fourth, you lied to the whole world, and why? Because you decided that God chose you personally for glory. And fifth, you were trying to have God give you credit for the work of a fourteen-year-old girl.” Dodge shook his head and released a long, slow sigh. “That’s quite a tab. I advise you to close it.”

  A bead of sweat rolled down Foster’s brow to the arc
h of his nose, then down the side. It looked like a tear. “Everything I’ve done has been…”

  Dodge spoke softly. “Everything you’ve done has hurt people, has hurt Jesus’s flock. And now you have a chance to make it up to Kat in heaven. Or maybe hell.” He whispered, “You’re a wolf. You’re Satan…”

  Still staring down the barrel, Foster strained. His chin wrinkled.

  Dodge said, “No, no, don’t cry. You’re not worth tears.”

  Foster tensed and the skin on his face tightened from his forehead to his chin. “God, let me go, please forgive me.”

  Softly again, Dodge said, “Just pull the trigger and yield up the ghost. Just pull.”

  Foster closed his eyes and tightened his finger on the trigger. As the hammer came down, he cocked his head.

  The gun fired. Crown molding above the door exploded. Splinters showered down. Foster screamed. The gun fell on the desk. He rubbed his hands across his skull. One hand came away smeared with blood.

  Dodge took a sip of whiskey. He waited for Foster to sit back down and then said, “For an instant there, I thought you had the courage to do the right thing.”

  Ryan trudged through the sand. The crashing waves and gusting wind splashed saltwater on his face. Once back in the car, he set Katarina’s notes on the seat next to him and turned the key. The engine turned over but wouldn’t catch. He stopped to let the starter cool. He tried again. It cranked over for about fifteen seconds and then caught. He put it in reverse and eased out the clutch, but the engine made a loud screeching sound and died. He turned the key again, but it just clicked.

  He popped the hood and poked around, just to be certain. The smell of oil burning off the exhaust manifold mixed with a less familiar scent. One more thing to try. He pushed the car so it was pointed downhill and jumped in. The car rolled forward. He put it in gear and popped the clutch. The tires chirped, and the car stopped as though he’d jumped on the brakes. The engine had seized. The odometer read 271,828 miles. Not bad.

  Ryan took Katarina’s notes. The light played across the ocean, the crests shimmering and the troughs in shadows. It looked like a stairway over the horizon.

  He fought for perspective but fear distracted him. Three years ago, confused by the mishmash of Bay Area freeways on his way to Silicon Valley, the sunset behind the Golden Gate Bridge had lured him north, and he had met Katarina. He watched the sunset some more. There was no bridge, no gate, just fading light. But there had been a reason for him to come here. He’d wanted his child, and in a way that he understood only now, his wish had come true. He really had come here for a reason.

  He noticed movement on the path to the beach, something the size of a small dog, maybe a skunk, probably a raccoon.

  Sitting on the Probe’s hood, he focused on Katarina’s notes. It had started when she discovered identical particles and latched onto the idea of identical people. Katarina argued that if someone were cloned and the entire contents of the original’s mind were mapped onto the clone’s mind, it would be impossible for anyone to tell them apart—even themselves. They’d called it “the clone paradox.”

  The question was, if the original was somehow eliminated, then was he or she really dead?

  Katarina insisted the answer was no. Since the clone was still alive and since no one, not even the clone, could tell the difference, he or she must be exactly the original person. It was the same for identical particles: if two go in and two come out, there’s no way to tell which was which.

  He stared at a diagram on one of the pages. It had a horizontal time axis and two stick figures.

  Katarina had come up with a model of how people exist in time.

  Time is a series of consecutive instants, and people only truly exist in one instant: the present. We’re awake or asleep yet sentient and alive in each instant, but no others, only now. We can’t live in the past—we have memories and impressions, but we can’t actually live in them. Same deal with the future. We can plan and dream, but we can’t be in the future. It’s as though we move forward in time by being cloned and mind-mapped in one instant and are then killed and replaced by our clone in the next instant. The person you were in the previous instant is identical to the person you are at this instant—the same way that the original and the clone are identical. The time steps are short enough that growth and change are so gradual that appreciable change occurs over many instants—like the mathematical concept of a “differential,” where you choose a time step so small that the difference between the two steps is, as the mathematicians say, “arbitrarily close to zero.”

  Okay, Ryan thought, kind of a fun way of thinking about our relationship with time, but in her message, she’d said that she understood the soul, what it is, how it works, and why people never really die.

  It was dark and getting cold, but enough light flashed off the thing waddling up the path for Ryan to recognize it as the lame pelican. “Crazy bird.”

  The sound of his own voice gave Ryan a feeling of substance and reality. He rummaged around in the trunk for a coat and found that old beat-up sweatshirt that Katarina wore when they came here the day after she was arrested. He tied it around his waist. The cold felt good; it distracted him from worrying so much that he couldn’t think. He started walking.

  The road twisted up out of the canyon. The breaking waves were luminescent in the starlight, and damn if that pelican wasn’t back there waddling along.

  After a few miles, the moon rose. It would be full in a few days.

  The model of rebirth in every instant certainly fit.

  Is that all there is to it? Was this the key piece she’d mentioned? He’d never given the time structure of a neural net much thought.

  The road curved through pastures dotted with the shadows of sleeping cows, then up a hill, over a ridge, and inland toward Petaluma. His feet were starting to hurt, but he didn’t mind because the longer it took him to get back, the longer he could hope that Katarina was okay, maybe even waiting for him at home.

  The thought formed slowly.

  If, in every succeeding instant, we wake up and experience this thing we call life, then what does it mean to be dead?

  Well, if we die in every instant, then we must know what death is. After all, we experience it constantly. He stood at an angle so he could see her notes in the moonlight. Death isn’t really such a thing as it is a time. We exist in each instant, die, and are reborn in the next instant.

  Okay, here’s an easier one: what happens when we stop breathing?

  “We die,” he said and laughed. “Duh.”

  It was almost noon when Ryan passed the sign “Petaluma City Limits, Pop. 55,900.”

  At Skate-n-Shred, he turned up the hill. When he got to the top, his feet were blistered and his heart was heavy but full.

  It made sense.

  Emmy’s car was parked where his Probe used to sit. Ryan trudged up to the porch. Katarina’s skateboard was under the bench. He hadn’t noticed it before. Could she have gotten home? Ryan rushed through the door.

  Emmy was lying on the couch. She sat up and rubbed her eyes. “Where’ve you been?”

  She didn’t look like someone with good news. He said, “My car finally died.”

  Emmy sat up. Her eyes were puffy, and her hair was a mess. She stood. There was no bounce to her, no smile on her lips, and her eyes were downcast.

  The doubt, the worry, the fear boiled in Ryan’s heart.

  Emmy reached up and put her hands on both sides of his face. When he looked down at her, her lips curled up, but it wasn’t really a smile.

  “They found her,” she whispered. “Ryan, she’s gone.”

  Ryan closed his eyes and there she was: Katarina the strong eleven-year-old, Katarina the nasty adolescent, Katarina alight with understanding at the whiteboard, Katarina making a wisecrack, Katarina smiling. She smiled more in his head than she ever had at his side.

  He whispered, “Fuck,” and would swear that he heard her say, “don’t say fuck.”<
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  In a slow, steady voice, Emmy told Ryan where and how Katarina had been found.

  He nodded, and as much as he wanted to turn and run, run forever, he sat on the couch. He sat for a long time. Emmy hugged him, but he didn’t hug her back. He didn’t have the energy. It took a long time, hours, before he could say a word without breaking into sobs. He fidgeted with Katarina’s notes, folding them and looking at them—not so much reading as looking at Katarina’s handwriting, thinking about her touching them, as though if he stared hard enough he could see her looking back. He lay on the couch but couldn’t sleep. He just stared out the window at the Sonoma Mountains and let the tears fall down his face until his stomach felt empty and his throat hollow. Emmy brought him a cup of tea and he drank. She sat next to him and held his hand over the pages. He said, “I found these at Point Reyes. I figured it out.”

  At first, Emmy was quiet as though she didn’t want to know. Then she asked, “What was it that she couldn’t tell you on the phone?”

  “Yeah, she was full of shit about that. She could have told me on the phone.” Ryan looked out the window again, at the mountains. “Emmy, Katarina was just lonely. I left her here too long, and she came looking for me because I was her only friend.”

  “Don’t blame yourself.”

  The comment caught him by surprise. “Why? She was coming to see me, and if I’d been closer, she’d still be alive. The judge told me that this world was dangerous for her. It is my fault that she’s dead. I was supposed to take care of her—that’s why I was here.” Ryan fought back a sob.

  Foster and Dodge walked in. Dodge’s face was ruddy and seemed to have acquired more wrinkles. Foster was pale except for dark ovals under his eyes, and his hair was sticking out at a bunch of angles as though he’d acquired a cowlick. They sat in chairs at opposite ends of the coffee table. Ryan and Emmy stayed on the couch.