The God Patent (27 page)

Ryan drew red lines from each of the lower boxes back to every one of the boxes above them—the result was a mess of black and red lines. “My invention is a population of networks. Think of each network as an individual mind on its own computer.” He stepped back and shook his head at the indecipherable drawing. “Start with a single computer running a neural net. Every net will have a bunch of sensory inputs—the ones Creation Energy implements will have input from every wire that comes out of the collider. Of course, the main purpose of each net is to operate the collider, but they will also have another purpose: to reproduce.”

He took the eraser and pulled it across the whiteboard, making a black and red smear. “Remember, I was trying to patent the soul, so I mixed biblical and biological ideas. Eve came from Adam’s rib, right? So to get the second net, take half the boxes from Adam and configure them on another computer. This way you have two unique nets—every net in the system
must
be unique.” He stepped to the side, behind Kat, to a blank region of whiteboard. He drew a black box and a red box and then a green box below the two. “So Adam and Eve make a baby.”

Emmy said, “Baby?”

Kat didn’t like the dismissive tone in her voice. Ryan’s eyes squinted—he didn’t like it either. They both ignored her.

Tran chimed in, “The patent uses the phrase ‘
begets
a neural network.’”

“Exactly, and kinda like people sharing chromosomes, their baby is made by copying half the neurons of each parent, which means half the properties of each parent.” He drew another cloud above the parents, lines from the cloud to the baby, and lines from the parents to the baby and back. “The baby has inputs from both the collider and its parents. The trick to making sure that each net is unique is that they must have limited lifetimes. If they don’t die, eventually they’d learn all there is to know about whatever they’re trained to do, and then they’d become identical—I got that from either Saint Thomas Aquinas or Saint Augustine, something about everyone’s soul being unique. Plus, since the parents have to train their babies, they can’t reproduce until they’re a certain age.”

Kat said, “So you end up with like, a whole mess of neural networks, making decisions and criticizing each other, having babies, growing old, learning and dying.”

Ryan said, “Yeah, each generation starts with the knowledge of the previous generation, trains the next generation, and then,
over many generations, the legacy of decisions, preferences, and assumptions lead to increasingly sophisticated nets. Each net has the wisdom and prejudice built from a sort of cultural evolution. It is that combination of wisdom and prejudice that gives them an intuitive sense of right and wrong and the free will to act on that higher-order sense. In other words, they develop morality and make decisions that are indistinguishable from the way that something with free will would make decisions.”

Tran opened a thick file and flipped about halfway through. The Creation Energy logo was at the top of each page—it was a printout of Foster’s book. He cleared his throat and said, “They think that a godless universe would be deterministic—the antithesis of free will and therefore sentience.”

Dodge said, “But it still wouldn’t work.”

Emmy nodded to Dodge and said, “I find this description wonderfully ironic. You’ve built a model of how complex systems, like a human brain, can be mechanical but not deterministic.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Dodge asked.

“Free will doesn’t require superstition,” Emmy said. “The vast number of inputs and the way we process them combine with the fact that the tiniest differences in external conditions can lead to huge variations in behavior. The result is that we are biochemical machines with free will.” She turned to Ryan and took his hand. “In other words, your patent describes how free will can be achieved without a soul at all. Perfect irony. I totally love it.”

Ryan obviously couldn’t think straight while she was touching him. He was incapable of pulling away too. He mumbled, “Yuh-huh.”

Emmy said, “Of course, some stimuli leave fewer options than others,” and let go of his hand.

Kat drew a little baby neural net, stared at it, and then said, “Two thinking things think a third thinking thing into existence. Doesn’t that make you God?”

Emmy laughed, leaned back in her chair, and said, “It sure does—and that should bother Foster Reed more than the fact that nothing spiritual is required.”

“This makes sense now.” Tran flipped to a dog-eared page of Foster’s book. “That’s it. I get it. They’re not playing God, they’re maintaining symmetry. It’s the inverse of Creation. If man creates a soul, spiritual energy is created on the physical side. During Creation, physical energy was created on the spiritual side.” Tran ran a hand through his hair, mussing his part. Kat thought he was going to jump out of his chair. “The window would have to open. There’s no telling what could happen. An energy source is the obvious guess. Or it could be an energy
sink
. It could suck all energy out of the universe, it could—”

Emmy groaned and, as though it were a command, Tran stopped.

Kat broke the silence. “So what came first? The soul or energy? Consciousness or matter?”

“Okay, I need to say something,” Emmy said as if she were in pain.

Tran looked embarrassed. “It’s just a model, I didn’t mean that…”

Emmy stared at the table. “You have taken a large step away from reason. I’ll grant you that the process you described could result in a network that would appear irrational and make decisions similar to the way that people make decisions. The decisions might not be predictable and in that sense could be indistinguishable from free will. But please, you don’t need anything like a soul, and you certainly don’t need God. Is that totally obvious to everyone?”

Ryan’s jaw clenched the way it did when he was confused. “If it looks like a soul, acts like a soul, smells like a soul, then it’s a soul. If you believe in God, then…”

“And if you bind yourself to blind faith, you’ll never encounter truth,” Emmy said. “Remember when I visited you guys in Petaluma and we talked about assumptions and leaps of faith?”

Katarina said, “We said that the scientific method is just watching our step.”

“Right. We need to identify our assumptions and make careful steps of faith rather than huge leaps.” She turned back to Tran. “If the software is indistinguishable from a soul, is that sufficient to identify it as a soul?”

Tran said, “If, just for the sake of argument, their primary conjecture is true—the symmetry of spiritual and physical energy—then that is exactly what they are testing. If indistinguishability is sufficient, their power generator would work.” Then, with a smile that looked almost devilish, he added, “If something is indistinguishable from an electron, it is by definition an electron. According to Saint Thomas Aquinas, free will is the defining property of a soul.”

Emmy held up her arms and laughed as though it were a joke. It was real, songlike laughter; she really thought it was funny. It reminded Kat of her new friend at school, Marti. Marti laughed all the time, especially when Kat said something intelligent that Marti didn’t understand. In fact, Marti laughed every time Kat spoke like a mathematical physicist. Kat puzzled for an instant. In a way, Marti made it easier for Kat to be a geek.

“Good one.” Emmy had a big smile. “I knew you’d say that.”

How could Emmy have seemed so angry and then all of a sudden be amused?

Ryan laughed too. Even Dodge smiled. Emmy was sort of like Marti—when she laughed, other people always laughed
with her. That’s how Marti affected people. She had a happiness feedback loop, but it was weird to see the same thing in serious, brilliant, badass Emmy. It didn’t make sense.

Kat looked at her notebook and concentrated, visualizing herself as a neural network with lines from her five senses to a row of boxes. The next row connected to her mother and had severed lines to her dead father, with a new box connected to Ryan and another with a thin line to Emmy.

She looked at Ryan’s coffee—a paper cup with a little heat-ring around it and a white plastic cover. Traces of steam curled out of it. Emmy’s was in a big mug with a dancing penguin cartoon. It didn’t have any steam now, but it had a few minutes before. Kat watched everyone interact but concentrated so that their voices were no longer words, just sounds, as though she had erased the input line from her ears to her mind. Even though Emmy thought everything Ryan said was wrong—really totally wrong—she still touched him every time he spoke, and Ryan leaned toward her like a happy puppy. Kat didn’t understand why Emmy would help Ryan. They seemed so mismatched—Ryan the big fuckup and Emmy the great scientist. What other feedback loop needed to be drawn in? Could it just be that Emmy thought Ryan was hot? Ryan was hella cute and funny, and he was smarter than most boys, but…

A thought hit Kat from a different angle, as though the severed line to her father had just solidified. Her father would say that Emmy is simply a nice woman who wants to help a nice man.

Dodge stroked his chin and glared at Emmy. Emmy’s brow furrowed deeply—the same way that Dodge’s did when he was angry, but now Emmy didn’t seem angry, just adamant. And every time Dodge made his annoying raspy not-laugh, Emmy exhaled. She looked like a little girl when she exhaled.

Kat turned to Ryan. He was looking back at her and had that smile on his face that he sometimes got when she was working at the whiteboard.

At once, as though all her little boxes lined up in agreement, she recognized the look on Ryan’s face. It was
her
look. It was her special look for when she really liked something. That little closed-mouth smile, lips turning up and eyes wide open.

Kat tapped her pencil on her notebook. “Each network has an effect on the others, right?”

Ryan nodded. The others didn’t notice that she’d said anything.

“What if two of them started out identical, and you put them with a bunch of others—eventually the two would be different, right?”

“Yep, in fact, that’s a good debug test. If two started out as identical but had different inputs and remained the same, it would mean something was wrong.” Kat had to strain to hear Ryan over Dodge and Emmy’s arguing.

Kat noticed that Tran had started listening to them.

“What would happen if you killed one of them?” Kat twirled her hair around her finger. “The decisions made by the other nets are still affected by the dead one. So it’s not really dead, is it? It has just stopped changing.”

“Sort of, for a while I guess. But the others keep changing, so eventually there’s no trace of the dead one.”

“No.” At some point, Emmy and Dodge had gone silent. Everyone was staring at Kat, making it hard to think. She sat up a little straighter. “No. Each net that was ever affected by the dead one continues to be influenced by its, um, its affection. And every affected decision affects other nets until the effects of the dead one are distributed evenly over all the others. So the longer
you wait, the more the dead net affects the whole system. Even though it’s dead.”

Tran added, “Though the longer it was alive, the greater its total impact on the others—just by sheer number of decisions.”

Kat wondered why he’d bother to say something so obvious. His eyes had narrowed some; he was obviously concentrating. Kat had never believed that she was smarter than other people. When she acted smart around her friends, it seemed to bother them, seemed uncool, at least until Marti laughed, so she usually acted the way they did: a little clueless, unconcerned, uninterested—you know, cool. She figured they had been doing the same thing. But that look on Tran’s face made her uncomfortable, though not in a bad way.

She turned to Ryan.

He spread his hands and said, “You’re way past me now…”

“What if, before it died, you recorded everything about it and then, right after you turned it off, you loaded it onto a different computer?”

“It’s software. It would be the same on any box.”

She could hear Ryan’s foot tapping against the table leg. “So the others would never even know that it had died.”

“But if you rebooted another computer with the same net, then it’s not dead,” Tran said. “What’s the significance?”

Kat realized how tightly her ankles had been crossed. It felt like she was looking for something but was blinded by the light of everybody staring at her. Her shoulders slumped. She felt out of place again—an imposter. “Nothin’,” she said. “I was just thinking about identical particles. Never mind.”

Emmy said, “The only effect that a well-trained neural net could have on an electron-positron collider, or even a
real
power generator, would be to optimize its output and get it closer to the
thermodynamic efficiency limit or even the Heisenberg limit. It could never get over that.”

Dodge said, “Can you convince a jury that it won’t work?” And the two of them were arguing again.

“Wait,” Ryan interrupted. “Dodge, you said that we just have to be able to convince the investors that it won’t work.”

Dodge jerked his head from side to side, and his eyes got so big they looked like they might pop out. “No, no, we want Emmy to prove the patents are worthless.”

“What?” Ryan said.

But Kat understood. It shouldn’t have surprised her. Dodge was lying to Emmy or Ryan, probably to both.

Before Ryan could say anything else, Dodge said, “Okay, Emmy—how are you going to prove the patents are worthless?”

“They violate the first and second laws of thermodynamics,” Emmy said.

“You’ll have to do better than that.”

“Dodge, there is nothing better than that,” Emmy said but then calmed down and turned to Tran. “Is there anything obvious in Foster Reed’s dissertation…” She said
dissertation
as though it were a dirty word.

Ryan turned in his chair to face Emmy and said, “You haven’t read Foster’s book? I believe we had a deal, ma’am. I read Feynman’s
QED
.”

She smiled a guilty but playful smile. “I tried to read it, but every time I picked it up I got queasy.” Then, to Dodge, she said, “I can destroy this dissertation sentence by sentence if that’s what it takes.”