The God Patent (37 page)

Ryan put his arm around Katarina’s shoulders and held her tight against him. Waving his arm across the entire horizon, he said, “This is the world. Live in it.” Then he let go and walked back to the car.

Katarina looked out to sea a few minutes more.

They drove down into a canyon and parked in a lot next to an outhouse, which they each used. Ryan took an old beat-up sweatshirt out of the trunk and tossed it to Katarina. It fit her like a dress. The two of them walked down a sandy winding path between dormant wild sage, ice plant, and daisies. A little brook meandered along, occasionally dropping into a creek. As they got closer to the ocean, the clouds grew thicker, and when they got to the beach, they could only see a few hundred feet in any direction. The only prints in the sand were from seagulls and sandpipers. They took off their shoes and walked toward the surf. The beach was boxed in by rocky reef formations to the north and south. Violent waves smashed into the beach leaving whirlpools in their wake, the signature of rip currents so brutal that even sea lions avoided them.

“Well?” Katarina asked, looking up at Ryan.

He didn’t look away from the ocean, just kicked the sand in response. He didn’t know why he’d brought her here, just that she wasn’t ready to go home yet. He knew that she needed something, but he didn’t know what it was or where to find it.

At the end of the beach, waves pounded a rock formation where thousands of sea anemones opened and closed as the water washed back and forth. Ryan climbed up on a boulder, out of the direct line of sea spray but close enough so that when he inhaled, he could taste the salt. He sat where he could lean against a rock that was smooth and dry. Katarina looked up at him, pulling her wind-whipped hair out of her eyes. He patted the rock next to him.

“I don’t think I can get up there.”

He shrugged as though he didn’t care, and she started climbing. When she was close, he offered a hand. At first she didn’t accept it. Ryan narrowed his eyes in anger that surprised him. She took his hand and he pulled her up.

They sat together and stared out over the ocean. A squadron of pelicans flew up the beach about ten feet over the sea and, just off the reef where Ryan and Katarina were sitting, broke formation. Most of them veered up at an angle so that they could examine the water for fish. One after another, they tucked their wings and dove into the water. They landed upside down, splashing with no grace whatsoever. Most of them returned to the air empty-beaked, while a few struggled to fly under the weight of water and fish in their gullets.

Ryan laughed.

“What are you laughing at?”

“Look at them. We always think of animals as so damn perfect. Like a lion hunting a zebra or an eagle against a snake, a bear and a fish—but pelicans, my God, look at them! They flop
on their backs, splash all over the place, and then almost always come up empty. Look at that one over there.” He pointed to a pelican perched on a rock thirty feet away. “He’s got a potbelly. The way his beak pokes way out—look at the expression on his face, did he just burp? I think he burped.”

Katarina laughed and pulled herself closer to Ryan. He put his arm around her so that his coat draped around her shoulders and said, “I feel like I should ask you what happened last night, but I’m not sure I want to know.” He looked toward the ocean. A sea lion’s bearded face bristled over the back of a wave for a second. “I’ve never been so scared in my life. I don’t want this,” he struggled for words. “I don’t want this to have happened to you.”

“No duh. I’m the stupid McBonehead this time.” She sighed and then looked up at Ryan. “I wanted to get crazy. I wanted to forget everything. When the band was playing, I got lost in the music. And when they finished, it all came back—all the stupid reality of my stupid life.”

As the sun climbed up the sky, the fog burned off, and they could see the other end of the beach. They still had it all to themselves.

Katarina dozed for a while, her face nestled against his chest. As she slept, her mouth fell open, and a little bit of drool leaked onto his shirt. He had to smile.

The pelican took a few steps toward them and poked its head into a tide pool. When it looked up, its beak was covered in sand. It waddled closer.

Katarina mumbled.

He looked down. Her eyes were open, and she rubbed her mouth on Ryan’s shirt. He said thanks and she giggled.

She said, “When I was sitting in that little steel room last night, my gray matter, like, caught on fire. Remember that stuff we talked about when we went to SLAC—neural networks? If you
take two computers and load them both with the same neural network, they’d be identical at first, remember?”

Ryan was still staring at the pelican. It took him a few seconds to switch gears. “Okay, we start with a neural network—a computer program—and load it on two identical computers. Yeah, of course they’d be the same.”

“But they’ll get different, right?”

“If they have different inputs then, yes, in a few seconds, their internal parameters will change, and the more input they get, the more different they’ll be. Eventually, they’ll look totally different.”

“Totally?”

Ryan thought for a few seconds. He caught himself staring at the pelican. “Why doesn’t he take off?”

“Because he’s interested in what I’m saying. Unlike you.”

Ryan stared at a patch of sand so he could think. “No, they won’t be totally different, especially if they both get some of the same inputs. I mean, they’ll be the same the way that twins are the same—the same hardware and the same software, but the longer they run, the more distinguishable they’ll appear to anyone who is using them.”

“What if you had a whole community of neural networks, and you took one off to the side and copied it onto another computer and then put the copied version back in the community—could you tell the difference?”

Ryan picked some grains of sand off a rock and started a little pile on his thigh. “You mean, could I tell that it was a copied version? No, of course not, they’re identical.”

“Just like identical particles, right? The only thing that makes them different is the situation they’re in. Like electrons, the only thing that makes one different from another is their quantum numbers.”

Ryan loosened his grip on Katarina so that she could raise her head and he could see her face. “What are you driving at?”

“What if you kidnapped someone and cloned him. Then you somehow made the clone grow really fast so that the clone would be the same age as the guy. Then you copy everything from the guy’s brain to the clone’s brain. You couldn’t tell the two apart, right?”

“I guess the clone wouldn’t have any scars or freckles—”

“No, the clone gets all those too, so that they’re identical. The same body, the same brain, and once you copy all of the guy’s memories into the clone there’s no way you could tell them apart.”

“Okay, if you somehow make two identical people, then no, you couldn’t tell them apart. So what?” Ryan tried to push the little pile of sand on his thigh into a column, but it crumbled apart.

“Think about it. The clone would have the same physical body and the same memories. It would believe it was the real guy, right? The real guy and the clone wouldn’t know which was which.” Katarina wiped the sand off Ryan’s thigh. “Okay, but since
I
cloned him, I know which is which.” She raised her eyebrows to indicate the brilliance of the point she was about to make. “Okay, so what if I kill the original guy and put the clone back in the community. No one would know the difference, right?”

“I guess. Except for you, the murderer.”

“The clone is exactly the same in every way to the original guy, and he
believes
that he’s the original guy because, well, why would he believe anything else? Now, since we have to include all
possible
combinations of processes that lead to the same outcome—just like when you add up Feynman diagrams—then he
is
the original guy.”

“No he’s not. He’s the clone.”

“This is the point. This is why my brains almost vaporized in my head last night while I fermented in that little cell. If someone had done all this to me—mapped my brain into my clone and then killed me—when I came out of that cell, there is no way you could tell the difference. But even better, I wouldn’t know the difference either.”

“Hmmm.” Ryan started another little pile of sand, this time on her leg.

“It would be like a virtual process. The cloned Kat
is
the real Kat.”

“Sounds like Schrödinger’s cat to me—”

“Shut up.” She started adding grains of sand to the pile. “Here’s the totally weird part—I swear to God, I wanted them to get you on the phone so I could tell you—check this out: since the cloned Kat is exactly the real Kat, then the real Kat never died.”

“But you killed it,” Ryan said. “What about the body?”

“They never find the body; it’s burned and the ashes are thrown in the river—it doesn’t matter because Kat is still alive. And—shut up—I haven’t gotten to the best part.” She flicked the pile of sand off her thigh. “Does the cloned Kat have a soul?”

“Good one. Why not? At least she thinks she does.”

“Well, everyone thinks they have a soul—that’s what makes it a soul. But does it have the
same
soul as the original Kat?”

“This is really confusing,” Ryan said, “and leave my sand alone.”

“Put it on your own leg then.”

“Yours is flatter.”

“Are you saying I’m fat?”

“No, I was just…” Ryan stretched out his legs.

“If it happened, I’d never know it, you’d never know it, no one would ever know it.” She was speaking really fast. “It wouldn’t even matter. It’s like a virtual process—”

“Wait. Hang on a second,” Ryan said, “there’s something wrong with that. It’s like you’re saying that when you copied the original Kat’s experiences, memories, and stuff onto the cloned Kat that you copied the soul along with it.”

“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.”

T
he 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.