The God Patent (42 page)

“Yes,” Foster said. “I tell you Ryan, the way things fit together—yes, that makes everything easier. You see, Blair is going to pay you from a separate account. Stashing your pay and keeping you off campus assures that Jeb won’t find out until I want him to. Let me call you back.”

Ryan hung up the phone and rolled over so he could watch the sunrise. Working for Creation Energy would destroy any last chance with Emmy, but it could solve his big problems. Oh well, he mused to himself, if you love something, let it go; if it doesn’t come back, then simulate it in software.

Foster called back a few minutes later. “Ryan, we can do it, no problem. And there’s one other thing: in exchange for your rights to the patents, we want to offer you stock options.”

“Options too?” Ryan asked. “Are they worth anything?”

Foster laughed. “Not yet, but you’ll vest immediately at the current value. You know the drill.”

Foster yammered from circuitry to faith, and Ryan pulled him back to software. When Foster told Ryan that they had been modifying a neural network they’d downloaded from CERN, Ryan laughed and asked for a raise.

When Ryan hung up, he felt the upswing of the yo-yo that his life had become.

Downstairs, Dodge hung up the phone too.

When Ryan started developing the new software, he was struck by the volume of necessary research. He commuted to the UC Berkeley Engineering Library each day and sat at a table next to a window where he could see the Golden Gate Bridge. From that perch, he worked through textbooks and journal articles on neural networks and fuzzy logic. The more he learned, the more he realized how close his patent had been to a workable method. Sometimes you guess right, and back in those days, he’d been on a roll with good fortune. Since he couldn’t check out books and take them home for her, he brought Katarina with him on weekends. She blitzed through the mathematical formalism and
then corrected Ryan’s software designs. Their partnership cut the development time in half.

Being at UC Berkeley had other temptations, though. He e-mailed Emmy, telling her what he was up to. She replied once: “The love we had is a noun.” He went to her office and asked her to lunch. She made courteous excuses, but he persevered, stopping by at the same time each day. She finally agreed so that he could “have closure.” Ryan asked her to meet him at a bench near Sather Gate.

Ryan wasn’t there when she arrived. She sat on the bench, and just down the hill on a patch of grass near a creek—the place where they’d made out like drunk freshmen—dozens of roses were scattered. A guitar chord resonated from behind her, the same street musician broke into the Beatles’ “Here, There and Everywhere,” and Ryan walked up the path. When he got to the bench, he knelt in front of her, licked his lips into a melancholy smile, and said, “I want our love to be a verb.”

Emmy started to take his hand but stopped. The music and the roses on the grass may have been enough, but when he licked his lips, she fell apart. She couldn’t go through this again.

He reached out to hug her.

She ducked under his arms and rushed down the path. It hurt too much. She just had to get away from him.

T
he support network that Foster Reed had cultivated in the great churches of the Bible Belt paid off. Along with the president and Congress, the mainstream press and conservative radio were bombarded with letters, phone calls, and e-mails demanding the end to religious oppression. A senator from Kansas gave a floor speech demanding that Amolie Nutter and Bob Park be tried for treason.

Emmy had strong but invisible support from academe, just enough to weather the threats and criticism—until she was stopped at airport security.

On one of several trips she made each year to the experiment at CERN, in Geneva, Emmy was schlepping her carry-on bag and dreading twelve hours crammed into a coach seat, when a kind young security officer asked her to step aside for a “routine safety screening.” She was guided to a small windowless room where she submitted to an X-ray search and was then left alone.

Emmy knew that this experience was part of her fight. She sat on the floor, pulled her legs into the lotus position, and exhaled slowly. It took an hour to relax, but eventually she lowered her heart rate to fifty beats a minute. She looked inside and went back in time, then forward. From when she was three years old, her first memory was Neil Armstrong walking on the
moon—a vivid memory of Dodge pointing at the moon while her father pointed at the TV. She recalled wielding a hammer in kindergarten. She’d told everyone she was making a ship anchor out of wood. She worked through every year of her life up to the present and then went back and forth again.

As the hours passed, Emmy looked ever deeper inside. She liked being a physicist. She loved discovery and the simple awakenings of understanding. There was one other thing she wanted. At first the thought teased her; she felt a yearning but couldn’t figure out the object of that desire. It was like the weird way that we know when we’ve forgotten something. She knew it was there but couldn’t figure out what it was.

Another hour passed, and she brought her heart rate lower, relaxed into a deep calm, and that desire resolved itself. It surprised her. She’d been pushing against the idea for weeks. Every time Ryan had entered her mind, she shoved him out, getting almost physical pleasure at the expression of anger. But now, in the strange peace of this cell, with her thoughts running in every direction, she let him into her mind and finally admitted it to herself.

She wanted to wake up next to Ryan McNear every day. And she wanted to be there holding his hand when Katarina graduated from high school. She wanted to help Ryan carry boxes into a dormitory when Katarina went to college. She might even want a little red-haired baby.

A TSA officer opened the door without knocking.

Emmy, still sitting on the floor, looked up. She let him mistake her tears as fear or anger or whatever he wanted. He helped her up and she got ahold of herself.

His was the only apology she would receive. He told her that her name was on the FBI’s no-fly list. There was no further explanation and no written record that she had been detained. The
only documentation was the unused boarding pass for a nonrefundable ticket.

She girded herself for battle, and the next day, from her Berkeley office, she ranted at the Department of Energy official who funded her research. When that got her nowhere, she called her congressman. The FBI wouldn’t take her calls, but an investigator from the Office of Homeland Security appeared on Fox News saying that as long as Emmy’s name appeared on websites “known to pose a threat to national security,” she would remain on the no-fly list. Conservative talk show hosts and Bible Belt congressional representatives lauded the event as evidence that the Patriot Act was working.

Finally, two months after the CNN interviews, the Union of Concerned Scientists composed a letter to the Senate Subcommittee on Defense Appropriations, voicing specific doubt that vacuum fluctuation energy extraction was technically viable. The evangelical senators from Kansas, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas responded by calling themselves the “Union of Concerned Defenders of Spiritual Freedom and American Ingenuity” and argued that basic research bloated the federal budget and did nothing more than “subsidize the attack on America’s fundamental spiritual ideals.”

The National Engineering Group maintained what, to most American citizens, appeared to be the moral high ground: “NEG’s investment in alternative energy sources can relieve the country’s reliance on foreign fossil fuels, reduce greenhouse gases, and provide a new technical backbone for American security.” The Union of Concerned Defenders of Spiritual Freedom and American Ingenuity negotiated sole-bid status for NEG in a defense appropriations bill for top-secret missile technology.

The Union of Concerned Scientists delivered a letter to the president bearing the signatures of seventy-five Nobel laureates
demanding that “all documents related to vacuum fluctuation energy extraction be declassified,” any defense contract related to these “questionable technologies” be subject to peer review, the two patents related to the technology be reexamined, and, finally, Professor Amolie Nutter’s right to freely travel be restored. The letter was published on page fifteen of the
New York Times
and page seventeen of the
Washington Post
. It didn’t appear in either the
Chicago Tribune
or
Dallas Morning News
.

R
yan received a certified letter from Creation Energy after the end of his second week of work.

Standing on the front porch in his stocking feet, Ryan handed the pen back to the postal carrier. He turned to go inside. Dodge was standing at the threshold, blocking Ryan’s way.

“You’re an idiot, McNear.”

“Dodge, get out of my way.”

“You’re settling for chump change,” Dodge said. “As your attorney, I recommend that all communications with Creation Energy flow through me. The more contracts they get, the higher the price tag on your rights.” Then his voice went coy. “Read that offer carefully. Stock options on technology that has no value? I can get you cash.”

Ryan looked at the unopened envelope. “Nutter, get out of my way.” He pushed past Dodge, walked inside and up the stairs.

Dodge called after him, “Don’t forget my twenty-five percent.”

“Wait a minute,” Ryan said, calmer now. “How do you know what’s in this envelope?”

“Nothing happens in this house that I don’t know about.”

“Only two people know what I’m doing, and neither of them would tell you.” Ryan started up the stairs again but stopped.

“Did you trick Katarina into telling you? She’s got enough problems without—”

“Nope, not Kat…” Dodge coughed on his raspy chuckle.

Ryan rushed to his room, his heart racing. He paced in front of the whiteboard and, slowly, his heart broke.

Emmy must have informed Dodge of everything.

Betrayal spread from his chest to his limbs, and his world went cold. All this time, he believed that she would come to understand why he did what he did, believed that their love would survive, but no, he really had lost her.