The God Patent (53 page)

“No. Or maybe.” Ryan touched Emmy’s knee. “I guess it depends on how you define God.” Ryan stood and walked toward the foyer. “This is where it really gets thick. Come on upstairs. The answer is in Katarina’s mural.”

Emmy stood quietly. Foster looked fascinated, but as he stood, he cocked his head into his smug look. Dodge looked like he cared more about the sand Ryan’s shoes had left on the coffee table than what Ryan was saying.

When they got to Katarina’s room, Ryan pointed at the ceiling. “See the cloud? The smudges are the names of people—the names of every person Katarina could remember, everyone who affected her. Look at how the cloud drips into her drawing of me. She put my sisters’ names in, and here’s Foster’s. There’s a little heart around Emmy’s.

“This is the immortality of the soul: our every action, everyone we touch, every way we express our affection—whether by making love under the stars or giving the finger to some asshole who can’t drive—is a gift to another. The soul isn’t something that we have to ourselves. We’ve gotten it from everyone who’s loved us, everyone who’s hated us, and everyone who didn’t care but somehow affected us. Our genetic makeup comes from the affection of our ancestors. It’s the core; she called it the canvas. In the instant following the death of our physical bodies, our soul
awakens in everyone we’ve ever affected, the same way that the soul awakens in any other instant—except that it’s no longer confined to one body.”

Ryan smiled at Katarina’s nagging impatience. “Katarina is a part of me. All her little quirks, the way she hassled me, her total lack of patience when I try to figure something out, all that. She’s right here, wide awake. Emmy, you didn’t know her as well, so you don’t have as much of her, but she’s awake and sentient in you too.

“At the instant of death, the soul awakens in everyone that soul ever affected. It’s only when we’re alive that we’re bottled up in one consciousness.”

Dodge said, “How is this different from the tired bullshit that”—he switched to a high-pitched mocking tone—“we carry the dead with us in our hearts?”

“No. You missed the point,” Ryan said. “The difference between the instant after you die and any other instant is that instead of awakening in your own single consciousness, you awaken in everyone you’ve affected—get it?” He paced for a few seconds, trying to wrap his own head around the idea. No one interrupted him, except for the sense of Katarina: “Ryan McDoof-face, it’s kind of obvious, we’re doing it right now…come on, get with the program.”

Finally, he said, “It’s like this: while I was walking home, I was thinking about this conversation. As I went through it in my head, I had a good idea how each of you would respond. Okay? I know you guys, so in my head, you responded the way your affection has taught me to expect you to respond. You weren’t aware that I was having this conversation in my head with the version of you that you’ve given me. You weren’t aware of it because your consciousness, your soul, is locked up in your own head. But when you die, your consciousness isn’t locked up anymore. If
you were dead, you’d have been wide awake in my head having that conversation. You see? Katarina’s not locked up anymore. She’s in here, and she’s annoyed that it took me so long to figure this out—annoyed in sort of an amused way, though, a very Katarina way. You see? When you’re alive, your soul is confined to your head, but when you’re dead, you’re aware and sentient. But instead of being in one brain, you’re smeared across everyone you affected.”

Ryan held his arms up to the ceiling. “That’s what the cloud represents—she called it the soul-cloud, but I guess you could call it something like a universal eternal soul. A cloud-like continuum of soul-stuff smeared across everyone. When you’re alive, your soul is stuck in one head as though a drop of soul condensed from the cloud into your mind. But when you die, your soul evaporates back into the cloud, and since you’re awake, you know it. You know everyone and are a part of everyone, and you share everyone’s experience.”

With his arms still raised to the ceiling, Ryan realized that he must look like a preacher at a revival. He dropped his arms and shrugged.

Foster said, “Then where does the soul come from?”

It struck Ryan that Foster spoke with none of his smug dogmatism. Ryan pointed at the ceiling again. “A baby is an affection sponge. When it’s born, it’s a genetic canvas built from the choices of its ancestors, and then we paint it with affection. We give it pieces of our souls. Like in the cloud, we rain drops of soul onto the baby and its own soul condenses. It awakens and grows and gives its own affection, gives us its soul—in a feedback loop.”

Dodge said, “Sounds like bullshit to me,” and walked back downstairs.

Foster said, “Good and evil come from our actions and the actions of those who trespass against us.”

“Heaven is when your soul awakens in all the love, care, and decency you gave others. Hell is awakening in the hatred, offense, and harm you gave them,” Ryan said. “I guess most of us get some of both.”

The room went silent. Emmy’s brow was furrowed. She looked around the room, at the murals and self-portraits, at the mess of dirty clothes and trash Katarina left behind. Tears worked their way out of her eyes, but she smiled. She said, “I hope so. I don’t want her to have died.” A dozen tears coursed down her face so slowly that most of them didn’t make it all the way. “People die, you know? Their bodies decay into earth, but Kat watched her step, and instead of a leap of faith, she derived a model that requires only one small step of faith. She distilled belief in her idea of the eternal soul down to one simple question.

“In the clone paradox, do you believe that the soul is alive in the clone even after the original is killed?”

T
he next day, Ryan packed a few things for the trip to Utah to identify Katarina. Dodge forged Jane’s signature and notarized a statement permitting Ryan to ID the body. Foster offered to drive Ryan to Salt Lake City, but Ryan turned him down.

After Foster left, Emmy and Ryan sat on the couch. Ryan told her that he’d found in Petaluma what he’d lost in Texas: a wonderful child that he got to watch grow up.

Then Emmy surprised him. “You know what she gave me?”

“What?”

“I’ve spent my whole life with a plan. I’ve worked hard, and all the dreams I’ve had—not stupid daydreams but the ones that I could really picture for myself—have all come true.” She sat up on her knees, facing Ryan, and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Kat gave me a new dream. I used to think that my students were my children, but Kat showed me something special.” A tear punctuated her statement. “I want to have a baby.”

They were quiet for the better part of an hour. Finally, Ryan kissed a tear from her cheek, stood, picked up his backpack, and tucked Sean’s football under his arm.

Emmy said, “Are you coming back?”

“Someday. I’m going to my son’s sixteenth birthday party, and then I’m heading back to Massachusetts. I haven’t seen my mom in five years.”

“I want you to come back.”

He set the backpack and football back down, put his arms around her, his nose rubbing hers, and he asked what felt like the most important question. “Did you take that small step of faith?”

“No.”

“I did.”

“Oh.”

Ryan walked out onto the porch and down the steps. He glanced under the bench at Katarina’s skateboard. He stopped on the corner and looked back at the house one more time, up toward the spire to his room. He could see the whiteboard, and Katarina’s window was open. Dodge was inside on a ladder, painting over the murals. A sign had been duct-taped to the porch railing: “Apartments for rent.”

Ryan looked down the block at Skate-n-Shred, turned toward the boulevard, and walked to a bus stop. When the bus came a few minutes later, he stepped up, counted out change to the driver, and headed up the aisle to find an open seat.

The driver grunted behind him. “The freaks I have to tolerate…”

Ryan looked back. There, on the top step, stood the pelican.

In writing
The God Patent
, I had a tremendous amount of help and support.

Foremost, I’d like to thank Ann Clark for working through every draft and for expressing her intense enthusiasm for this and every writing project I have ever pursued. I’d have never jumped into this pool if Ann hadn’t pushed me.

I’m in debt to everyone who reviewed the early drafts, especially to my writing colleagues and mentors: Tamim Ansary, Athena Katsaros, Carol Sawyer, and James Warner; as well as Jessica Sinsheimer (who will one day be the greatest agent in New York City); and the experts on particle physics, law, and evangelical Christianity: Michael Vinson, PhD, H. Lee Sawyer, PhD, Barry Wildorf, JD, and Marty Castleberg, PhD—who did what they could to help me get the facts correct. The mistakes are mine and mine alone.

I also wish to thank Kemble Scott for encouraging me to publish
The God Patent
in electronic form and Yanina Gotsulsky and Numina Press, LLC for publishing the original print edition; Robert Kroese, who read the Kindle version and recommended it to his editors at Amazon Publishing; Laurie McLean for providing the support that only an agent savant could; and my editors at 47North: David Pomerico for his confidence in this project, Christopher Cerasi for helping to improve this edition,
and Bill Latimer for protecting you from my abuse of the English language.

I wish to express tremendous gratitude to The San Francisco Writers Workshop for their help in six-page segments; to Litquake, the San Francisco literary festival, for morale and motivation; Lefty’s Sports Bar for the fine IPA; Joe Quirk, who bought the first copy of the electronic version; and Christine Comaford, whose footsteps I followed into this business.

Thank you for reading
The God Patent
. Thank you even more for buying it.

I was born in Oakland, a fifth-generation Californian, and raised in the foothills of Mount Diablo. When I was in the physics PhD program at UC Santa Barbara, I discovered a particle while working on an experiment at SLAC—the sort of academic achievement that matters to about fifty people. Later, as a research associate and then a physics professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, I worked on the ATLAS experiment at CERN and the D0 experiment at Fermilab and was on the team that discovered the top quark in 1994. In 1999, I couldn’t resist the allure of the expanding high-tech bubble and took a job directing patent development for a wireless web startup.

The God Patent
is my first novel and is in no way autobiographical. Ryan McNear came from a recurring nightmare. For ten years, my daughter, Heather, and I lived in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. As the single father of an adolescent girl, I had a huge fear of losing custody and making the sort of stupid decisions that ruined Ryan’s life. Things worked out for us, though, and when Heather graduated from high school, we moved back to California.

Katarina is based on who I feared/expected Heather to be before she was born. Fortunately, Heather and Katarina have
almost nothing in common other than their brilliance, the cadence of their speech, and smart-alecky attitudes. Along those lines, Ryan’s voice is a lot like mine, but I’m not as friendly and outgoing or as tall and pale as he is, though I have better hair.

Emmy Nutter is based very loosely on the turn-of-the-previous-century mathematician Amolie (Emmy) Noether. She was a Jew in Nazi Germany, and she made what I think is the most important discovery in human history, Noether’s Theorem, which is what Emmy Nutter is teaching in the chapter where she first appears.

Skate-n-Shred is a bizarro version of the Phoenix Theater in Petaluma. Unlike Dodge Nutter’s place, the Phoenix is an incredible resource for teens that provides health, homework, and life advice—as well as a great place to hang out.

I live in Petaluma now with the wonderful Karen and our dogs and make a living by writing novels and by writing popular science and stuff for the electronics trade rags.

Novels are capsules of thought, and reading one is akin to reading the author’s mind. It’s an intimate experience that ought to breed familiarity. To that end, it’s only fair that you share your thoughts with me. Please drop me a note at
[email protected]
.