The God Patent (4 page)

“Heh, heh, I like you.” Dodge headed deeper into his apartment as Ryan opened the front door.

A
s Ryan headed out to find his car, fog rolled over the Nutter House towers the same way it had the Golden Gate Bridge. He wondered about the girl, Katarina. Funny, Ryan was fighting to rebuild his life just so he could be a dad to his son, and here was Katarina, loud and clear, but with a dead father. At least Sean had a stepfather.

He passed an old theater whose marquee was covered with Day-Glo writing in the style you might expect to see spray-painted on a New York subway car: “Skate-n-Shred.” Teenagers huddled around the entrance. It looked like a natural habitat for a kid like Katarina.

The fog worked its way into his bones, and he picked up his pace. By the time he found the Probe, he was shivering. He started the car and flipped on the heat. As the engine warmed, the car filled with the smell of tired antifreeze. That smell reminded him how far he had to go, but he’d made the first step. He had a place to live.

He drove through town along the boulevard, paused at a stop sign, and then turned up the hill toward Nutter House.

Something darted in front of him—he hit the brakes hard.

A woman on a bike headed straight for him, her long black skirt trailing behind. Did she have a death wish? If not for her pale skin, he’d never have seen her.

In the instant that her face crossed his headlights, she looked at him with a blank stare and then pedaled off.

The Probe sputtered to a stop in front of the garish Victorian. He took a deep breath of the moist air and stared up at his new home. He put his outdated computer atop a box of books and carried it upstairs. Being an engineer whose computer had a squeaky fan, whiny disk drive, and hardly any memory was embarrassing. He didn’t have a cell phone, not even a pager—no reasonable technology at all.

Ryan opened the door to his new apartment, stepped in, and fell over a pile of contracts. He managed to cradle the monitor so that it didn’t break as he went down.

One more trip up the stairs and everything Ryan owned was in the apartment. He set the tiny student desk in the rounded corner facing out the curved windows and unrolled his sleeping bag between his lamp and an aluminum beach chair that would double as a nightstand. Then he grabbed his most valuable possession: a football.

Sean had scored his first touchdown with that ball. The memory shaded his outlook. Ryan used to live in a real house in a nice neighborhood with a loving wife, a fine son, and a good job. He’d always been happy. Even now, he wasn’t really unhappy. It was just that memories like this, when he was alone and undistracted, gave him a case of what his grandma used to call “the melancholies.”

He grabbed the stack of contracts and leaned back on the beach chair with his feet propped on the windowsill. There it was: in exchange for the deposit and first month’s rent, Dodge would take half of any income that Ryan made from his patents.

Ryan didn’t get it. The company he’d worked for when he formulated the inventions held all the rights. Engineers have to sign the patent waiver before they can even interview for a job. But
there was something about Dodge; the only way any of this made sense was if the old bastard knew something that Ryan didn’t. Ryan scratched out the 50 percent and wrote in 25 percent, initialed it, and took the papers downstairs.

Uncomfortable stepping into Dodge’s living room, he stopped in the foyer. There was a wide offset floorboard where a door should have separated Dodge’s apartment from the rest of the house. A huge flat-screen TV across from the couch was tuned to a crime show, but no one was watching.

With no door to knock on, Ryan walked through the living room, looked around a corner, and started quietly down a hall. He felt like a burglar until he realized that this was exactly how Dodge wanted him to feel.

He called down the hallway, “Hey, Nutter, we need to talk.” There was no answer.

At the end of the hall, he walked into a brightly lit kitchen. Dodge sat at a round Formica table wearing headphones and plinking away on an electric piano. He glanced at Ryan but kept playing.

Ryan waited.

Except for copper pots and pans hanging from the ceiling, everything in the kitchen was starkly white. After a few minutes, Ryan set the pile of documents on the table and eased into a chair. Just as he settled down, Dodge pulled off the headphones, stood, and said, “In my office—now that we’re business partners, it’s time to chat.”

Ryan followed him back down the hall. The term
business partners
churned in his belly like sour milk. Dodge walked into his office—a sprightly walk, nearly a dance. It did nothing to reduce Ryan’s emotional nausea.

Dodge sat behind a desk the size of a twin bed and flicked on a lamp. It had a green shade that cast an olive pall, not a pleasant
match to Dodge’s skin tone. In addition to a blotter, an alarming ornament rested on the desk. Set on a judge’s gavel pad was a snub-nosed pistol.

Dodge flipped through the documents, adding his signature. “You can stay in the hallway, McNear, or take a seat.” He motioned to a rocking chair—upholstered in the same diamond-tuck red velvet as the couch.

Ryan pulled the chair closer to the desk. “Is the gun loaded?”

“There’s no such thing as an unloaded gun.” Dodge pulled a bottle of Irish whiskey out of a desk drawer and two tumblers. “Sorry, I don’t have any meth.”

“Funny.” Ryan sipped from the glass, sinking into the sweet-scented fluid—it reminded him of his father.

“All right, you have six patents that are owned, as far as you know, by GoldCon, a cable manufacturing company whose stock skyrocketed when they introduced fiber-optic technology in 1999.” Dodge looked over his glasses for confirmation.

Ryan watched his whiskey swirl around in the glass, unsurprised that Dodge could find the information but noting how fast he’d assembled it.

“I don’t care about the ‘Novel Multi-Tasking, Multi-Threading Tool,’ or the ‘Self-Optimizing Optical Network.’ No, it’s these two patents that interest me—the ones you coinvented with Foster Reed: ‘Application of Fundamental Uncertainty to the Generation of Energy’ and ‘Method of Multiple Feedback for Neural Network Self-Generation of Artificial Intelligence’—remember those?”

“I remember them.”

“Talk to me.”

“Not much to say. A couple of ideas my friend and I played around with. We never expected the patents to be granted.”

“Tell me about the patents.”

Ryan sipped the whiskey and glanced from the revolver to Dodge. He took another sip. “What’s with the gun?”

“Go ahead,” Dodge said. “Pick it up. Shoot it if you want.” With his bald head sticking up behind the huge desk, he looked ridiculous. “Come on, McNear, tell me about the patents or the deal’s off.”

Ryan pushed the gun aside along with its little platform. “Do you know anything about GoldCon?”

“The patents, McNear.”

“Well, it started out as Golden Conductors. They’ve been manufacturing wires and cable in Texas since the advent of electric power. In 1998, they renamed the company GoldCon and got into high tech. During the tech buildup, lots of companies jumped on the telecom locomotive. I was hired along with a hundred electrical, optical, and computer engineers from tech powerhouses like Bell Labs and WorldCom. We were all in our late twenties, the perfect age for high productivity and low salary, and some of us, like Foster Reed and me, had worked together before. We’d been on the same development teams since we graduated from college.”

“The patents, McNear—get to the point.”

“We wrote those patents on our first day at GoldCon…”

Ryan dropped a box of books on the desk of his new cubicle. “Why is everything in this business blue? I feel like a bee in a huge blue honeycomb.”

In the neighboring cube, Foster positioned his monitor at the perfect angle and then stepped back. “I love it; smells like a new car.” The cubicles didn’t have doors and the partitions were
just chest high. Foster attached a Christian fish symbol to the entrance of his cube and started unpacking his things.

Ryan booted up his computer, leaned back in his chair, and sorted through the pile of memos in the welcome packet. “Hey, did you see this patent award bonus thing?”

Foster leaned over the wall between their cubes. He had light brown hair precisely parted on one side with a little flip over his forehead. “I saw the subject header in an e-mail.”

“They’re offering a five-hundred-dollar bonus for filling out a patent submission form.”

“So?” Foster pursed his lips the way he did when confused. “You have an invention?”

“Dude, you’re not getting it. We fill out the form, put it in internal mail, and some lawyer who knows jack-shit about high tech cuts us a check.”

Foster sat down, adjusted his glasses, and opened his packet. “I see a foosball tournament, a barbecue for the whole engineering team.” He laughed and added, “Perhaps they’ll even have a slumber party. Wouldn’t that be great?”

Ryan said, “It’s the same game they play at all the big tech firms. Whether the patents are useful or not doesn’t even matter. They just want to trot out a ridiculous number of applications to impress investors.” He stood and looked over to Foster. “What are you doing?”

“Signing up for aerobics—if there are any women in this company, that’s where to find them.”

Ryan and Foster had met during orientation at their first jobs and were assigned to the same product development teams, Foster on hardware design and Ryan in software. Ryan had moved to Texas from Massachusetts for that job, and Foster was his first buddy.

“Come on, Foster, let’s fill out patent applications. It’s easy money. If we come up with a real idea and the patent’s granted we get five thousand dollars!”

Foster made a
tsk
sound. “Okay, Mr. Edison, what’s your brilliant invention?”

“My brilliant invention is to fill out as many of these forms as I can before the patent attorney clues in. Remember that guy at Bell Labs who has a hundred patents? He told me that most of them were lame ideas dressed up in enough jargon to confuse attorneys at the patent office. He holds a patent for drilling a hole through a chunk of circuit board—called it an optic waveguide.”

“There is already a name for holes in circuit boards. The
via
has a grand history.”

“Yeah, but this one was for a
horizontal
hole.”

In a whining, übergeek tone of pure sarcasm, Foster said, “I consider that patentable.”

Ryan tapped a mechanical pencil on his keyboard and then put the pencil between his teeth and started typing at full speed. He stopped long enough to pull a book,
Fuzzy Thinking
, out of his backpack, dug around in the boxes he’d just set down, and found another,
Neural Networks
. “We’re in. The down payment for the metal-flake blue Ski Nautique will be in hand shortly.”

A few months earlier, Foster and Ryan had rented a boat on Lake Texoma. They caught largemouth bass as the sun rose and skied around the lake all day. When they returned the boat, they vowed, complete with pinkie-shake, that someday they would buy a boat together.

With the two books on his lap, Ryan resumed typing. Foster wheeled his chair over, and Ryan moved aside so that Foster could scroll through the document. A smile separated Foster’s pursed lips. “I see what you’re doing, translating English into
engineering—this is a Dilbert moment—except, hold it. This might not be such a bad idea.”

Ryan chewed his pencil and stared at the ceiling for almost a minute. “You think?” He resumed typing again. A few minutes later Ryan said, “There are tons of patents for artificial intelligence and stuff like neural networks—I want to patent something special or maybe something ridiculous.” He typed for a while longer and then stopped. “I’ve got it.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m submitting a patent for the soul.”

“Pardon me?”

“Yeah, free will, sentience, the soul. I’ll write an algorithm that does something that, at least to an uneducated observer, would do the same thing that the Bible says a soul does.”

“Scroll through that again.” Ryan scrolled and Foster read, “…a software algorithm that makes decisions based on a preconceived concept of right and wrong.”