The God Patent (23 page)

“It’s war and the good guys are losing. Do you want to fight in this battle?”

They stared at each other for almost a minute. Finally, Foster walked out of the office.

Ryan went downstairs and sat at a bench, a white bench just off one of the white concrete paths next to a white stucco building. His adrenalin dissipated and left a sheen of uncertainty.

Half an hour later, Foster walked up the path. He didn’t make eye contact with Ryan. “Your hotel and rental car should be paid for. Have a safe trip home.”

Ryan said, “What happened? What’s wrong?”

“I wonder why you’re here.” It was as though Foster were talking to himself. “I can’t hire you. Maybe you’re not close enough to God. It’s not for me to judge, but I can’t hire you.”

“What?” Ryan stood and poked his right index finger into Foster’s chest. “What the fuck are you talking about? If you want to win this
battle
, you better accept that it’s about technology—you can’t build a goddamn generator on faith.”

“Forget it. Please accept my apology. You betrayed your wife, your son, and…really Ryan, I’m so sorry.” Foster looked up and spoke to the sky. “There is a reason, though. I hope you find it.”

“What? You filthy son of a bitch.” Ryan shook his head and smiled at the irony. “This just in,
Professor
Reed: you wrote bullshit patents with me so you could buy a boat. It wasn’t a miracle, it was stealing. Fuck you. And fuck your silicone-titted wife too.”

Foster deliberately pushed Ryan’s finger away from his chest. He spoke in a voice that was warm and calm. “You just don’t understand.” He turned and walked back toward his lab.

Ryan watched his old friend walk away. When Foster turned the corner, Ryan started to laugh. He felt like he’d woken from a spell. A spell that he’d cast on himself.

Here he was again, one friend fewer and no problems solved.

R
yan got off the bus and trudged up the hill to Nutter House. He pictured Foster’s smug-ass face and the shock on Rachel’s. It helped to keep his anger revved up. There would be no disarming smile and wisecrack to bring the peace this time. Foster Reed had stolen his work, was profiting from it, and had betrayed him—it was that simple.

Wasn’t it? It was hard to keep the doubts at bay.

Marching up to the porch, he saw Dodge and Katarina through the window, sitting on that ridiculous couch watching TV. He laughed at himself, his imitation of Dodge’s annoying chortle—Dodge might be his only ally.

He slammed the front door and jogged upstairs.

Katarina was knocking on his door seconds after he closed it.

Ryan threw down his bags, kicked Sean’s football out of his way, and fished out his notes and Foster’s book. He wrote down everything he could remember about Creation Energy. He combed his memory for the name of any company that might be investing, but all they’d said was a “Fortune 100 corporation” and Rachel’s father. He let loose another Dodge-like snicker. To top it off, everything Foster had, probably even his wife’s tits, was funded by his father-in-law.

His anger was thick enough that he only now heard the knocking on his door.

She finally turned the knob and walked in.

“Hey, Katarina, I don’t feel like talking, okay?”

She said, “So don’t talk,” and sat on the floor, her back against the wall under the whiteboard with Sean’s football in her lap.

Ryan sat in his beach chair looking across the valley. Foster was his best friend.
Was
seemed to be the operable term. No, that had the residue of rationalization to it too. Foster was just being Foster, smug-ass Foster. But there was another way to look at it: suing Creation Energy was simply a “business decision.” Ryan had a right to any profit generated from his patent. This was how the intellectual property marketplace worked.

Ryan laughed out loud.

Katarina said, “So you’re staying?”

“Huh?” Ryan leaned back in the chair so he could see her. The sun was setting and the room was dim. “Do you think every choice is actually a rationalization? Is there anything that people do that isn’t contrived?”

It took a while for her to answer. Ryan liked watching her process the information. Her eyes seemed to fill up. It calmed him.

“Pleasing ourselves is the hypergoal,” she said. “Though, Ryan-o, most of pleasing the self comes from what we think other people think, and what we think they’d think if they knew what we were actually thinking.”

“You are a weird little chick.” Ryan stood, stretched, and let out a loud yawn. “Well, I’m gonna kick my best friend’s figurative ass. I got it rationalized every way to Sunday, but the truth is that I’m doing it because I can’t think of any other way out of this mess.”

“That’s nice for you.”

Katarina was fixing a box of macaroni and cheese in Ryan’s kitchenette when he went downstairs.

Dodge was sitting at that huge desk with the distasteful green lamp. A short glass of brown liquid waited for Ryan a few inches from the revolver. He sat in the rocking chair with the silly diamond-tuck upholstery and set his notes and Foster’s book between them. He drank the sweet, smoky fluid, and Dodge refilled his glass. The bottle had a gold label with the silhouettes of three birds, “John Powers, Three Swallow”—the same stuff Ryan’s father had drunk the night he died. Terrance McNear drank nearly a fifth of John Powers, then walked out of the bar and fell in the street. A car ran over him.

Dodge said, “Tell me about your trip.”

Ryan shuffled through the stack of paper and pretended not to be surprised that Dodge knew where he’d gone. The nondisclosure agreement was the top sheet.

“McNear, nothing happens without my knowledge.” Dodge topped off Ryan’s glass. “I take it you didn’t get the job, and now, finally, you’re ready to sue the bastards.”

Ryan said, “I signed an NDA.”

Dodge took the page and put it in an empty legal-sized manila folder. “Irrelevant.” Then he set his elbows on the desk and touched the fingers of one hand to those of the other. He stared at his hands for a few seconds. “Ryan McNear, I’ve told you this before and I’ll tell you again. I’m an attorney, and I am an expert on these things. You’re lucky that they didn’t hire you. Lucky.” He looked across the desk at Ryan. “Listen closely. Getting a job in Texas will not help you. You must have a large sum of money, enough to pay a substantial fraction of your child support debt. Only then can you go to a Texas court and hope they will grant you an audience with your son. Having a job and making payments is not enough. Do you understand?”

“Dodge, I know. Okay? I’m here, I’m ready to sue my former friend.”

“Just so we understand each other.” Dodge began reading Ryan’s notes. He laughed and coughed and set them aside.

“They might be able to pull it off,” Ryan said. “They’re not a bunch of hillbillies denying evolution. They have a particle collider in their lab and some serious computing power. They’re a long way from producing energy, but at the rate they’re going, it could happen in a year or two.” Ryan took a sip, and when he set the glass down, a bit dribbled onto the desk. “Dodge, they’re on to something. I know how Emmy feels about it, but you should see this place. They’re not fucking around. I’m talking about hardware that functions
now
. Once the software, the soul, is installed, it’s going to take off.”

“Ryan McNear, your stupidity impresses me.” Dodge pulled a bar towel from a drawer and wiped the desk. “You should have told me when your pal called. I could have prepared you to get the information we need.” He tapped Ryan’s notes. “The key to winning this is to remember that whether or not they develop a power generator doesn’t matter. All that matters is that they’re attracting money. As long as money flows, we can skim our share.”

Ryan leaned back and crossed his legs. “No, Dodge, if they can produce energy by combining science and spirituality, it will be worth much, much more.”

Dodge started to laugh. It started deep in his belly and resonated upward. It wasn’t sincere laughter, but it was loud. “I don’t know whether to feed you more or less whiskey.” He shook his head for a few seconds. “McNear, try to stay with me. All that matters is the money. Okay? Spell it for me—m-o-n-e-y—are you with me?”

Ryan took Foster’s book out from under the stack of notes. “I’ve been studying QED for months. Foster’s theory fits together, and his argument makes sense.”

“McNear, you’re an idiot. Why do you think Foster can’t get anything published where the
real
physicists, like my sister, put their work?”

“No offense to your sister, but if Foster is right, there’s no way that the scientific establishment would give him a chance to prove it. Dodge, come on, the existence of the universe
proves
that energy has to come from somewhere. Those guys could be onto the biggest discovery in history. Free, unlimited energy—and they might not be able to control the reaction. They don’t even care. Unleashing that energy could cause total destruction. Their redneck chancellor thinks it could cause the Rapture, and it’s fine with him. Don’t you see how dangerous they are? An obscure research lab tapping into a new type of energy with no one in the government, the media, or at mainstream labs paying attention. They could destroy the world.”

“McNear, you’re killin’ me. The Rapture—I’ve been waiting for someone to play the goddamn Rapture card. What’s next? You about to be reborn? If you are, don’t do it in here, I don’t want to clean up the re-after-birth.” Dodge sipped from his glass and squinted at Ryan. “Or do you think there’s a way to get more money from them by pretending we believe it?” He stroked his chin.

Ryan flipped open Foster’s book to the diagram with the Heisenberg mirror separating the physical from the spiritual. He set it in front of Dodge.

Dodge pushed the book aside, rubbed his hands together, and said, “Let me explain how this is going to work.” He swiveled around to a filing cabinet and pulled out several thick files then set them, one by one, in a neat stack on the desk. “This is case law, a dozen examples where companies defrauded inventors of their rights. Every one is an example where the court voided a patent waiver and awarded an engineer rights to income derived
from his invention. Half the cases are just like yours, where the company changed the terms of the agreement without the inventor’s permission.” Dodge started to sip from his glass but stopped. “Ryan? Where’s that boat you two bought with your patent money?”

“I guess Foster has it. There was a picture on his desk with his wife posing on it.”

Dodge looked up at the ceiling, a full-toothed grin spreading across his face. “So your friend Foster got all the money. You didn’t actually get
any
.”

“I don’t know if you could say that. The boat is half mine.”

“Really? Why do you keep it in Texas?” Dodge leaned forward, resting on his elbows. “Okay, as I was saying, the value of those patents is strictly tied to the profit that can be derived from them. Creation Energy believes that the profits will be huge—that’s all that matters. We will threaten to sue them, and then we will demonstrate that we can convince their investors that the so-called technology is bullshit. They will offer to settle.”

“What? That’s convoluted, even for you.”

“Listen carefully, I’ll speak slowly.” He spoke so slowly it was hard to pay attention. “We don’t need to convince Creation Energy that their
product
is bullshit, okay? What we have to do is convince Creation Energy that we are capable of convincing their investors that it’s bullshit—and that’s easy. My sister
lives
for opportunities to expose scientific fraud.”

“If she proves that the patents don’t work, they’ll cancel the project.”

“That is why we have to make our play at exactly the right time, right after they’ve gotten a good-size investor, right when they have dollar signs in their eyes.” Dodge snickered. “Trust me, they won’t leave money on the table.”

“What if they don’t settle?”

“They will settle.” Dodge cackled. “Didn’t I say that already?” Dodge swallowed the rest of his whiskey and poured another.

“You think Emmy will go along with this?” Ryan sipped from his glass and swallowed. “I got the impression that she was more interested in blowing the whistle on them than in making money for you and me.”

“Ryan, sharpen your fuckin’ pencil. You are in a precarious position. I am your attorney; what we say in this room is confidential. No one has a right to know what is said here. Not even my sister; especially not my sister. I know you like her, but you don’t have a chance with her until you have crawled out from the hole you’re in. Do you understand?”

Ryan watched the green-tinted light from the desk lamp scatter from the glass-covered desk. Another rationalization added to the pile. Ryan couldn’t ask Emmy to jump into the hole he’d made of his life. He had to fix it first. If fixing it required deceiving her, well, hopefully it wouldn’t.

Dodge said, “Now we wait. The instant they get major funding, I’ll know and we’ll file.”