The God Patent (24 page)

T
wo months later, Emmy was making last-minute preparations for a trip to CERN, the big lab in Europe. Her new graduate student, Tran, who had been one of her favorite undergraduates, knocked on her door. Tran had been working on hardware for the experiment at SLAC. She asked, “Do you need anything before I go?”

He said, “Did you see what Bob Park reported in the latest
What’s New
?”

“What did the old curmudgeon come up with this week? Another tree fall on him?” The weekly news update from Washington, DC, by Robert Park, a physics professor at the University of Maryland, served as the first line of defense against politics and religion encroaching on the pure empiricism of physics in particular and science in general.

“The company that holds those patents you had me read last year, Creation Energy, is getting a big investment from National Engineering Group. They claim that it’s an alternative energy source.”

“No.” Emmy’s smile evaporated. “Total cynics.” Her voice mixed irony and disdain. “By investing in alternative energy that won’t work, they neither threaten their oil interests nor the interests of their investors, all of whom are big oil men. What greater
way to solidify their Christian Coalition base, kowtow to public demand, and avoid threatening their core business.”

Tran said, “Oil? I thought they were a defense contractor.”

“They’re the biggest nonmissile defense contractor in the world, but historically, they’re an oil industry infrastructure firm.”

Emmy grabbed her briefcase and walked out of her office, leaving the door open.

Tran followed, offering her a sheet of paper. “I designed the preamplifier for the new photon counters.”

She took the page in her free hand but didn’t look at it. “Okay, I get it. They can claim to be developing a whole new technology. What’s the first application of
every
technology?”

“Weapons and porn.”

She did a double take but managed to hold back laughter. “If only it were as harmless as porn, but no. Their audacity is amazing. They can get everything Creation Energy does classified under a DOD contract and then tell whatever lies they want, and no one will be able to access the truth.”

“D-O-D?”

“Department of Defense.” She stopped in the hallway and looked at the diagram.

He looked over her shoulder and said, “I’m on the agenda to present the design at the next collaboration meeting.”

“Okay,” she said. It was his first project, and it wasn’t perfect. She needed to baby him along. Tran was strong and direct in class. His utterly out-of-date short, parted hair, black-rimmed glasses, and pressed shirts complemented his sharp features, making a fashion statement of pure confidence. She knew better. If he presented this design to the three hundred PhD physicists that made up the collaboration, they could destroy him.

She rested her hand on his shoulder and pointed out the design flaws. His confidence evaporated. She said, “Wait until
I get back from CERN to present this. I want you to build one first and see how it works—remember, you don’t need their approval if you know you’re right.”

Tran sighed.

Emmy reached up and patted him on the back. He took back the sheet of paper. Emmy loved watching students mature. People are at the most dynamic stage of growth from age twenty to twenty-five. In a few years, Tran would be able to deliver on the promise of his confidence.

Thinking about the patents reminded her of Ryan. She caught herself thinking of him as a graduate student of life, growing the way Tran was. The way he persevered, how he cared for Kat, his good nature and dogged optimism, all pointed to his potential to be a really wonderful partner. He just needed one little growth spurt to put his life together and graduate to her level. She caught herself smiling at the thought and made a mental note to send him an e-mail next time she logged on.

Tran walked with Emmy as far as the next door and then ducked into the lab.

Emmy chuckled to herself. Suddenly she was all in favor of Ryan suing Creation Energy for all he could get. She turned around, walked back up the hall, and leaned into the lab door. “Hey Tran, could you pull those patents up from the US Patent and Trademark Office site again?”

R
yan’s college textbooks were scattered across the apartment floor. After all this time, he still hadn’t performed a successful QED calculation without having Katarina breathing down his neck with step-by-step instructions. He stared at the new Feynman diagrams Katarina had drawn on the whiteboard. She’d scribbled in the mathematical expression for each diagram below them.

She sat behind him at the desk huddled over the big red paperback,
The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume III
. “Richard weirdo Feynman writing weirdocity.”

Without looking at her, he said, “It says lots of weird things in volume three.” She grumbled in reply. Staring at the whiteboard, Ryan wondered how the hell Katarina had figured out the math. He sneaked a look at her. She was concentrating so hard that he could almost see beams of cognition bouncing between the book and her eyes. This child was hungry for knowledge and needed to be fed. She needed a decent computer. She used his all the time, but it took ten minutes to boot up, and the disk drive whined in the same tone as his car’s transmission. Ryan resolved that he’d buy her a new computer next time he had any money.

Ryan had another realization about the knowledge-hungry child: she was looking less and less childlike.

Her feet rested on Sean’s football, shuttling it back and forth. Her legs were longer than they used to be, and when had she grown a waist?

“Identical particles,” she said, “identical, the same, no diff. Too weird.” She went to the whiteboard and took the eraser from the tray. “Look at this.”

“Wait!” Ryan said, “Don’t erase—” It was too late.

“That?” She slowly erased the diagrams and equations. “Was one of us still working on it?”

“Yeah, the one with a math degree hasn’t figured out how to evaluate a propagator.”

She put two dots on the board, labeled one “electron-a” and the other “electron-b,” then drew two Feynman diagrams describing different ways they could interact. Under each diagram, she wrote an equation. “This is no help. There’s no way to tell them apart. Duh. They’re
identical
.”

“Why are you freaking out? An electron’s identity is given by its quantum numbers.”

“Ryan, you’re missing the point. They are identical, yes. The only thing that makes one different from another is where it is and what’s around it—don’t you see?” She was angry that he couldn’t keep up. “Identity is all anything has, but if we switch the circumstances of one with the circumstances of the other, their identities switch too.” She tapped the whiteboard with a green marker, putting polka dots around each electron. “It’s like there’s nothing to them; they have no character.”

“Their character is that they are electrons,” Ryan said. “Why is that weird?”

She tossed the marker onto the tray. It bounced out and landed on the floor next to a couple of others. Relaxing her legs, she slid down the wall and sat on Sean’s football. “I don’t know, but there’s something. I mean everything,
everything
is made of
these particles and…” Katarina cocked her head, listening, then Ryan recognized the sound of someone clomping up the stairs.

Katarina said, “Oh shit, what the hell does he want?”

“Damn, Katarina, you talk like a sailor.”

They listened as Dodge worked his way up the stairs. Ryan said, “There’s a bounce in the geezer’s step—that can’t be good.”

“Could he be happy?”

“God help us if he is.”

The clomping made it to Ryan’s door and, for the first time ever, Dodge knocked. His knock, the shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits “dun da da daa dun, dat dat” riff, was somehow more maddening than when he barged right in. Ryan didn’t say anything; the door was unlocked.

A beat later, Dodge opened the door. He wore an evil smile. Ryan braced himself—rent was due today, and he’d have to postdate a check.

“Mr. McNear,” Dodge said, letting the second syllable of
mister
glide off his tongue. “I am about to become your best friend.”

Ryan leaned back in the beach chair as if to put distance between them. “Dodge, the last thing I need—”

Dodge walked forward until he stood directly over Ryan, nearly drooling the words. “The pot just got bigger; check or bet to us.”

Ryan let the chair fall forward. “Why now?”

Dodge told him that NEG was the Fortune 100 investor. Ryan went to his desk and pulled a spreadsheet up on the computer. “How much do you think I can get?”

“We, partner—how much can
we
get.”

“Not funny, Dodge. I need to know. I’ve got outstanding debts.”

“There are three key players in this game: their attorney and original investor, a guy named Blair Keene—”

“That’s Foster’s father-in-law.”

“You’re shittin’ me.” Dodge’s faced folded into a smile that emphasized the length of his nose. “Nothing I like more than taking the silver spoon from the baby’s mouth.” He rested his arm around Ryan’s neck. It felt like a big hairy insect crawling across his shoulders. “The other principals are the university chancellor, Jeb Schonders, and the director of alternative energy research at NEG, fellow by the name of Bill Smythe. Keene and Schonders will want to meet with us before alerting National. Think about it. What better way to show they can run their company than to present a problem after it’s been solved?” His breath smelled of Listerine. “Listen carefully, we’ll bring Emmy along, and within a week they’ll make an offer. Then we have options. We can blackmail them—they either pay or we expose them to NEG. If that doesn’t do it, we blackmail NEG. The price to keep us from exposing them as idiots to their shareholders might even be higher than Creation Energy would pay.” Ryan shrugged out from under Dodge’s arm.

It felt like having the school bully on his side.

As though reading his thoughts, Dodge added, “Ryan, I’m your last chance. It won’t be long, six months at the most. You’ll get your kid back. All better—and all I get is fifty-five percent of the proceeds.”

“Fifty-five?”

Dodge took a sheet of paper from his back pocket. It was a copy of a page of their rental agreement. “Yeah, you signed off on twenty-five and, as your attorney, I get forty percent. Twenty-five percent of your sixty is fifteen plus my forty—voila! But forget about it, last thing you need to worry about. Plenty of money to go around. What you need to worry about is getting my little sister on our side. Do you want to call her or should I?”

Ryan sighed. “I’ll call her.” He wanted to call her. It had been a while since they’d spoken, and he wanted to hear her voice. He thought that if she were on his side, it had to be the right side. “One thing, though, she’s only doing this because she thinks she’ll get to testify.”

Dodge said, “We must avoid telling her that there will be no testifying, then, mustn’t we?”

“I’m not going to lie to Emmy.”

“You don’t have to lie to her.” His right eyebrow rose, twisting his face into a sinister mask. “As your attorney, I handle all negotiations—I’ll lie to her.”

Alone at the whiteboard, Kat redrew the electron-electron interaction, now with a photon scattering off the incoming electron and another off the outgoing electron—that would be enough to tell which was which, give them identity. But it also meant anything that resembled individual character came from their interactions with others. She didn’t try to calculate the effect of the identifying photons. She just stared at it while Ryan and Dodge argued.

Eventually, she set the marker on the tray and went next door to the apartment that these days she shared more with her mother’s clothes than with her mother’s presence. Thinking about identity, she put on her mother’s long skirt. It had an equally long slit up the side. She painted on makeup to make her eyes sharp at the edges but open and soft in the center. All the while she watched the eighth grader staring back at her transform into her idea of sophisticated womanhood. An image she had acquired from music videos. Then she sprayed so much of
her mother’s perfume on her neck and thighs that she smelled like a candy shop.