The God Patent (45 page)

Ryan sat in waiting rooms the next day, signed stacks of forms, and wrote checks. He provided urine, hair, and blood samples and, of course, wrote more checks to have each of them processed. He tried not to smile at any irony and resisted every temptation to make a wisecrack. The only challenge to his resolve was that the nurse who took his blood and hair was extremely hot.

The day after that, he met Ms. Robins in Dallas. He gave her an envelope with copies of the checks he’d sent Linda. She said that they would be useful in court but would only irritate the Office of Child Support Enforcement. Money sent directly to the
custodial parent without being channeled through the OCSE would not count as child support but rather a gift.

He filled out more forms, including one that authorized Creation Energy to garnish his wages, a mandatory service for which he had to pay a fee. Ms. Robins had Ryan wait in the hallway as she negotiated the federal charge for leaving the state to avoid paying child support. In three minutes, she stepped into the hall and said, “Can you write a check for thirty-five thousand dollars right now?”

Ryan said, “Thank you, ma’am. May I have another?” He had deposited the two months of accrued pay the day before. After taxes, it came out to $32,000. Hopefully the check would have cleared. He could skip paying Dodge rent for a month, but there was one obligation he didn’t consider negotiable, that he would buy Katarina a laptop computer with his first paycheck. “Thirty thousand is the most I can do.”

She went back in the office with the check.

E
verything looked the same as it had when Ryan was here to interview. The grass was manicured, the buildings looked like ivory, and the lab was stocked with equipment and packed with technicians—but it didn’t feel the same. Mabel walked Ryan to the lab, and Foster greeted him with a long article that described the collider in detail and told him that its output power had been bogged down at a factor of ten million from breakeven for the last three months.

Ryan handed Foster a memory stick with the neural network software he and Katarina had developed. Without another word, the two of them sat opposite each other at a granite lab bench. Ryan started reading the paper, and Foster popped the memory stick into his computer.

At first, Ryan was psyched that Foster had written up the collider. It was tantamount to a product requirements document, but it took him fifteen minutes to work through the first page. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that collecting positrons into bunches and focusing and accelerating them into a target was complicated. He flipped a few pages forward to a schematic diagram. The realization dawned that he knew far too little about the nuts and bolts of the project to provide a neural network mind.

An hour later, Ryan looked up. Foster was staring at him. They started to speak at the same time. Foster laughed. Ryan wiped his forehead as though he were sweating, flipped back to the first page, and started over.

In their first job together, before they worked at GoldCon, they had experienced a moment of panic while designing a new networking gadget. Not only did the gadget not work, but they had no idea if it could ever work. They learned quickly that moments of panic are part of the buzz of engineering. You think it’s impossible, then you start figuring it out, and then, usually, you get it to work.

Ryan reread the first paragraph of the collider paper for the sixth time.

At midnight, they were still seated across from each other. An empty pizza box served as a collection plate for printouts of marked-up software source code that had doubled as napkins.

Foster set down a fresh cup of coffee and sighed. “Ryan, this is a powerful software algorithm. I’d recognize your code anywhere, but the interface with the collider isn’t close to functional.”

Ryan was hunched over a printout. He leaned back, looked around the lab, and said, “Man, I haven’t done an all-nighter in years.” Then, as if he’d just heard what Foster had said, he said, “No prob’, we’ll figure it out.”

It turned into a six-week crash course in accelerator technology, particle detector development, and data acquisition. The number of switches, knobs, and levers involved in operating a particle collider was in the thousands, and each one provided information that could influence the decisions made by the community of neural nets.

Ryan worked fourteen hours every day. On those days that he had to drive to Fort Worth for counseling and drug testing,
he debugged software on his laptop in waiting rooms and did all-nighters in the lab to catch up.

Foster put in twenty-hour days six days a week. When he wasn’t on the road speaking at churches, he used the Sabbath to sleep.

Ryan called Katarina from the lab every day after school. The day Katarina’s laptop computer was delivered, Ryan e-mailed her a document. She opened it while on the phone: a patent submission for their neural network algorithm. It listed Katarina as an inventor.

The calls settled into a routine. First, Ryan would ask about school, what she was up to, whether she was getting in trouble, what was up at Skate-n-Shred, that sort of thing, and Katarina replied in information-free single syllables. With that out of the way, Ryan would e-mail her the latest software and put her on the speakerphone so Foster could join them.

At first, Foster had a hard time accepting a fourteen-year-old girl as a consultant, but then she recommended they use separate neural network communities to control the focusing magnets. He said, “But they’re both doing the same thing—separate nets will be redundant; it’s a waste of resources.”

“Foster,” Katarina said, her voice straining with condescension, “are they identical? Of course not. There are an infinite number of small differences, right? You should also be aware that using feedback loops in a nonlinear system means that even infinitesimal differences in the boundary conditions can have large effects on the results. Remember that little nugget of chaos theory? Separate networks will respond in different ways to small variations of stimulus. They will compete to get the right answer, increasing the efficiency of the system. Have you ever heard of survival of the fittest? Evolution? Oh, that’s right. You don’t believe it.” She finished with, “Do what I tell you and
bitch at me if it doesn’t work—but wait, oh yeah, that’s right: it will work, so shut up.”

Ryan expected an instant dose of Foster smugness, but instead, he asked for details on how to implement the new system. It seemed completely out of character, especially letting the crack about evolution slide. Watching Foster closely, Ryan recognized the look on his face. It was the same as when Rachel was short with him. He never questioned his angel. In exchange, Katarina granted him a hint of patience—from her, the ultimate expression of largesse.

The next day, Foster reported that this single change had increased the power output by a factor of two.

A month later, on one of their daily conference calls, Ryan told Katarina that he missed her. He said it every time he called, but this time it slipped out, and the fervor he said it with surprised him. “I feel homeless without you around. I just don’t belong here.”

Foster looked away as though giving them privacy.

Katarina said, “Ryan, Foster can confirm that we’re not plants! We don’t grow roots, and the more we interact with others, the more we become a part of each other. It’s how we develop character.”

Ryan said, “What about genetics?”

“Genetics is the biological history of our ancestors, the foundation or canvas, and character is the paint that goes on that canvas—that’s what the soul is.”

Foster interrupted, “Katarina, there’s another piece. Don’t forget the symmetry between the physical and the spiritual.”

“I’m just thinking out loud,” Katarina said. “You know that feeling when you can tell you’re about to understand something but haven’t yet?”

Ryan said, “Not really.”

“Figures. Well, I’m close to understanding something, something major.”

Foster said, “Really? You’re about to get it?”

“Pretty soon.”

“Katarina, listen to me,” Foster said. “Follow that feeling. You are being guided to the truth.”

“Foster,” Katarina said, “you are freakishly weird.”

Ryan said, “We better figure out something major soon and get this thing going or I don’t think they’ll let me go home.”

“Ryan, you
are
home,” Katarina said. “Accept it. You live in Texas where you belong, near your son. Don’t waste your time worrying about me. I’ve got it goin’ on.”

Ryan oozed into semipermanent residence in Foster and Rachel’s guest room. Rachel apologized for being judgmental the night that Ryan confessed how he’d wrecked his life. More than that, she seemed to think he was the cavalry come to save her husband’s reputation.

Every morning, precisely six hours after Ryan went to bed, Rachel would open his door, draw back the curtains, and wake him with a smile, showcasing frighteningly white teeth. A cooked breakfast and a full pot of tea would be waiting downstairs, and she’d sit across the table to chat. Her favorite subject was Emmy. Rachel convinced Ryan that he shouldn’t assume that Emmy had betrayed him—talking to your brother about someone you care for is not betrayal. She also talked him into sending her e-mail. “Just pop a note to her whenever you think of her, whatever is on your mind. She’ll be flattered.”

After he’d been there a month, Emmy finally replied—a short note asking about Katarina. Rachel helped him invest the
correspondence with significance, and the two of them wrote to Emmy and invited her to visit. The note concluded with a line that took them an hour to compose: “Katarina told me that you and I are meant for each other, and I believe her. Do you?” Emmy didn’t reply to this one.

Ryan also sent a note to Ward, the guy back in the neighborhood who’d been sending occasional notes about Sean. Ryan told him that he was back in Texas and building a legal case to resume joint custody. Ward responded with more frequent updates—things like, “Sean’s stepfather is teaching him how to drive” and “I bumped into Linda and Sean at the Piggly Wiggly yesterday. He’s a well-mannered young man.”

It took six weeks for Ryan and Katarina to get the power output of the collider back on track. It had increased tenfold and was still rising. A month later, Katarina introduced a new idea.

“Is this it?” Foster asked. “Is this what you were talking about? Have you figured
it
out?” He lingered on the word
it
as though choosing the word carefully.

“Huh?” Katarina said. “Oh that. No, probably not, but this should be good enough for you.” She told them to attach the parameters of all the neural networks that had died of “old age” onto a superstructure connected to every “living” network—Katarina called it a “cloud of death.” Over the lifetimes of eleven generations of neural networks, which was a couple of hours in the lab, energy output increased by a factor of a hundred. They were producing a ten-thousandth as much power as they were using—an important benchmark to NEG.

The three of them spent the next week analyzing how the energy output had changed during those eleven generations. They found a little bump in a graph of output energy as a function of beam energy. Ryan and Foster wrote it up as “Observation of a New Electron-Positron Resonance in the Presence of Heavy
Nuclei”—hardly an earthshaking discovery, but it was accepted for publication in the
Physical Review
, the first peer-reviewed academic publication from EWU.

Emmy sent Ryan an e-mail when the paper came out: “Congratulations on some nice work and a fine discovery.”

Ryan replied immediately, “I miss you.”