The God Patent (52 page)

A bead of sweat rolled down Foster’s brow to the arch of his nose, then down the side. It looked like a tear. “Everything I’ve done has been…”

Dodge spoke softly. “Everything you’ve done has hurt people, has hurt Jesus’s flock. And now you have a chance to make it up to Kat in heaven. Or maybe hell.” He whispered, “You’re a wolf. You’re Satan…”

Still staring down the barrel, Foster strained. His chin wrinkled.

Dodge said, “No, no, don’t cry. You’re not worth tears.”

Foster tensed and the skin on his face tightened from his forehead to his chin. “God, let me go, please forgive me.”

Softly again, Dodge said, “Just pull the trigger and yield up the ghost. Just pull.”

Foster closed his eyes and tightened his finger on the trigger. As the hammer came down, he cocked his head.

The gun fired. Crown molding above the door exploded. Splinters showered down. Foster screamed. The gun fell on the desk. He rubbed his hands across his skull. One hand came away smeared with blood.

Dodge took a sip of whiskey. He waited for Foster to sit back down and then said, “For an instant there, I thought you had the courage to do the right thing.”

R
yan trudged through the sand. The crashing waves and gusting wind splashed saltwater on his face. Once back in the car, he set Katarina’s notes on the seat next to him and turned the key. The engine turned over but wouldn’t catch. He stopped to let the starter cool. He tried again. It cranked over for about fifteen seconds and then caught. He put it in reverse and eased out the clutch, but the engine made a loud screeching sound and died. He turned the key again, but it just clicked.

He popped the hood and poked around, just to be certain. The smell of oil burning off the exhaust manifold mixed with a less familiar scent. One more thing to try. He pushed the car so it was pointed downhill and jumped in. The car rolled forward. He put it in gear and popped the clutch. The tires chirped, and the car stopped as though he’d jumped on the brakes. The engine had seized. The odometer read 271,828 miles. Not bad.

Ryan took Katarina’s notes. The light played across the ocean, the crests shimmering and the troughs in shadows. It looked like a stairway over the horizon.

He fought for perspective but fear distracted him. Three years ago, confused by the mishmash of Bay Area freeways on his way to Silicon Valley, the sunset behind the Golden Gate Bridge had lured him north, and he had met Katarina. He watched the
sunset some more. There was no bridge, no gate, just fading light. But there had been a reason for him to come here. He’d wanted his child, and in a way that he understood only now, his wish had come true. He really had come here for a reason.

He noticed movement on the path to the beach, something the size of a small dog, maybe a skunk, probably a raccoon.

Sitting on the Probe’s hood, he focused on Katarina’s notes. It had started when she discovered identical particles and latched onto the idea of identical people. Katarina argued that if someone were cloned and the entire contents of the original’s mind were mapped onto the clone’s mind, it would be impossible for anyone to tell them apart—even themselves. They’d called it “the clone paradox.”

The question was, if the original was somehow eliminated, then was he or she really dead?

Katarina insisted the answer was no. Since the clone was still alive and since no one, not even the clone, could tell the difference, he or she must be exactly the original person. It was the same for identical particles: if two go in and two come out, there’s no way to tell which was which.

He stared at a diagram on one of the pages. It had a horizontal time axis and two stick figures.

Katarina had come up with a model of how people exist in time.

Time is a series of consecutive instants, and people only truly exist in one instant: the present. We’re awake or asleep yet sentient and alive in each instant, but no others, only
now
. We can’t live in the past—we have memories and impressions, but we can’t actually live in them. Same deal with the future. We can plan and dream, but we can’t
be
in the future. It’s as though we move forward in time by being cloned and mind-mapped in one instant and are then killed and replaced by our clone in the next
instant. The person you were in the previous instant is identical to the person you are at this instant—the same way that the original and the clone are identical. The time steps are short enough that growth and change are so gradual that appreciable change occurs over many instants—like the mathematical concept of a “differential,” where you choose a time step so small that the difference between the two steps is, as the mathematicians say, “arbitrarily close to zero.”

Okay
, Ryan thought,
kind of a fun way of thinking about our relationship with time, but in her message, she’d said that she understood the soul, what it is, how it works, and why people never really die.

It was dark and getting cold, but enough light flashed off the thing waddling up the path for Ryan to recognize it as the lame pelican. “Crazy bird.”

The sound of his own voice gave Ryan a feeling of substance and reality. He rummaged around in the trunk for a coat and found that old beat-up sweatshirt that Katarina wore when they came here the day after she was arrested. He tied it around his waist. The cold felt good; it distracted him from worrying so much that he couldn’t think. He started walking.

The road twisted up out of the canyon. The breaking waves were luminescent in the starlight, and damn if that pelican wasn’t back there waddling along.

After a few miles, the moon rose. It would be full in a few days.

The model of rebirth in every instant certainly fit.

Is that all there is to it? Was this the key piece she’d mentioned? He’d never given the time structure of a neural net much thought.

The road curved through pastures dotted with the shadows of sleeping cows, then up a hill, over a ridge, and inland
toward Petaluma. His feet were starting to hurt, but he didn’t mind because the longer it took him to get back, the longer he could hope that Katarina was okay, maybe even waiting for him at home.

The thought formed slowly.

If, in every succeeding instant, we wake up and experience this thing we call life, then what does it mean to be dead?

Well, if we die in every instant, then we must know what death is. After all, we experience it constantly. He stood at an angle so he could see her notes in the moonlight. Death isn’t really such a thing as it is a time. We exist in each instant, die, and are reborn in the next instant.

Okay, here’s an easier one: what happens when we stop breathing?

“We die,” he said and laughed. “Duh.”

It was almost noon when Ryan passed the sign “Petaluma City Limits, Pop. 55,900.”

At Skate-n-Shred, he turned up the hill. When he got to the top, his feet were blistered and his heart was heavy but full.

It made sense.

E
mmy’s car was parked where his Probe used to sit. Ryan trudged up to the porch. Katarina’s skateboard was under the bench. He hadn’t noticed it before. Could she have gotten home? Ryan rushed through the door.

Emmy was lying on the couch. She sat up and rubbed her eyes. “Where’ve you been?”

She didn’t look like someone with good news. He said, “My car finally died.”

Emmy sat up. Her eyes were puffy, and her hair was a mess. She stood. There was no bounce to her, no smile on her lips, and her eyes were downcast.

The doubt, the worry, the fear boiled in Ryan’s heart.

Emmy reached up and put her hands on both sides of his face. When he looked down at her, her lips curled up, but it wasn’t really a smile.

“They found her,” she whispered. “Ryan, she’s gone.”

Ryan closed his eyes and there she was: Katarina the strong eleven-year-old, Katarina the nasty adolescent, Katarina alight with understanding at the whiteboard, Katarina making a wisecrack, Katarina smiling. She smiled more in his head than she ever had at his side.

He whispered, “Fuck,” and would swear that he heard her say, “don’t say
fuck
.”

In a slow, steady voice, Emmy told Ryan where and how Katarina had been found.

He nodded, and as much as he wanted to turn and run, run forever, he sat on the couch. He sat for a long time. Emmy hugged him, but he didn’t hug her back. He didn’t have the energy. It took a long time, hours, before he could say a word without breaking into sobs. He fidgeted with Katarina’s notes, folding them and looking at them—not so much reading as looking at Katarina’s handwriting, thinking about her touching them, as though if he stared hard enough he could see her looking back. He lay on the couch but couldn’t sleep. He just stared out the window at the Sonoma Mountains and let the tears fall down his face until his stomach felt empty and his throat hollow. Emmy brought him a cup of tea and he drank. She sat next to him and held his hand over the pages. He said, “I found these at Point Reyes. I figured it out.”

At first, Emmy was quiet as though she didn’t want to know. Then she asked, “What was it that she couldn’t tell you on the phone?”

“Yeah, she was full of shit about that. She could have told me on the phone.” Ryan looked out the window again, at the mountains. “Emmy, Katarina was just lonely. I left her here too long, and she came looking for me because I was her only friend.”

“Don’t blame yourself.”

The comment caught him by surprise. “Why? She was coming to see me, and if I’d been closer, she’d still be alive. The judge told me that this world was dangerous for her. It is my fault that she’s dead. I was supposed to take care of her—that’s why I was here.” Ryan fought back a sob.

Foster and Dodge walked in. Dodge’s face was ruddy and seemed to have acquired more wrinkles. Foster was pale except for dark ovals under his eyes, and his hair was sticking out at
a bunch of angles as though he’d acquired a cowlick. They sat in chairs at opposite ends of the coffee table. Ryan and Emmy stayed on the couch.

“Someone has to identify the body,” Dodge said.

Ryan put his feet on the coffee table. “I’ll do it.” His voice choked.

Emmy sighed as if it were a question that had to be asked. “What did Katarina figure out?”

Foster jerked his neck to attention. Then he looked across the table at Dodge. Dodge reflected back a look of disgust.

Ryan said, “Katarina figured out how and why the soul is eternal. She figured out heaven and hell and why morality is more than a set of commandments or a fight against karma.

“Remember when she told us about the clone paradox? The clone is identical to the original—soul, sentience, experience—everything is the same: two spiritually and physically indistinguishable people. Now, if the original is eliminated, there’s no way that we could know it. Therefore, he or she must not have died, and the soul survives in the clone.”

Emmy said, “In this definition, the soul must not be split between the clone and the original. When the original is destroyed, all the soul the original had is still in the clone, right?”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “It’s kinda weird. The soul isn’t like energy—soul can be created and destroyed, and it can change form too. The clone paradox says that in the instant where the original and clone are identical, they have the same soul. So if one disappears, the soul is still there, in the other.” With every word he said, he could feel Katarina’s annoyance that it was taking him so long to figure it out. “Which brings me to the next piece: how we exist in time.”

Then Ryan described what he’d gleaned from Katarina’s notes about the steps of time. “It’s like each instant of existence is
another frame in a film. Our lives are forever stuck in the present. No future or past, just now. So the way we move into the future is the same as mapping our minds into a clone that is one instant ahead in time. The soul is what carries us through time. It is not attached to our bodies. It awakens anew in every instant.

“The key is that when someone dies, the body stops waking up in each instant. The body dies, but the soul keeps waking up.”

Foster said, “If there is no body for it to awaken in, then it wakes up with God?”