The God Patent by Ransom Stephens Read Free Book Online Page A

fifteen years ago, but people still invest in it.” The memory of the cold fusion debacle brought a flush of embarrassment. She had been a first-year graduate student at Caltech when Pons and Fleischman announced their results: unlimited cheap energy produced by nuclear fusion at room temperature on a tabletop. At that point in her career, she had known enough to understand how it might work but hadn’t yet developed the scientific acumen to question the important details. In the excitement, she designed an experiment to reproduce the results. Then she manipulated a fellow graduate student into putting her on the Physics Department Colloquium agenda. She proposed her experiment with unvarnished naïve confidence to the entire department. A Nobel laureate professor, obviously impatient, had interrupted her: “Why have you no gamma-ray detectors?” She would never forget standing in front of all those distinguished men floundering for an answer. She had missed the point. And it was the only point that mattered: nuclear fusion is characterized by emission of gamma rays, essentially ultra-ultraviolet light. No gamma rays meant no fusion. It was the most embarrassing moment of her life. After the colloquium, he had come to her and said, “The beauty of physics is that you can understand it yourself. You don’t need faith in anything, but you have to think it all the way through.”
    Emmy dispelled the memory by focusing on the patent. “These guys were totally clever. This one on energy creation—the name alone should have set off alarms at the patent office. I like the other one better, it’s subtle.” She took her time reading through the preferred embodiment section of the patent disclosure. “In a way, it’s brilliant. If I’d read it without seeingthe energy creation one first…it’s a delightful idea for a neural network.” Then she laughed—a real laugh, not her version of the family chortle. “Except for this one line: ‘Further sentience is created through conception of another intelligence, for example, by insemination of one network, by said original network, resulting in, as detailed below, a proliferation of intelligences, each possessing the ability to choose with progressively greater liberty.’ I’ve heard about engineers toying with the patent office like this.”
    “But why a university?”
    “Dodge, please call me sometime when you aren’t scheming, okay? Please?”
    “Will you testify as an expert witness if I go to court?”
    He said it with that tone again, and this time Emmy noticed, but instead of amplifying her suspicion, she was distracted by the image of herself in court teaching the legal system that science is beyond political interpretation. “If you get that far, I’ll testify—for sure. But listen, Dodge, no meetings in smoke-filled rooms. I will only participate to prevent those charlatans from deceiving the scientifically illiterate.” She paused for a second to make sure he was listening and then spoke loud and clear: “Everything I say has to be public. Do you understand?”

D odge liked to think of himself as a card shark, and what he liked best in life was to stack the deck. The trick was to assure that nothing, no change, no nuance, not the slightest fluctuation, occurred without his knowledge, therefore allowing him to react with the appropriate check or bet. Over the years, he’d played lots of hands; not only had he developed a wide network of associates, he was an expert at developing new sources of information.
    He made calls to Evangelical Word University until he found something that resembled the science and engineering department. A woman with a thick Texas twang answered. Dodge sensed that this woman, Mabel Watson, wore a constant nervous smile. When he asked about the patents, she directed him to a company called Creation Energy. She gave him the number and laughed as she hung up. Dodge dialed it, and the same woman answered the phone—still