The God Patent (17 page)

Foster met Jeb’s stare. Jeb’s eyes relaxed and he started to smile. Finally, he nodded and said, “All right, then. It’s your call.”

R
yan finally got the e-mail from Foster: “We want to interview you for the position of director of software next week.” Ryan waited a day before replying so that he wouldn’t appear desperate. Within thirty minutes of sending a note saying he “could be available,” he got an e-mail from Foster’s secretary with a complete itinerary.

Five days later, a Wednesday, Ryan walked into the San Francisco airport dressed in the high-tech uniform: khakis and a polo. In line at security, he talked to an Asian man carrying an Analog Devices briefcase. On the plane, he helped a computer engineer debug some software. The feeling of belonging stayed with him at the car rental counter in San Antonio and through the drive west to Hardale, home of Evangelical Word University. It wasn’t until he set down his suitcase in his hotel room and caught his reflection in the mirror that doubts surfaced. The lines in his forehead seemed to extend the bridge of his nose up to his widow’s peak, and the auburn hair over his temples had platinum highlights.

The next morning, Ryan jerked awake with the feeling that he was about to step off a cliff.

He dragged himself to the shower and then made a pot of tea in the in-room coffeemaker. As he sipped his tea, he caught himself wondering if he really believed what he’d read in Foster’s book. Emmy sure didn’t. Had Foster discovered
something, or was it all an elaborate way of forcing religion into the context of science? He tried to put the thought aside. It was more important that he present himself as an engineer excited to start a new project.

The elevator door opened, and across the lobby, Foster rose from a couch smiling, his head cocked to the side.

Ryan held out his arms and said, “Dr. Reed, I presume?”

They met halfway across the room. Foster said, “God’s been watching over you. After all you’ve been through—you look fantastic.”

As far as Ryan knew, Foster didn’t know much of what he’d been through. Foster engulfed him in a hug. Ryan squeezed back. The smell and feel of his longest friendship helped but didn’t push away that feeling of stepping into thin air.

Foster hustled Ryan out to the parking lot. “Come on, we’re spending the day in the lab, dinner with faculty, interviews all day tomorrow, barbecue at my house, and sign a contract Monday. But first, I’m hungry.” He hit the remote entry and opened the passenger door of a red Porsche.

Ryan held up his hands. “Whoa!” He pointed at the huge spoiler. “Someone’s paying you more than you’re worth.”

“Rachel’s dad gave it to us as an anniversary present. As a professor, I’m lucky I make enough to eat—but you. You, sir, stand to make some serious cash.”

Before starting the car, Foster looked at Ryan. “Hey, we’re back on the front lines, man. This is how it was meant to be.”

“Do you have my schedule? I need background on everyone I have to talk to and—for Christ’s sake—tell me what they want to hear.”

“Hold it.” Foster winced. “Do
not
swear around here.” At the first stoplight, he reached behind Ryan’s seat and pulled out a folder. “The agenda is in here.”

The university gate was visible from half a mile: huge ivory-white columns reaching two hundred feet to a bronze arch that read “Evangelical Word University” in turquoise gloss. A gold cross hung from the arch. As they got closer, Ryan noticed the rough texture of the columns—stucco. The gates had outlines of angels blowing trumpets, and there was a small sign: “Established MCMXCIX, Year of Our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Foster said, “Driving through these gates never gets old.” He zigged under the arch and zagged down a side street. Rich green lawns covered small knolls with pale concrete paths that guided students from one white stucco building to another—all white and green with hints of Greek-temple architecture. He turned into a parking lot at a sign that read “Department of Earthly Science.” Before getting out of the car, Foster placed his hand on Ryan’s shoulder. “You’ll see. Being laid off was the best thing that ever happened to you. You’ll see.”

Ryan raised one eyebrow.

Foster laughed. “It’s going to be okay—we’re back!”

They walked along a path to a small cafeteria. The students didn’t dress the way they had back at UMass. No tie-dye, no piercings, and no weird hair—the men wore button-up shirts with tacked-down ties, and the women wore dresses that hung past their knees.

Over breakfast, Foster filled Ryan in on how he’d come to EWU. After getting laid off at GoldCon, Foster had gone to graduate school to study physics at Evangelical Word—it started with a piece of junk mail he’d received literally the day they were laid off. He’d be their first PhD candidate.

“At other universities, if you talk about faith, the Lord, or even invoke Creation—they ignore everything else you say. Evidence doesn’t matter to them—they’re that set on destroying
the Word of God. You’ll be hearing a lot about the attack we’re under, but by the time you and I are finished, it won’t matter.”

Foster’s rants were still the same. It was fun to see him get worked up, and Ryan found comfort in releasing his doubts by reeling Foster in. “Do you have a product requirements document?” The PRD defines the features of a new product so that design engineers have specific goals. Without a PRD, Ryan had once told a junior engineer at GoldCon, you just meander along the path.

Foster’s face relaxed. “This is great. God bless you.”

They walked back to the department and up a flight of stairs to Foster’s office. Foster offered Ryan his desk chair. “I’m teaching a class in a few minutes. When I get back, I’ll fill in the details.”

Ryan sat in the chair and popped open his briefcase to show Foster that his copy of
The Cosmology of Creation
was suitably dog-eared and that he also had Feynman’s
QED
.

Foster said, “Ryan McNear—always ready to get in the trenches.”

“Well, I’m trying, but I still haven’t figured out what you’re doing.”

“We’re building a power generator based on a combination of biblical and physical principles. The great lesson of modern physics is that every law of nature can be traced back to a principle of symmetry. I discovered the symmetry that links the spiritual and the physical, the very symmetry that God used to create the universe.” Foster had a cryptic grin, as though he were tempting Ryan to contradict him. It was the first indication that Foster wasn’t quite the same guy Ryan had known years ago. The realization was comforting to Ryan; after all, he’d changed too.

Ryan ran his tongue across his lips, smiled, and offered an outstretched palm. “Dude, I’m with you, but I do have one question: How are you gonna build a power generator out of that?”

Foster looked at his watch and said, “That will have to wait until I get back from class.” He motioned to the folder he’d given Ryan in the car. “Look through the university documents, check your e-mail, and relax while I’m gone.” Foster grabbed a binder and stepped toward the door but stopped. “I’m sorry about what happened between you and Linda, but it’s going to turn out for the best. I promise. You’ll find your angel too.” He closed the door on his way out.

A picture of Rachel, Foster’s “angel,” was set next to the computer. She was lounging on the blue ski boat in a bikini. Ryan thought something was different about her. Last time he’d seen her, she was still a skinny aerobics instructor. She looked good in the picture, happy and comfortable; maybe she’d put on some weight. Her hair was shorter now too. Maybe that was it.

There was a knock on the door, and before he could say anything, a petite woman with great gobs of curly white hair peeked in. She looked like Dolly Parton’s grandma. “Why, I thought I heard someone in here—you must be Mr. McNear. We’ve talked on the phone—I’m Mabel.”

Ryan stood and took her hand, offering a little bow. She said, “Darlin’, can I get y’all a cup of coffee or a Coke?” He half expected her to kiss him on the cheek.

Ryan followed her to the coffee station and answered a slew of questions about California—yes, the weather is nice; no, the men aren’t all “queer”; yes, the taxes are high; no, you don’t see movie stars in every restaurant. He didn’t have the heart to tell her he drank tea, so he took the coffee and excused himself back to the office.

He flipped open the folder and read the university brochure. EWU had been founded by a man named Joseph Bowie, a distant descendent of legendary Texan Jim Bowie. Joseph’s father was an oil man, not quite in the class of Rockefeller, and his life goal
defined the university mission statement: “We will build an ivory tower that will reach from Earth to Heaven, where the Word can be studied in both letters and science to provide a foundation that is based in Scripture and supported by faith.”

It wasn’t like anything he’d seen at UMass or at any business. That feeling came back for an instant, the sense of stepping off, but Ryan buried it under the realization that he couldn’t recall anyone ever taking a mission statement seriously.

When Foster got back from teaching his class, he led Ryan down a hallway to a bridge that connected the Department of Earthly Science to the Creation Energy Annex. The bridge crossed over the lab’s loading dock, flanked by two tanker trucks marked with green “nonflammable gas” signs, one for liquid nitrogen and the other for liquid helium. The tankers were attached to a huge stainless steel structure of pipes. Steam boiled off valves at the connections.

Inside the annex, a steel cylinder stretched from one end of the building to the other, at least fifty yards. Every few feet, the cylinder passed through ceiling-high towers with big valves connected to pipes feeding down. The ceiling itself was covered in trays that routed cables to the different areas of the lab. The steel tube ended at a two-story-tall device that looked like a giant soup can on its side. The floor had been dug out and the ceiling tiles removed to accommodate its height. Thousands of green cables emerging from seemingly every point of the device’s surface were assembled in a great coil that disappeared into the ceiling.

Covering the opposite wall were endless racks of blade servers. Each rack held sixty-four separate computers connected by a spaghetti of orange cables—no monitors or keyboards, just raw computing power. Behind each rack, a fist-thick blue cable ran up the wall to a tray that fed the cables to the front of the building. Just to the side, as they walked in, the cables dropped like a
waterfall behind a wall of flat-screen monitors. The displays were cluttered with charts and graphs and gauges with rapidly changing numbers. It looked like Mission Control at NASA but with a lot more cables.

A dozen men sat at workstations along each side of the control center. Some nodded to Foster, but most continued working. A young man stepped away from a granite lab bench. He was a short man with a big smile and short messy blond hair, wearing tan pants and a blue shirt. He was the only other person in the lab who wasn’t wearing a tie. Foster said, “This is Matthew Smith—my graduate student.”

Ryan shook Matt’s hand but couldn’t take his eyes off the endless row of blade servers. “How many teraflops have you got?” A teraflop is a measure of computing horsepower: one teraflop is a trillion floating operations per second.

Foster wagged his head to the side and said, “Not ‘tera,’ my friend, exaflops. Each CPU has half a gig of cache and ten gigs of RAM. They’re networked with five-gig fiber-optics so that you—yes, you, Ryan McNear—can configure the entire system as a single massive serial processor or over forty thousand parallel processors.” Foster wagged his head to the other side. “You like?”

Ryan ran his fingers along one of the racks. “Fuckin’ A.”

Foster said, “Remember what I said about swearing.”

Matt went back to work, and Foster pried Ryan away from the computers to continue the tour. He indicated equipment they’d purchased and showed off equipment they’d built. As he spoke, Foster’s enthusiasm increased. When he twiddled the knobs on a high-end oscilloscope to show Ryan a signal, Ryan felt the rhythm he’d always felt while working with Foster.

The long steel cylinder was a particle accelerator, a collider. Foster referred to the spaghetti of green cables as the system’s nerves and the thick blue cables emerging from the computer
racks as its spinal cord. “Right now, just one of the servers on one of the racks is controlling the collider. It will be your job to implement your invention—your patent of the soul—on this system of processors.” Then he said the thing that made Ryan want to work here more than anything he would ever say again: “Did I get you enough computer power?”

Ryan nodded his head and licked his already smiling lips.

“Okay,” Foster said, “now it’s time for me to explain what we’re doing. First—oh dang! I forgot to have you sign the form.”

“Form?”

“Yes.” Foster held out his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I’ve acquired a bad case of absentminded professor. You have to sign a nondisclosure agreement.”

Foster led Ryan back across the bridge to his office, where Mabel provided a three-page form. Ryan had to sign in two places—one pledging that he wouldn’t share any information, the other agreeing to yield rights to any intellectual property he conceived while working for Creation Energy. They were the standard nondisclosure agreement, NDA, and patent waiver forms that Ryan had signed at every company he’d ever worked for.