The God Patent (26 page)

When Kat finished, Emmy said, “I’m giving you another one of Feynman’s books,
Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals
.” Her brow furrowed, and she stared at the whiteboard. Then she looked at Kat, back at the whiteboard, and then back at Kat. The lines in her brow disappeared. “Kat, if you keep working at it, you can be one of the great mathematical physicists. I totally envy you.”

Kat wondered why Emmy would say something like that. Did she want something? Was she pumping Kat up the way her mentor used to? Emmy acted as though she was stating something obvious, as though she’d said “if
a
equals
b
and
b
equals
c
then
a
must equal
c
.” It embarrassed Kat, made her feel sort of ashamed, as though she were a fraud. But all she’d done was a little math. Emmy walked to the other side of the table where Ryan and Tran were staring at a big messy diagram on the opposite whiteboard.

Kat looked at the whiteboard where she and Emmy had just been working. She loved the symbols and the language but hated her reaction to what Emmy had said. To dissolve her own shame, she tidied some of her calculations and caught herself
wondering what it would look like to her father. She tried to stare hard enough so that if he could somehow see through her eyes, he would see this. She repeated Emmy’s words
a mathematical physicist
to herself and slowly, as though under the guidance of her father, she managed to embrace them.

Emmy said, “Kat, pay attention.” Ryan had scribbled a mess of little boxes connected by lines and arrows that seemed to go in every direction and back again. Emmy rested her hand on Ryan’s shoulder and said, “Okay, I want coffee. Anyone else?” Ryan made eye contact with Kat, then rotated his eyes to indicate Emmy’s hand on his shoulder. He looked like a purring cat.

To Tran, Emmy said, “Black coffee, right?” Then to Kat, “You want a Coke or something?”

Kat said, “I’ll have mine black too.” Ryan mouthed the word
poseur
at her. She’d never had a cup of coffee in her life.

Emmy started for the door but waited at the threshold, looking back at Ryan. He just sat there with a goofy grin. Kat whispered to him—a whisper loud enough to make it across the room—“Yo, doof-McNear, she wants you to go with her.”

Ryan walked along about half a step behind Emmy. They paused at the door to a well-lit room as a man in a tweed jacket stepped out. Ryan leaned down and whispered in Emmy’s ear, “Are tweed and sneakers like a uniform around here?”

She turned to him and said, “Do you think I’d look good in tweed?”

“I think you’d look good in anything.” He straightened up and nodded as though concentrating. “In fact, I suspect you’d look even better wearing nothing at all.”

“Oh, please,” she said and took paper cups from a stack and a ceramic mug with a cartoon penguin from a shelf.

The coffee room had a sink, a refrigerator, and an industrial-capacity coffeemaker. Ryan put a bag of industrial-quality tea in a paper cup and filled it with water while Emmy poured four cups of coffee.

“Make Katarina’s decaf,” Ryan said.

“Okay. She said she wanted it black. Should I load it with milk and sugar?”

“Milk, not too much sugar. I don’t know how long it’s been since she went to the dentist.”

Emmy poured in a lot of milk and a packet of sugar. “You do realize that you’re her father figure, don’t you?”

Ryan handed her a stirring stick. “Probably more like a neighbor figure.”

Instead of taking the stick, she took Ryan’s hand and looked up at him. She looked concerned. “You’re the most important person in her life right now.”

“You think?”

“I’ve met her mother.”

“Okay, I’ll take her to the dentist.”

Emmy smiled and accepted the stirring stick. As she turned away, her hair brushed along Ryan’s arm. “Tall, funny,
and
sweet.”

“What about handsome?”

“And a mind reader.”

“You can’t read minds, can you?”

She stopped pouring coffee and turned toward him. She looked down at Ryan’s feet. From that angle, her eyelashes stood out, and as she scanned upward, taking in his jeans, untucked shirt, and then his face, Ryan couldn’t remember if he’d combed his hair this morning, not that it would do any good.

She poked a finger in his belly and said, “You’re mind isn’t hard to read.”

“You know,” Ryan said, looking to the left and then right. “This is the first time we’ve ever been alone, unchaperoned.”

“You better behave. My big brother is right down the hall.”

“Dodge?”

She nodded with a closed-mouth smile. They stared at each other for a few seconds and then started laughing.

“It’s hard to believe that you’re related to him.”

“Tell me about it.”

“What’s the deal with him, anyway?” Ryan asked. “The gun, the obsessive neatness, and why would a guy like that have a business like Skate-n-Shred?”

“Well,” Emmy said, “my brother is a walking contradiction. I think the gun is there for some kind of bravado, but I’m not sure.” As she spoke, her forehead furrowed in a way that made her eyes look even bigger. “He’s always had a strange fascination with suicide. My parents worry about him a lot. So do I.” She lifted two paper cups of coffee and her mug and motioned for Ryan to take the cup with lots of milk. “He’s much older than me, and I don’t know him well.”

Ryan said, “He’s not really a knowable kind of guy.”

“I’ll tell you one thing about him that you might not have realized yet.” She stepped into the hall. “When it comes right down to it, my brother will always do the right thing.”

“What? Dodge?”

“I know, he seems mean sometimes, and he’s always scheming, but when someone needs help, he helps them. He’s helping you, isn’t he?”

“It’s hard to tell. It seems more like he’s helping himself than doing me any favors.”

“That’s his way.”

Ryan could hear Dodge’s voice from the conference room.

Emmy said, “Speak of the devil.”

“Devil seems like an accurate description,” Ryan said. When they were a few steps from the door, he said, “What are you doing later?”

Emmy stopped. “After our meeting?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll see.”

Then she turned away, her hair brushing against him again, and walked ahead into the conference room. Ryan noticed an extra swing to her walk that he hadn’t seen before.

While Ryan and Emmy were getting coffee, Tran had asked Kat how she’d learned QED. “Emmy gave us the book and we read it.” The answer didn’t seem to satisfy him. He asked a lot more questions, mostly about math—not math in particular but how she’d learned the math. She repeated, “It was in the book.” It confused her and made her feel like an imposter. How could she help Tran? He really belonged at SLAC, and she didn’t even know if she had a social security number.

Kat recognized a voice hollering down the hall. “Emmy? Where the hell are you? Nutter? Anyone seen Emmy Nutter?”

She went to the door and yelled, “Shut up, Dodge—we’re in here!” She could hear Ryan and Emmy laughing from the other direction.

Dodge sat at the head of the table, set down an old, scratched aluminum briefcase, and took out a yellow legal pad. Ignoring Tran altogether, he looked at the whiteboards and asked Kat what they’d been talking about. As she told him, he wiggled a wooden pencil between his fingers and bobbed his shiny head. Kat
concluded by saying, “You need a haircut—it’s bozoing around the sides. You look like the pointy-headed guy in Dilbert.” She laughed but Dodge didn’t respond. Tran smiled into his hand.

Ryan and Emmy returned with coffee a few minutes later, and Dodge greeted them with, “Can you prove that the inventions are bogus?”

Emmy looked at Tran. He shuffled the marked-up patents to the surface.

Ryan started to speak, but Emmy stopped him by resting her hand on his arm. He looked at her hand, and his eyes seemed to soften in a way that Kat had seen before.

In his sharp tone and considered manner, Tran said, “The first patent, Application of Fundamental Uncertainty to the Generation of Energy, blatantly violates the first and second laws of thermodynamics and therefore violates patent law. It is illegal to submit a patent for a perpetual motion machine. I should think that any patent attorney could successfully dispute it.”

Dodge broke in, “Who is this guy?”

Tran looked up sharply. “My name is Tran Than Nguyen—graduate student in physics at Cal. Dr. Nutter asked me to review these patents for physical consistency.” He glanced at his notes and continued, “The second patent, Method of Multiple Feedback for Neural Network Self-Generation of Artificial Intelligence, being a software algorithm rather than a machine, is less problematic. One might expect the term
intelligence
to be defined before claiming
artificial intelligence
, and the wording seems intentionally obscure…”—he looked at Ryan, who shrugged—“…the description of the behavior of the ‘asymptotic generations of self-replicated neural networks’ is fascinating.” He smoothed the pages of the patent.

Dodge said, “Can it work?”

Simultaneously, Tran said, “Maybe,” and Emmy said, “No.”

“Yes,” Ryan said, louder than was necessary. “It’s software that writes other software. The result will make decisions that resemble the way people make decisions—free will. Hey, this isn’t my first rodeo.”

Tran added, “I suspect that Mr. Nutter’s question is asking whether the whole system will create energy and—”

“And the answer is no.” Emmy stood up.

Kat sighed in such a way that it caught the attention of Emmy and Ryan. Emmy said, “What is it, dear?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Dodge hit the table with his fist and let loose a coughing chortle. “Thank you, Kat.”

Ryan went to the whiteboard, erased it, and drew a grid of rectangles with a black marker. “Think of a neural network as a bunch of boxes that you can ask yes or no questions—each box gets a vote. The boxes are called neurons. They’re kinda like neurons in our brains, and a bunch of them makes a neural network. Neural nets are good at recognizing patterns, sort of like how you recognize a cup of coffee.”

Above the grid, he drew a cloud and then a web of lines from different parts of the cloud to each box in the top row. “Think of each of these lines as sensory input, like color, shape, smell—the stuff that your brain assembles without you having to think.”

“First you process the senses. Is it the right color? Does it have the right smell? If it passes those tests, then there are higher-order questions.” He drew lines from each box in the top row to each box in the second row. “Does the cup look like a coffee cup? Is it in a conference room, a kitchen, or on a desk, where you could expect to find coffee?” He drew lines to the next row. “And so forth until each of the boxes in the last layer votes on whether the data are consistent with what the network has been trained to recognize.” He held up his cup. “All the assumptions
and prejudices that you learned in order to intuit that this is a cup of coffee had to come from somewhere.”

He took a sip, set down the cup, tossed the black marker toward the tray—it bounced off and landed on the floor—and picked up the red marker from the table next to Emmy. “Training starts by showing the network coffee: with and without milk, hot and warm, but probably not cold, in different types of cups and environments, and then forcing the net to identify each data set as a cup of coffee.” He circled the bottom row, but there were so many black lines you couldn’t really see the new red one. “Some boxes might only recognize black coffee, or coffee in a Starbucks cup, but the network will weigh each box’s answer so that the network as a whole says, ‘It is coffee.’”

Kat drew her own version of the neural net in her notebook. Instead of using lines between the boxes, she used tubes so that she could fill them with stick figures, names, and diagrams like she did in her murals. She turned to a blank page and redrew her version of the neural net, this time replacing the boxes with little dragons—that didn’t feel quite right either, but it was close, really close. She had that satisfied feeling she got when she figured something out mathematically but didn’t know exactly what it meant.