Read The God Patent for Free Online

Surprise! Science discovers something that shortens their measurement of the age of the universe and moves the theory closer to the description in Genesis. It’s still got a long way to go, but the scientists will get it right eventually.”
    Ryan balanced the book on the partition between their cubicles, hesitating before broaching the sensitive topic. “Why are you obsessed with the Bible being literally true?”
    Foster and Ryan had been close friends for five years. They shared affection for boats, cars, and sports. Ryan understood that Foster was a devout Christian. It seemed as though Foster was okay with Ryan’s essential indifference to religion until this topic came up.
    “Even if it was inspired by God, the Bible was still written by men,” Ryan said, “men who didn’t know the first thing about quantum physics or relativity or evolution. Even if God had told them the whole story, how could those guys have written it down?”
    “The Bible is the Word of God, verbatim.” Foster looked back at his monitor and resumed typing. A few minutes later, he looked back at Ryan and added, as if to make peace, “Though it would be convenient if the description were more mathematical, and please don’t get me started about evolution.”

    Dodge refilled Ryan’s glass and said, “So you and your buddy developed these patents so you could buy a boat?”
    “Yeah,” Ryan said. “Even if they had any value, GoldCon has all the rights.”
    “Are they totally bogus?”
    “Actually, the one I wrote, my patent of the everlasting soul,” he laughed at the thought and the memory of Foster looking aghast at the concept before proceeding to write his own version of Creation, “has some neat ideas in it about training neural networks and some cool optimization algorithms, but I never got a chance to develop them.”
    “What about the other one?”
    “I never really understood it. Whenever religion came up, Foster got kind of weird, so when he tried to explain it, I just sort of nodded. But he’s a smart guy—who knows?”
    Dodge looked at the desk. He slid the revolver over and spun it around. When it stopped spinning it was pointing at his empty glass. He said, “Last week, someone bought the rights to those two patents—a university.”
    “What university?”
    “Does Evangelical Word University ring a bell?”
    “No.”

    Ryan lay awake in his sleeping bag that first night in Nutter House. When cars drove by, lights flashed off the tarnished copper work on the ceiling. It reminded him of the day GoldCon’s CEO had presented a plaque to each of them. That the patents were granted had caught Ryan by surprise. At first he’d felt uncomfortable cashing the big checks—the company split the $5,000 for each patent between them; together they had four checks for $2,500—but it didn’t bother Foster. He said they should trust the patent office, that it had happened for a reason. They were skiing off that blue boat the following weekend.
    Ryan listened to the sleepy old house creak and settle. It was hard to get comfortable, not just because the foam under his sleeping bag was lumpy, but because he wanted to go home.
    He started dozing off, and a vision of Linda and Sean woke him. He thrashed around, trying to think of something else, anything that could shake off the melancholies. It was harder at night. These internal battles always ended the same way: an image of Sean—half daydream, half nightmare. He’d be thirteen by now, wearing cleats, pads, and a helmet, walking home after being cut from the team and blaming his absent father for not being there to teach him football’s
X
s and
O
s. Ryan couldn’t stand the fact that he had abandoned Sean, just like his father had abandoned him. Linda had thrown Ryan out when Sean was about the same age Ryan had been when his father died.
    Someone coughed down the hall. Ryan got up, put on his pants, and stepped toward the door. He opened it and looked down the dim