The memo said they’d get bonuses for submitting patents, so why not? Concealed in engineering jargon, Ryan submits a patent for the soul disguised as an artificial intelligence technique and Foster ties Creation to the Big Bang and submits it as a power generator. Two years later the economy collapses and both are laid off.

Ryan McNear loses his career and family to a tangle of misunderstandings and petty crimes. When the Constable shows up with an arrest warrant, Ryan flees Texas and lands in California’s wine country determined to reclaim his life and son.

After being laid off, Foster Reed goes to Evangelical Word University and discovers the loophole in quantum physics that he believes God used to create the universe. Funded by a military contractor, Foster builds a power generator that will link science and spirituality, proving the existence of God and the soul – if it works.

Dodge Nutter, conman, attorney and landlord of a Victorian mansion turned apartment complex, takes a percentage of Ryan’s patents in lieu of rent and devises a scheme to screw Foster out of some serious cash – the cash Ryan needs to see his son again. But convincing Ryan to betray his friend is harder than Dodge expects so he throws his sister, Emmy, into the fray and lets nature take its course.

Emmy Nutter, a passionate University of California physics professor (based on Emmy Nöther, the German Jew contemporary of Einstein), leads the scientific establishment in exposing Foster’s bogus science, but first she must teach Ryan enough physics for him to understand how the God Patent violates the laws of nature.

Katarina Ariadne is the death-obsessed adolescent math prodigy next door. Katarina and Ryan find in each other the parent-child relationship both crave.

With Nick Hornby characters in a plot of Neal Stephenson depth, The God Patent is suspense literature. It is not science fiction, but fiction with authentic Brian Greene-style science. Sex, drugs, quantum physics and artificial intelligence collide with faith and freewill erupting in a perspective-altering conclusion that includes a description of the soul that requires not a leap, but a mere step of faith.

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Ransom Stephens writes

The Future of Science in Literature

Not science fiction, not allusions to science and extrapolation (e.g., Michael Crichton), and absolutely never poorly informed inaccurate pseudoscientific plot twisting. It’s the real thing: Fiction and narrative nonfiction that incorporates authentic science like quantum physics and relativity with none of the inaccurate semi-mystical <bleep> that permeates so much of mainstream literature whenever the word “quantum” is mentioned. Instead, the science is integral to the plot and the passions of the characters, it’s accurate, fascinating, and in a setting where it feels real, but with enough tension that readers can use as much (or as little) of their brainpower to understand it as they want without getting lost in the narrative.