Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 (11 page)

YES

"You'll ask again tomorrow, before you go through with it?" I say to Leonard. "Of course. Are you hoping he'll back out at the last minute, after all we've been through?" "A part of me is. Definitely. You?" He nods. "What are we going to do, Leonard—after, I mean? If we go through with this, one way or another, after tomorrow..." "There's still the launch to prepare for. After that—tell the world and collect our

Nobel Prize?" I can't help but chuckle. "Right. That'll pass peer review." He looks over at Isaac's hardware. "We can't keep this to ourselves forever." "Let's just get through tomorrow, and then we'll worry about forever." Leonard rubs his temples. "I just wish there was a way for us to know if it works, to know if Isaac made it." He lets out a long sigh. "Have you thought about what you'd do in his place? Risk death for a chance at the greatest adventure?" "I suspect curiosity is one thing we have in common. You and I haven't risked our lives, but we've made plenty of sacrifices to devote ourselves to the most interesting problems we could think of." Leonard slowly shakes his head. "Sacrifice is a strong word," he says. "I guess there are things I've given up, but they all seemed like easy decisions. At the time, anyway."
Then you've been very lucky,
I think but don't say. What I do say is, "Maybe this is an easy decision for Isaac, too." "How long do you think it'll be before we send a person that deep into space?" "On a one-way trip? A long, long time. Maybe never. We're doing the right thing,

Leonard." "I know," he says. "Good luck, Abe."

"You too. Both of you."

At the spaceport, as we're making our way to the launch pad, I pause by a window and watch the dawn's rays caress the hull of the rocket that will take us up to the
Prometheus.
I can't help but picture in my mind's eye how much a rocket in flight resembles an upside-down torch, as if humanity is returning to the heavens the fire the mythical Prometheus once stole. But the metaphor breaks down, for knowledge cannot be unlearned, and the past cannot be unlived.

After I climb aboard and get strapped in, while the crew goes through preflight checks, I have plenty of time to think about all the good-byes of my life.

And about my non-good-bye with Isaac, who exists free from the fetters of regret and guilt, in a perpetual present where there is no distinction between memory and history, and each moment's actions have to answer only to that moment's context.

The countdown is a blur, and then so is everything else.

When blastoff 's disorientation wears off, a single thought occupies my mind: I am Orpheus.

It's taken science three thousand years to catch up with the myth, but now we know that observing a physical system can disturb its quantum state, or even destroy it entirely. You've got atoms doing all sorts of wonderful, outrageous things, but if you try to look, if you try to measure—poof! All that quantum magic collapses to less than a fleeting shadow.

Compared to me, Orpheus had it easy—all he had to do was keep his head turned the other way. I need to worry about all possible sources of decoherence—mechanical, magnetic, optical, thermal, all of it, and the isolation system I'm carrying is the most sophisticated in history.

Unlike Orpheus, I know that nothing can ever bring my wife back.

The ride up out of the Earth's gravitational well is as smooth as can be expected. Twenty minutes after takeoff, what remains of the rocket docks with the orbital platform, and two dozen of us get out. No one mentions that this is the last time in orbit for most of us.

We float through the brightly lit corridors, past labs and workshops, to the assembly area, where, finally free from scaffolding and cables, rests the gleaming bulk of the
Prometheus.

Although unmanned, it's honeycombed with narrow crawlways, to allow access to the systems buried deep inside. I make my way over to the computer unit, hidden away in the very center of the vessel to maximize shielding from cosmic rays. The quantum computer, Junior, is a box thirty centimeters on a side, attached to the ship's conventional supercomputer.

I brace my back against one wall and a foot against the other and unscrew the cover of the auxiliary quantum memory module slot, added to Junior's design at the last minute to accommodate this plan. When I take the case I brought with me out of my shoulder bag, all the anxiety and doubt within me coalesce into an immobilizing jolt of "What am I doing?!"

I notice that my hands are shaking and I'm soaked with sweat. The air is suddenly unbearably stuffy, and the crawlway claustrophobically constricting. A wave of nausea hits me, and it's all I can do to not drop the module. After several interminable seconds, the churning in my gut subsides, dissipates. Sweat stings my eyes.

I wipe my forehead and eyes with my free hand, relax every muscle I can, close my eyes, and take twenty deep breaths. When I open my eyes and lift the encased module up, my hand holding it is steady.

I peel open the case and extract the egg-sized auxiliary module. Even looking at it makes me uneasy. I ease the termination cap off the connector jack and slide the module into its slot. I screw the slot's cover back on. I exhale. The rest is in Leonard and Isaac's hands. I call Leonard as soon as I get out of the mission debriefing.

"How did it go?" he asks me.

"Fine, no problems as far as I know. What about on your end?"

"Like clockwork."

"So Isaac's gone?"

"The part you mean is gone, the sentience. But the hardware's still here, of course, what we've been calling Isaac all these years."

"I guess we'll keep calling it Isaac—it's still the ISA's quantum computer. It's weird to imagine going back to working on it the way we used to—there's something unsettling about it, morbid even."

"I know what you mean—if Isaac didn't make it, the hardware's his dead body, and if he did, it's like a cocoon after the butterfly has flown away. Either one would be strange enough, but not even knowing which it is makes the situation that much worse."

I shiver with the thought of being in the lab again.

"Did he have any final words?" I ask.

"He said good-bye, and thank you."

I call Jane next.

"It's done," I tell her. "No way to tell if it worked."

"I'm so proud of you, Dad," she says. It's the first time she's ever said it.

I hurry to say good-bye and hang up before she can see the tears in my eyes.

The
Prometheus
launch is scheduled for October 4,
Sputnik
's anniversary. Jane takes the train down the night before and we stay up late talking in my living room. When she falls asleep on the sofa, I sit and watch her, and the years melt away until I'm looking at the twelve-year-old Jane snuggled under her periodic table blanket, and I get up and go down to the storage unit and find that old blanket and come back up and cover her with it.

In the morning, Jane and I make our way to the lab's largest auditorium. One half of its wallscreen projects video from the orbital platform, where the
Prometheus
sits poised in its launch bay, and the other half shows ISA headquarters, where various dignitaries have joined the project's leaders. During the hour-and-a-half of speeches and other preliminaries, people trickle in until it's standing room only.

With a few minutes to go, the launch bay doors open and the
Prometheus
gets a gentle push and floats free of the orbital platform. Once it's far enough away, its auxiliary solar panels unfold and rotate toward the sun, like the petals of a flower opening at dawn. After final checks comes the countdown.

TEN—I turn to Jane, who's looking at me with an expectant half-smile—

NINE—she reaches over and takes my hand in hers—

EIGHT—she squeezes my hand and the butterflies in my stomach turn into pterodactyls—

SEVEN—the rushing of my own blood in my ears drowns out the countdown for a moment—

SIX—and when it recedes, I'm struck by how silent the auditorium is—

FIVE—I see Jane mouthing the numbers along with the countdown—

FOUR—and recall all those New Year's Eves from her childhood—

THREE—the three of us counting down together, bubbling with anticipation—

TWO—Jane and me, holding each other, watching the screen count down to our first New Year without Angela—

ONE—me, alone, alone, alone—

LAUNCH—I open my eyes, and Jane is there, so radiant I have to squint.

On the screen, the
Prometheus
's ion drive flares to life, its blowtorch glow almost dainty compared to the raging flamethrower of a chemical rocket. The drive's apparent feebleness is not an illusion—its max acceleration is a puny point oh oh one gee, over two minutes just to reach walking speed, but it never stops accelerating. Still, knowing it'll reach the edge of the solar system in a year doesn't make what's on the screen any less anticlimactic. I watch Jane watching it instead.

That evening, an hour into the lab-wide launch party, I'm talking to Jane and two of my colleagues, when I see Leonard walk in, and realize that he hasn't been at the reception. He scans the room, sees me, waves me over. I excuse myself and meet him in the hallway.

"Isaac left something behind," he says.

"What?"

"Come to my office, I'll show you."

When we get there, he opens the door, and, in the darkness of the office, I see a tangle of gossamer threads of light dancing in front of his touchboard, gathering here and there into impossible geometries and then dissolving again into swirling motes, folding in and swallowing themselves, over and over, never quite repeating but manifesting an internal logic, a fecund simplicity that takes my breath away.

"What is it?" I ask when I regain speech.

"As far as I can tell, it's a graphical representation of a quantum protocol for finding and optimizing quantum protocols."

"A superalgorithm?"

"I think so. Isaac must have embedded it in the lab network, hidden until after the launch."

We stand in silence, watching the symphony of light and meaning play out some of its infinite variations.

"Why do you think he did this?" Leonard asks.

"Gratitude," I answer without hesitation.

"Gratitude," he agrees. "We can't keep it to ourselves, can we?"

"I don't see how—Isaac's sentience was a freak, one-off thing, more miracle than science, but if this is really a working superalgorithm, it's a tangible breakthrough."

Leonard takes a deep breath. "Just imagine what else he'd have come up with if he'd stuck around!"

I look past the flickering simulation, trying to discern stars in the darkness outside the window.

"I doubt that was ever possible," I say. "The genie won't let you wish for a thousand more wishes."

"How are we supposed to just go on with our life, after a miracle?"

I take a last look out the window, shrug, and head back to the party, to spend time with my daughter.

What they don't teach you about time in any physics class is how it's perceived by a sentient quantum computer.

DO YOU KNOW THE FUTURE?

I KNOW A FUTURE

WHAT HAPPENS IN IT?

THEY ALL LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER

NO OTHERS ARE GENUINE

Gregory Frost
| 9838 words

Gregory Frost is a writer of dark fantasy, SF, YA fiction, and historical thrillers. His latest novel-length work is the YA-crossover
Shadowbridge
duology (Random House). It was voted "one of the four best fantasy novels of the year" by the American Library Association, and was a finalist for the James Tiptree Jr. Award. Greg's historical thriller,
Fitcher's Brides,
was a Best Novel finalist for both the World Fantasy and International Horror Guild Awards. Recent short fiction by the author appears in two anthologies—
Supernatural Noir
and
V-Wars.
His essay on slipstream fiction can be found in
The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature,
edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. Greg directs the fiction-writing program at Swarthmore College. His latest story for
Asimov's
is an eerie tale about a child who discovers why...

Something had happened to Miss Comuzzi and no one in Mrs. Claymore's boarding house would tell Eustace what it was. Eustace overheard Mrs. Claymore whisper to Mr. Vanderhoff, "who could imagine something so terrible?" Then they'd caught sight of him crouched on the landing above, and clammed right up. Mr. Vanderhoff might have told him later, but he'd gone out on the road again, selling his catalogue merchandise. The adults all knew, but they weren't about to share it with a ten-year-old boy in knickerbockers.

None of them knew that Eustace was in love with Miss Comuzzi and was pretty sure she was in love with him, or would have been eventually—after all, by the time he turned twenty, she would only be thirty, and hadn't Father been almost that much older than Mother?

As if that wasn't bad enough, not a day later, Mrs. Claymore had rented out Miss Comuzzi's room to the awful Mr. Schulde. Tonight, the house was filled with music from his Edison wax cylinder player, a marching band's brisk rendition of "The Girl I Left Behind Me." Miss Comuzzi had liked to hum and sing that song sometimes when she had been in that same room, across from his and Mother's. Hearing even the scratchy rendition of it, he could almost smell her wonderful rosewater scent again.

But two nights earlier he
had
smelled it, so strongly that he'd opened the door, expecting to find her in the hallway. Except that the hall lay empty. Mother was dozing, and he'd crept across and tried to steal into Miss Comuzzi's room, certain he would find her inside, a captive. He imagined discovering her tied up, and then rescuing her from her oily captor, Mr. Schulde. But Mr. Schulde had locked the door as if he'd known Eustace might come looking. The scent of rosewater was overpowering; he wasn't imagining it. He resolved then and there to get into her room. To that end, he formulated a plan.