Free Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 by Penny Publications Page B

place.
    She bent down—slowly, because she'd gone stiff by then—picked up the coversuit, and touched the three butterflies on the sleeve. She tossed her sunglasses on the ground, and smiled up into my branches. Sighing, she leaned against my trunk and dipped her big toe in the stream. I rustled my leaves, dappling her with sunlight.
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QUANTUM ORPHEUS, AT THE LIGHT CONE'S APEX
    Igor Teper | 7561 words
     
    Igor Teper is a physicist and an author of fiction, poetry, and essays. His story "The Secret Number" was recently adapted into a short film of the same name, for which he co-wrote the screenplay. He lives with his family in the San Francisco Bay Area. Igor's first story for Asimov's is a hard SF tale about a modern day Argus putting the finishing touches on a space-faring ship that may need its own...
     
    What they don't teach you about time in any physics class is that the present is all you have, all you can ever own. Your past, like your future, belongs to someone else, someone you may think you recognize but can never know. All you can know are the past's traces and the future's inklings, scattered like compost and seeds through the soil of now.
    My name is Abe Kapelin, and my wife, Angela, is dead. I would give anything to be the Abe Kapelin whose Angela is alive, but all I can do is envy him.
    Hrmmm-klat-klat-whirr, hrmmm-klat-klat-whirr. I'm running performance tests on the International Space Agency Quantum Computer—nicknamed Isaac—in preparation for a newer version's use on the Prometheus, the first deeper-space probe, due to launch in less than a year. Or rather, Isaac, ensconced in a cocoon of cryogenic vacuum equipment and fiber-optic and electrical cables, is running tests on itself, and I'm watching the results and listening to the modulated humming, thrumming, and clicking of the apparatus's power supplies and motorized actuators.
    Isaac's self-diagnostics are the first to notice a slight delay in its computations, compared to earlier benchmarks. It's as if someone else is siphoning off Isaac's computing power, impossible not only because no one knows how to do that, but also because the only means of accessing Isaac is at my fingertips.
    I test the experiment's subsystems—lasers, cryogenics, electronics, all fine. Reinitializing Isaac takes two weeks we don't have, plus it's a matter of pride that I figure this out. I don't tell anyone else, not even Leonard Rains, once my best graduate student and now the project's brightest rising star. This is the first time I've kept science from him.
    Night after night, I wait until everyone but the overnight security guards has gone home, and poke and prod Isaac with every kind of calculation I can think of, without learning anything at all. Long after midnight on the fourth night, having exhausted both myself and the variety of possible computations, I try an impossible one. The outcome should be meaningless quantum noise, but what shows up on my touchboard screen is a single word:
    END
    I run the calculation once more.
    END, Isaac repeats.
    In our language for interfacing with Isaac, "end" signifies the end of a stream of input commands; it has no meaning as an output. Not one we gave it, anyway.
    A week later, I'm desperate enough to consider calling my daughter. Two more days, and I muster the resolve to do it. I cannot tell if the tingling on the back of my arms and neck as I dial her number is due to my mood or to the storm whipping water against my windows.
    Jane puts me on voice-only. I haven't seen her since her college graduation.
    "My birthday isn't for another three months," are the first words out of the speaker.
    I'm breaking the not-entirely-unspoken agreement—I only call her once a year, on her birthday, and she has a civil conversation with me—that governs our relationship.
    "Please hear me out, Jane. This is important. Are you still working on expert systems?"
    "What do you want, Dad?" That last word is a curse.
    "Our quantum computer