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

it's easy to overlook, but part of what makes Isaac such a great physicist must be that, free from the need for food or sleep, free from the worries about safety or comfort, free from the ten million distractions that percolate through human brains, he can focus totally on the problem at hand, and maintain that focus until he finds a solution. If that's true, there must be a host of problems, both practical and deep, in physics and elsewhere, that Isaac is the only mind in the world capable of solving. Sending him to the Prometheus, even if successful, would waste all that potential for discovery on Earth.
    But given how unconcerned Isaac seems about his survival, I don't see how I can compel him to stay behind and work on problems he's not interested in.
    I describe my thinking to Jane.
    "And what if you could coerce him?" she asks. "Wouldn't that be forced labor, enslavement?"
    "But there's no telling what kind of impact he could have on Earth, on our biggest technological problems. What if he could save lives—many, many lives? Surely he owes us for creating him."
    "Like a child owes its parents?" my daughter asks, and I have no answer.
    I spend the remaining two days of Jane's visit teaching her enough quantum physics to allow her to understand how Isaac works, or at least how he was designed to work, and she teaches me enough about the philosophical principle of charity to convince me to trust Isaac to know, and express, his own desires.
    With deadlines closing in, and considering the amount of work involved, I know it won't be easy to persuade the rest of the project's team to go along with the teleportation plan—or at least its disguised version, since I don't plan to share the truth about Isaac. I suspect Leonard, whose big-picture vision of the project is at least as deep as mine, may be the hardest to convince, and, conversely, his backing should go a long way in winning over the others.
    I rehearse my most persuasive arguments and stop by Leonard's office one evening. Short, slouching, and the only man in the lab complex wearing sandals, he's standing before his wall touchboard, studying, with almost palpable concentration, a 3D model of Junior's computational topology.
    I knock on his open door. He turns, and his whole demeanor changes as he refocuses his attention from the model onto me.
    "Abe! What's up?"
    "I've been thinking about Junior and risk mitigation, and I've decided it may be worthwhile to build in a backup quantum memory module. An entanglement reservoir, in case of a decoherence cascade in Junior's primary memory."
    As he considers the idea, Leonard nods his head, slowly at first, then more vigorously.
    "We wouldn't need it to be fast," he says, "so we could make it super-stable, totally isolated from everything."
    "Exactly," I say, and launch into the particulars.
    Leonard is so quick he fills in many of the details himself and answers his own questions right after he asks them. When I finish my pitch, he looks down.
    "I just have one question, Abe," he says quietly, then his face swings up and his eyes fix on mine. "Were you ever going to tell me about Isaac?"
    He raises his eyebrows, as if to let me know there's no use dissembling.
    "How...?" is all I can manage.
    "I noticed something goofy was going on, and when I tried to track it down, Isaac revealed itself." He throws his head back and thrusts out his arms, palms open and fingers spread out. "What the heck, Abe? Why didn't you tell me?"
    "I didn't want to involve you, for your sake. There's no telling how things'll turn out."
    He scrunches up his nose and the corners of his eyes, and rakes his fingers over his head. "You know me better than that! The biggest discovery of our lifetimes! You should have told me."
    "You're right, I should have. I'm sorry. I should have told you."
    He shakes his head, and a broad smile spreads over his face.
    "I'd be a lot more mad if I wasn't so damn excited. How'd it happen?"
    I tell him the whole story, and