A deep bass clang announced the arrival of the giant elevator car. The grinding halted. And then massive doors parted, revealing Chen and that strange, strange child of his, smiling oddly up at her. Why had he brought her here?

“Honored Professor,” Li-hua started.

“Li-hua,” Chen said. “Complete the backups and initiate the shutdown. I’ll await your report.” Chen strode toward the guards, his odd little daughter in tow, and presented himself to be scanned.

So Chen wasn’t going to participate? Too much for him to see his golden goose slaughtered, perhaps. All the better.

“Come, then,” Li-hua said to the team behind her. She walked for the elevator. The guards had already cleared them, verifying that they had no electronics whatsoever. The only data that would leave here today would be in Li-hua’s equipment bag, in one of the three snapshots of Shu’s brain sent to secure locations for safe keeping.

She drilled the team one last time as the great elevator descended its kilometer long shaft. Backing up a quantum computer was a tricky business. The no-clone theorem stipulated that it was technically impossible. No quantum state could be copied with precision. They would be taking only an approximate recording. To do so they’d be collapsing waveforms, forcing qubits suspended in an indeterminate mathematical superposition of 1s and 0s to become quite determinate indeed, to suddenly decide one way or the other.

It would be a death of sorts to Su-Yong Shu, an end to her consciousness, even as an approximation of her state was written to a form of storage that she could one day be – approximately – resurrected from.

Yet they must take great care. The wrong step could trigger a catastrophic cascade of decoherence, prematurely collapsing waveforms in an avalanche across her simulated mind, destroying information before they could capture it.

Li-hua wasn’t going to allow that to happen. Nor would her team. They’d do it right – for her, if not for Chen.

This was her domain. In the outside world she wasn’t special. She wasn’t rich. She wasn’t famous. She wasn’t from an important family. (Of course, those three traits were highly correlated, now weren’t they? Hmmm.)

But she was intelligent in the extreme. She was fair to subordinates. And she worked hard – far harder than the world famous Distinguished Professor Chen. The team might be in awe of him, might worship him, might crave his favor. But they were loyal to her.

It would be a bit sad to leave them behind.

The elevator clanged to a halt at the bottom. Its wall-sized metal doors opened. A moment later, the meters-thick stone blast doors of the Physically Isolated Computer Center beyond parted, and Li-hua led her team forward to kill Su-Yong Shu.

Li-hua took the central console seat as the others spread out to their own tasks.