Rewrite

by Gregory Benford

  Heinlein nods. “You know my work?”

  “I grew up on it,” Charlie says truthfully.

  Heinlein peers at them intently. “So how do you want to do the leaps through time?”

  “A time machine.”

  “No cryonics for going forward?”

  “I think it makes the movie too complicated. ‘One miracle at a time,’ H. G. Wells said. I have the money to buy the rights, if you are amenable,” Charlie says, to buy time.

  Heinlein seems restless and abruptly stands up. “You’ve passed muster, gentlemen. Ginny, let me put that on safety.”

  He drops the pistol into his pant pocket. “Maybe there is some common purpose that could be developed among reincarnates. Let me mull this a bit.”

  “Do you oppose those reincarnates who play the changing game?” Albert asks. Charlie realizes he is holding his breath. He did not see this coming.

  “Casanova sent you, didn’t he?”

  “No,” Charlie says, “he doesn’t know about us coming here to see you.”

  Heinlein looks irked and also nervous, almost afraid. He leans across the dining table and his eyes flash. “Why a movie?”

  “Let’s say it’s a way of getting the whole suite of ideas on the table,” Charlie says. “To draw some others in.”

  “I don’t want to be mixed in with some of those others,” Heinlein says, his steady gaze moving between the two men. “They have”—his eyes narrow—“their own ways of changing the future.”

  “That’s true,” Albert remarks casually. “But men and women of goodwill should stand together against a mutual threat. That is independent of politics, I would think.”

  “You don’t get milk by shooting a cow,” Heinlein says quickly. “Destruction is a bad game. I prefer to make the future with ideas, books, work.”

  “And so do I,” Charlie says. “Help us get these ideas into the mainstream, that’s a start. You’ve written plenty about this—short stories, novels—and you have a feel for how we can spin this movie the right way.”

  Heinlein visibly considers this, glancing back at the kitchen, where his wife is scraping leftovers off the plates. Charlie wonders how much she knows.

  “Why now?” Heinlein asks.

  “The game’s afoot,” Einstein says flatly.

  Heinlein studies them both, considering. “I have a lot of questions I’d like answered myself.”

  Albert spreads his palms. “Perhaps we can help. I do know about some matters you have treated in your novels, dealing with relativity and time. I know this from a past life.”

  Heinlein’s eyes widen. He gets it. “You . . . are Albert—Einstein.” A broad grin spreads across his face and he seizes Al’s hand, shaking it vigorously.

  Albert nods and continues on, unperturbed, gently drawing his hand back. “We all wish to know more. We started in different places, me in a land far away. It was inevitable that I end up here, and that these dramas play out here.”

  “You’re from that Casanova guy?” Heinlein asks again. “I went there once, had some drinks. Not my type. Old-style grand.”

  Charlie says mildly, “We know him. This is our show, though. We want to bring together other reincarnates using this movie. It will make their ears perk up.”

  “Why now? Why the USA?”

  Charlie has an answer to this, the small realization that gave him the idea, back in New York City with Gabriela. “Reincarnates have a lot of questions. The USA is the place where you can find the freedom to raise them. Can you think of any other country that has a national anthem that’s packed with questions?”

  Heinlein frowns. “I wrote some stories, novels . . . and I get some odd letters, sure. But a movie . . . Do you think this could really work?”

  Charlie doesn’t dare answer. He doesn’t know, of course. Life is uncertainty. So is history. If the guy who saw so much of the future doesn’t know, well . . .

  Heinlein says abruptly, “I don’t much like creation by committee, but maybe I can help with the dialogue. Now the big questions.” Raised eyebrows. “What are you planning to do about the black hats among us reincarnates?”

  Charlie shrugs. “I think we have to deal with the bad-actors as they come at us. And the movie is to help us find the nonplayers, the reincarnates who just want to get on with their lives—their many lives. But don’t want to let history mess with them.”

  Charlie feels some relief at getting the core of their argument out in the open.

  Einstein beams, saying, “If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”

  32 Charlie knows enough to let Spielberg run the show whenever he turns up. With his posse in tow, Spielberg goes straight to Robert Zemeckis—who has taken over shooting the movie, since Spielberg is overbooked. “I’m just here to kibitz, Bob.” Spielberg’s gaze is concentrated. “I also want to meet with that writer, Al, who gave us that great twist.”

  Charlie steps forward. “Steve, Al’s down working with the set crew on the DeLorean. He wants it to look a little more spiffy.”

  Spielberg nods. “The way Al has it in this new rewrite”—Spielberg waves a sheaf of paper—“we anchor the scene here.” Spielberg sweeps his arms around the Universal town-square set, the courthouse with big clock overhanging like a metaphor, dominating an actual functional street that has appeared in thousands of movies for the last half century. Hometown America, suspended in time. “So now Marty meets Doc in the parking lot of Twin Pines Mall. They come here, town square, time looms over them with the clock image. Doc shows him the DeLorean, modified into a time machine. It needs gigawatts—let’s have him pronounce it ‘jigowatt,’ okay? Sounds trippier—power from a plutonium-powered nuclear reactor.”

  Albert appears, coming up from the set crew, talking to Heinlein. Their eyes are bright, and Heinlein marches beside Albert’s casual gait. Spielberg goes over to Albert, nodding to Heinlein. “Just got these new pages, Al,” Spielberg says. “Love them. Cutting from drama to humor. Where’d you learn that?”

  “Much of it is from my friend Mr. Heinlein.” A nod. “And of course Charlie.”

  Spielberg nods, fast and sure, seeming to find the three of them a team of mysterious originality, the trio he goes to when he needs something more.

  The whole set moves faster now. Wiry and intense, Spielberg moves around the shoot as the last light fades from the western horizon. They are working hard to finish on budget, so they do only one take of Doc programming the DeLorean time machine. They watch as Doc enters November 5, 1955, as the target date.

  Watching a film getting made is like waiting for grass to grow. Charlie tires of it and ambles over to Albert and Heinlein, whom he now has the privilege of calling Robert.

  “As soon as this is done, we’ll move to 1955,” Charlie tells them.

  Heinlein’s eyes dance with anticipation. “I’m glad Spielberg liked that material I wrote. It’s close to my heart.”

  Charlie likes it too. He didn’t put in all the intricate, funny plot twists when he pitched it with Albert. The whole motif—Marty’s finding that his father in 1955 is a nerdy teenager, and his mother a goo-goo-eyed schoolgirl—leads into great jokes. And the paradoxes work. Marty, not his father, gets hit by a car, so his own mother gets turned on to him. But Marty realizes that he won’t exist at all unless his parents fall in love. The Oedipal stuff fits right in with Heinlein’s own obsessions, and he has written some great dialogue.

  Albert nods. He did not want to name Doc Brown’s dog Einstein, but admitted that Heinlein’s idea played well in the scene already shot. “Ideas, they change. When I died as Albert, a pathologist made off with my brain. Nobody knew this until a pupil in a fifth-grade class mentioned that, as he put it, ‘My dad’s got Einstein’s brain.’ So they discovered that one area of my brain, part of the parietal cortex, was swollen with neurons.”

  Heinlein frowns. “So that . . . what? . . . That explained . . .”

  Albert shrugs. “Was that th
e cause of intelligence, or the effect of decades I spent exercising the brain?”

  Heinlein nods. “So I guess the question is how your mind worked, not your brain?”

  “I had no special brain, no special talent. I was only passionately curious. As I still am.”

  As Doc Brown does a retake, Heinlein asks diffidently, “Do you think as hard now?”

  Albert eyes the crowd. There are always onlookers who turn up on a set, but he seems to be seeking someone. “I think upon the time-loop problem—our problem, my friends. I wait for a revelation. Truth comes as a sudden illumination for me, a rapture. Nature likes simplicity. But in this repeating of worlds, of time—I do not know what nature has in mind.”

  Charlie says, “If it has a mind.”

  Albert laughs. “I wonder if we do, even. Back when I first came to America, as the Great Man, this fellow Edison—already quite old—sent around a pop quiz. He thought scientists were too abstract. Especially me, he said. There were a hundred fifty questions. What country drinks the most tea? How do you tan leather? What is the speed of sound? So the reporters asked me if I knew these things. I said I could look those things up. The hard part was thinking!”

  * * *

  The film gets done, with the usual stack of hassles. Charlie is kept busy with the last cuts, fitting it into a neat, short package. It has just enough newness to tickle the noses of the public.

  With the final cut done, Charlie feels like a serious drink. He takes Albert and Robert to Musso and Frank’s, a Hollywood institution decades old, dispenser of millions of martinis to movie minions and majesties alike. Ancient waiters in red half coats glide through the gossip-thick air. In the back room the long bar shields bartenders who could be the fathers of the white-haired waiters from the yammering crowds.

  Their service is slow, so Charlie eases through to the bar. “Three vodka martinis, olive, a bit dirty.” By the time he’s back, Heinlein is quizzing Albert on physics.

  “Better to use the German, Verschränkung, which is a kind of intimate entanglement,” Albert says. “I called it spukhafte Fernwirkung, or ‘spooky action at a distance,’ when I was the smart, famous Albert.”

  “If that means there’s faster-than-light travel—”

  “It doesn’t,” Albert says. “I know you want to go to the stars, but alas . . .”

  “That’s a shame.”

  Albert sips his martini, smiles, and says quietly, “Everyone complains about the laws of physics, but no one does anything about them. I have been working on a theory, though. It shows that it is also possible to create entanglement between quantum systems that never directly interact, through the use of entanglement swapping.”

  “Which means?” Heinlein ignores his martini.

  “We set up conditions with our minds. They are the predicates here.”

  “Just thinking?” Heinlein looks affronted. “Not doing anything?”

  “Both, actually. We make certain events occur, and if our minds are entangled with the opening between two emergent quantum systems—that is, this present universe and a fresh one forced into being by our actions—then our minds will dictate the nature of that new universe, its time line.”

  Heinlein blinks, takes a sip, smiles. “Just so I get to do something.”

  A gang of their film people come by their booth, gushing about finishing the shoot on the movie. Bright eyes and flashing white teeth tell Charlie the scuttlebutt is running in their favor. He sits back and lets Albert and Robert bask in the envy-glow for a while, using a thin smile to distance himself. The studio crowd will think him either drunk or above it all, doesn’t matter much which, and he likes to let ambiguity keep them guessing; it helps maintain the Moment aura.

  Albert has put a packet of papers on the seat between them. There is the usual shooting script in its binder and on top a different sort of typescript. Albert and Heinlein keep talking while Charlie sneaks a look at what turns out to be the abstract of a scientific paper.

  In a quantum universe theory, because of complementarity relations, it is not possible to give numerical values to all field operators throughout a specified physical motion. In fact, the state of motion is specified by giving numerical values on only one spacelike surface. Entanglement proceeds from this state. The simplest case is an entangled EPR pair of two qubits. Extension to N-state particles (i.e., particles whose states lie in the N dimensional Hilbert space) is straightforward. The future of the state of motion cannot then be determined from the field equations, which are in general second-order differential equations. Therefore the action principle, which was enough for the classical theory, is no longer enough. The actual quantum state of the density matrix—for our purposes, the mental state of one or several minds—must be cohered with the action. Motion and thought must occur on the same time surface. This retains the sense of individual identity and continuity. Of course, a single mind is the easiest case. Here we analyze this in a new way, using a state vector matrix notation for clarity.

  As if this were not bad enough, he cannot even understand the title above it. Or recognize the name. He flips through the manuscript—equations, thickets of notation in Greek.

  The bright eyes from the studio eventually drift away with waves and “Let’s have lunches,” and Charlie whispers, “Uh, Albert, is this yours?”

  Albert smiles as though caught in a minor sin. “Yes, I am polishing it for Physical Review. I use a pseudonym, in a way—my current name.”

  “These phrases—‘quantum state of the density matrix,’ ‘must be cohered with the action’—mean . . . what?”

  “The quantum of information—physicists who have no ear for music call it a qubit—is like a particle of meaning. One can regard our universe as a sum of all its qubits. Your mind is many, many qubits. A swarm of particles, in a way. When coherently engaged, it can be teleported to anywhere else in space-time. The group wave functions—though I do not like that term—are overlapped. The most welcoming portal for such is a complex mind very much like yours—if there is one. So if a separate universe exists—through quantum splitting, but I will skip over that—with someone like you in it, your mind can go there.” Albert takes another sip and looks at the noisy crowd around them the way an eagle looks down on lands below.

  Heinlein gulps. “What makes that happen?”

  “Trauma, it seems. Like an organizing shock wave. That forces quick attention, and thus coherence, on the mind’s many internal connections.”

  Heinlein nods. “Nothing focuses the mind like the prospect of a hanging, as somebody said.”

  Charlie says, “What’s special about minds?”

  “Mathematically, they have the density matrices with the greatest cross correlations. Minds hold the highest information density of all things. Through entanglement they can grasp across the abyss between quantum universes. Like throwing a rope over a raging river, then hand over hand across it.” Albert smiles, as though he has just thought of this metaphor.

  His eyes wander in the direction of the starlets nearby. Charlie can see his mind is elsewhere, so he asks, “Minds can span universes, find fresh lives—especially at crunch points, big emotional events?”

  “True, not simply trauma. A profound emotional shock, a triumph—those could work also. It would seem, from studies done in my last time line, that minds have their greatest correlations when threatened. Evolution selected for that—engage the entire organism at moments that menace its existence.”

  “I thought evolution was about enhancing reproduction, leaving lots of offspring. . . .”

  Albert smiles, winks. “And when you do that, do you not feel whole, intact?”

  “Orgasms are—”

  “Many qubits flying!” Merrily Einstein clinks his martini glass against theirs in turn. “Pleasure is evolution’s way of saying, ‘Do that again!’ my friends.”

  “So our minds have a kind of immortality that plants, say, don’t?”

  “Even perhaps animals.”

>   “So there is an afterlife for people with ‘density matrices with the greatest cross correlations,’ eh?” Heinlein says skeptically. He, too, is distractedly watching the starlets flounce about.

  “This I do not know. At first I thought intelligent people had the greatest probability of making the transition. But I have met stupid reincarnates aplenty.”

  Charlie looks back at the scientific manuscript. “What’s ‘EPR’ mean?”

  Albert waves this away. “An old paper.”

  “And E stands for you, right?”

  Albert purses his lips. “An early attempt. Yes, me, also Podolsky and Rosen, who worked with me at Princeton in the 1930s.”

  “So these ideas go way back,” Heinlein says.

  “And far forward. Physicists in this area are getting ideas now for experiments. In a decade or two they will, if this time line works out as did my initial one, propagate entangled particles hundreds of kilometers. Then whole containers of gases will be so entangled.”

  Heinlein brightens. “Step by step, building up to more complicated things.”

  “Done with machinery, so far,” Einstein says ruefully. “For minds, difficult to do experiments. But we know, gentlemen, that minds can entangle to other universes if their coherence is enough.”

  “So you’re on the trail of a theory about what happened to us. Bravo!” Heinlein finishes his martini, signals for another round. “Then maybe we can learn to use it. Make a technology.”

  It is as though the gossip-gabble around them has ceased to exist, Charlie notices.

  “I’m a practical guy,” Heinlein says, “but I know this: there’s nothing more useful than a sound theory.”

  Charlie studies them, such different types who, surprisingly, get along well. Albert is the key. He is mainly interested in being left alone, to live his own kind of life, have his affairs and entanglements, and pursue his lifelong search for truth—a search that began and now continues outside the academic establishment, indeed never fit comfortably within it. Not that Hollywood is any better.