Excerpt: The Quantum Guide to Hunting Demons with Tarot

He felt a sort of pulse, and a momentary feeling of breathlessness, and the screen lit up. The view for about two seconds was the garage full of vehicles, then suddenly they were outside facing the trees, which were bathed in a weird green-orange light, and then they were through the trees and on a road somewhere, also in the funny colored light, and then the view shifted again, and again, and again. Each of the scenes was present just long enough for him to focus and recognize some objects before the next picture was up.

"Pretty neat, huh?," said Alex, smugly. "Would you like something to drink before we get to the lake?"

"Drink?," he said, wildly. "I feel as though I'm already on drugs, LSD or something. What is this thing? What are we doing? What is going on on the screen?"

Maury, Alex, and Q all spoke at once, and he shook his head, closed his eyes and dropped his head in his hands. He felt Alex's hand on his arm, grip it and shake it a little.

"Sorry, man, I forget - I like to go too fast sometimes. I should have explained it better."

Maury said, "Could I explain?" Alex said, "Sure, go ahead."

"It's basically like this - Q, could I get a whiteboard and pens? Thanks -" as a whiteboard appeared on the wall in place of the screen, complete with a set of markers and an eraser.

She went over to the board, and drew two short horizontal parallel lines in red along the left side. She wrote YES to the right, next to one line, and NO next to the other. "Have you ever heard of the theory that every time you make a decision, a new universe splits off and gets created? There are thousands of science fiction plots based on the idea, and the field of quantum physics recently got excited about it, because it explains a lot about how particles move and interact." Getting his nod, she continued.

"So, let's pretend there are two possible choices for you to make, a yes/no decision. Before you make the choice, both of those possibilities actually exist in the universe somewhere; actually, they both exist, but in different universes. Until you make the choice to go into one of them, you're not aware of them at all. So, let's say you decided not to go to Dale's party this afternoon. There's a universe out there in which you stayed home and did something else. You decided to run when Alex showed up to get you; in a different universe, you stood fast, and waited to find out what Alex wanted."

Alex turned to him and grinned, with a slight leer, and he suddenly felt his heart speed up. He had a mental flash of riding behind Alex on the ATV, holding onto his waist. He quickly turned his attention back to Maury, who was watching with a faint smile, and quickly said "Go on!"

"But you chose as you did in this universe, and so this is the outcome." She drew a single line to the right of the other two. "And those are the simple choices," continued Maury. "The complex ones get even weirder, but the point is at every moment you are making a choice, and every choice creates some new choices in the future, and eliminates others; but there are literally billions of universes with different outcomes."

"And I project and monitor those universes, and choose which ones to be in to get to where my passengers and I need to go," broke in Q. "For instance, there are universes where a woman taking her kids home from school decides to stop at a fast food place for a snack. That creates a different traffic flow on the road than the one in which she goes straight home. I put myself in her spot. I am taking advantage, if you will, of all the decisions that everyone makes all the time."