Eve dropped her pen and buried her forehead in her hands.
She fought — really fought, like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill — back the tears.
Brady was knocking at the door.
Thankfully, Donnie answered it.
"Hey, how is she? You know, we're all pretty worried and anxious to know what the hell happened. I just need to ask her, you know, so I can tell the others, when she might feel up to talking to us?"
Donnie smiled politely, nodded vigorously, shut the door in Brady's face without saying a word, and went back to watching Ridiculousness reruns on fubo.
He needed, Eve knew, to go dig a trench or something. Donnie got cabin fever. He had no idea what to do for her, so sitting there, feeling helpless, indoors, was going to make him twitchy.
She couldn't imagine how he'd manage two weeks in a fallout shelter with ten people.
Ten people, and a baby, Eve reminded herself. She scribbled "crib in bunker!" on a piece of paper and underlined it three times.
As for Donnie, he had no intention of leaving her side. Not until that douchebag showed itself again so he could snap its collarbone.
Do Elohim have collarbones? He wasn't sure. But if Gabriel could stand, he had kneecaps. And Donnie could fuck up some kneecaps.
Eve understood better now what made Donnie... Donnie.
It was yet another needed conversation she didn't know how to start.
Essentially, Gabriel explained, he exists in a state of quantum superposition.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Apparently, it's very rare — maybe once or twice in an entire epoch — but it is one of the many possible combinations of souls, vessels, and God's spark of life that can occur. Not a mistake, but a simple mathematical probability that occasionally pops up.
In every lifetime, every soul experiences every possible outcome of every choice it makes, from walking the dog now rather than after The Kelly Clarkson Show to world domination.
Shoutout to the geeks who looked at wave patterns and realized that quantum entanglement and Schrödinger's cat are a thing.
An instantaneous, autonomic function of the knowledge-hungry soul is to play out every reaction to every action and seek out the most likely effect of every cause.
In a process "far too complex" for Eve to "currently begin to comprehend," Gabriel told her, when you are deciding whether to go right or left, parts of your soul split off, simultaneously experiencing the consequences of going left, going right, standing still, going straight, going left then changing your mind and doubling back, etc. etc. etc..
After all possibilities are explored — allowing the soul to truly understand every situation from all angles — the most likely outcome is identified and it plays out on Earth where human vessels are anchored.
Humans are not consciously aware of this function, in the same way they aren't consciously aware of what has to happen almost instantaneously for their hand to move just because they unconsciously willed it to do so.
In the same way that the human brain chooses not to acknowledge the annoying fact that it can see its nose — and for much of the same practical reason — the soul keeps from the conscious human the fact that, while some furious housewife was thinking about what to say to her cheating spouse, in that instant, at least one part of her soul just pierced her hubby's neck with a meat thermometer in an alternate timeline.
That's quantum reality, and it's an ingenious way, if your goal is perfection and you literally have all the time in the word, for every human soul to experience all its options so that it can come to an informed decision, or at least properly reflect in later contemplation on why the decision they did make was a shitty one.
But humans would go insane if they saw the quantum doors open all around them. It would paralyze them, like deer caught in Heavenly headlights. It's simply TMI for the human brain at this stage of its development.
Just ask Donnie.
For reasons unknown, he remembers a good deal of those quantum soul excursions. From his perspective, he has gotten stuck in more than one decision-making loop and has fully experienced the often horrible consequences of many of those possible outcomes.
To put it another way, Donnie is lucid dreaming in the quantum field, and he can't wake up.
If Occam's razor is the most likely, correct outcome, Donnie is Occam's butter knife.
Knowing that made Eve feel like an asshole. He'd tried so many times to tell her, but he just didn't know how, especially when he was forced to analyze all that could go tits up if he did tell her.
She pulled herself up from the table, went to the hutch, grabbed a full bottle of Jack and the Monopoly board, and headed for her bed.
"Clothes on!" she barked over her shoulder.
"Daaaammit," he replied and quickly followed.
As she spread out the board and he made his dog hump her top hat, Eve knew they had to make some decisions. With a quickness.
Starting with Luka.