Infinite

by Brian Freeman

He had a large mole in the seam of one of his nostrils, which was the kind of thing you couldn’t stop looking at.

Never trust a river, Dylan. Give a river even half a chance, and it’ll try to kill you.

The first wave of grief can’t go on forever. You may feel dead, but eventually you realize you’re still alive, and you have to figure out how to go on.

It’s about how we’re all part of an infinite number of parallel worlds. Every time we make a choice, a carbon copy of ourselves makes the opposite choice in a different universe.”

“Well, there’s a speaker at the LaSalle Plaza tonight who believes that we’re living in the midst of infinite parallel universes.

the math of quantum mechanics creates a strange paradox. According to the math, particles have the ability to exist in two different states at the same time. However, whenever we look, we only see one state. That’s the problem.”

“That sounds insane,” I said. “Not according to the math of quantum mechanics. And the math is pretty solid. That’s why we have things like the atomic bomb.”

Chance ruled everything. Chance determined who lived and who died.

“If we accept the Many Worlds theory as true, then our universe is constantly replicating itself, atom by atom, moment by moment, choice by choice. Every possible outcome of an event exists in its own separate world. We are all inching along on a single, solitary, fragile branch of a tree that grows infinitely larger with each nanosecond.

Until we had microscopes and could look at a drop of blood, nobody would have believed that there were so many other worlds living inside it. Millions of cells inside a single drop of blood! Impossible! But now we know it to be true. So is the idea of the Many Worlds an absurd theory? Or do we just need a better microscope?”

I found it hard to stand in the shadow of all those monuments to God after he had taken away my best friend.

The fact is, in this city, some murders are more equal than others. Ten black kids get shot on a holiday weekend, nobody seems to blink. But a pretty white girl gets stabbed in a park? People notice that.

For the longest time, the partiers in the club were oblivious to us, the beautiful woman dead in the corner, and the man who’d let her die twice.

The only prison we can never escape is our brain, and yet our brain is what sets us free.

He was like a virus, stalking his victims silently and only coming into the open when he saw that they were vulnerable.

“Those worlds felt every bit as real to me as this one does. How do I know this isn’t just another part of the illusion?