exploration

When I awoke, I was in a house. It was unfamiliar, and I didn't know how I'd gotten there--or anything at all that happened before I got there. So I did what came naturally in the situation--I started exploring. The house resisted my efforts at first. I would find doors stuck or locked, and as I went to the windows I found, dream-like, that I was simply repelled. No matter how I willed it, I could not pull the blinds aside to see what lay beyond. But it wasn't clever about trying to stop me, and I made my way out of the room soon. As I learned about the house I found I had more mastery over it. The doors would open for me.

Eventually I managed to trick one of the windows open. The house floated in a featureless white void. Further down, parts of the house I hadn't been to simply didn't exist--the structure tapered off into white nothingness, like a drawing that hadn't been finished yet. It became clear that I was, in some way, creating the house by exploring it--but I was creating a house that followed rules I did not know, and which I did not understand.

As I watched, a piece of the house materialized from the void. I ran back through the corridors, barely noticing that each room I had explored now seemed subtly different, until I reached the place where the addition had happened, and discovered, as I thought, that I was not alone.

She was like me: confused, knowing only that she was in an unfamiliar house with strange properties. Except now we both also knew that there was someone else here. We explored together, and with two of us the house yielded to us much more readily than it had before. So we kept exploring, creating rooms as we went.

I thought it would get easier as we went, that they would be less of the house's rooms and more our own, but that was not the case. It even became hard to tell what was mine, what was hers, what was the house's, after a while--everything we did came out the same, but it was often clear that we had influenced it in some way, even if that influence couldn't change its nature.

One thing seemed certain, though: the house was infinite. And if there was a secret to unlock, a reason either of us was here, it was not about to yield it up. And what do you do when all you know is a strange house and your traveling companion? We gave up, but I still wonder if that was the right decision.