Gross Peterson had been walking down the street of his home town, or rather one of the two streets, when he’d fallen down a hole.  He had tripped, or something, and pitched eyes first into a hole of about two feet across, into which he had been falling for two or three minutes before he bothered to look around him.  All this time he had thought he had been falling he had in fact been standing, more or less solidly, in a room.  The door to this room had been open for several years, and all of that room’s history seemed to be spilling through the doorway, and amazingly, as though it were an aging painting in the attic the room recoiled and shriveled and decayed at its re-acquaintance with its past.  It wasn’t really a physical warping, but the smell of the thing changed.  It had started at the rich, dusty flavor of a library but was soon an intermingling of beer and Hier de Chaussance perfume, which had fallen out of vogue in the mid-80s and stopped production in ‘03.  He walked over to the door and closed it, touching nothing but the brass protrusion at waist height.

    “God, why couldn’t my life have stayed closed in that doorway?”

    He turned back into the room which he had locked into its stasis.  There was a woman, middle-aged and thereby a good decade older than Gross Peterson, reclining on the only piece of furniture in the room.
    
“I wonder why I couldn’t see you before, or I would have asked your permission to shut the door.”
    
“You couldn’t have done.  Neither you nor I live in anything but this moment, yet there are infinite yous and only one me.  We’ll have to stay here or you’ll be alone.”

    “There aren’t others like you, then, on different levels?  In different eras I mean.”

    The woman took it as a slap in the face and nearly poured her pint-glass onto the ground as she crossed her arms.  “You’ve known me a moment and you’re already thinking of replacing me?”

    Was there a trace of playfulness in her eyes?

    “No, of course not.  You mustn’t take it like that.  I’m simply learning my place and trying to understand.  And if I understood only what you told me I’d be a very weak student.”

    She sniffed indifferently.  “You would actually be about average.  And you should know before you study me into obsoleteness that none of the other women have the connection with you that I do.”

    “You mean that you’re my sister?”

    “You’ve only got one.  Well, none, if you treat me mathematically.  And you won’t find me in other partners.”

    “I shan’t at that.  I can see that, but as I said, that wasn’t my meaning.  But on the other hand, I really haven’t got a use for a sister that only lives in a single moment, do I?”

    She froze, carefully.

    “I mean that, the attraction of a sister is that she’s known me all my life, isn’t that right?  It would be like coming to know myself physically.  But you, well, you’re just a moment in our lives the same as any other I can have.  I hope that by ignorantly shutting that door I didn’t suggest interest in you that simply isn’t there, but whether I did or didn’t maybe the best thing is for me to leave.”

    The pint glass shattered against the north wall.

    “Do you know if that door will take me out?”

    “Of the things that matter, yes, but aren’t you asking whether it will take you back?”

    “That is a better phrasing of the question.”  In a moment of human weakness he could suffer her dejection no longer.  Playful or not, he answered her pout with an earnest tongue.  “I don’t mean to refuse you.”

    “That is what you’re doing.”

    “Yes, it is.”  He placed a hand at the back of her head and forced it into his.

     “And more by this than by walking out the door.  You have given me humanity, even in the  impending murder of me that you will commit.”

    “It was murder either way.  You could have known that.”

    “And I did.  But perhaps you were fooling yourself.  Perhaps you were allowing yourself to ignore me, distancing yourself to allow your cruelty unhindered access to me.  Now I know how perfectly you see me.”

     “Were you there at my beginning?”

    “It’s possible you desire our mother, and not me at all.  Your motives seem to suggest that, if all you want is permanence and the beginning.”

    “Answer the question.  You do not understand it.”

    “I was.”

    “Will you be there at the end?”

    “Unlikely.”

    “Leaving me time to undo this possible mistake?”

    “If you work fast enough.  You’ll only have seven or eight years at most.  But you might see the ultimate consequence of tonight before my death.”

    “I won’t go back on myself a second time, and I won’t end a life I’ve spared.”

    “What a silly idea.  You’d drag yourself through your entire life simply for consistency?”

    “That and piece of mind.  That is all I can assure myself of, and I’ll be slower to abandon those than you or anything else.  But you’ll soon be the same as them, so that is a useless analogy.”  Gross picked up the three pieces of glass by his foot on the ground.  “This wasn’t to hurt me, was it?”

    She shook her head and gestured around her, as though to say ‘all of this, not you.’

    “I pity your self-revulsion.  Maybe I can teach you to relinquish it.”

    The woman let out a sob.  “Self-revulsion?  You have been here this long and you cannot see that I am not this place?  We are not a body, but a parasite and a host, or a prisoner and a prison.  At worst I am a cancer to this room, but never suggest I am a willing servant, even if my origins are rooted in these walls.   Even if it created me, I have achieved an independence of thought.”

    “Is there a distinction between a servant who was created to serve and a free child who was created to be independent, ultimately?”

    “Yes!  Or you suggest that a creation intended for independence is incapable of rejecting its creator.  Certainly to serve this house is not rebellion.”

    “Everything is rebellion, isn’t it?  In the same way that everything is servitude.  Or perhaps only a fellow environmental determinist and existentialist would agree with me.”

    “And I am neither.”

    “Then perhaps I can ask you to examine the intention of a creator, and later confirmation of this by the created.  If you were meant to dislike this room, then is your dislike not thoroughly fruitless?”

    “The actions of a truly independent mind retain identical value no matter what the intention of the parent.”

    “Well, you are not that.”  Gross chuckled and joined her sitting.

    “This seems a terribly academic discussion of a life I have been living for so long.”

    “What could you know of time?”  He nibbled a strand of her hair.

    “I have heard stories, the same as you.  You cannot truly experience time.  You can only gain some sense of it by comparing memories to each other.  And after all,” she pressed against him, “I was there at your beginning.  I know all of your memories, and construct my idea of time identically to how you construct yours.”

     “But you are older than me.  How can our visions of time passing be identical.  I have no  recollection of my birth, and yet you supposedly do.”

    “Of course I don’t.  I said I was there, and as I exist only within a moment, I was present within your memory, the reality that you remember, not the reality that supposedly happened in an instant outside of this one.  Otherwise, I would hardly have been there with you.  It would hardly have been your beginning, but simply the beginning of my knowledge of you, which you do not care about.”

    “Then before I was born?”

    “I existed only as nothing.”

    “Is your mind different than mine?”

    “In the interesting places, yes.  We both pray in the same way, though, and our senses of touch and taste work identically.”

    “Then I have become a committee in this,” he took her hand.  “I am no longer the king but simply a senator.”

    “You oversimplify yourself.  There was never a you to be king.  You, we, have always been the chaotic product of temporary victors of inner conflict.”

     “Then you are a determinist.”

    “To be a determinist is to be so idiotic as to not recognize those smaller parts of ourselves as also human.”

    “But at some point we are made up of non-human substance.  Just as matter is ultimately not made up of matter, but sub-matter.  Whatever it is that makes up atoms.”

    “An authoritarian view of things, and insufficient.  There is no absolute that can serve as an analogy for its more moderate counterparts.  You would have me believe there is no such thing as matter simply because there is no matter at an infinitesimally small level?  A humanity can be made up of non-human components.”

    “A sum is only equal to its parts.  There is no divine addition.”

    “Addition or transformation?”

    “The idea of a true transformation is simply an insufficient understanding of the parts to begin with.  A rearrangement, yes, but nothing more.  And nothing that can create a true humanity out of nothing.”

    She smiled into his neck.  “Then you reject humanity as nonexistent?”

    “As a type of entity capable of true creativity and truly motivation-less action, yes.  We are built out of nothing but the concrete and the exact, the linear.  At our smallest level we are only circuit boards, every desire a simple chemical reaction created through a chain of pathways that can be predicted without error to ultimately create a body so convoluted and ambiguous that it is mistaken as magical.  We made the same mistake with the rising of the sun and the change of the seasons.”

    She recoiled slightly at this.  He advanced.

    “Precisely.  Everything predictable, everything comprehensible in exact terms.  Just as I can see what I am, and what you are, what this house is.  You have been playing yourself as a sister of mine all this time, but this wall -” he kicked the wall “- isn’t a divine barrier.  It is a visual construct as a result of my own neurons sending signals retro-actively into the visual chord which are then perceived by me as real sight, truly existent in three-space before me.  You are clearly a strange embodiment of the own insecurities inherent in my character, but of course we’ve both known this all along.  The true hoax, the one I may have entertained as real, was that I loved you.  You pulled that on me pretty well, but then you know me better than most.  My only uncertainty is why you are older than I am.  Your naivety is childish, a work of immaturity, and yet you are middle-aged.  The science of my faculties fails me only here.  You should be younger.”  

    And the woman vanished.