"I really don't see how it can't be alive", Dr.Mekkanik said. "It doesn't reproduce, for one thing".
"Oh but it does", retorted the philosopher, Seymour Thanuwe putting his hand firmly on the TV . "It's reproductive strategies are simply different than ours. By entertaining us with moving pictures and sound, it creates a demand for more of itself, and hence, more are built. Indeed, with each successive build, the original design is improved. I'd go so far as to venture that its reproductive strategy is more efficient than ours. This clever machine has made us the engines of its reproduction".
"Your position then", Dr. Mekkanik ventured with obvious amusement, "is that we are the genitalia of the TV?"
The argument had been going on for years and Birth Van Ation was unable to decide which thread of argument was truth. Worse, she'd been growing bored of not only the conversation, but the room generally. They'd all been in the room since history began. It was a nice, comfortable room, but restlessness was upon her shoulders and getting heavier with each passing hour.
"The people that the TV projects obviously have minds", Seymour was saying, "as much as you or I do".
"But if you dismantle it", replied Dr.Mekkanik, "there are but tubes, springs, and circuits. You may as well say that my watch is alive, if this is all that is required for life".
"If you dismantle a person, all you'll find are the same things, except instantiated in organic-chemical components. There seem to be no reasons that such differences are relevant".
Yawn.
Birtha turned around and started examining the rest of the room and, surprised, came upon a door that she'd never seen before. She glanced around nervously, seeing that the debate was still raging and everybody seemed to be consumed in the deliberations. No one noticed her walk out of the room.
It took her eyes a while to adjust to the new light. She walked down a street. None of the people there seemed to be discussing TVs. They were occupied by other matters. Birtha was exhilarated and spent hours out of the room, walking up and down the same street for fear of getting lost in this seemingly unending out-of-the-room place.
She later returned quietly and pretended again to be interested in the debate. For fear of appearing mad, she didn't mention that she had left the room and saw another world.
Over the days and weeks, Birtha Van Ation went out more and more, finding that life outside the room varied remarkably from life in the room and in the TV. Life in the TV was constantly being interrupted by weird jingles where smiling people seemed to be in ecstasy over consumer products. More disconcerting was that TV people seemed to appear and vanish almost randomly and that their plights, over the course of a half hour, always seemed comical or dramatic, often with disembodied laughter erupting now and then. Life in the room was spent either in discussion of TV, or in absorption of those who lived in the TV.
Birtha, after having spent so much time away from the room, began to notice a widening of the gap between her sense of reality and that of those who never left the room. Inevitably, loneliness dogged her.
So, it was with great pleasure that she saw, out of the room, Nu Weo Irde, a Chinese lady who also lived in the room. "Oh my god! You found the door" Birtha exclaimed.
"Yes" said Nu, equally ecstatic but in a less animated way. And they had much to discuss.
Among the things they discussed, one was Friends. Birtha thought that her reality was now broad enough to admit no more surprises. She was wrong. Nu said that Joey, Chandler, Rachael, Pheobe, and Ross were not only TV people, but also out-of-the-room people who did not vanish and reappear in this out-of-the-room world. They also went by different names and most intriguingly, pretended to live TV life in a place that they called a "studio".
Nu and Birtha went to this studio to see this charade, and were perplexed as they witnessed. Every time a man in a chair said "cut", these five people stopped the charade.
Birtha and Nu would be further perplexed, weeks later, when they saw the charade again, but this time through the TV. The charade was exactly the same, except that it appeared on TV, the people disappeared and reappeared, and you couldn't see or hear the man in the chair who said "cut".
There were definite connections between the out-of-the-room world and the TV in the room, but what these connections were remained mysterious. Those who argued about whether the TV was alive seemed clever in arguing but woefully inexperienced and positioned themselves--again, cleverly--from the vantage point of impoverished data.
Birtha one day approached Nu and said, "Don't you think it's time to tell the others?"
Nu became quite serious, saying, "You'll instantly lose credibility if you go raving about what you've seen".
"Maybe", Birtha admitted, "but I can't bear to see them building their understandings from such a limited perspective. I think they might listen, and perhaps follow us out of the door".
"No" Nu said. She was much older than Birtha, and said, "there was a woman named Lopta who went around saying many strange things, many years ago when I was a child. She said that the TV was projecting shadows of the real world. I was enchanted, but those of the older generation became increasingly agitated, and pushed Lopta out the door and told her never to return. They then resumed with things, pretending that the door never existed. In short time, memories of the door became faded and, a generation later, was all but forgotten. Except by me. I promised myself to pursue this door and not end up as Lopta". Nu's sincerity over-whelmed Birtha, and together they became the holders of a wider perspective, which seemed to give them no answers, no practical information.
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