TV on the Dot.

Late one night, at a time when only the hum of electricity coursing through somnolent hardware blanketed the night, a TV came on.

And on it, a dot was born. It glanced to its left, and saw an array of dots that flickered in and out of themselves. Up, down, right: same behavior.

It turned to the dot to its right and said: "Yo".

"Yo back atcha", the right dot said.

"Am I flickering in and out of existence?"

"What?"

"Like, am I turning white and black rapidly?"

"I don't know, man. What kind of question's that?"

"It's just that you—"

And the right dot turned away.

Conversations with other dots were just as unenlightening, and perhaps the dot may have found an answer if it shouted into the void hoping dot 998,276 might hear, but a dot gets tired, you know?

So the dot on the TV decided to decipher a pattern to the flickering, and by so doing, figure out the rhythm of its own flicker.

At first it recorded encouraging progress. Dots 994, 214, 3, and 19 had been blinking at regular intervals in the last 400,000 cycles, so there was a stable pattern there—wait. Nope. Dot 214 just went out of sync with the others. The dot decided to find more patterns, by which it might find generalizable laws.

It was confounded every time, and every time before the crash it was exhilarated by the illusion of impending revelation.

After a billion cycles, the dot exclaimed:

"It is utterly random! I can never truly apprehend this, and thus I shall never truly apprehend myself!"

So it yielded to the randomness of the TV.

And that is when it began to realize a new likelihood: perhaps it, The Dot, was the one thing that did not flicker on the TV. The Dot had figured out its distinct rhythm, that it was a solid white or black (depending on what you like, dear reader) in a sea of noise.

Perhaps it was enough of an answer for The Dot.

Footnote

The image for this essay was generated by Google Gemini, as I couldn't find a sufficiently representative image on Unsplash.

The text on this page was generated by my favorite generative AI model: