Excavation Report, Chamber 12: the domestic shrine complex.
In nearly every dwelling of the Screen People we recover the same arrangement: a vessel of fired clay, filled with sterile earth carried indoors at great effort, from which a single specimen of vegetation was compelled to grow. We name this the potted supplicant. That the Ancients dragged soil into their sealed habitats, having sealed those habitats specifically against soil, tells us the act was not agricultural but devotional. One did not eat the potted supplicant. One tended it.
The wear patterns are exquisite. A residue ring on the windowsill beneath each vessel indicates it was moved repeatedly toward the light-portal, as a worshipper turns a votive toward the rising sun. Beside several specimens we find a small clay-glazed vessel with a curved spout, the aspergillum, used to administer measured libations of water.
The libations were, by the evidence of the mineral crust, insufficient. The Screen People loved these captives and starved them all the same, which we take to be the central tension of the age.
Most telling is what the potted supplicant was permitted to do that its keepers were not. It stood in the window and did nothing. It faced the light directly, without the glowing tablet the Ancients otherwise held between themselves and every waking hour. We believe the potted supplicant was an object of envy dressed as an object of care: a small living deputy, installed to perform the stillness its owners had forfeited, to hold vigil at the window on their behalf.
They were a people who could no longer sit in the sun, and so they hired something green to sit in it for them, and called the arrangement love.