Conditional Reality

We found the reality detector at a junk shop. The owner said it was very old. It was made of wood and looked like a set of scales. How it worked was you wrote down a description on a piece of paper, then put the paper on one of the pans. If the other pan went up, the words described reality. If down, the words described a fantasy. We wrote this on a sticky note: The world cannot accommodate a genuine reality detector. We put the sticky note on the left pan and held our breaths. The right pan trembled.