Episode 1: Wine in the Woods

Somewhere, deep in the woods of North America…

               The sun is a few minutes away from setting as a young couple enjoys a few beers and some wine in front of a warm, roaring campfire on a crisp autumn night.  Ewan slowly stands, stretches, and says to his girlfriend, “I’ll be right back, honey!

No he won’t.  Not if he’s lucky, that is.  His girlfriend is kind of a nag.  But I digress.

Having nearly consumed his shoe size in beer, thus filling his squirrel-bladder, Ewan walks away from the campfire about twenty paces into the tree line to water a nearby bush.  No sooner does he begin, a bright light shines in his face.  He squints and turns face away from the light, “Look, Mr. Park Ranger, I’m just whizzing in the woods.  That’s not illegal, right?  Bears crap in the woods all the time, right?  And you don’t ever see them in jail for it.  Come on, man.  I’m just trying to have a romantic evening in the woods with my girlfriend so that she won’t nag me about it for awhile, and then I can watch sports in peace.  You understand, right?  I’m sure Mrs. Park Ranger pulls the same stuff on you all the time.  …Hey, does anyone else hear a microwave running?”

There is a bright flash and when Ewan opens his eyes he is standing in front of another young couple about his age on the bridge of a highly sophisticated spaceship.  They are holding hands and wearing what looks like matching skin-tight flight suits.

“Are you The Matrix?” says Ewan to the man and woman.

“No,” the man replies.

“The park ranger?” asks Ewan.

“No,” says the man again in a slightly annoyed tone.

“Batman?”

“NO,” says the man and the woman together in unison.  “And stop peeing on our floor!”

“Oops, sorry,” says Ewan as he cuts off the flow and quickly zips up.  “So who are you?”

“We’re lost…,” says the man.  He pauses for a minute and woman next to him fixes an intent stare in his direction.  “…and we need directions.  My wife and I are on our honeymoon, and we took a wrong turn, and now we’re trying to find our way to the resort just past the next galaxy.”

“Ummm, can’t any of all this help with that?” says Ewan pointing to all the various computers and blinking lights around them.

“…” the man starts to speak when the woman cuts him off, “You would think so, wouldn’t you.  But no, Captain Tightwad here wouldn’t spring for the GPS maps for this solar system.”

“Well can’t you just put the address of the resort into the GPS and have it take you there?” asks Ewan.

“No, Captain Obvious, we can’t.  My husband didn’t write down the address of the resort.  He figured we’d just ‘wing it’ and follow the road signs to get there.  Got any other bright ideas?” 

Ewan thinks about asking her why she didn’t also write down the address of the resort before they left, but then he thinks better of it and wisely decides not to.  “Ummm, not really.  I still have to pee some more and so it’s hard not to think of anything else.  Where’s your bathroom?  I’ll help you more after that when I have a clear head.”

“Bath what?”

“Bathroom.”

“What-room?”

“Bathroom.”

“A what-what?”

“It’s a room you pee in.  Don’t they have bathrooms in the future?”

“We’re not from the future, we’re from another galaxy.”

“Whatever.  You’re spacemen from outer space with a fancy spaceship--”

“We just call it a ship,” interrupts the man.

“Hunh?” says Ewan.

“The spaceship.  We just call them ships.  All ships go through space, so it’s kind of silly to call them space ships.  I’m assuming you all on Earth are still piloting cars, right?”

“Um, yeah.”

“Well you don’t call them land cars, right?”

“Well no, that would be silly.”

“Just like calling ships spaceships.”

“No, that’s different.”

The man sighs.  “Let’s agree to disagree on this one.”

“Sure, whatevs.  I still need to pee though.  So what do you guys do about that?”

“We use our iPhones.”

“What?”

“Yeah, there’s an app for that.”  The man pulls out a small handheld device, points it at Ewan’s crotch, and presses a few buttons on the touch screen.

“Wait, what’s it doing?” says Ewan, now suddenly concerned about his family jewels.

“It’ll be fine.  Just hold still.  It takes about fifteen seconds… There, it’s done.”

“Wow, it worked.  I don’t have to pee anymore.  That’s amazing!  I don’t know what’s more surprising though; that you have iPhones or that you use them to go to the bathroom.”

“Well of course we use our iPhones to go to the bathroom.  We use them for everything!  Helen’s iPhone is piloting the ship right now, which is a good thing because you know women don’t know how to pilot!  Am I right?!  Hi-five!”  Ewan and the man exchange laughs and hi-fives.

“Shut-up, Frank!” says Helen.

“Sorry, dear.  Anyways.  My iPhone is also translating our speech right now.”

“Hunh?” says Ewan with a puzzled look on his face.

“You don’t really think we’re all speaking English right now, do you?”

“Um, well, yeah, right?”

“Wrong!  It’s not like we’re from another country a few thousand miles away like China where it’s remotely possible we might have learned English.  We’re from another galaxy, billions of light years away.  But never fear, there’s an app for that, too.  That’s the universal translator app.”

“Will you boys please quit playing with your toys and help figure out a way to get us to the resort!” says Helen.

“Yes, dear.  So you can’t help us at all, can you?” asks Frank.

“Nope.  I’m afraid not,” replies Ewan.  “You might be able to help me though.”

“How is that?”

“Do you know how to make baked beans over a campfire?”

“Not off the top of my head.  I’ll try looking it up in the ship’s computer though.”  Frank wanders over a console, closes his eyes, and fiddles with the instruments.

“What’s he doing?” asks Ewan.

“He’s googleing for the recipe within the ship’s local database,” replies Helen.

“Where’s the monitor?”

“The what?”

“The display.”

“Oh.  Computers don’t usually have those anymore.  After doing a lot of research with the blind using computers our civilization realized that if you could do without the monitor then you could have a desktop with infinite resolution.  And having infinite resolution opened the door for a whole new way of interacting with technology.”

“So the traditional desktop is…”

“…a living picture in his mind.”

“Cool.”

“I guess so.  I never really thought about it until now.  It’s pretty standard these days.  You can get dressed in your closest in the dark, right?”

“As long as it’s my closet and not when I got drunk and pass out at the T.G.I. Friday’s restaurant bar, and changed in the very public coat room the next morning while everyone there was trying to have brunch, then yeah, I can do that.”

Helen starts to imagine how a person would get into such a situation, then quickly dismisses it with a shudder and a shake of the head before the mental picture she is getting solidifies.  “Yeah, well it’s sorta like that.”

“So then why does your iPhone have a display?”

“It’s an iPhone Classic.  The display makes it hip in a retro sort of way.  Also, when they first took the display away there was a big surge of complaints from the subscribers that their apps didn’t work right anymore.  Really, the apps worked fine, they just thought that they didn’t because the display was gone.  It’s like what happened with your civilization in the early 2000s with cell phones.  They took the little plastic doohickey off the top of the phone that looked like an antennae and everyone complained about getting crappy reception.  The antennae was always in the phone itself though, and the knob was just for aesthetics.“

“You guys heard about that?”

“Yeah, it was on all our comedy channels for a week.”

“Well I wish you guys would have done something about it.  I got horrible cell phone reception when I bought one of those phones without the antennae on top.”

Helen gives him a puzzled look.

Ewan shrugs his shoulders, “Meh.  So do you guys live on this ship, too?”

“Yep.”

“So you eat, sleep, and travel in this space ship?”

“Ship.”

“Regular ship?”

“Just ‘ship’.”

“Right, my mistake.  So you eat, sleep, and travel in this ‘ship’?”

“Yeah, pretty much.  That’s how everyone in our civilization lives.”

“That kinda sucks.”

“And what would you suggest as an alternative?  Driving to work every day, sitting in hours of traffic, and spending a fortune on a non mobile home that you barely use?  Yeah, that’s a really efficient way to live.”

“Touche’.”

Ewan and Helen talk for a few more minutes when Frank chimes in, “I found the recipe.  I can transfer it to your iPhone if you’d like as my transfer app is backwards compatible to the original iPhone.”

“I don’t have an iPhone.”

Dead silence.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said I don’t have an iPhone,” repeats Ewan.

“I’m sorry.  I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” says Frank in a stern, even handed tone.

“Wait, can I first get that recipe??”

“No, sorry, I’m afraid not.  Bye-bye now!”

****

With a zap and a flash Ewan finds himself back in the woods, although apparently not the same section of woods he was in before.  He wanders around aimlessly for a few minutes trying to find his campsite, but with no luck.  He’s totally lost and might freeze or starve to death, which is a bit of a bummer.

But on the bright side, his girlfriend is nowhere to be found either.

He smiles, “Sweet.".

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 Next episode:  Ewan and the Deer