Twilight Zone Episodes For The Internet Age
by Ralph Gamelli

“Love Takes Time”

A lonely man is surfing various porn sites when he gets an Instant Message from someone calling herself SexyGrl22. In the following days and weeks, they get to know each other through intimate online conversations, and eventually he learns that she hails from the year 2147. She’s been using illegal time-travel software to have cyber sex with primitives, which is the cool thing to do in 2147.

He vows to cryogenically freeze himself so they can meet. They exchange pictures so that they’ll be able to recognize each other after his thawing, but the man finds that he’s not attracted to her. (Mid-22nd-century hairstyles are not particularly flattering, and she’s got quite the schnoz.) He offers cursory compliments, and they talk once or twice more, but then he changes his screen name to prevent her from contacting him again.

He experiences some guilt but feels better again when he realizes there was a tiny, but still very real, chance that, in a startling twist, she could have ended up being his great, great, great granddaughter.

“Now You Know How It Feels”

A woman receives an e-mail from a Nigerian princess offering vast wealth if only she’ll send a check for $5,000. The woman is well acquainted with this infamous scam and starts to type out a harshly worded reply. Just then, lightning strikes her house, and she’s knocked unconscious by the jolt of electricity that surges through her keyboard.

When she wakes up, she finds that, ironically, she has been turned into a Nigerian princess. She tries to get help, but no one believes her. They insist she’s always been like this, although she’s been putting on some weight lately. The woman decides her only chance to put things back to normal is to start sending thousands of scam e-mails to her old address in the hopes that lightning will strike again. In the meantime, she exercises and eats better.

“The Invaders”

A man prone to conspiracy theories stumbles into a chat room and slowly comes to realize it’s filled with aliens planning to invade the Earth. He makes a copy of the chat log and takes it the CIA, who ask him many questions and take him into custody. Turns out it was actually a top-secret CIA chat room he stumbled into. They are the ones going around invading other planets. So they swear the man to secrecy, then put a bullet in his brain. The invasion goes smoothly, resulting in the acquisition of abundant alien riches and slaves.

“The Present”

A father goes into a mysterious electronics shop in search of a used computer for his son. The owner is a strange old man who speaks cryptically, but the father ignores it because he finds a real bargain on a laptop. He takes it home to his son, who goes from an active, fit boy to an overweight slob who spends twelve hours a day on the computer.

Eventually, the father tries to take back the cursed, evil laptop, but the electronics shop is gone, as if it were never there in the first place. This is because the father has always been very bad with directions and has gone to the wrong strip mall.

Instead of going home, he rents a boat, takes it out to the center of a large lake, raises the laptop high over his head, and tosses it into the deep waters. When he gets back to the house, he finds that his son has purchased a used Play Station, which he proceeds to use fourteen hours a day.

“The Reviewer Reviewed”

A woman goes to Amazon.com and writes a review for a book she’s just finished. It’s an informative, polite, and well-expressed review, but she only gives the book two stars. Later, she finds that she’s received dozens of unhelpful votes.

Close-up on the woman’s shocked face. Cue crazy twist-ending theme music. Roll credits.