The announcer cleared his throat dramatically. "And now, our intrepid DS Team is making their way to the city, where they will install fresh biomes, to save a starving world!"

Diplomat Dangerous, a purple man, strains against a rope tied from one handle of a rolling cart to another. The cart has 24 clear jars of pickles, restaurant size, sloshing.

At the back of the cart, Jane The Biome Tech pushes with one hand as she smoothes her blond curls with the other. Both wear a dark blue jumpsuit and tennis shoes. "Hey, Dangerous! I thought biomes were blue!"

He speaks in a very dramatic baritone. "Some are green. They will store data, though not as much as the blue ones."

"Are they supposed to have dill pickles in 'em? I never heard of data pickles!"

They are pulling the cart through a residential neighborhood with older homes. Dangerous starts to answer, then they have to pull the cart to one side as a tractor with a bush hog attachment goes around them.

A mother walks by with a toddler, who looks up at her. "I'm hungry, Mama!"

Dangerous strikes a heroic pose. "We are here to help people of Earth not to starve!"

The girl looks at a jar of pickles. "Good. Can I have one?"

"Not this! If I open a biome, I might contaminate it by breathing on it!"

The mother steers her daughter away with a worried look at him, then they walk faster up the street.

Dangerous looks at her, then down at the jars. Frowns. "Uh, Jane, where did you get these biomes? They do not look like the ones from the ship."

"The cart was right by the ship, like it should be."

"You didn't pull the cart from our cargo hold?"

"I thought you already did that!"

Then, Diplomat Dangerous looked at the label on the handle. "'Property of Piggly Wiggly Grocery Stores, Inc.' What does that mean? You are our biome tech. I expect you to install the biomes. I am a diplomat. I only know how to negotiate with people and write treaties!"

Jane looks up at the clear, blue sky.

The next scenes show them going the other way, up one street and down another, to a busy highway. Cars honk as they pull the heavy cart down it and into a shopping center.

Their gray metal saucer-shaped ship is parked next to a Piggly Wiggly's loading dock. The windshield wiper has a ticket under it. A young man wearing a white apron with the Piggly Wiggly logo on it runs to them. "Oh, there's my cart of pickles! I knew you must've grabbed it by mistake, because there weren't any bar codes on 'em! My manager told me to wait for you. I was supposed to get off from work five hours ago! Why didn't you park in the Spaceport?" He kicked the gray saucer.

Someone yelled, "Hey!" and he jumped.

Diplomat Dangerous untied the rope. "I am terribly sorry, but here are your pickles. We were very careful with them."

He handed the rope to Jane, who tied them onto the cart of much bigger biome jars. They were half full of blue liquid, and open at the top.

Then, the next scenes, speeded up, show them going down the busy highway, getting honked at, then through the neighborhood and the same tractor pulls around them.

They reach another busy highway. Jane wipes sweat off her face. "Tell me again, why you didn't park at the Spaceport?"

Dangerous drops the rope, and it clangs as if it were metal. Both of them jump! "Alliance regs. We cannot park near the Spaceport. Natives fear that we contaminate the environment with our ship emissions."

Jane stares at him. "What ship emissions?"

"Centuries ago, we had emissions that killed plants and animals. Everyone knows that!"

"But, Dang, we're on Earth. They're a new member of the Alliance. We can park right by the Atlanta Server and just put the ship in alt space!"

Dangerous stares at the camera. It zooms in as he says, "Nooooooooooo!" in slow-mo.

Then he takes a walkie-talkie from his pocket. "Pilot Zoom! We need the ship!"

The gray saucer zips into view above them, then lowers onto them. Splat! Blue biome liquid splashes the camera.

They are inside the ship, standing in a heap of broken glass and sloshing blue liquid to their knees. Dangerous looks at Zoom, who looks guilty. He is also purple. "Do you have to live up to your name all the time? We are still paying damages from landing on Columbia."

"Oh, I'll make enough trade to handle that—"

"That's what you said about Waf, Luna, and the Martian Colonies. Five of them."

"Well, everybody makes mistakes—"

The next scene shows Zoom holding a sign with his thumb up. California Or Bust!

Tune in next week, when Zoom says, "Oh, I can drive in a big circle! How hard can it be to drive a race car, anyway?"

Sounds of screeching tires and a crash startle him, and a tire rolls past him which nearly hits him. He jumps out of the way. "Oh. Not that hard. I'll take the job!"

- 10 Jul 2024