Film and literature are full of fantasies in which people like you and me suddenly find themselves transplanted to unfamiliar worlds: The Time Machine, Planet of the Apes, Gulliver's Travels, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Typically these settings are far removed from what we know. We're in the distant future, or everyone else is the wrong size. Or the monkeys are in charge and, in the shape of Helena Bonham Carter, weirdly attractive. Or everyone wears a white stretch jumpsuit, and midget robots are called Twiki.
As entertaining as these stories are, I like my fantasies a little closer to home. If a guy were to fall asleep and wake up in Underling's Alternate Reality, things might at first seem perfectly normal. He reads the newspaper over breakfast, before taking the train (not a hovercar) to work. While there he sends the wrong document to a client, and in the process loses business for his company. He leaves the office at the end of the day, and stops for a drink with colleagues on the way home.
But look closer - things are different.
The paper advertises jobs at firms where all the managers are female, and motivate their male staff through the routine use of corporal punishment. Indeed this morning, on arriving late to work yet again, our hero is called into his boss's office where she delivers six firm swats of the paddle to aid his timekeeping.
Later that day, she learns of the lost contract and repeats the process at greater length.
Boarding the train that evening, slightly tipsy, he fails to move along the carriage and make space for an older lady behind him. She loudly rebukes him and slaps him, hard, on the behind. There are some smirks among the other passengers, but no-one is taken aback. He mumbles an apology and hides his scarlet face behind his evening paper, in which there is a report on the outcome of a corruption trial. The defendant was found guilty, and Judge Judy Sheindlin has sentenced him to a hundred hours of community service and fifty strokes of the cane. The date of the flogging has yet to be set, but the article mentions that it will take place in the evening so that it can be televised live on the Justice Channel after the watershed.
Finally arriving home, our guy is met at the door by his wife. He is two hours late, dinner is cold, and the hairbrush is already in her hand.
So that's the world I'm offering. It's still Earth, in the early 21st Century. Nobody gets to fly around in spaceships. But ladies, you do get to exercise your spanking arm with every man who steps out of line. And gents, you get your bottom warmed wherever and whenever you need it - at home, at work, at the doctor's office, at the supermarket, at the drop of a hat. Doesn't that sound more exciting than white spandex, and an annoying robot going 'bidi-bidi-bidi'?
