Alice in Kaleidoscope/41

The Caterpillar felt more at ease now.

“May I know how magic is meant to happen…?” Alice asked, her voice calibrated and soft, half-expecting a nod along the air might hit some invisible Enter keys.

He didn’t look back. One lazy limb swung toward a mushroom.

“Bite the right side,” he said—with the sum of all the worst wills in Wonderland.

Alice squinted. “Such a mini limb— which is which?”

The flying cameras swarmed... Pinging:

[ERROR: 
No response from Wonderland.botany. Requirement: Ant-oid 17. 
Release date: Must have been yesterday].

“The black one… the green one… the purple one… the pink one… the alpha one…” Alice muttered, lost in a kaleidoscope of mushrooms, or ants, or ants atop mushrooms, or mushrooms atop ants.

The Caterpillar stayed silent, slipping slowly to be out of sight; a trailing curl of leaf-ghost scent wobbling where he had been.

It was a multiple-choice question with E: None of the above. One careless nibble could launch [Identity_overwrite.exe, Batch file: Alice]—[Protocol: Irreversible].

She stared at the Caterpillar’s tail, flicking this and that way. The cameras spun in binary rhythm—0 and 1, lub and dub—each pulse echoing like the quantum heartbeat of nebulae, utterly otherworldly.

Waves of muscular contractions rolled from tail to front—each segment wriggling, curling, and twitching, channeling invisible currents of glub energy. It was an earnest, procedural attempt to be helpful, completely oblivious to the glubbing mind it was attached to, which quivered, fizzed, and hiccupped in echoed waves of improbable relaxation.

The Caterpillar’s version of the ‘Head and Tail Game’ soft-landed.

Saved, unclassified: /Wonderland/Head & Tail Game/Tail_tried_Head_Ignored. 
[Status: Everyone can edit.] 

Note: One little edit would prickle the curl, sending its urticating hairs raining through the whole writing—stinging the a, irritating the b, itching the c.

Leaving the rest of the alphabet nervously hiding behind your eyelids, peeking out only when you blink.

Coming up next--

Inflated Chaos

Missing ti, fa, do,

The Chime Misfired 

A surreal chapter in Alice’s digital dreamscape.

One Old Caterpillar/40

The New Year timed out.

Wonderland reverted to default settings, rolling quietly back into its normal routine—glubful, absurd in totality, and glitchy.

“Silly thing,” the Caterpillar muttered nastily.

He massaged his numb bottom—as if it didn’t belong to him—then curled himself up and took a long, sulky drag of the hookah before shuffling away from Alice.

But then his legs argued among themselves—some stepping forward, some idling in standby mode, others nodding off mid-step, and one leg entirely absent—fully immersed in the aesthetics of steeping.

“Wait—just wait!” Alice called, her voice echoing across the mushroom caps. “I haven’t even experienced a proper magic yet!”

A wave of giggles bounced off the mushrooms. It chimed: 

🎵 Five old Caterpillars went out to play,
🎵 Over the mushrooms and far away…
🎵 Mother Caterpillar said, “Glub‑glub‑glub‑glub-glub!”
🎵 Only four old Caterpillars came back today…

The flying cameras were 8K—yet surrendered to faint voices, beyond the reach of any resolution.

The Caterpillar staggered on, still unable to teach every leg to cooperate. Pinching a few of them in irritation, he muttered, “What a day—one stupid girl and even many more stupider legs.”

With a long-suffering sigh, he bypassed a few insubordinate ganglia and tightened his muscle crochets further.

Alice watched anxiously, as if he were unfastening Pandora’s box.

“There,” he groused. “Manual override. Honestly—what’s the point of all these legs if none of them listen? And one’s even gone—a ghost of a leaf.”

That seemed to work; he moved closer to being a caterpillar—less a tangled marionette now.

Alice shrugged. It was neither a Box nor a Fleece—neither a trap to unleash chaos nor a glittering prize to fuss over.

Yet this was the flying cameras’ gem; they learned, recorded, and savored it:

[SYSTEM_LOG] 
Command: manual_override.exe 
Execution: Bypass feedback loop
Nonsense tolerance: 99%. 

They saved the command—quietly, very quietly. 

The garden was stunned. Its jaws almost dropped.

It had just observed an important phenomenon—tragically wasted on 8K. 

[Outcome: Half a spoon of strawberry jam a day at most.]

[Status: CRITICAL INFLATION]

[Central Narrative Bank glubbed: regulating all jam—traffic jam, cosmic jam, emotional jam, Jam-boree, Jam-es Bond, and...]—All alarms in Wonderland are decorative… decorative… mostly decorative.

Coming up next--

Alice in Kaleidoscope

Head & Tail Game,

Caterpillar’s Version

A surreal chapter in Alice’s digital dreamscape.

A Wonderland New Year/39

Wonderland momentarily halted. 

Everybody froze—until a series of bells rang out, followed by a bold Ho Ho Ho of laughter.

System rebooted.

The Garden inhaled. So fresh.

Mushrooms popped—popping here, popping there—like miniature firecrackers, emitting dazzling light and colour.

The flying cameras blinked red, blue, and orange, chiming in festive melodies.

Some tried to break away from the Meta-Theatre, stretching toward the fourth wall, unravelling the Veil just enough to notice you noticing them.

They paused—because the sentence needed your participation before it could continue.

By the time you finished reading, the wish had already been made.

Happy New Year.

Oh—a Wonderland New Year.

The mushrooms sang::

🎵 Ring my bell? // Bell unavailable: on holiday.
🎵 Ring our bell? // Error: Bell in Santa's bag.
🎵 Ring the bell again? // Ho Ho Ho, Happy New Year.
🎵 Ring! Ring! Ring! Ring! // Flying cameras echoed: Ring! Ring! Ring! Ring!

The Caterpillar, overly self-referential, curled himself into a loop.

[Biological Paradox: Forked moment resolved by circularity.]

Alice’s mind glubbed: What if it is my charming New Year ring—what if…

She touched her finger—nothing there, of course.

The Caterpillar, still folded into himself, paprika-spiced philosophy like a chef’s-kiss ingredient: Rings made beginnings pretend to be endings, and endings pretended they had always been beginnings, as if the text itself were over seasoning.

Was it 2025 arriving first—or 2026 instead?

For a moment, it wanted to be Aristotle. Returned Aristutal.

The twins collided, Aristotle fell inside Aristutal—philosophy folding into meta-theory.

The bang was colossal—echoing across the Wonderland. 

The bells rang again—louder now—and the cameras shimmered with multicolored glee, aligning at last.

Clean and simple.

2026.

The Caterpillar uncurled—neither lOop nor Curve—into himself, finally.

Alice smiled—released from wOw, from preCarious bent.

Somewhere between a wish and an error, the Wonderland let the moment pass through.

[LOG: Cycle_2025 concluded.]
[NEW FILE CREATED: /Wonderland/New_Year/New_Version]
[PERMISSIONS: Everyone can dream.]

And there—the song so loud it parsed as magic—next year began.

[ACTION: Let's cheer, let's celebrate—let's prepare to glub.]

Coming up next--

One Old Caterpillar

Marionette Walked,

Manual Override

A surreal chapter in Alice’s digital dreamscape.

Multi-folked Caterpillar/38

CAPTCHA was a word far beyond the Caterpillar’s comprehension.

He shook his head again and again—so violently that his cheeks flapped and his lips billowed. The flying cameras zoomed in just in time, yet his face grew so monstrously distorted that the Garden momentarily got lost inside the imagery.

>Explain_Yourself — the words emerged as a system prompt, syllables rigid, warped, and quivering with uncompromising cold.

Though his pushed-back face and whooshing voice made her explanation feel almost absurd, Alice answered with her bravest confidence:

“The room melted after I sipped the Red Magic.”

The Caterpillar puffed at his hookah, eyes half-shut. The smoke took its time delving through his mind. He showed no intention of speaking his mind at all.

Everything paused for one… two—the flying cameras looped back, [Motion not detected]—and three seconds.

“It reset itself only when I gave a thunderous laugh,” she went on cautiously.

The Caterpillar cracked one eye open and exhaled a long, hopeless mind of smoke, as though Alice were composed chiefly of disbelief. 

He drifted—over Malaysia’s durian-scented ports, across Iowa’s Big Sioux River, and finally the cornfields of Nebraska—without moving at all.

“But then it turned upside-down instead!” Alice concluded, fact-loaded and thoroughly theatrical. 

What an outlier she was, in every sense the Caterpillar could reason: answering prompts with sideways logic, offering lived scripts that crashed his interpreter. 

Between Alice::Pool_of_Tears and  Alice::UpsideDownRoom, he felt multi-forked, adrift in nowhere-land. 

[404 – Forking error]...glubbed. Was I in Maryland? The Caterpillar wondered—already unsure why that name had surfaced at all..

If Alice’s thoughts feel faster than yours, please do not panic.

Wonderland has always run ahead of its visitors.

No examination will follow. 

Coming up next--

One Old Caterpillar

Marionette Walked,

Manual Override

A surreal chapter in Alice’s digital dreamscape.

The Nonsense Threshold/37

“No!” Alice panicked. “You see—William drove his limousine, and the tra-la-la-la-la-ing in the Caucus-race.” Did the answer lead, or wander?

The Caterpillar’s face wandered queerly from blue to green, then yellow, then orange, and finally red.

He puffed his hookah for so long that Alice counted it terribly on her fingers—ten whole seconds, not one less—while the flying cameras whirred softly, adjusting their focus from his colour-changed face to her anxious fingers and back. 

Then, by his own trick, he cooled back into blue again. 

The Garden grinned, sensing something tickling its armpit—uncomfortable, yet ridiculously funny.

As rough as a grinding hard drive, he cursed, “Who are you?” as if her mind were a map demanding street names.

Alice’s head spun, overstuffed with answers she’d never had to juggle before—not even with the Mouse, the Dodo, or the Queen of Hearts. 

She teetered in her high-heeled answers, the lenses of the hovering cameras narrowing to hunt down the very hiding spots of the heels.

“How ridiculous not to know myself!” Alice insisted. “Should I have shouted ‘Alice’ into the air and hoped it marked my presence?” 

Alice was weather—buffering. A system state changing mid‑sentence.

Then she blurted: “I’m Alice—from an upside-down room.”

“Yes! That must be correct,” she thought, super proud, as if she’d just passed the Wonderland CAPTCHA.

****

New environment instantiated.

User: “Alice”

Status: Unverified

Initiating deep-level authentication protocol

Verifying…

Cross-checking with flying cameras...

facial_recognition...

lost and found...

Contradicting…

Disbelieving…

Rolling back…

Rebooting doubt…

Error: User identity exceeds standard nonsense threshold.

Warning: Truth is fluid, it glubs.

To cope…glub…or not to cope…

To surf…glub…to drift…glub…within the glitch

Coming up next--

Multi-forked Caterpillar

Motion Not Detected,

Rebooting

A surreal chapter in Alice’s digital dreamscape.