A Wonderlandish Corner/32

Alice was confused—rather like someone had pressed Copy, hovered over Paste, and misplaced her into her-e, t-her-e, and somew-her-e—a glitch so thoroughly Wonderlandish, even the letters couldn’t resist joining the chaos and scattering her everywhere.

She probably no longer held a charge after the rock concert, yet a faint disappointment still managed to cling to her soul at once.

“Ah—what a little quiet garden,” she sighed. “How exceedingly tiresome.”

Adrift in that Wonderlandish corner, her thoughts  drifted to another: one where the King still rocked, denim-clad and splendidly anomaly. So curious.

Soon she found herself among mushrooms—dozens upon dozens—some upright, some bowing politely, some lying flat, and many gossiping. The air was cool and sweetly mossy, laced with the earthy scent of petrichor.

Amid the calm, the garden blinked once, unfolding its array of compound eyes, recording her every step—live and alert, like a swarm of flying cameras.

A little mushroom popped up suddenly, shuddered, lifted its cap, and emitted a tiny test ping—immediately chased by a kinetic notification rippling across the garden.

Then—pop, pop, pop—a dozen mushrooms lifted their caps in reply, each sending out its own tiny echo-ping.

Something grand for Alice was on the way—gloriously grand, and doomed the instant the Caterpillar began with his first move.

Alice’s mind hummed along on minimal resources, calm—or perhaps merely bored—much like the garden itself.

Somewhere behind the scene, the garden pinged the flying cameras:

“Wrong recording date. Revert to today. Do not film the crochet game—though you might find it entertaining—and stop sending heart-shaped reactions.” 

So hilariously busy. 

Pop, Pop, Pop,

Echo-Ping.

Coming up next--

A Smoky Start 

Thick Hookah Smoke 

Corrupted His Face

A surreal chapter in Alice’s digital dreamscape.

Dream in Dream/31

The scene had remodelled itself, loading a legacy cultural daemon.

In front of Alice stretched a vast, secret flatland. A place the Queen of Hearts surely shouldn’t have known. It was so enormous, the land itself felt ancient, yet sang in a youthful tenor tone through its years.

Alice was a tiny star, trudging like a dinosaur through black velvet, heavy-lidded and tired. Slowly, she nearly winked out at the horizon…

Then came a cosmic resonance, and a steady, thudding rhythm—like an unseen crowd: the Mouse, the Dodo, and who-knows-who else, screaming a name—jerking her sharply back into herself.

A man stood on a stage ahead of her. He wore light-blue denim jeans and a white tank top. On it, Alice’s portrait laughed quiet double-over. This was the very spark of excitement the cosmos had bookmarked—a moment saved ever since the first cut-off microphone stand was invented.

“Ay-oh,” and a massive echo replied; the King’s silent voice swirled unexpectedly through the soundscape.

The fast vibrato and subharmonic growl erupted from beneath his fat moustache—careful not to echo in his nose—vaulting clean over his arching eyebrows and streaking straight into the high, rising sky.

The sky seemed to lean closer, drawn to the concert as though the universe itself couldn’t bear to miss the rolling surge of rock notes.

All the stars huffed with force, flashing beams of electric blue and amber that converged on the center stage, dancing in sync with the guitar riffs and drumbeats.

Stomp-stomp. Clap. Pause.

The rhythm demanded participation—so the King sent an anonymous Like.

Alice obeyed on instinct. She stomped, clapped, and sang with a time-travelled longing—a memory glitching her sense of now, as if a daemon so influential had rocked Alice back to the past— the past of the crazy little lovely champions.

Pure energy coursed through her, and goosebumps—a high-power system alert from deep within—erupted across her skin.

Beneath the stage—Wonderlandian as ever and the true origin of goosebumps—a mother goose sat upon her nest, the father standing guard. They adored the stomping and clapping, but their rhythm was perfectly out of sync, bouncing into two incompatible worlds.

Alice leaned closer to the mother’s face. Concern?

No—wrong.

Both geese hissed at her— Hiss—Hiss—Bump-bump—and a goosebump rippled across her skin again as the curiosity dragged her dangerously close; all her hairs stood on end.

Then, a scheduler process—a big-footed, rat-costumed man—sprinted across her vision.

Instantly, the world snapped back to the thunderous stage—full volume, fully Wonderland, and thoroughly otherworlded.

A messenger pigeon darted past, homing toward the palace.

Before long, a scream tore across the scene from far—the Queen, booming with outrage: “How dare you shout so loud? Off with your—”

Alice rubbed her eyes, unsure if she had dreamed, or if this was just its virtualised variant.

Before her stretched a little garden.

Quiet.

Too quiet.

A faint murmur drifted through the leaves.

The King, somewhere behind a dense laurel shrub, muttered to himself— secretly, heartily, and raw with admiration:

“I wish I could be him.”

With a second of hesitation, he enabled the Ring Alerts.

---

⭐ Mirrored scene

Somewhere behind another thick laurel shrub, the King—crowned with a rocking star flickering in blue lasers, swinging his scepter as though to command the stage—stood poised forward.

He was dressed in denim jeans. The Queen’s shouting portrait blazed across his white tank top. Fist raised high, he whispered:

“I wish my kernel could reboot me as him.”

A soft but piercing “ding” shot into the air.

The Queen in the portrait immediately clapped her hands over her ears.

Queen, Geese.

A Mega-Byte Dream.

Coming up next--

A Wonderlandish Corner

Alice: Dreaming 

Mushrooms: Pinged,

Notification: Received

A surreal chapter in Alice’s digital dreamscape.

The Buffered Hill/30

Alice reached up—or perhaps down—and gave the frame a firm push. Behind her she left an archetypal wonder: the first-ever wonder of ancient Wonderland, a relic meant to be unearthed only in the far, skeletal centuries ahead.

Oops. An error occurred!

It was not quite like a window.

Clearing a cache of dust from her skirt, Alice leaned closer.

Inside the glass stretched a wide black scene: a reflection of an absurd space between Wonder and Land—nonsense romping loose, popping when it pleased, and bouncing with no memory of sense, as though it had been unwritten from its source code long ago.

At a far corner, a lonely cursor hopped and blinked.

As the hopping reached its ultimate point, the black screen cleared to reveal a hill—green and serenely ordinary—beneath a sky so smooth that even the Queen of Hearts would have found it uninspiring.

“Off with your head!”—a sentence decreed for a simple crime of complex boredom.

Absurdity.

The very hand that once dreamt this world must have slipped, fallen, rolled through time, and collided with his Wonderland at the nib of a fountain pen.

No Dodo’s nest. No Mouse’s burrow. Not even a hole—not a Rabbit-Hole, nor a USB port.

Just—perfection.

“Why, this isn't my Wonderland,” said Alice. “I should suspect it’s where windows initialises my dream—though I’ve no clue how it crawled through my body.”—And taking over her memory, her operating system, copying and pasting her from here, to there, and to everywhere.

And with that, she climbed through—one hand upon the frame, the other steadying her curiosity—into a new bombarded, Wonderlandsome episode.

“A new adventure update is available. Estimated duration: four days. Please do not leave your table.” A dialogue box blinked insistently.

Virtualised Alice,

Steadying Her Curiosity 

Coming up next--

Dream in Dream

Voice Soared into Sky,

Goosebumps 

A surreal chapter in Alice’s digital dreamscape.

Windows Took Over/29

Alice, much like the girl next door, possessed no innate power—this she knew all the way to her very fingertips.

With a soft metallic relief, the embarrassed identity—⊥Iᗺᗺ∀ꓤ ˙M—on the brass plate atop the door shied away into a blur.

The letters soon reconfigured into a scholarly, hopeful title: A Hundred Ways to Escape—as though Wonderland, somehow apologetic, had conjured a long wand of possibilities, so far-reaching that its final spark might have not found Alice.    (Lumos… Nox instead.)

“What a book without illustrations,” she murmured. “All I lack is speed-reading—that’s simple—anything to outrun the crawl among the bad sectors.”

In the corner, along the ridgepole, an empty, neckless bottle reclined in perfect idleness, its label having chosen to blank itself, too nervous to volunteer another DRINK ME-style chaos.

Meanwhile, the window, rousing from a lazy drowse, blinked once… then twice.

A legend—short but precise—flickered into existence:

Lumos. Solis. — EXIT WINDOW —

A soft sigh slipped from Alice’s lips. “Alright… though I never quite know what world they’ll open into next.”

Lumos...Maxima...

Lumos...Solis...

Coming up next--

The Buffered Hill

No Rabbit Hole,

No Mouse's Burrow

A surreal chapter in Alice’s digital dreamscape.

Door Introduced Itself/28

Meanwhile, the door—dangling above like a vast book, loaded with at least three inches of life-knowledge—seemed to recall its purpose. It groaned forward, “I’m here.”

Beside it, the window drowsed by a dozing mouse, half-idling, half-deciding— hesitating whether to power itself up or hibernate once more into glassy sleep.

Altogether, it would require only halffff an inch, the flick of a too-keen wrist, and the room itself would gather its poise and tip back upon its handsome collar and twirling mustache.

“Oh dear! Do mind your angle,” cried the door and window together. “We can’t all be Piza, and you aren't its master, you know — standing upright keeps our magnetic appeal, like a prince out of a story book.”

And yet Alice endeavored to make sense of it all. “The one I stepped on, it must be the floor,” she reasoned. “What a muddle to walk about, like a lopsided wander-wand —ah, I daresay I’ve gone and broken it altogether.”

Alice nearly cast a die to decide the size of her flick. It quivered so eagerly, itching to etch its name into history. And now, one small flick from her; one tremendous flip for the world.

The tipping room, uneasy furniture, and dozing mouse all held their breath—balancing, barely, on a single trembling pin.

 Alice Nearly—

Smothered Eveyone

Coming up next--

Window Took Over

⊥Iᗺᗺ∀ꓤ ˙M.

Exit Windows...

A surreal chapter in Alice’s digital dreamscape.