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.