Hookah-Tainted Question/35

“Quiet! Foolish things!” the Caterpillar snarled —then coughed once, twice, thrice.

Party terminated.

Every mushroom shuffled back into the background—immediately, neatly, and obediently.

The party did not die. It rooted itself in the mycelium, laughing from kernel space and streaming through the Wood Wide Web in silent pulses. Every plant was tickled.

The Caterpillar exhaled a long ribbon of hookah smoke. It slipped between stems like a sly little serpent, diving into the forest, the damp soil, and then vanishing.

Soon, a silent “Who are you?” cropped up—hookah-smoked and zigzagging through the mushrooms: first a humour, then a rumour, then a humour again.
[RULE: humour >> rumour]

[PRIORITY: laughter.exe]

[ACTION: mycelialise absurdity]

[ACTION: germinate jokes]

Humour over rumour.

j was released, Usained, then Boltified—trailed by some flying cameras; ok sprinted after it; other cameras hovered above; es hopped over fallen logs; more cameras jolted— and the jokes tumbled into chaos, all while every flying camera remained in the mêlée, dodging and weaving Chaplinly to avoid collision.

The scent thickened, puffed, and grew dense. Alice, all of Mushroomland, and even the Caterpillar himself seemed trapped inside a single buffering question-mark of a chorus—hilarious, off-key, and faintly choking.

The Caterpillar tried to force-stop the chorus, but it continued—quietly, offline, disguised—while the Garden smiled from every corner, its flying cameras flickering to life and streaming in obsessive 8K—not half a K less.

Yet not all the Ks mattered in the smoky, hazy air.

Soon the scene toppled into the absurd chorus, laughing—and being laughed at—so thoroughly overwhelmed that a bewildered K slipped loose and landed before the Caterpillar.

The two met eye-to-eye; a misfit pair, forced into я-ecogniↄin-ƃ one anoth-er—the handshake glitched behind firewalls of silence.

Under Surveillance

Party went Offline

Coming up next--

Simple 0s and 1s

Caterpillar Parse,

0 and 1, 2?

A surreal chapter in Alice’s digital dreamscape.