Simple 0s and 1s/36

Misplaced, and carrying an entire Extra-Terrestrial loneliness behind it, K went home.

And then an elusive query found the way back to its origin—grand parties rarely distract it for long.

Blowing a lazy puff from his hookah, the Caterpillar asked an earthy question: “Who are you?” 

“Ahh—it comes back,” Alice sighed.

The smoke curled around his head, twisting into looping question marks.

The flying cameras, all 8K and curious to the point of feeling busy, zoomed in to macro-view the question marks. 8K auto-downgraded to merely 1K.

“I’m Alice…” she said cautiously, hesitantly, “…from—oh!—the Pool of Tears.” She felt she’d nailed the answer, as if this were a multiple-choice test.

“Pool of what?” boomed the Caterpillar, his voice crackling like a broken speaker.

Every fandom had its extreme members, but Alice was definitely not one of his.

“Pool of my own tears,” Alice replied faithfully, convinced that this was an absolute sense.

All the flying cameras scattered—pinged: [404  Pool of tears not found].

“Nonsense. Don’t talk nonsense,” he insisted, as though every word she spoke were transcribed, stirred, then spilled into bizarre ASCII values—too scrambled for his Caterpillar brain to parse, even though the transcript was only simple 0s and 1s.

The Caterpillar couldn’t parse.
Motors spooled. Scanners on. The flying cameras took over immediately:

Diagnosis Report

Observed two illegal 2s sneaking in, straightening into dieted little 1s, scrambling every rule of convergence, the answer drowned mid‑transmission.

The Caterpillar’s mind bubbled with nonsense.

Glub‑glub‑here

glub-glub-there

everywhere glub

🎵 E‑I‑E‑I‑O

🎵 E‑I‑E‑I‑O.

Choir mode enabled.

***This is a self-generated report, for reference only.

01000001 01101100 01101001 01100011 01100101

Alice

Coming up next--

The Nonsense Threshold

Re-verifying,

Rolling back,

Rebooting Doubt.

A surreal chapter in Alice’s digital dreamscape.