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.