Post‑Metamorphic Residues/44

Series: Digital Wonderland | Meta-Logs | Ongoing Absurdity Chronicles

The lagged system drove the garden and flying cameras into greater chaos.

Position: zoom in… zoom out… hi… lo… tilt… recalibrate… abort… turn over…

System alert: !!#%EXCESSIVE COMMANDS DETECTED%%!!

Panic levels: critical… very… panic… HIGH-LEVEL panic…

Sweat, smoke, mass, the Caterpillar rocked: upright, but not his own upright; a memory he’d never want to upload. Post-metamorphic residues he’d come to regret: a glitching butterfly dreaming—its wings wobbling like Weeble-boats, its uncontained self slipping between shapes, swollen to squeeze into its entire dream.

Stranded at the edge of the scene, Alice’s head and eyes tracked on different planes, drafting the trajectories of the flying cameras—and never losing sight of the Caterpillar for a single instant.

Somewhere along the recursion, both the garden and the cameras forgot about Alice entirely—as if she had slipped out of the script while still standing inside it.

The Caterpillar, meanwhile, was sorrowfully more stable now.

Self-remedied at last.

He let out a faint hookah sigh of relief. The smoke—ever loyal—clung to him through every wobble, far more faithful than his legs.

"Like a Caterpillar Weeble," Wonderland declared in moral media, "you will be knocked about by catastrophe, but you will always wobble upright again."

🎵 Ti… Fa… Do…

The off-sync chime struggled to recompose itself with only three odd syllables. 

The Caterpillar’s tail—visible only under a magnifying glass—manual-overrode itself, counting the page views of the moral declaration no one remembered reading. Its tip became a mathematician—formulating a spreadsheet: page_views.xlsb.

One pivot table auto-counted straight from the prehistoric age, when numbers learned to speak dinosaurly.

Yours counted as 🦕, honourably. 

Coming up next--

Roller-Coastering in Haze

Finger-pointing the universe,

[Outcome: Total cosmos failure.]

A surreal chapter in Alice’s digital dreamscape.

This post is part of an ongoing original metafiction series exploring identity, systems, and absurdity through a digital Wonderland.