Ribet in the Veil/51

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

[HUM: Ribbit... Ribed...sounded SEA]

Alice nodded. She understood: Ribet.

Not just a word—it was the system thinking itself into being. The veil between story and reader vibrated. Threads unraveled—memory, comment column, a soft hum of awareness.

Somewhere—maybe you—hummed back.

The peppery Footman bowed. From his coat sleeve, a cloud of cili padi pepper leapt naughtily, licking Alice like a dog that had borrowed a cloud to mark its presence.

“It’s ground from the Queen’s own cili padi garden. Quite… invigorating,” he added.

And somewhere, just beyond the hum, a Ribet twirled, spinning a new moment of wonder.

Alice sneezed three times in rapid succession.

[Achoo, Achoo, Achoo: Invigoration confirmed.]

“Apologies, Miss,” said the peppery Footman. “It’s part of the uniform. Tradition, you know. One Footman plain, the other… seasoned.”

“Seasoned!” Alice laughed. “Then I suppose there must be a sugar-coated one, or a curry-wetted one hiding about as well?”

[Searching... Objects not Indexed.]

“Yes, Miss. This might be after the menu changed in another quarter to come.” The peppery Footman answered with the precision of a diplomat, every word polished, deliberate.

[META NOTE: Time fast-forwarded]

“Seasoned!” Alice laughed. “Then I suppose there must be a sugar-coated one, or a curry-wetted one hiding about as well?”

[Searching... Objects not Indexed.]

[SYSTEM: Might.exe initiated — standing by for a past that thinks it’s future.]

Wonderland crooked, reshaping itself. The Footman’s words reversed, then doubled, then started addressing Alice directly:

“Miss Alice, you may observe the menu—but the menu observes you.”

Then the Footmen both turned, together, in perfect unison, their voices blending into a harmonic hum:

“You see the veil, Miss Alice.”

[HUM: Ribet—acknowledged]

“So does the one still reading.”

Somewhere, behind the hum, a new Ribet popped up—neither from the sentence nor the comment—already mutating into its own moment of wonder.

Coming up next--

The Veil Learned to Shimmy

[RINGTONE: Chimed everywhere, in C8, D8, and E8]

[SYSTEM: Saliva logged. Recalibrating…]

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.

Me ∓ Chaos/50

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

Tales held absurdities together while ambiguities surfed along—with pepper in your hand, even without the Caterpillar, a new episode wouldn’t under-season itself.

Alice emotioned it, tolerated it, and eventually indulged in it, stacking layer upon layer, surprise upon surprise, like a glitchy roti canai: dhal over quail egg, quail egg over deep-fried shallot, shallot over sardine paste, sardine paste over durian paste — all escaping sideways, bouncing off the walls of known expectations, defying the gravity of taste buds.

No more than twenty steps away, if Wonderland’s stepstones could be relied on, a little house stood, quietly recording its existence alongside my narration, long before Alice had even approached.

[Me ∓ Chaos…]

Outside the house, crumbs of butter cookies, morsels of pizza, shreds of Satay, and the occasional rogue olive lay scattered, as if someone had just smashed their last snack break.

From the woods popped a Footman—dashing, overfilled with eagerness.

[Pending: Topsy-Turvy Protocol]

Alice’s attention latched on. 

[RESULT: Different UI Sorted]

He rapped the wooden door with his knuckle. A monotone pinged...as flat as Alice’s response. 

The door creaked open. Another Footman appeared—identical round face, enormous eyes—but now Alice noticed: both heads were fully, irrevocably frog. Yes 🐸.

[PROTOCOL: AMPHIBIOUS LIVERY ACTIVE]

[COUNT: 2 × FOOTMAN]

Immediate anomaly detected: the second Footman exhaled a suffocating cloud of odd pepper.

[STATUS: Peculiar Inner Log Detected] 
[ALERT: Pepper Seasoned]

Alice smiled. What a peculiar livery! She’d never have volunteered one like this—not even in a dream.

Her mind blinked back to the breakfast table, where The STARS had advertised a frog-wearable wallet, splashed across the front page: RM29,999, LIMITED EDITION.

Frog livery. Frog wallet. Everyone enjoyed a Wonderland kind of life.

Alice’s thoughts tangled in numbers and jam. How big was RM29,999?

One day of non-stop strawberry jam refills?

A month?

A year?

Or a Wheat-and-Chessboard problem— refilling jam for a whole life?

[STATUS: Calculation × e^∞...][INTERRUPTION: Me ∓ Chaos tingled—calculation aborted at threshold]

Coming up next--

Ribet in the Veil

Somewhere, behind the hum, a new Ribet popped up—neither from the sentence nor the comment—already mutating into its own moment of wonder.

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.

A Half-Written Caterpillar Story/49

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

Some stories continue; some minds leap.
And somewhere between their breathing, appreciation discovers its rhythm.

Halted by a tiny black mushroom, the light bulb finally guttered.

It blinked thrice, clearing its remnant charge.

And off it went—dropping, and quietly logging its own departure.

The flying cameras, busy as ever, zoomed in on the Caterpillar from every conceivable angle.

The Caterpillar lifted himself high, poised toward them, and took a slow, deliberate bite of the mushroom.

Flashlights burst and spangled, flooding the scene with chimerical glints, fracturing images into overlapping shadows and blinding the eye against itself—far beyond any protagonist’s tolerance, tripping the Wonderland-graded Mirabilia scales—⚡▢▢▢. FUSE BURNED 🔥.

The pampered Garden waited, impatient; a split second bent itself into a full, grinding century.

Alice watched him intently, tracking every motion with devoted focus; she had now learned: magic always arrived unexpectedly and vanished just as quickly.

At last, the Caterpillar shrank—shrank—and shrank again, until he returned to his proper size. An ordinary Caterpillar now.

By then, many flying cameras had flashed themselves into failure and fallen; their batteries surrendered faster than a low-power alert could form.

[STATUS: AGENIC AI DUMB | PROCESSING HALTED | ALERTS INERT]

Without fuss or farewell, the Caterpillar began to fade into the cluster of mushrooms.

🎵 Five old Caterpillars went out to play,
🎵 Over the mushrooms and far away…
🎵 Mother Caterpillar said, “Glub‑glub‑glub‑glub-glub!”
🎵 All five old Caterpillars came back today…

“Wait!” Alice called, eyes wide. “If you turn into a blue butterfly… will the tale, and the next tale, and the following ones still know it’s you?

Or will it just instantiate a new character with your memories? How do I know I’m not talking to a copy?”

Alice realized she was almost repeating her own question, sending it forward into a tale that might not even exist yet. Everything remained quiet—silent, patient, as if the narrative itself were buffering, holding its breath, waiting for narration to continue.

"Should I prepare an answer for your question?"

"Should you remember your question as a butterfly?"

"Will you recognise me, Alice?"

“Then you’ll have to remember me as Alice."

The Caterpillar vanished into nothingness, leaving her questions to question themselves in the still air, with only the air listening—a tale half-written, waiting for someone, someday, to finish the rest—or simply let it go on.

Saving…

/Wonderland/Caterpillar.tmp

████████████████████████▒▒ 91%

WARNING: Path no longer valid.

Resolved to:

/Wonderland/Weeble_Butterfly.tmp

Proceed | ESC

[INPUT RECEIVED]

[AMBIGUITY CONTINUED: SOME WALKED. SOME LEAPT]

Coming up next--

Me ∓ Chaos

How big was RM29,999? 

One day of non-stop strawberry jam refills? One month? One year?

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.

Roger Light Bulb/48

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

The Caterpillar puffed another trailing plume of hookah.

The smoke twisted, spiralled, and corkscrewed—helixophiling absurdity, nonsense, and all of Newton’s Laws in under a second.

One exclamation mark escaped—under Wonderland’s raised eyebrows, crossed your sightline, punched through your USB port, and assumed the right to charge itself.

It popped—tchk!—and flared into a glowing little bulb 💡 above the Caterpillar, faster than your eyes could notice, and somehow blinked back as you were noticing, announcing either a warning… or an uncannily brilliant idea.

The cameras flickered and pinged: [LENS_ERROR_03: Abstract UI. SUBJECT REFUSES STREAMING.]

The garden wobbled, growing suspicious.

Alice’s eyes went wide enough to nearly pop out —not from fear, but from realization. The mystery hadn’t lessened; it had simply changed form, and in changing, intensified.

“Roger, Roger.”

The reply did not speak; it instantiated itself—mind-stamped, time-stamped, rubber-stamped, counter-stamped, over-stamped—and was immediately archived as a Close Encounter of the Third Kind, in strict compliance with Wonderland’s Narrative Integrity Authority, §1.1.1: Canonical Cinematic Disruptions.

[NOTARY SEAL—Wonderland Proof of Life]

"VIVO ERGO SUM" (I live, therefore I am archived).

The Caterpillar hunched. He rippled. He inched—each movement a wince, guided entirely by the bulb’s flash of wit.

In the Caterpillar’s slow-burning agony—two tik-toks long—it stretched into a full, unbearable century.

Across the glowing bulb blinked a progress bar:

[BATTERY LEVEL: 1%]
[SYSTEM_CRITICAL]
[LIGHT BULB — UNFALTERING]

The bulb dimmed into power-saving mode—no courtesy warning, no hesitation.

The flying cameras jumped, jolted, freaked out—then sarcastically ran a battery-level self-check, as if their circuits’ nerves had arced.

Somewhere in the middle, the Caterpillar inched forward. One slow move more, and he would remain exactly as he was: trapped in his historically absurd shape, in a glitchy MOCKUP UI.

[MOCKUP UI---META-METAPHORS UI]
[MOCKUP UI---   META-METAPHORS UI]
[MOCKUP UI   ---META-METAPHORS UI]

[TUG-OF-FORCE DETECTED]

[RESULT: VAPOURWARE??]

.

..

...

Wonderland waits. 

[STATUS: Pen down.]

░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░

The pen is down, but the brains keep mining… yours too? Filing mental tickets, indexing Wonderland anomalies, and queuing absurdities for later execution.

Coming up next--

A Half-Written Caterpillar Story

[INPUT RECEIVED]

[AMBIGUITY REMAINED]

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.

Storage Overflow/47

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

Just before the cameras could spit out [found str..._j..½_spoon], greyish smoke overtook the scene from within; spinning question marks choked, tangled, and finally scribbled themselves into a dense, unsolvable confusion-knot.

Stray exclamation marks squeezed their noses, bursting like pogo sticks—ricocheting head to tail, tail to head—shrieking, “Cool down! Cool down!”

Yet, in perfect contradiction, the questions slipped through the dot-sized needle heads—jab, stitch, sew—looping themselves tighter, weaving confusion into one layer, two layers, then whole strata of knotted drama.

The flying cameras pinged sharply:
[ERROR 01] [ERROR 02]
[ERROR OVERFLOW]
[LENSES: #PINNED]

That made the Garden sit anxiously. [Garden_Log: #PINNED error code not found. Social_Regret: Cheekbook/Howsapp pinnable moment missed.]

[#PINNED: 0 shares | 0 likes | insubsribable]

[Spelling Error: FOMO intensifies]

The haze gradually thinned.

The tangled question marks stretched, and yawned like sleepy hooks. Exclamation marks lay scattered, their needle-heads still prickling faintly, jammed with unsolvable questions.

The flying cameras pinged: [Error Erased. System Restored.]

And now, even the Caterpillar leaned back, puffing a full ribbon of hookah, as if the absurd storm had passed.

The flying cameras pinged anxiously this time:

[STORAGE_WARNING: 4.6GB / 4.7GB. Clearing Cache and Deleting Old Glitches.]

The Garden shuddered.

“Stop clearing too much.” It demanded.

But the cameras only blinked, like a sly eye hinting something through a curtain of chaos.

[Blinking…🟢…blinking...🟢...Cleared 4.0GB]

The Garden glubbed 💧 …glubbed 💧 — roots and all, pinned down by their efficiency. 

The flying cameras were not merely cameras. They were the Systemligence now.

They could delete anything—without knowing that they, too, were deletable.

Coming up next--

Roger Light Bulb

[Battery Level: 1%]

[Light Bulb — APOPLETIC] [SYSTEM_CRITICAL]

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.