A Smoky Start/33

Bored, Alice bent over one particularly huge mushroom, its cap glistening with a bead of dew that held only one Alice—not the burdensome nine hundred and ninety-nine extra I had expected.

“Who are you?”

“A talking mushroom?” cried Alice, enchanted. She was uncontrollably alive again.

The flying cameras activated their standby mode.

“Who are you?” came the question again—obviously slow and heavy, each word dragging through a throat smoky and rough.

Only then did she notice him—lounging upon a broad orange cap: a great blue Caterpillar, gazing at her with sleepy impatience.

The thick hookah smoke swirled lazily around him, corrupting his face into a hazy mask and turning his eyes into over-exposed film.

It blurred Alice’s every attempt to begin a proper conversation.

Somehow, conversations born in smoke seldom started clear—nor promised to end pleasant.

The flying cameras, thoroughly bewitched by the haze, forked their footage, each split replaying a hesitating Alice in slightly different moments; and lost focus with their own sensors, every correction triggered the same old loop: “Who are you?”

The garden looked at the cameras, the cameras fixed on Alice, Alice stared at the Caterpillar, and the Caterpillar pointed his nose to the hazy air—which, rather selectively, tilted itself and fell right back at Alice. 

Ahhh... what a wonderful Wonderlandish hierarchy of eyeballs—each pair paired with another pair at an utterly incompatible parity, and there, waiting eagerly for its turn, stood Error 409 — Wonderland System Conflict, quite certain it would be paired like everyone else.

Behind it lay HTTP 200 OK, sprawled flat on the ground, flat as a skinny boxer, making “OK” feel far more like KO, as though the count of ten had long since ended in the haze.

It's a Mushroom...

It's a Lounge...

It's Caterpillar...

Coming up next--

Enter, Again, and Again 

Laughter overflow. 

Party terminated.

A surreal chapter in Alice’s digital dreamscape.