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.

Emotional Packets Misaligned/46

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

“Even the lenses—and everyone else—are learning to glub-babble,” the Caterpillar muttered. “Blaming all the chaos on smoke.”

He puffed a strong ribbon of hookah smoke, and physics—contaminated, coughing, indignantly awake—sent him wobbling so violently that his center of mass nearly resigned, citing the Non-Hookahing Act 🚭.

[STATUS: Newton interrogated. Internal rebellion force burst. File closed.]

Still puzzled by the wobbling Caterpillar, Alice clutched the mushroom nervously. “Perhaps the left side will fix it?” The urge pulsed—instinctive, attentive, insistent.

The Caterpillar tried to shout down the cameras. “Go away, you annoying flying wiza...” 

At that exact moment, Alice drew in a long breath, pinched her nose, and nibbled the other edge.

The flying cameras scattered, activating high-alert glub-mode.

His upper half swelled, then stretched—without sound, without reason, without the participation of inertia—normalizing in a way that felt deeply, unsettlingly wrong.

His mouth continued to morph, transcoding the balance sentence into olfactory output: fermented, mushy, malodor.c0ded.

The cameras hovered in a ring.

The Garden goggled.

Alice’s mouth dropped again.

And the Caterpillar, somehow, instantiated every one of these reactions at once.

Quickly, he was slender again—stretched to the size of Alice’s arm.

[Newton: ΔCaterpillar = f(UnknownForce). Law non-applicable. Cause unresolved.]

Alice’s adjectives were lost, were kidnapped—by cameras, glubs, or invisible aliens. Her feelings tangled like spiderwebs. Sidestepping the Caterpillar’s gaze, she spotted a single word lying on the ground:

 "sorry."

His body stretched further, turning glossy, almost translucent.

Alice could see straight through him: a pint of adjectives, two ounces of why‑am‑I‑like‑this, three pounds of gossip—all churning in a glitchy broth of punctuation marks, yesterday’s over‑diet, and today’s smoke.

Some cameras, abandoning their video duties, shifted to X‑ray mode. They pinged sharply:

[Biology.exe not responding. Emotion.exe override. 🥶🥶]

The Garden ignored the alerts and executed: [Search: Strawberry_jam—½_spoon.]

Then—out of nowhere—an apple glubbed.

Its silhouette was imperfectly bitten but pixel-perfect. “My missing byte too…?”

[Newton frowned. Law failed to parse.]

The Caterpillar felt the glubs prickling:

Scoville-scale—from “eh, barely there” to “ouch, that’s sentient”—all dissolved, mingled, and distilled into the secret mushy sauce seasoning his body chemistry.

Coming up next--

Storage Overflow

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

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.

Roller-Coastering in Haze/45

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

An explosive problem always found its way back to its origin; it was only a matter of time—be it the slow-motion Caterpillar’s or fast-forward Alice’s clock. Tiny seatbelts 🪢—Wonderland-approved—were now attached.

“Why can’t you follow the right way?” the Caterpillar barked—at her—then, almost in the same breath, spun his fury onto his own ballooned lower half.

He glared at it with total disappointment. “Is that so damn complicated?” he snapped. “And don’t you dare quote me some stupid [WBL-SELF-CHECK: 89° | DON'T ARGUE]. You’re smart. You walk!”

A wave of regret washed over Alice.

What if his legs grow longer… half an inch (too shy?), one inch (just right?), one and a half (overreach?)—a sequential simulation of frustration spun through her mind, only to topple, glitch, and collapse under its own corrupted physics the very next second.

She wished—and toggled her option again—that there were a PREVIOUS button floating in the air, ready to whisk her back to a moment before the chaos.

But chaos had never been optional in Wonderland—except for gesture recognition, which Wonderland strictly prohibited.

The rule stated, quite clearly and with absolutely no wiggle room:

Finger-pointing the air,
finger-pointing the moon,
finger-pointing the sun,
finger-pointing the universe,
[Outcome: Error %£#@ error %£#, Total cosmos failure.]

The flying cameras remained on high alert: some clung to the slow-going but fast-mutating Caterpillar, and some—self-appointed geniuses with manual override engaged—flailed their lenses in every direction, convinced that miracles would pop and must be grabbed—sizzling, unwrapped… undeniably spicy, al bacio.

[Gaze tracking mode: activated]. They pinged back in cheerful unison.

[Gaze FAILED: Haze prevailed.]
[AQI > 500] — the sensors blinded… lenses registering only Caterpillar-blur.

[Camera02: Eye itchy. Lenses winking.]
[Camera04: Inhaling smoke. NASTY.]
[Camera06: Dirty. Lenses stuck.][Camera08: Overheated. Reader accusation detected.]
[Camera10: Shut your ears. ERROR: Sensory module missing.]

The cameras could no longer tell whether they were reporting events or broadcasting gossip in 8K.

reportgossipLO…… | reportgossipREPORTGOSSIP! | lowrez…sharpTURN… | reportGOSSIP……glub.

[NOTE: Fasten your seatbelt. Roller‑coastering in gossips.]

[ADVICE: Reduced Exertion. Do not trust all camera reports.]

"Trust me." whispered the mushroom in Alice's hand. Alice hesitated to answer. Her fingers tingled anyway, registering a soft desynchronization between desire and urge—mirrored in the Caterpillar’s wobbling form.

Coming up next--

Emotional Packets Misaligned

The garden goggled its eyes. 

Alice’s mouth dropped again.

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.

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 one 🦕, 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.

Pool of Sweat/43

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

[Path:/Wonderland.Void/Pool of Sweat.txt ]
[Description: A place where things glub while waiting to change.]

[File size: glub; squishy]

[Content: glubs; ∞]

[PERMISSIONS: READ-ONLY]
[NOTE: Attempts to walk the path initiates more glubbing. Continued walking initiates non-terminating glubbing.]

One tired C gnawed at its own curve, wobbling like a tiny letter‑Weeble.

The other exhausted C twisted its ankle—half in pain, half in existential horror—balancing at what used to be its equilibrium, before au! knocked it out of place.

The flying cameras pinged: 

[Images experienced pain, emitted foul scent; visual data corrupted by emotion, aroma, and glub.]

Both insisted they were the original...glubber ?

System status:
[Sense: scarce]
[Exit path: not found]

The Caterpillar tried to stand, but the attempt was absurd: his little legs churned furiously, marching a whole parade of air-steps, none of which touched anything. He wobbled on his swollen base—upright, but unmistakably not standing.

He nearly floated away, bounced by playful gusts that snatched his smoke back into his mouth, catapulted his monsoon sweats like stray meteor rain, and wobbled his body into a bulging sail—all afloat on the rising tide of his own despair. A Weeble‑boat of nonsense, wobbling helplessly in its own pool of absurdity. Glub🫧, glub🫧, glub🫧.

Alice found herself, somehow, emotionally in sync with the Caterpillar.

She had initiated the cause—yes—but the story had slipped its track, glubbed ahead of her—and glubbed back—like an underarm zephyr 💨 whirling commas loose and leaving you slightly… drifted. The Caterpillar, by sheer displacement, by the story's own slippage, had been promoted to protagonist without consent.

The garden barked command after command, none of which made sense.

The flying cameras buzzed with the pitch of a failing siren—anxious, intense, unbearably urgent. 

Traces of commands lingered in midair. 

Tasklist: monitoring the C...ater… C...at-… erpillar…

The System lagged. Commands hung.

One C gnawed at its own curve, the other C gnawed at its own curve.

The Caterpillar let out a hookah-scented sigh, curling into a string of C’s, each biting its own end. All pretended to be tiny ouroboroi of letters, searching for its own stable attractor state.

A stable core would ensure a new beginning —at least, Wonderland liked to joke.

[WARNING]

NerveRoots registered [VERTIGO: CRITICAL]

Fall: denied.

Glub: confirmed (proprioceptive).

Coming up next--

Post‑Metamorphic Residues

Like a Caterpillar Weeble,

You will always wobble upright. 

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.

Inflated Chaos/42

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

The Head and Tail Game failed to provide any clue.

Alice, always trusting her instincts, went for a pink mushroom. Pink had been her girl-next-door favourite colour.

She nibbled at its side, precisely the side that mirrored her own, expecting a pinkish, lollipop sweetness—bright enough to make the magic feel immense.

"What a rotten‑skunk‑sour‑pickle taste!” she spluttered, spitting the mushy bits onto the ground, her face scrunching as if she’d just sniffed a dragon’s armpit. Yuck—a primeval dragon’s armpit!

The tiny nibble—half a second, too long, or too short?—had already propagated elsewhere.

The Caterpillar’s lower half responded, puffing, ballooning, until it resembled a great, striated watermelon.

The flying cameras buzzed and flashed—as if slipping unconsciously back into New Year mode. Some hovered low, some circled overhead, some zoomed in, all pinging at once: [MIRACLE FOUND].

Alice’s mouth dropped. “Oh! That wasn’t supposed to happen to you!” she exclaimed.

It was a topsy-turvy remark—yet entirely understandable, by a commoted Alice. For if not him, then who should have inflated? The Queen? The Mouse? The mushroom? Herself? Or... YOU? Yes—I meant you. Highly questionable, if not downright piscine.

Oh yes, please don't even stop to hesitate and breathe on the commas; the dragon had never guarded its armpit—🐲💨.

The mushrooms giggled, trying to compose a chime for this phenomenal aberration, but Ti wandered off, Fa burrowed underground, and Do—blushing violently—simply refused to cue. The chime misfired. 

Meanwhile, the garden botched the live feed.

The System grinned—far wider than any Cheshire Cat's.

[Biological Error 000: You sneezed! You sneezed! System forcing Rhinitis Reset.]

The System grinned again, absurdly wide, its capital S forking into C/C—a syntax hosting two Caterpillars, locked in armpit combat, weaponizing scent instead of verbs.

C for Caterpillar—💨!

C for Caterpillar—💨…

[Warning] 

Your ouch wouldn't fix the Caterpillars —they boinged, pffffted anyway...

and left your desk smelling like a skunk holding its own nose—non-deodorantable.

Oops...too late to unread now.

Coming up next--

Pool of Sweat

Tiny ouroboroi of letters, 

searching for its own stable attractor state.

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.

Alice in Kaleidoscope/41

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

The Caterpillar felt more at ease now.

“May I know how magic is meant to happen…?” Alice asked, her voice calibrated and soft, half-expecting a nod along the air might hit some invisible Enter keys.

He didn’t look back. One lazy limb swung toward a mushroom.

“Bite the right side,” he said—with the sum of all the worst wills in Wonderland.

Alice squinted. “Such a mini limb— which is which?”

The flying cameras swarmed... Pinging:

[ERROR: 
No response from Wonderland.botany. Requirement: Ant-oid 17. 
Release date: Must have been yesterday].

“The black one… the green one… the purple one… the pink one… the alpha one…” Alice muttered, lost in a kaleidoscope of mushrooms, or ants, or ants atop mushrooms, or mushrooms atop ants.

The Caterpillar stayed silent, slipping slowly to be out of sight; a trailing curl of leaf-ghost scent wobbling where he had been.

It was a multiple-choice question with E: None of the above. One careless nibble could launch [Identity_overwrite.exe, Batch file: Alice]—[Protocol: Irreversible].

She stared at the Caterpillar’s tail, flicking this and that way. The cameras spun in binary rhythm—0 and 1, lub and dub—each pulse echoing like the quantum heartbeat of nebulae, utterly otherworldly.

Waves of muscular contractions rolled from tail to front—each segment wriggling, curling, and twitching, channeling invisible currents of glub energy. It was an earnest, procedural attempt to be helpful, completely oblivious to the glubbing mind it was attached to, which quivered, fizzed, and hiccupped in echoed waves of improbable relaxation.

The Caterpillar’s version of the ‘Head and Tail Game’ soft-landed.

Saved, unclassified: /Wonderland/Head & Tail Game/Tail_tried_Head_Ignored. 
[Status: Everyone can edit.] 

Note: One little edit would prickle the curl, sending its urticating hairs raining through the whole writing—stinging the a, irritating the b, itching the c.

Leaving the rest of the alphabet nervously hiding behind your eyelids, peeking out only when you blink.

Coming up next--

Inflated Chaos

Missing ti, fa, do,

The Chime Misfired 

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.

One Old Caterpillar/40

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

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.

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