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.