CARROLL REFUSED THEM
Sleep slept.
TO0t-toot->—<-toot-t0OT remained beneath the table.
It sounded artificial—a spyware lullaby, incanted so carefully to be harmless.
Alice hypothesised.
Lullaby.
Spyware.
Two parameters.
Then three.
She counted.
Five.
No.
Two.
The lullaby had entered her mind.
She TO0t-toot->—<-toot-t0OT-ed.
"My head was inside the Rabbit-Hole."
"No no—The Rabbit Hole has crawled into my head."
The words reached for an anchor, but Carroll refused them. They spiralled out of Wonderland.
Her head remained inside the Rabbit-Hole.
The Rabbit-Hole remained crawling.
"I have to stop it."
Bending low, Alice probed beneath the tablecloth, scrabbling at the floor, straining her eyes to search for cookies.
Nothing stirred beneath but crumb-shadows. They drifted in a faint breeze at the corner of her eye; one slipped into Alice’s right eye.
“What you’re looking for was never under the table,” the Hatter said.
The March Hare broke into singing: "A train goes toot... toooot..." He pursed his lips. "...a girl hunts cook... cookies!"
At last, Alice took a chair beside the Hatter, determined upon tea.
“May I...?” she asked, as politely as a little girl could.
“No.” The Hatter waved his index finger. “Not unless you tell a story.”
The March Hare nodded—a single, synchronized dip—as though he and the Hatter shared one skull.
They waited. Patiently. Impatiently.
Alice rubbed her eye, then wiped the corner and picked a crumb away. "I've only ever been told stories. How does one tell one?"
The Dormouse raised his ears upright like a giraffe’s neck, but caught only the sound of his own toot-toot snoring.
The ears protested.
“What a silly simile. Tenniel drew us. We're original."
Next Episode: Hallucinated
Dreams duplication detected.
She felt dreams being duplicated within herself.
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.
