Multi-folked Caterpillar/38

CAPTCHA was a word far beyond the Caterpillar’s comprehension.

He shook his head again and again—so violently that his cheeks flapped and his lips billowed. The flying cameras zoomed in just in time, yet his face grew so monstrously distorted that the Garden momentarily got lost inside the imagery.

>Explain_Yourself — the words emerged as a system prompt, syllables rigid, warped, and quivering with uncompromising cold.

Though his pushed-back face and whooshing voice made her explanation feel almost absurd, Alice answered with her bravest confidence:

“The room melted after I sipped the Red Magic.”

The Caterpillar puffed at his hookah, eyes half-shut. The smoke took its time delving through his mind. He showed no intention of speaking his mind at all.

Everything paused for one… two—the flying cameras looped back, [Motion not detected]—and three seconds.

“It reset itself only when I gave a thunderous laugh,” she went on cautiously.

The Caterpillar cracked one eye open and exhaled a long, hopeless mind of smoke, as though Alice were composed chiefly of disbelief. 

He drifted—over Malaysia’s durian-scented ports, across Iowa’s Big Sioux River, and finally the cornfields of Nebraska—without moving at all.

“But then it turned upside-down instead!” Alice concluded, fact-loaded and thoroughly theatrical. 

What an outlier she was, in every sense the Caterpillar could reason: answering prompts with sideways logic, offering lived scripts that crashed his interpreter. 

Between Alice::Pool_of_Tears and  Alice::UpsideDownRoom, he felt multi-forked, adrift in nowhere-land. 

[404 – Forking error]...glubbed. Was I in Maryland? The Caterpillar wondered—already unsure why that name had surfaced at all..

If Alice’s thoughts feel faster than yours, please do not panic.

Wonderland has always run ahead of its visitors.

No examination will follow. 

Coming up next--

One Old Caterpillar

Marionette Walked,

Manual Override

A surreal chapter in Alice’s digital dreamscape.

The Nonsense Threshold/37

“No!” Alice panicked. “You see—William drove his limousine, and the tra-la-la-la-la-ing in the Caucus-race.” Did the answer lead, or wander?

The Caterpillar’s face wandered queerly from blue to green, then yellow, then orange, and finally red.

He puffed his hookah for so long that Alice counted it terribly on her fingers—ten whole seconds, not one less—while the flying cameras whirred softly, adjusting their focus from his colour-changed face to her anxious fingers and back. 

Then, by his own trick, he cooled back into blue again. 

The Garden grinned, sensing something tickling its armpit—uncomfortable, yet ridiculously funny.

As rough as a grinding hard drive, he cursed, “Who are you?” as if her mind were a map demanding street names.

Alice’s head spun, overstuffed with answers she’d never had to juggle before—not even with the Mouse, the Dodo, or the Queen of Hearts. 

She teetered in her high-heeled answers, the lenses of the hovering cameras narrowing to hunt down the very hiding spots of the heels.

“How ridiculous not to know myself!” Alice insisted. “Should I have shouted ‘Alice’ into the air and hoped it marked my presence?” 

Alice was weather—buffering. A system state changing mid‑sentence.

Then she blurted: “I’m Alice—from an upside-down room.”

“Yes! That must be correct,” she thought, super proud, as if she’d just passed the Wonderland CAPTCHA.

****

New environment instantiated.

User: “Alice”

Status: Unverified

Initiating deep-level authentication protocol

Verifying…

Cross-checking with flying cameras...

facial_recognition...

lost and found...

Contradicting…

Disbelieving…

Rolling back…

Rebooting doubt…

Error: User identity exceeds standard nonsense threshold.

Warning: Truth is fluid, it glubs.

To cope…glub…or not to cope…

To surf…glub…to drift…glub…within the glitch

Coming up next--

Multi-forked Caterpillar

Motion Not Detected,

Rebooting

A surreal chapter in Alice’s digital dreamscape.

Simple 0s and 1s/36

Misplaced, and carrying an entire Extra-Terrestrial loneliness behind it, K went home.

And then an elusive query found the way back to its origin—grand parties rarely distract it for long.

Blowing a lazy puff from his hookah, the Caterpillar asked an earthy question: “Who are you?” 

“Ahh—it comes back,” Alice sighed.

The smoke curled around his head, twisting into looping question marks.

The flying cameras, all 8K and curious to the point of feeling busy, zoomed in to macro-view the question marks. 8K auto-downgraded to merely 1K.

“I’m Alice…” she said cautiously, hesitantly, “…from—oh!—the Pool of Tears.” She felt she’d nailed the answer, as if this were a multiple-choice test.

“Pool of what?” boomed the Caterpillar, his voice crackling like a broken speaker.

Every fandom had its extreme members, but Alice was definitely not one of his.

“Pool of my own tears,” Alice replied faithfully, convinced that this was an absolute sense.

All the flying cameras scattered—pinged: [404  Pool of tears not found].

“Nonsense. Don’t talk nonsense,” he insisted, as though every word she spoke were transcribed, stirred, then spilled into bizarre ASCII values—too scrambled for his Caterpillar brain to parse, even though the transcript was only simple 0s and 1s.

The Caterpillar couldn’t parse.
Motors spooled. Scanners on. The flying cameras took over immediately:

Diagnosis Report

Observed two illegal 2s sneaking in, straightening into dieted little 1s, scrambling every rule of convergence, the answer drowned mid‑transmission.

The Caterpillar’s mind bubbled with nonsense.

Glub‑glub‑here

glub-glub-there

everywhere glub

🎵 E‑I‑E‑I‑O

🎵 E‑I‑E‑I‑O.

Choir mode enabled.

***This is a self-generated report, for reference only.

01000001 01101100 01101001 01100011 01100101

Alice

Coming up next--

The Nonsense Threshold

Re-verifying,

Rolling back,

Rebooting Doubt.

A surreal chapter in Alice’s digital dreamscape.

Hookah-Tainted Question/35

“Quiet! Foolish things!” the Caterpillar snarled —then coughed once, twice, thrice.

Party terminated.

Every mushroom shuffled back into the background—immediately, neatly, and obediently.

The party did not die. It rooted itself in the mycelium, laughing from kernel space and streaming through the Wood Wide Web in silent pulses. Every plant was tickled.

The Caterpillar exhaled a long ribbon of hookah smoke. It slipped between stems like a sly little serpent, diving into the forest, the damp soil, and then vanishing.

Soon, a silent “Who are you?” cropped up—hookah-smoked and zigzagging through the mushrooms: first a humour, then a rumour, then a humour again.
[RULE: humour >> rumour]

[PRIORITY: laughter.exe]

[ACTION: mycelialise absurdity]

[ACTION: germinate jokes]

Humour over rumour.

j was released, Usained, then Boltified—trailed by some flying cameras; ok sprinted after it; other cameras hovered above; es hopped over fallen logs; more cameras jolted— and the jokes tumbled into chaos, all while every flying camera remained in the mêlée, dodging and weaving Chaplinly to avoid collision.

The scent thickened, puffed, and grew dense. Alice, all of Mushroomland, and even the Caterpillar himself seemed trapped inside a single buffering question-mark of a chorus—hilarious, off-key, and faintly choking.

The Caterpillar tried to force-stop the chorus, but it continued—quietly, offline, disguised—while the Garden smiled from every corner, its flying cameras flickering to life and streaming in obsessive 8K—not half a K less.

Yet not all the Ks mattered in the smoky, hazy air.

Soon the scene toppled into the absurd chorus, laughing—and being laughed at—so thoroughly overwhelmed that a bewildered K slipped loose and landed before the Caterpillar.

The two met eye-to-eye; a misfit pair, forced into я-ecogniↄin-ƃ one anoth-er—the handshake glitched behind firewalls of silence.

Under Surveillance

Party went Offline

Coming up next--

Simple 0s and 1s

Caterpillar Parse,

0 and 1, 2?

A surreal chapter in Alice’s digital dreamscape.

Post Pairing-Spell/34

“WHO ARE YOU?” Came a sudden imitation—the voices bloomed, washing over the mushrooms in ripples of colour. They shifted from blue to red, green to orange; from slender to fat, from tall to short, and from short to even shorter.

Everyone stirred, as though waking from a pairing-spell—though when the next one would arrive, nobody knew.

The flying cameras blinked alive and pressed Alert Mode.

It wasn’t an angry sound, nor even a proper question, but a joke of the day—as absurd as [Error-50: ahh-cho0O…Computer?]. 

The flying cameras sneezed and wobbled, and the Garden was infected. The scene—fluid, sticky, oozing, clinging—[QUARANTINED].

Perfectly safe. Perfectly mushroomy.

It worked out as planned, gloriously grand.

They began to laugh at that question, anticipating a job interview-style drama to be played again— so parodically, that several shook loose a few dreamlike spores, straying like some odd confused ✨emoji ✨.

The mushrooms laughed again and again—from solo to chorus, from timid hiccup to full forest cheer, as if all of Mushroomland were about to start a party.

Alice found her head involuntarily nodding along with the rhythm—each dip and lift like pressing Enter again and again and again until the key nearly stuck.

“It’s rather nice,” she said at last, “to be applauded by mushrooms.” Even her landing here felt like the result of a careless misplacement.

As the final Enter was executed, a new paragraph emerged:

403 Forbidden: Enter key stuck. Party terminated. 

Alice Nodded,

Joining A Party.

Coming up next--

Hookah-Tainted Question 

Daemon Party,

Hilarious, Choking

A surreal chapter in Alice’s digital dreamscape.