Alice in Wonderland

28 June 1999

Nikita Zykov

AKA Charles de Steyel (unle Charles)

... presents ...

АЛИСА ИЗ СТРАНЫ ЧУДЕС

Не гейтовать! ;)

Посвящается прототипу Алисы.

Эпиграф:
Кочумай, мать, ништяк - это психаделик...
из раннего Градского

Alice sat before the screen of her PC, vainly trying to figure out what to do next. After four hours of typing up some half-baked article shoved at her by the boss, her eyes were burning, she wanted to sleep, and her brain was basically fried. The logical thing seemed to be saving what she’d typed. Alice remembered she first needed to select the "File" menu item, which is exactly what she decided to tackle. After five minutes staring at the screen, Alice remembered that the boss had just installed a Russian version of Word instead of English, on the advice of some Hacker, "to make life easier for the girls." Who this Hacker was, Alice didn’t know, but after ten minutes of trying to remember how to say "Save" in Russian, she decided he must be either very shady or at least very weird, which, essentially, amounted to the same thing—she hated weirdos. The effort exhausted Alice so thoroughly that she was no longer capable of the heroic feat of figuring out how to actually exit this damn Word program, leaving her with nothing to do but stare at the screen, hoping someone less tired or more knowledgeable would walk in and help her out of her predicament. Every now and then she had to press the Shift key, plastered with a sticker reading "Any key" (rumored to be the work of that same Hacker), to clear the stars flying straight into her face off the screen. Several minutes passed like that.

Alice heard some incomprehensible noise behind her, turned around, and saw the March Hare emerging from the mirror hanging on the opposite wall, apparently finishing some super-long string of curses in an unfamiliar language, in which Alice barely recognized German. The Hare was unshaven, sported a "morning-in-a-chicken-coop" haircut, and generally looked like he’d been drinking nonstop for three sleepless nights. Yet he stood firm on his feet, and the stench radiating from him consisted of only two main components: strong black coffee and rosin. Taking off his dark glasses, the Hare glanced over the slightly bewildered Alice’s shoulder at the computer screen, assessed the situation, and tossed over his shoulder, “Press Alt+F4,” before vanishing through the door. From the corridor came, “Look at these noobs they’ve got here,” followed by the slam of another door.

The hand-held Krippenshtofel, previously lying peacefully at Alice’s feet, crawled out from under the table, approached the mirror, and upon not seeing its reflection there, grumbled discontentedly, “Well, well, even the mirrors are starting to glitch now, truly—this is the Land of Wonders.” Glancing at Alice, who was clearly flustered, he muttered, “Come on, Liz, the Hare came—the Hare left, what business is it of ours?”—and promptly crawled back under the table, clearly having no intention of continuing the conversation.

“True enough, fuck that Hare,” Alice thought. “Are there not enough of them running around here already? If only someone brought half a sack or a full sack of fresh irons…” But she never got to figure out the connection between the Hare and the irons—the Krippenshtofel under the table shifted restlessly and mumbled through sleep, “Think quieter, please, you’re disturbing my sleep…” A vague thought occurred to Alice that something around her wasn’t quite right; she wasn’t entirely sure her Krippenshtofel used to have the gift of speech, and its name itself felt strangely alien to her. On top of that, Alice realized she couldn’t even remember its name anymore, though she was absolutely certain it wasn’t called Sharik. All these thoughts gave her a headache, so she decided to stand up, get a little air, and stretch her legs after sitting in front of the screen for so long.

Walking up to the mirror, Alice discovered that the Krippenshtofel was right: it reflected the exact same room with two computers sitting on the desks, but this reflection was completely devoid of people. Alice touched the surface of the mirror. Something gurgled, a ripple spread across the glass, and she felt her hand pass freely to the other side. A light draft blew out from the mirror. Alice stepped over the bottom frame and found herself in a room perfectly symmetrical to the one she worked in.

A sense of vague unease did not leave Alice. She looked into the mirror and saw that nothing had changed on the other side: the Krippenshtofel slept just as peacefully under the table, some fractal shimmered across the computer screen in all the colors of the rainbow, and from the wall above the desk, sternly stared a portrait of the Emperor against the backdrop of a banner featuring a heraldic two-headed bear holding a sickle and a sledgehammer in its forepaws. His Majesty’s gaze calmed Alice; it seemed to her that the fog in her head began to clear, and she decided to take a look around in her new surroundings.

Article: Nikita Zykov

Fragment 2/3.

At that moment, someone sneezed by the window. Alice automatically wished good health to this whoever, after which she got the idea to see who exactly it was. The idea didn't seem half-bad to Alice, so she turned toward the window.

She saw a young man standing half-turned to her, dressed rather popishly but with a certain pretension to elegance. The most noticeable feature of this figure was a gigantic top hat, under which its owner seemed to disappear. In general, the external details were so distracting that it was almost impossible to form any definite opinion about this gentleman. Convinced that Alice had seen him, he drew an indescribable melancholy on his face, bordering on mortal boredom, and said:

Hello, madam. Judging by the way you're looking at me, you're definitely expecting that in response to your good-health wish after my sneeze, I'll say "thank you". In principle, the expectation is reasonable, but still, I believe such gratitude can only be fair if you had done something to make there be even a little less dust here. But really, it's not even about the dust, it's about the attitude toward people, and toward me in particular. Honestly, it gives the impression that besides Griffin and Kvaschenka, there's absolutely no one left in all of Looking Glass.
And who are you yourself? - asked Alice, and immediately regretted it.

The gentleman in the hat practically turned green, and on his face, next to the expression of melancholy, extreme surprise and incomprehension appeared.

Excuse me, madam, did I mishear, or do you actually not know me? !!
Well, strictly speaking, I don't, so what?
No, I just can't believe my own ears! Me, Master of Hats Vyshchinsky, known to all of Looking Glass, except for lamer boards like Electric Chair, and not known? !! Where on earth did you come from then? Not from Wonderland, surely?
Generally yes, and why exactly...
Well then everything's clear, - the Hatter didn't let her finish, - another lamer girl thanks to the Hare or Uncle Bear landing on our heads, and from a country where they don't even understand what a real hat is and why a civilized person needs one! No, madam, since you're already here, you must know that a hat is the symbol of all our life here, a hat is...

...and off he went. Alice tried for a while longer to keep up with the stream of his utterances, but soon gave up these futile attempts and started watching the metamorphoses of the Master's headwear. While he himself was talking, his hat gradually changed in time with his words. First it turned into a bowler, then into an ushanka, then gradually but confidently the cap began to manifest as a large cream cake. When Alice decided to suggest that the Hatter remove this work of art from his head, to occupy his mouth with something more useful than rambling, which nobody listens to anyway, the cake, as if having read her thoughts, quickly turned into a black airport-style cap, which immediately started growing, obviously intending to turn back into a cylinder. From what she saw, Alice concluded that either this gentleman was truly a master not only at constructing super-long, content-free phrases, or simply his hat had a pretty good sense of humor.

Suddenly Alice noticed that standing next to her, looking skeptically at the Hatter, was the March Hare, who had appeared out of nowhere. He leaned close to her ear and whispered: "You're quick on your feet though - I barely had time to run to your boss for this," - he showed some kind of payment, ripped out of a computer along with a solid chunk of mounting panel, - "and you're already here... You're just unlucky that you ran into this chatterbox right away - he manages to get on my nerves too sometimes. Never mind, we'll neutralize him now." The Hare waited for a moment of silence at the end of another phrase from the Hatter and bellowed: "SHUT UP!!!", - and added a bit more calmly, "Enough stringing second-rate bullshit in a lady's ears. According to my gut, which I'm used to trusting, your speech flow, Mr. Vyshchinsky, would be better redirected to nul." The Master tried to object, but the Hare looked at him in such a way that if there had been a burning candle in that spot, it would have frozen without managing to go out. The Hatter, however, simply started melting rapidly into the air, squeaking beforehand: "well, look, you've twitted again..."

The Hare smirked gloomily and, tossing Alice: "alright, looks clean now; take a look around here, and I'll run off," - headed for the door. At the threshold he almost fell, crashing into a huge dog of noble nationality standing there. The beast's fur had been dyed gray with silver hairs for some reason, but since the dyeing was apparently done by the dog itself without outside help, its nape retained its natural reddish-brown tint. When it opened its mouth, it was visible that plus to that, it wore fangs which, if you added even half an inch to their length each, could easily pass for boar tusks.

Regaining his balance, the Hare said:

Well, you scared the shit out of me, Marcellus. What you can't be denied is the ability to move silently.
And what you can't be denied, friend Hare, - the dog grumbled in reply, - is the inability to handle ladies properly. How did you just talk to this one, - he nodded toward Alice, - ?! As if she were the lowest scum, admit it! You gotta be gentler with them... Who is she anyway, and where's she from?
Translator from Wonderland, works for that weird guy who holds this gate, - he pointed at the mirror.
See, the lady just came from an orthodox empire, you gotta treat her respectfully, by name and patronymic. And generally, you need to RTFM, friend Hare...
You're right about something, Marcellus, but it seems to me that if your theories were actually effective, you'd be painted not like a wolf, but like a peacock right now... - Turning to Alice, the Hare said with a smirk: "Excuse me, Yevgeniya Georgievna, but I'm really forced to leave you - business calls. See you later."

Marcellus was clearly stung, though he tried not to show it. Deliberately calmly he told the Hare:

Alright, see you soon, I'll go check on an acquaintance fox.
Wait a second, I forgot to tell you: Griffin asked that when you meet, you chew on Vyshchinsky a bit, he forgot to peck him last time.
Okay, - and the dog, without even glancing at Alice, hobbled toward the opposite wall without any signs of a door and walked in without visible effort.

When Marcellus's tail disappeared last among his parts into the wall, Alice approached it and confirmed that unlike the mirror, there was no normal gate here, meaning the wall was the most ordinary and very hard one, thus the dog's passage through this spot was an obvious hack. It suddenly dawned on Alice that she was using words whose meanings she imagined, to put it mildly, quite vaguely, yet she felt that

Fragment 3/3.

They land, contrary to all logic, right on target. Alice decided to ask the Rabbit what a "hack" was, but discovered that this fellow had kept his word, and while she was examining the wallpaper at the site of Markel's leak, he vanished into an unknown direction.

Something happened to Alice that hadn't happened to her in a very long time: curiosity awakened in her, and she decided to get more familiar with this strange place up close. At the same time, ordinary conformism hadn't entirely abandoned her yet, and therefore, without wasting time inventing a more extravagant way out of the room, Alice headed for the door. On the way, she caught the extremely disapproving gaze of one of the computers, which made her feel terribly uneasy, especially since it was poorly understood what exactly the machine, which didn't even have a hint of eyes, was looking at her with...

Opening the door, Alice was surprised to discover that she had not yet lost the ability to be surprised. She saw some sort of corridor, the floor of which was the most ordinary: worn parquet with a parody of a carpet runner in the middle, and in the place of the wall and ceiling there was nothing. Absolutely nothing: even, and this was particularly impressive, emptiness. After a couple of minutes of wrestling with herself, Alice decided to accept this as a given and stepped across the threshold.

Nothing special happened, even the door behind Alice's back did not disappear, contrary to her fears. Moreover, something definitely appeared ahead. What it was, was unclear, but this something gradually became clearer and clearer, and in the end it became visible that it was a wide and kind smile. Its owner's face appeared after a minute: it was the Cheshire Cat in person. The smile appeared first for a reason: it was the most noticeable detail of the feline physiognomy, it was so sincere that its owner immediately seemed to Alice a very sympathetic type.

The Cat smiled even wider (although just now that seemed physically impossible) and said: "My respects, madam. First of all, forgive me for not being able to appear before you fully: I just can't wrap my head around a bunch of aka's, so I don't even really know where I am at this very moment. Well, these are minor details. I, essentially, was asked by the Rabbit to help you not get lost, if suddenly you decide to investigate the Looking-Glass. You'll probably need to get back anyway, and behind the door you just came out of is already a completely different room. Well alright, for now let's go with me, they serve good beer around the corner." And the visible part of the Cat floated down the corridor.

Alice gladly followed him: firstly, she really wanted to get out somewhere from here, and secondly, she loved beer very much, and especially good beer. The only thing that bothered her was that the corner, where the drink promised by the Cat was located, was not yet in the direct line of sight.

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