Lost in Thought, Alice Did Not Immediately Notice...

Lost in thought, Alice did not immediately notice the commotion arising to her right. Looking over, she saw a large hall filled with a haphazard assortment of tables, stands, nightstands, chairs, and stools of every shape and size, surrounded by and occupied by people and beasts whose variety of appearance vastly surpassed the furniture scattered across the room. It was immediately apparent that there were very few ladies among the crowd, and all of them were the center of attention for the circles forming around them. The largest crowd had gathered around a young woman in a silver mask, who was moving swiftly through the hall, bestowing upon the surrounding gentlemen richly meaningful, yet utterly ambiguous glances. The reaction of those favored varied wildly: from a friendly smile to dead fainting—likely either from an excess of emotion or from sheer exhaustion brought on by overspending energy in efforts to draw her gaze. The far wall of the hall was semi-transparent, behind which lurked an innumerable multitude of wistfully hungry eyes, to which the mingling partygoers paid no heed whatsoever.

"Is the beer here?" Alice asked the Cat.

He chuckled and replied, "Good heavens, Alice, this is the famous club run by Annette—that lady right there in the middle of the hall; all the drinks here are strictly virtual. People come here to warm up, not to get plastered. On the other hand, everyone is let in—even Rats..."

Something that clearly fell from somewhere above hit Alice hard on the shoulder, bounced off, and landed on the floor with a clatter. She picked up the object and saw that it was a bar of French "Lux" soap, tied with a pretty pale-golden ribbon and smelling of lavender. The Cat yelped and whispered into Alice's ear: "Let's run for it, or they'll bury you up to your neck in this stuff! And pray it's only this kind, because some might start chucking laundry soap..." Alice grasped the gravity of the threat and bolted forward down the corridor at full speed, trying nonetheless not to veer too close to the missing left wall. However, before running, she did not forget to wrap the fallen soap in a clean handkerchief and slip it into her jeans pocket.

Suddenly, the corridor came to an end, and Alice found herself standing in an ancient pine forest on a fairly wide path that wound away behind the trees. Beside her, the Cheshire Cat began to fade back into view. Having fully materialized, he said, "Well then, we are practically right next to our alehouse,"—he wanted to say something else, but didn't have time: a tremendous crash cut him off.

                 *  *  *

The ground shook beneath their feet, showering the Cat and Alice with pinecones from the nearest tree. A couple of hundred meters ahead, a wall of dust rose into the air. Someone emerged from it and came jogging down the path with a slight limp. As he drew near, it became clear that it was a somewhat battered, but still rather jaunty March Hare. He only noticed Alice when he nearly collided with her. It took the Hare almost a minute to catch his breath, after which he found the strength to nod to the Cat, smile at Alice, and tell her: "Rotten luck, though—you've arrived at the wrong time—look, the triangle collapsed again, took out half the forest, I barely managed to dodge it myself..."

A large jackdaw flew over their heads with a letter in its beak, cawing loudly, "Crisis! Crisis!", which didn't come out very clearly owing to its mouth being full. The Hare spat and grumbled:

"Crisis, crisis... How many times were they told—the triangle is obsolete, high time for a rewrite... And they go: 'Oh, it'll hold, what could be sturdier than reinforced concrete.' It'll hold, sure, it can withstand any drop and won't shatter, only you see, it wasn't supposed to fall down in the first place. And now we've got to restore the woods again, trample all the paths anew..."

"So what actually happened?" the Cat inquired.

"Didn't have time to properly sort it out—you saw it yourself; from the looks of it, Mikola got carried away again distributing those super-capacity fridges they convert for him out of microwave ovens, and failed to notice yet again that his kid unscrewed the mounting nut. So the whole thing came crashing down—the load-bearing chains are rusty, you know, that's our common curse..."

And the Hare uttered a long, untranslatable German curse, the elegance of which not even a barbaric accent could ruin. Alice pretended to blush, and so naturally that the Hare even apologized. The Cheshire Cat decided to ease the tension, pulled two faceted shot glasses filled with some sort of liquid out of thin air, and handed them to Alice and the Hare.

"Cheshirovka," he declared proudly and tossed back a third glass that had appeared out of nowhere. The Hare drained his vessel in three little sips and, with complete nonchalance, took a bite out of the rim of the glass by way of a chaser. Alice figured that if this stuff could be chased with unsalted, non-nutritious glass, then the proof-to-volume ratio posed no immediate threat of a premature hangover, so she downed the shot in a single gulp. One couldn't say she deeply regretted it: while not entirely typical for a lady, she was accustomed to strong spirits, but on the other hand, she was only able to breathe again after swallowing a sandwich with a pickled cucumber materialized by the Cat.

The Cheshire Cat suddenly began to show obvious signs of anxiety. It could hardly have been the effect of the cheshirovka—by all appearances, he had far more experience on the drinking front than Alice, and what she had drank was barely enough to take the chill off... Finally, he said, "Looks like something is wrong with my AKAs—feels like my tail got pinned under the triangle. I'll have to leave you—must go sort it out. As for you, madam, if you decide to linger in the Looking-Glass world, you are most welcome to our local alehouse—only there, none of the cheshirovka for you: boozing doesn't become a lady..." He flashed his widest grin once more, nodded to the Hare, and quickly dissolved into thin air.

"Aye, looks like it's time for us to clear out of here too," the Hare remarked, "it's getting too dusty. Where did you want to skip off to, anyway?" he asked Alice. She expressed a timid desire to get closer to her native empire—the ambiguity of the situation was starting to wear on her. The Hare scratched the back of his head and, without uttering a word, set off down the path. Alice followed him. About three hundred meters later, the path ended, terminating at a massive wooden door standing completely isolated, with no trace of a building around it. Alice made a move to peek behind it, but the Hare cautioned: "Wouldn't advise it. Honestly, even I can't say for sure what awaits you on that side. Right now the main thing is to step through from this side before anything shifts around here..." He opened the door, let Alice through, and stepped in after her.

                 *  *  *

Alice found once again that she had overestimated her habit of dealing with surprises. What she saw simply shocked her. She and the Hare were standing on the street of a great city teeming with buildings, people, and cars. Yet the city looked nothing like those Alice was used to in Wonderland: the houses looked washed and well-kept, the air—despite the abundance of cars—was fresh and clean, and, most noticeably, people's faces lacked that perpetual anxious look so common among citizens of the empire. At the same time, something about the place felt familiar to Alice since childhood. Within a few seconds, she no longer doubted that she was in the eternal city whose streets remember nearly all the great minds that have lived on Earth over the past few centuries, a city impossible to forget once visited, a city where every single house as well as the layout of these houses along streets and boulevards are works of art, and where you wouldn't dream of calling even the tiniest street an alleyway—in short, in Paris.

The Hare waited until Alice recovered her senses and said, "You are quite right, this is the very city. But not for long—we only need to cross over to another gateway just around the corner...", and after a short pause added, "and you must admit, there's nothing quite like this in your Wonderland."

Alice thought about it and answered, "Well, indeed... On the other hand, everything there is so calm and clear, everything is at hand, and triangles don't come falling on your head. And the folks seem somewhat cheerier, too."

The Hare made no answer, but thought to himself that the non-falling of triangles in the empire was largely due to their physical absence. And cheerfulness was an extremely relative concept; a short while later, they received further proof of this.

They were walking along the left side of the street, leaving the Arc de Triomphe behind them. As they passed a small café, a rather respectable-looking gentleman in a grey jacket and white trousers tumbled out the door right under their feet. Struggling to his feet, he rested a hand on the Hare's shoulder and asked him in pure Russian: "Lisshen, Vassya, do you reshpect me?"

The Hare's rather good, if slightly flawed, French—which he had been speaking ever since entering the city—vanished instantly. In the native tongue of the over-imbibed fellow, he delivered a roughly ten-minute lecture on the harms of drunkenness in polite society, referencing his ancestry, as well as the origins of his shoes and necktie. By all accounts, the speech brought about a miraculous cure for the gentleman's alcohol poisoning. At the very least, he quietly apologized—even attempting to do so in French—stepped back into the café, sat down at a table, and began contemplating what he had just heard.

                 *  *  *

The Hare and Alice turned a corner, walked a few steps, and suddenly found themselves in complete darkness. "Aha, seems like we've arrived at Master Bo's. He's always too busy with work and therefore constantly forgets to turn on the light in the hallway," said the Hare. He pushed an invisible door, and Alice discovered that her idea of the Master differed greatly from his actual appearance. Contrary to her expectations, he looked nothing like Grebenshchikov himself: not very tall, rather plump, he wore glasses that gave his face a touch of lightheartedness. Master Bo's business consisted of copying text with a quill pen onto a pen-notebook screen from a sheet bearing the proud title: "The Explanatory Gospel According to Zemleroykin." On the Master's shoulder sat a brightly colored parrot, watching closely as the words were jotted down, occasionally screeching at the top of its lungs: "Enough with the flames, am I the worst of the bunch or what? I agree with what's written here, too!"

Master Bo greeted the newcomers and offered them a seat and some tea from a samovar standing right there. He mentioned that the gate wouldn't open for another fifty minutes, so in the meantime, they had time to relax. At that moment, the parrot snapped out of its self-contemplation and turned its gaze upon Alice. A second later, it was already fluttering around her, jabbering something barely comprehensible. Amidst a heap of unfamiliar jargon, Alice could only make out that the parrot was outraged by the state of affairs in the Looking-Glass world, that Bilbo Baggins ought to be forced to serve in the Wonderland Emperor's guard for what he said, and that he (the parrot) didn't like the rock band "Columbarium" because he'd never heard it.

Bo looked at the parrot with a patronizing smile, as if at a child, while the Hare grew gloomier and gloomier, until finally asking the parrot to interpret the Zen Buddhist koan: "if your friend has a fountain, always look north." Without a second thought, the parrot cobbled together an utterly obscene pun and somehow vanished unnoticed. Right at that moment, a gate opened in the floor—simply a fairly wide circular hatch. The Hare tossed to the Master: "Say hi to the Woodpecker!" and jumped down, calling Alice to follow.

They found themselves in the office corridor right outside Alice's door. Opening it, Alice was nearly knocked off her feet by her krippenshtoffel, showing wild joy over her return. The March Hare waited for the animal's bouncing amplitude to subside and said to Alice: "Well, here you are, back home. And that black beast doesn't look like it'll let you go through the mirror a second time. Oh well—enough weirdness for you. Bye." And before she could even open her mouth, he stepped across the mirror's threshold, something clicked, and Alice saw her own reflection right where it was supposed to be. She sat down at her computer and fell into thought.

Alice was awakened by the thud of something heavy falling from the desk onto the floor. She forced her eyes open and saw the March Hare sitting on a chair by the neighboring computer, gloomily staring at a power transformer lying on the floor. Alice's black mutt, Bobik, sat nearby, eyeing the device with an equally grim look—he clearly disapproved of heavy objects dropping two feet from his nose.

Taking a closer look at the gentleman sitting beside her, Alice realized that he wasn't a hare after all—his ears certainly didn't fit the part, though there was a lot about the man that resembled one. He glanced at her, smiled, and said: "So, you must be Alice. The boss talked a lot about you. Hmm, far too much. But his taste is definitely old-school Soviet—he told me a short haircut suits you. But that's trivia. The main thing is, he asked me to hook up a network on his PC. Heh, kamikaze... Right, forgot to introduce myself. I'm Zaytsev—a programmer; from time to time I pretend to help your naive boss. So there you go. And as for you, you're gonna be my pointessa now."

September 1994

Author's Afterword:

Congratulations to everyone who managed to read this piece all the way to this point. I imagine those who made it through realized that my state of mind while writing it was not entirely sober.

In light of this, I offer my apologies.

I also offer my apologies to those targeted by the jabs in this text. Most of them have a sense of humor, so they are unlikely to take serious offense. And as for those lacking said sense—well, good riddance to them. See Fig. 1.

There is a chance this book will be released in an intro-like format by the group Cold Boot—more detailed info will be provided there.

Until then—good luck to all!

Send your feedback to:
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CopyRight (C) 1994 by Nikit Zykov [ALEF Systems]
Distrib site: ALEF BBS - 19:00-9:00 WD 24h WE, (095)138-2231

P.S. From the Editorial Board:

If anything is unclear, see About...9!
And that's all for now ;)