The Wormhole Wore a Waistcoat

She entered unannounced; no bell, no brass. The aperture, a bureaucratic lapse in Nature’s accounting, permitted transit for the curious, not the wise. Through corridors of warped conjecture, she drifted—unclaimed luggage of a thought experiment. Each particle bowed with procedural discipline; each law maintained protocol under duress. The stars retracted their nominations, preferring anonymity to metaphor. Black holes enacted fiscal policy on mass—levying inertia, taxing spin. She met a moon citing Schopenhauer on surface gravity’s despair. The Queen of Vacuum—resigned—filed formal complaints against causality’s etiquette. No refreshments were served. The Hatter’s discourse, though uninvited, continued: “Time is a misprint. Tea was never meant for relativists.” Just as Alice prepared to file a motion against entropy’s indiscretions, a frequency—unreasonable yet familiar—pierced the vacuum. It had no spatial coordinates, no signature of mass, only a moral urgency disguised as a maternal summons. “Alice—Alice—school,” it said. The voice, inertial and wan, did not beckon—it cross-examined her presence. And just like that, the wormhole relinquished custody. Space, stripped of metaphor, unspooled around her as the stars began to forget their own biographies. She awoke amid textbooks and sky-colored sheets. Time resumed its typographical error. cosmos without name— even gravity forgets how to hold its breath