The Alice Experiment

B. Longear White
Deepwarren 2B
Wonderland Estates

The Right Honorable Jack Hart
H.M. Ministry of Intertemporospatial Affairs
Croquet Grounds Hall, Capitol

Dear Jack:

After the way everyone let me take the blame for the whole Alice thing, I really should let you go ahead with it, old boy.  But you tried to lessen my punishment at least, and in spite of everything the good of Wonderland is still dear to my heart.  So, for Wonderland, and for you, I'll try just once to warn you.  I suggest you listen.
I can certainly understand why you underestimate the humans who live on Base Plane.  Don't you remember that I'm the poor sod H.M. Government sent there in the first place?  I've been there.  I've seen what uninspired lives they lead in that place, where the power of the mind can only change reality slowly, and at terrible effort.
They do seem such dull, unimaginative creatures.  Don't I know it?  Even Alice herself appeared so.  
I searched for someone like her for months, Jack.  Months!  Looking among the high and mighty of that cold, unfriendly world.   Searching among their scientists, among their government officials, among the brightest and best-educated humans, and the only one I could find with a spark of the power we sought was a deranged mathematician and amateur photographer with a prurient interest in--
Well, we won't go into that.
But I'd given up, Jack.  I'd completely given up, and I was on my way back home, when I saw one of that mathematician's friends, a child, sitting on a sunny bank of grass and staring off at the sky, lost in a daydream.  She looked small, and harmless, and the light on her face made her seem more fit for our soft and changeable world than for that sad, cruel, hard world where she had been born.
The crystal in my watch sparkled too when I got near her.  I looked at it, I looked at her, and I knew she held the power I'd crossed so many dimensions to find.  The power to remake our entire world.  Not only that, but it would be a kindness, a pure and absolute act of mercy, to remove her from that world and bring her home to ours.  So I decloaked and tried to catch her attention.
You'd think a six foot-- well, I'll admit it, five-eight-- white rabbit in a waistcoat ought to catch a human's attention on Base Plane, where magic is so rare.  You'd think so, wouldn't you?  But do you know I had to run up and down in front of her seven times and practically shout "Oh dear, I'm late!" into her ear before she even saw me?  
As the Author is my witness, I thought the detector crystal had to be wrong!  I thought she was such a dullard that I'd have to go kick her in her tailless rump and yell "Hey, kid, chase me!" before I'd get a rise out of her.  Once again, I was ready to come home empty-pawed, in despair.
But for a Reality Commando, a mission is a mission.  I stuck to my assignment, stamped my feet, and shouted "I'm late!" at the top of my lungs.  Finally the little twit deigned to notice me.
I ran away, and she followed me through the interdimensional slideway just as we'd planned.  For once things were going well.  I was alien to her and she'd followed me anyway.  She had to have the power we needed, to be brave enough and original enough to do such a thing.
So we fell through the slideway, and arrived here, and I ran off, making sure to let her see me and follow.  But I looked over my shoulder, and she was gone!
"Where's our subject?" Hatter asked me.
"She was right there a moment ago.  I can't imagine where she might have gone."  I was almost in tears.
"You can't imagine.  None of us can.  That's the whole point, isn't it?" Hatter said bitterly.  But then his own watch jumped in his pocket.  He pulled it out, looked at it, and went pale.  
"By the Author!  We've got massive spatial distortion in Sector Twelve!"
"What's that mean?"
"Something's changing size, back and forth, in massively unpredictable fashion.  Look, you go warn Her Majesty and the court.  I've got to find the source of this problem before it tears our plain of existence to shreds!"
Poor Hatter.  He was our best scientist, once.
Now, I swear, as I swore at my court-martial, that I ran to you then and begged you to end the experiment.  I told you we couldn't use this human child to reshape our world; that even now, undirected and unaware, her imagination was so powerful it threatened to destroy our entire universe.  I told you that, Jack.  I swear I did, even though you can't remember a bit of it.
You do remember the croquet game though, don't you?
"My Author, she's turned the mallets into repulsive pink birds, and all the balls into little spiny insectivores," I whispered to you.  "This has to stop, right now!  Her slightest whim can distort all of our reality.  We can't harness her power.  It's just too dangerous!"
And what did you say?  "Oh, never mind, White; I'm sure we can handle a few birds and bug-eaters."
Hah!  Handle a few birds and bug-eaters!  The hedgehogs keep burrowing into my living room, and with no natural enemies, the flamingoes are everywhere.  I can see a dozen of those repulsive birds wading around in the frog pond even now.  An ecological disaster unprecedented in the history of Wonderland, that's what we have to thank your "few birds and bug-eaters" for.  Sorry if I'm bitter, but how did you get off free after such a massive error in judgment while I got sent into exile?
But I forgive you, Jack.  After all, being turned into a playing card is pretty rough.  I think of you politicians as rather two-dimensional in any case, but becoming literally two-dimensional had to be extreme even for you.  
I can forgive you if your judgment wasn't the best for a few years after the disaster.  And Author knows you had a lot of other things on your mind in those days.  We had a randomization plume spreading across the countryside for hundreds of miles beyond the site of the imagination meltdown.  We had rebuilding, cleanups, disaster relief efforts, and refugee camps.  We had characters from the sequel popping up in the backdraft of the reality inversion matrix.  Everyone here was far too busy to worry about one poor rabbit, unjustly convicted of criminal negligence.
I guess even I was playing my part to help.  I suppose someone had to take the blame for the disaster, in order to preserve H.M's government.  And I suppose considering the fallout and all, being exiled to other planes of existence for a few years wasn't such a bad thing-- although sending me to that beastly Watership Down, as a female no less, was unspeakably cruel of you.
So now things are clean again, and nobody's a playing card any more.  So somehow the whole disaster ended up giving us some kind of stability in our world; not that we know how, but at least our universe hasn't threatened to fade away since that day in 1865 when Alice told that mathematician about her "dream."  So we had a disaster that nearly erased us all, but in some strange way it all worked out for the best.  Perhaps the Alice Experiment was a good idea after all.
Hell it was.  We were lucky, Jack.  We had a meltdown that almost destroyed us, but we got away with it because and ONLY because the Author's own luck watched over us.  You know that as well as I do.
Jack, I never thought you were especially bright, but at least I assumed you had the good sense not to play any more with a power that once turned you into a little rectangle of brightly colored pasteboard.  "That Jack, he's dumb, but he's not stupid," I'd say.
And then the other day I heard you were trying to start the whole experiment over again.  By the Author, Jack, have you taken leave of what little mind you still have left?
Oh, yeah, sure, you're running the experiment on Base Plane itself.  You've surrounded it with as thick a layer of rigid, mechanical, invariable reality as you can find.  Those "freeway" things and the machines on them should make enough pointless motion, noise, and stink to drag the humans down and prevent any dangerous outbursts of creativity.  They should lack the peace necessary to completely unleash that Power of Imagination we covet and dread.  
But you're playing with powers mere characters were never meant to wield.  The Author will strike you down for your presumption!  End it now, Jack.  Cancel the hotel block, refund the registration fees, and kill the con while you still can!
You're unleashing the power of imagination, Jack.  That power can change their cold and brutal world, THEIR rigid and cruel world of chemistry, physics, and mindless machines.  Stop, Jack.  Stop a minute and tremble at what the power to change a world as rigid as that could do to our own poor, pliable Wonderland!

				Sincerely,

				B. Longear White, Esq.