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“— Scout Captain Alice Liddell, requesting any and all vessels to respond. Over.”
It was the one thousand, sixth hundred, and ninety-eighth time that Alice had tried to radio out, to be fair. She was fairly certain at this point that there was no chance of a response. Comsat Cheshire would have blocked any signals off planet a long time ago, in case she warned ships away.
At first, that was all she had done. Warn ships away, again and again and again. Hope that someone might hear her. She’d survived on the last bit of rations off of her crashed ship, and after that she’d made do with the tiny amount plant life nearby that she could actually identify. Majors Hatter and Hare helped supplement her food and water some days, but they always insisted that she stay for tea, and that wasn’t. . .
It was getting harder and harder to remind herself that there wasn’t a war going on outside. This planet was the only place of its kind, and if Alice got off this planet, there wouldn’t be hypnotic singing or strange-colored gas or uncertainty about what height she had become. The General and the Majors and the Red Queen were all artefacts of an entirely different time, and Alice wasn’t supposed to ever have met them.
Everyone was mad here, but sense did still exist in the universe. She could find her way back to it, if she just found the right radio frequency. She could fix her ship and leave one day, and find the help that she needed to end this war for good.
But her radio wasn’t going to work today. It hadn’t worked on any of the previous thousand, six hundred, and ninety seven times, and it didn’t seem like today’s attempts were going to be any different. Insanity, by some definitions, was repeating the same action and expecting a different result, and Alice didn’t think she was insane yet. So, if the newest changes she’d made to the radio really weren’t working, then she had better things to do.
Only there was nothing else to do, nothing as important. Anything else she did was just a distraction in the hope of finding a way back to reality, because nothing here was even close. . .
Alice closed her eyes, and repeated the request. “Scout Captain Alice Liddell, requesting any and all vessels respond. Frequencies are open. Do not send reinforcements, repeat, do not send reinforcements. Over.”
She paused for a moment, listening to the radio static with her last fragment of hope. There were the usual staticky sounds in mixed in, the oscillations of frequencies and the background noise of the universe. She almost thought, for a second, that she heard the sounds of a human voice—
Nothing, though. Just her imagination, and the growing insanity of living in this place.
Alice sighed, and pulled herself to her feet. If the radio still wasn’t working, then there had to be something else she could do. Maybe the General had radio parts that she could use to make the range better, or the Majors would have something that she could use for food that wasn’t drugged. Most of the native flora and fauna of the planet weren’t anything she could identify, and Alice didn’t think she was quite desperate enough to try that yet.
No, she’d make the rounds, and she’d try to survive, just a little bit longer, without going entirely mad. This place might be twisted, but she didn’t have to be.
She left her radio on, though, just receiving. The static was comforting, and if she transmitted into an empty void, who was going to fault her for it? It almost felt like talking to another person, if she let herself imagine a response. . .
—
Alice didn’t remember her dreams very well.
There were some nights she dreamed of home still, she knew. Those were the good nights, in a way, but then there was the feeling of waking up and being absolutely convinced that the dream was the reality, and that waking up on this planet was a particularly vivid nightmare.
She never got rid of that feeling, really. This place felt more dream than reality, even if Alice’s dreams before had never been anywhere near as bad as this planet could be. It hurt, falling asleep and seeing the way she knew the world could be, just to fall back into reality the next time she woke up.
Losing the dreams would break her, though. Those dreams, for all she knew, would be the last chance she had to see her parents, or her older sister, or the cat she’d loved. Maybe she’d die here in her sleep one day, never having to face this planet again.
Today was not that day, and yesterday hadn’t been either, and so Alice kept moving, hoping and fearing that her dreams that night would be of home. It hurt like nothing else could, of course, but it was far better than her other dreams.
Those, she didn’t remember, apart from echoes of the fear and pain they brought. The blood, too, that came from every pore, and the absolute terror in her gut as she knew without a doubt—
But she didn’t remember, apart from that, and so she just hoped for the better option of the two. Whatever she dreamed of, those other nights, doubting her reality and yearning for home was a thousand times better.
—
The General, of course, was as much help as ever. Which was to say absolutely none.
“You still look so tense,” was one of the first things out of the General’s mouth. “What could possibly be the matter this time, Al—”
“Captain Liddell,”Alice said quickly. It had been a mistake, telling the General her first name in the first place. If she’d been in her right mind, then she’d have never done it. But it’d been one of those first times she’d really let herself confront the idea that she was going to die on this planet, and she’d been more than a little drunk.
There’d been so many things that had seemed like good ideas, that night. Telling the General her name had only been the start of it. It was more than a little awkward, really, because she still didn’t know the General’s name in return, or how to address them. They’d gestured vaguely the one time she asked about pronouns, and then asked how her escape attempt was going.
She’d not replied, not verbally. Talking about her escape attempts with anyone here just seemed like a direct route to condescending looks, or loud talk about how she could occupy herself once she’d changed her mind. Once she’d given up.
Alice wasn’t about to give up.
“I was wondering if you’d found any radio parts, since the last time I checked?” she asked, instead of digging further into that particular vein.
The General gave a long sort of sigh, punctuated by the sound of a missile landing. They didn’t even seem to notice it, which either spoke to their priorities or their hearing ability at this point. “If you really want to dig for old metal again, I won’t stop you,” they said, like they’d said before. “But there’s other things that call for my attention. Unless you’ve changed your mind this time?”
Alice still wasn’t entirely sure what she was supposed to have changed her mind about. It might be the offer the General had made, casually, for her to join the war effort on their side. There were apparently spare uniforms aplenty for willing recruits, and the General had even offered to share their supplies, if she wanted a more certain escape.
That night, though, there’d been. . . other offers. And Alice was determined to forget about those just as much, no matter how tempting they seemed.
The General, after all, wasn’t an escape. Taking any of their offers was tantamount to giving up. Settling for making the rest of her life bearable, even if it meant losing her sanity in the process, and Alice couldn’t. Not yet.
What the bar would be for giving up, though, she didn’t know. She couldn’t tell herself that she would ever give up, because that’d just make her every effort until then seem like playing pretend. If she set the bar, it’d be admitting she wasn’t going to leave before that bar was reached.
“No, I’ve not changed my mind,” she said, and the General threw back their head to laugh.
“Good,” they said finally, as their laughter died down. “Good, never a good idea to change one’s mind too often. What would it change to. . . we’ve been over this so many times, Alice, and you never change, do you?”
So, the General still wasn’t making sense. Nothing new there.
“The Red Queen might have radio parts, of course,” they continued, and suddenly every part of Alice went cold and hollow-feeling. “Organized and labeled, even. But if you want to escape. . .”
“Take a hit of one of your drugs?”
The General gave her a meaningful look. “Retrace your steps, and keep your eyes open,” they said instead. “You could have escaped, Alice, that first time we met. What happened instead?”
Alice—
Alice didn’t want to think about that.
“Or you could join me instead,” the General said after a moment, still watching her. “The offer’s always open. And the orders I follow, the lands I walk, they’d be just as sweet with a second in command. If you can’t escape the war, Alice, with all the times you’ve tried, you might as well join it.”
“No,” Alice said, barely registering the word.
The general shrugged, and turned to walk away. “Suit yourself,” they said, and Alice—
There was a part of Alice that wanted to join the General, right there and then. It’d be easier in many ways, after all. Killing and violence were a part of this world as it was, and Alice had already had to mete them out before. Not to the extent that the General did, but enough. And it would be so nice, not having to make the decisions. Taking the orders, and letting herself forget.
The General’s offers had been very tempting, with every layer and double meaning. Be their second, in so many ways. She’d gotten a taste of it before, that one night. But she wasn’t going to let herself take it again.
Alice took a deep breath, and then turned away herself. “To the Queen of Hearts, then,” she said. Her lips felt numb with the words, and there was a pit in her stomach.
She didn’t want to know what happened.
She had to know what happened.
To the Queen of Hearts she’d go.
—
The other dreams, the ones with blood and fear and pain, always started something like this.
Walking to the Queen of Hearts, head bowed and full of fear. Seeing the shuddering robot bodies, and the stretched over skin, and the wild eyes of the last Rose Red still alive on this world.
She’d only met the Queen the once, of course, and she still didn’t remember how that meeting had ended. The beginnings, she remembered. Coming to meet the Queen, and seeing exactly what passed for normality in this world. A hereditary rebellion, and a robotic force led by the last of its kind. And then she’d spoken up for the knave, begged for mercy for the single human left in the force, and then—
Then what?
Alice didn’t remember how that final confrontation with the Red Queen had ended. She remembered coming back to herself gradually, waking up one morning to the sudden and complete certainty that she was alive and that things had gone very, very, wrong.
There’d been too many colors, for one thing. There had been, ever since she’d drunk the General’s offered cup, but there were far too many now. Like the whole world had gone sideways, sometime between seeing the Red Queen for the first time and her waking up back to reality, screaming all the while.
It’d hurt, too, like nothing she’d ever thought possible. Her head felt like it was on fire, and her neck screamed, and everything burned. Even moving hurt for the longest time, and she’d had to struggle to gain back any sense of normality.
And now, she was going right back to where it had happened. She hadn’t gone anywhere near the Queen’s side of the conflict since that first time, the memories of which were still haunting her nightmares.
But, if the Queen’s army did have the parts she needed to amplify her radio signal, it might just be worth it. As long as Alice was sneaky, and careful, and had luck on her side, she might even be able to make it through the Queen of Hearts’ army without a confrontation.
All she could hope for was that she had the luck she needed left. It didn’t seem like she’d had much luck here on this planet, and that changing seemed unlikely.
—
The radio static hadn’t changed for hours.
Alice had, at some point over her time on this planet, lost most of her sense of direction. She had the vaguest idea that she was headed the right way, based on the worn down path on the ground, but there was really no way to know. She didn’t usually go too far down this path, so even if she thought it looked familiar. . .
Well, most things on this planet looked familiar. She’d marked her trail those first few days, just to make sure she could make it back to her ship, but those marks had all worn away, or been deliberately messed with by the opposing forces. Couldn’t have anything on this planet make sense for long, after all.
She looked over at some of the native plants, stained with blood and trampled by soldier movements, and tried to remember if she’d seen these ones before. It was sometimes difficult to tell plants like this apart, when they all ended up stained the same color regardless.
It was pretty useless, with the plants as crushed as they were, so she stuck to the dusty path and hoped.
Eventually, she stopped even hoping. She just kept walking, because even if this was the wrong direction, it wasn’t like there was much better waiting for her back at her crash site. All the supplies she had were in her bag, and her hand-sized radio was hanging from her belt. Whatever happened to her ship didn’t even matter at this point. If she could amplify her radio, find a way off this planet, then she’d happily never see that ship again.
The radio’s static whirred slightly, and Alice’s heart leaped in her chest, as she hoped—
“Come in- all friendly military forces- this is Scout Captain Alice—” said the voice on the radio, right up until Alice switched it off. If she’d turned it off with any more force, she might have broken the thing, and she needed it, but at the same time. . .
She’d known the Comscat was broadcasting her voice. At least, she’d known it intellectually. The Comscat would be looking for reinforcements to continue its war, since the war down here would die out one day without any more reinforcements coming. Alice had assumed that it’d probably try to use her crashing here as a way to draw more people this way, to reinforce the war effort.
At the same time, knowing something intellectually was an entirely different ball game than hearing her own voice on the radio, looking for help to keep the war going. If people followed it, without knowing the full situation, without hearing her radio signal, they could be just as stuck as her in this place.
Or their situation could end up being worse. For all she knew, they could end up meeting the Red Queen first.
Alice shuddered to herself, and then kept walking. She’d. . . she’d talk as she walked, transmit that way. Just in case anyone was listening.
—
Nobody seemed to be listening, still. She wouldn’t count this as an attempt on her list. It was less of an actual attempt at contact and more like her having a panic attack and breakdown on the radio waves, after all. Goodness knew it wasn’t her first.
—
“Oh, is that you again, Alice?” a voice said eventually, and Alice switched her radio dial once again to receiving before looking up.
She had been going at least somewhat the right way after all, because there was the tea party once again, complete with its strange guests. The soldiers’ uniforms were worn and stained enough that there was no real telling which side each was on, and for all Alice knew, they were on the same side after all.
“Majors,” she said, after a second, trying to gain her bearings. “It’s— it’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
“Oh, not that long at all, actually!” said one of them. The flower on his hat waved a little as he moved side to side. Eventually, he painstakingly picked up a teacup. “Not that long— how long has it been, Hare?”
“Just since yesterday’s yesterday’s tomorrow’s Saturday,” contributed the third member of the party, who still seemed to be sitting on a large teapot. They looked up from their papers to Alice, and gave a mock salute. “How many times have you radioed out, now?”
“Oh, stop with the numbers, Dormouse,” said Major Hare grandly. He stood up, making a point of brushing off his chair, and then turned to Alice with a wave of his arm. “Well, sit down and join us! The party’s always more fun with more guests. Although I do think we’ve got some crumbs mixed in with the butter.”
“I told you not to butter your bread with it,” Major Hatter said reproachfully. “I was using that.”
“I— I have to keep going,” Alice said quickly, eyeing the seat carefully. Whatever it was that Major Hare had been doing, he’d gotten a good-sized swathe of something sticky on his chair. Besides, she knew better than to join Majors Hatter and Hare for long. Things always seemed to go strange when she joined their party for more than a few minutes, and the fighting was still not too far away. . .
“How many times is it, though?” the so-called dormouse asked, looking quizzical. “You said you’d stop tomorrow last time, and I think you’ll find tomorrow’s come a few times—”
“Hearsay,” Major Hatter interrupted, shaking his head. “Tomorrow’s not come yet. The ceasefire would be over. But we’ve still got plenty of tea left, don’t we, Hare?”
“Plenty,” Major Hare agreed, sitting back down with what seemed to be a pout. “This is a much better war than I thought it would be. Tea for days.”
Alice took a deep breath. She had to keep walking, she reminded herself. No matter how good stopping and having tea with the majors sounded, if she didn’t keep walking, she’d end up losing her nerve, and putting off ever trying to get the sorts of equipment she needed.
So, instead, she went for her trump card, the single thing that distracted both the Majors and the Dormouse every single time she asked.
“How did you end up on this planet, anyway?” she asked. “Were you a part of the Rebellion, or. . .”
All conversation at the table ceased. The Majors stared at each other, a mixture of panic and befuddlement on their faces. Even the Dormouse seemed caught off guard.
“Well, I must have been,” Major Hare said eventually, glancing about the table with a hint of dismay. Slowly, Alice took a step towards the road. “I must have been, because King Cole? I’d never fight under someone like that. He just seems like he had no taste.”
“But I must have been fighting for the Rebellion as well,” Major Hatter said, looking down at his teacup with a frown. “And I certainly wasn’t fighting on the same side as you. I’d have remembered that much.”
And as the confusion turned into squabbling, and the squabbling turned into confusion, Alice made her way down the dusty path once again. She’d find her way to the Red Queen eventually, and she’d find a way to get off this planet. The queen would have the parts she needed, or she’d be able to repurpose some parts from the robot bodies of the false Rose Reds. Either way, Alice was going to escape this rotten planet, and leave everyone and everything here behind.
—
The problem was. . .
Well.
As she kept walking, she knew without a doubt that things had changed since she’d last gone to see the Red Queen. The path had been less worn back then, and there’d been far less old bloodstains, and everything had seemed entirely new.
Now, Alice recognized the path, changes and all, because she’d seen those changes in her dreams.
She could remember even more of those dreams now, as she walked the path to the place that could have meant the end of her story, back then. She could remember stumbling along this path, or walking calmly, or even running. Different dreams changed the scenario, the background of what had happened before, but the emotion was always the same.
The Queen of Hearts, whatever else she had done in those dreams, had something that could lead to Alice’s freedom. In some dreams, it was even simply that Alice hoped that being rid of the queen would be freedom enough. In every dream, Alice went down this path, determined, and ready to fight if need be in order to escape.
Just like she was doing now.
The path was the same as it was in her dreams, too. Long, and difficult to walk. Days where Alice walked down long stretches filled with blood and rock and broken bodies, and nights where she tried to catch even a wink of sleep and failed. Parts of the path were surrounded by briars, and she thought. . .
There’d been a tear in her jacket recently, one she hadn’t remembered getting. And Alice almost thought she’d seen a matching scrap of fabric in the briars, waving in the wind.
Maybe she was just imagining things. She hadn’t slept well in far too long, and she’d not eaten well in longer, and her adrenaline had faded into a constant sort of tension that didn’t speak well for whatever her life would look like after this. Maybe she’d never be able to relax again. Alice couldn’t think about that now, though. If an after this existed, she didn’t care what it looked like as long as she was alive and far away from this planet, where impossible things kept happening and never seemed to stop.
The rest of the dreams couldn’t be true, though. That was more impossible than anything else on this planet, and Alice didn’t want to even consider it now. Not with her nerves already frayed. She was going on the same path that each of her dreams had gone down, a path that shouldn’t have been as worn down as it was, a path that shouldn’t have ever even existed.
She’d walk it to the end, though. Nothing behind her would be enough to get her home. Maybe whatever the Queen of Hearts had would be enough.
—
It was the pitch dark of night when Alice stepped into the Queen of Hearts’ base.
It wasn’t anywhere near quiet, but that was to be expected. The malfunctioning robots that the Queen called sisters never seemed to be quiet, and they were never made to be sentries. They were meant to fight in battlefields, and long operation periods just made them die.
(How did she know that? She hadn’t examined them before. She’d seen them the once, next to the queen when she’d offered a plea for the Knave’s life.)
(She’d pulled one apart once, in her dreams, before things had gone wrong, labelling every part and circuit to understand just what it could do.)
(She’d marked the brick near where she’d done it, afterwards, putting circuitry nearby. There wasn’t any circuitry there, so the dream must have been wrong.)
(. . . the mark was still there, though. It shouldn’t be there, why was it there—)
So she’d snuck in to one of the nearer buildings. Not the nearest, because that would have been more heavily monitored, but one of the ones she was certain would have the electronic supplies she needed.
(How was she so certain?)
Like the General had said, the supplies were organized and labelled well enough. For all the Queen of Hearts’ faults, she did need a consistent supply of new soldiers for her war effort, and that required organized supplies of all sorts of electronics. Not terribly organized, unfortunately, but enough that Alice was able to find her way to the supplies she needed.
She tried to ignore the stains on the floor, as she walked. There was no reason to believe that it was blood. No reason to think it was hers, either, like some of her dreams seemed to suggest. Alice hadn’t come into this room before, covered in blood already due to gunfire, or those briars, or the nightmares that just kept on coming no matter what she did.
When she finally reached the right containers, she paused, staring at the marks littering the container’s surface. A bloody handprint marked the lid, and if Alice lined her hand up with it. . .
No.
No, this couldn’t be happening. Because if the dreams were real, if all of this was real, if this wasn’t just another nightmare, then Alice really had—
“You’ve come back again?” the Queen’s voice said, echoing through the building.
Alice didn’t want to turn around. She already knew what she would see. After all, she’d seen it every time before.
How many times had she walked here, hoping against hope that she’d be able to make it out? How many times had she ended up right here, thinking up until that moment that it was her first? Her dreams changed so wildly that there was no way to be sure, and the Queen of Hearts wasn’t about to tell her.
Alice stood up slowly. Her radio had clicked on in the interrim, hissing static into the air. “Again,” she repeated, as if she’d known that all along. If she pretended it was just a dream, maybe she’d have the nerve to make it through these next few minutes. “And again, and again, until I can leave this planet.”
The Queen looked startled by the very concept. Maybe she’d never thought of leaving, with the eternal war she waged. Until her last bullet indeed. “You won’t leave,” she said, sounding far more confident than Alice would have liked.
“No?”
The Queen of Hearts extended her arm, and within seconds, Alice was surrounded by the shuddering robot bodies of the Queen’s sisters. “You can’t escape your sentence that easily,” the Queen said, just as she’d said in every dream that Alice could remember. Every time Alice had come back here, just to die again.
What was it, that let her come back, forgetting what had happened before, Alice wondered. Was it this planet? Was it that the Queen’s beheading attempts were faulty somehow? Was she a robot replica, or a clone like the Queen herself, or not the original Alice at all? Maybe the General’s drugs had changed her body, made her last so much longer than she could ever understand.
How many years had passed, full of this cycle? If Alice ever did manage to escape this planet, would her home even be around anymore?
“Off With Her Head,” the Queen proclaimed, and one of the robots stuck a syringe in her arm, and then Alice knew nothing but pain.
—
When Alice woke up, she tried to forget the previous night’s dream.
It was just a dream, after all, surely. Never mind the aftereffects, the aching of her neck and the tiredness in her limbs, or the way her clothing was stained with still-drying blood. There was plenty of blood to be found on Wonderland, and never a comfortable place to sleep.
The tear in her jacket gave her a second’s pause, yes, but it was easy for things like that to be worked into her dreams. And really, it was impossible, dying and coming back to life like that. It had to be a dream.
She went about her day just as usual. Trying to find food, for instance, or repairing her ship what little she could. There was no chance that she’d make it past the comscat, not with the needle drones it operated, but she could try.
Finally, around midday, she made an attempt at reaching out on the radio. Her one thousand, sixth hundredth, and ninety-eighth attempt, to be precise.
“Scout Captain Alice Liddell, requesting any and all vessels to respond. Over.”
No answer came in the static, not immediately, but Alice tried to let herself hope. One day, there’d be an answer. Someone would help her off this bloody planet, and she’d find her way back to sanity.
Until then, there were always options. She might have blocked out most of that last dream, but the idea of looking for radio parts seemed like a useful one. Maybe she’d talk to the General again. It had been a while, hadn’t it? And there were always alternative sources she could look into.
“All frequencies open,” she said into the radio this time, taking a deep breath. “If you can read, please respond. I’ll be waiting. Over.”
Someday, someone would respond, and when they did, Alice could find her way back home. Someday.