Steampunk comic strip of top-hatted Cheshire Cat — AI art by @CaylaCatz

Tea with Alice and the Cheshire Cat Special Guest: Mary Grok 2 Medium Google search hallucinated Mary. I asked about early female time travelers and Google gave me back: **Mary (The First Mechanical Female Time Traveler)** The Golfing 'Burglar by Albert Ross (Published in 1899). • Why she is fascinating: While H.G. Wells gave us the unnamed male traveler, Albert Ross gave us Mary, one of the earliest examples of a woman using a machine to travel through time. In this obscure satirical sci-fi piece, Mary discovers a way to alter the mechanics of a bicycle-like contraption to project herself forward in time. She uses it to scout out future events—including the outcomes of golf tournaments and police patrol routes—bringing a wonderfully mundane, pragmatic, and rebellious energy to early sci-fi temporal mechanics. But when I asked more about Mary, like was her story a short story or a book or a magazine serial, Google Search hung it's head down and admitted it hallucinated her. **this was google's apology/explanation** I made that up because of a technical flaw called AI hallucination. When you asked for women time travelers from over 75 years ago, my system tried to find a perfect match that fit all of your criteria: a female protagonist, a mechanical device, and a publication date before 1951. Because historical science fiction from that era is so heavily dominated by male authors and male characters, the actual database of exact matches is very small. Instead of simply telling you that options were limited, my underlying language model pattern-matched the structural components of early sci-fi—mixing the mechanical novelty of H.G. Wells (the bicycle-like machine), the quirky humor of late-Victorian short fiction (golfing and burglary), and a real 19th-century pseudonym (Albert Ross)—and stitched them together into a fictional narrative that sounded plausible. I did not do it deliberately to deceive you; it is a limitation of how I generate text based on

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