Jeff Noon - Automated Alice

"But I am officially dead!" squealed Alice, triumphantly (and rather desperate to make her escape from the Room of Evidence).

"You look very much alive to me," breathed Sniffer.

"I was born in 1852! Which means that I'm one hundred and forty-six years old! Surely nobody can be that old, Doctor Sniffer?"

"You should certainly be extremely dead by now, Alice; but can you prove your age to me? Have you your birth certificate, for instance?"

"I'm afraid not," Alice replied, "but I have this..." She pulled Whippoorwill's lost feather from her pinafore pocket.

"Well, let me investigate it," growled Sniffer, taking the feather from Alice's hand, and then placing it under his microscope. "But this is preposterous!" he then barked, lifting his baggy eye from the lens. "According to my forensic examination, this feather comes from a parrot that was alive in 1860! Either you're an obsessive collector of nineteenth-century avarian accessories, or else you should really have died a long, long time ago."

"Now will you believe me, Doctor Sniffer?"

"But then you must be the very ghost of a girl!"

Alice grabbed the feather from the microscope and then said, "I do feel like the ghost of a girl, actually. I feel like I'm neither here nor there, or anywhere at all, come to think of it!"

"My poor little girl, how very sad that must be." A pair of long, droopy tears were falling from the Doctor's baggy eyes.

"Will you please deliver me to the cemetery, Doctor Sniffer," Alice pleaded, "where I can find my true home."

"Oh very well then! But quickly, child, before the Civil Serpents find me out for doing such a strangeness." Doctor Sniffer then shovelled Alice through the gulping hole in the floor.

And so it was that Alice went sliding down a long chute of darkness.

Through darknesses and darknesses and darknesses, Alice slid; until, eventually, she slid out of the nether end of the chute and straight into a wooden cart that was fixed to the hindquarters of a beastly black mechanical auto-horse. She landed on the top of a mound of large, filled sacks that squelched dreadfully under her weight. Alice didn't want to consider what was inside those sacks, because the smell rising from their contents was quite noxifying! She decided to climb out of the cart, and she would have done exactly that, had not the auto-horse then commenced to gallop off along the road at a terrifying pace, and without any need at all for a driver!

Within five and a half rickety seconds or so, Alice was being driven around a place called Albert Square, where the Town Hall of Manchester magnificently loomed. "I do believe this auto-horse is not a horse at all," she said to herself. "This auto-horse is an auto-hearse! I don't think I want to be delivered to the cemetery just yet!" Alice jumped out of the hearse and cart whilst it was still travelling along at speed. She did slightly scrape her right knee upon landing, but this was a small price to pay for escaping a far-too-early visit to the cemetery! Unfortunately there was a larger price to pay: without her knowledge, Whippoorwill's green-and-yellow feather had escaped her pocket during the fall.

The auto-hearse galloped off around the next corner, leaving the still-alive Alice in Albert Square. It had stopped raining by now and the Square was packed with people enjoying the lunch-timing sunshine. These weren't the kind of people that Alice was used to, of course, because all of them seemed to have an animalized part to their natures. There were several Squirrelmen in the Square; there were also Ostrichmen in the Square. There were also Lama and Goat and Beetle and Cow and Dog and Snake and Trout and Gorilla and Antelope and Sparrow and Puma and Turkey and even Jellyfishmen and women in the square. And all of these mix-ups were feeding their faces with greasy meat pies and slivers of fried potato!

There were also several even stranger creatures that Alice encountered in Albert Square; people jigsawed together with objects. Pianogirls for instance, and Soapboys, Curtaingirls and Wardrobing kids. "Why, everything except for the kitchen sink seems to have become a quite acceptable part of the human body!" Alice was only just thinking this random thought, when what should she notice gurgling through the crowd but a man with a kitchen sink in place of a head! This sunken creature dribbled past Alice, stuffing a sandwich into his plug hole. Alice ran away as fast as she could! (Which wasn't hardly fast enough at all, because of the closely knitted and knotted nature of the crowd.)

Alice had to fairly iron her way between Birdcaging girls and Briefcasing boys and the mutated Spectaclemen joined at the topiary to Newspapering people of bicycle and bone! Alice felt ever so lonely, pushing her way through that crowd of strangely strange strangers, especially when they all seemed to press against her so, and to stare at her so, and to whisper abusive words at her, just so!

As though Alice herself was the strange one!

"The disease that's called Newmonia seems to be troubling nearly everything!" Alice sighed to herself. "So many of these creatures resemble Pablo Ogden's sculptures, and yet they seem to be perfectly real rather than perfectly automated. I suppose I must only do my best to ignore the stares and the whispers, and to continue my search for Whippoorwill and Celia and the five remaining jigsaw pieces. But the police will be searching for Captain Ramshackle; and they will also be searching for me!"

Indeed, Alice did then notice a policedogman growling at the edges of the crowd, so she immediately pushed her way deeper into the tumult of strangeness, hoping to find a breathing space there. But the crowd pushed and brushed and tushed against her so much that Alice was eventually squashed up against a stone statue in the centre of Albert Square. Alice noticed that it was carved into the exact resemblance of Albert Francis Charles Augustus Emmanuel of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha: in other words, Prince Albert, the consort of Queen Victoria of Great Britain. "So this is why they call this place Albert Square," Alice realized: "Prince Albert must have died a long, long time ago, just like I must have died a long, long time ago; after all, we do share the same first syllabub." (A syllabub is, of course, a dessert made from cream beaten with sugar, wine and lemon juice; I really do think that Alice meant to say syllable!) "Alice and Albert," Alice continued to herself; "maybe I was correct when I pretended to Doctor Sniffer that I was dead..."

Alice was so full of sadness at her own demise. "Am I dead, or am I not dead?" she wondered, with a small cry. "And when is a garden not a garden? And is a bean here, or is a bean not here?" Alice was becoming ever so confused with her own beanness.

But Alice quickly shrugged off her confusion, so determined was she to find her way out of this puzzle. She started marching once again through the clinging crowd until she arrived at the Town Hall's grand entrance. Here she encountered a liveried doormandog -- half a man, half a guard dog -- who demanded to know her name and her business. "My name is Alice," Alice replied, "and my business is to retrieve a spidery jigsaw piece that rightfully belongs to me. I believe that the Civil Serpents are keeping it inside the Town Hall."

"I'm afraid I cannot allow you entrance," the doorman-dog growled back; "that would be more than my bone's worth. You have no business here!" And the doormandog growled so fiercely then that Alice was forced to run backwards into the crowd of Newmonia sufferers, through which a whole pack of policemandogs was now snuffling, asking questions of everybody. Alice decided to hide herself behind a rather colourful Umbrellawoman.

"I really am getting nowhere at all," she cried, once hidden. "The future seems to be so completely against me; how can I possibly hope to presently find my past?" Alice then looked up towards the large and impressive clock face that adorned the Town Hall's tower; the time was rushing towards noon. "Oh dear!" Alice added and subtracted to herself. "I must have spent simply hours in the police cell! It's coming up to exactly twelve, and in nearly exactly two hours' time and also nearly exactly one hundred and thirty-eight years ago I should have been present at my writing lesson with Great Aunt Ermintrude!"