Jeff Noon: Automated Alice

Oh dear! Whippoorwill immediately flew out of his cage; his bright feathers made a fan of colours and his screechy voice seemed to fill the room. "Whatever shall I do now?" cried Alice, aloud. "My Great Aunt shall have to have words with me!" The parrot flew all around the room and Alice tried her best to catch hold of his tail feathers, but all to no avail. Finally he flew directly into the grandfather clock's open casing. Alice quickly ran to the clock; she slammed the door shut, trapping the poor parrot inside. The door had a window in it and Alice could see Whippoorwill making a fearful commotion trying to escape. "Now let that be a lesson to you, Whippoorwill," said Alice. She looked up at the clock's face and saw that it was almost ten to two in the afternoon. At precisely two o'clock each day her Great Aunt would come calling for Alice to take her afternoon writing lesson; Alice could not possibly be late for that engagement. (She had not at all bothered to complete yesterday's assignment on the correct use of the ellipsis in formal essays: the truth be known, Alice didn't even know what an ellipsis was, except that it was made out of three little dots, just like this one is...) Despite the young girl's predicament, the two hands of the clock seemed to put a smile on its moon-like face: it was then that Alice found the answer to Whippoorwill's latest riddle, but when she looked through the glass window into the casing all she could see was the blur of the parrot's wings as he flew upwards into the clock's workings.

Whippoorwill vanished!

Alice looked here and there for the parrot, but finding only a single green-and-yellow feather floating down, she decided that she must go into the clock's insides herself. Alice therefore opened up the door and climbed inside. It really was a very tight squeeze inside the clock, especially when the pendulum swung towards her. "That pendulum wants to cut my head off," thought Alice, and then she looked up into the workings to discover where the parrot had got to. "Whippoorwill?" she cried, "where on the earth are you?" But there was no trace of the parrot at all! Alice climbed aboard the pendulum as it swung past her, and then started to climb up it, which is quite a difficult task when you have a porcelain doll called Celia in your hands. But very soon she had reached the top of the pendulum and now her head was pushing against the very workings of the clock, and the tick-locking, tick-tocking seemed very loud indeed! And that naughty Whippoorwill was still nowhere to be seen.

Just then Alice heard her Great Aunt's stentorian voice calling over the clock's tickings: "Alice! Come quickly, girl!" the voice boomed. "It's time for your lesson, dear. I do hope you've done your assignment correctly!"

"Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!" cried Alice. "Whatever shall I do? Great Aunt is early for my lesson! I really must find Whippoorwill. He must be around here somewhere!" And so Alice climbed up the pendulum even further until, with a sudden ellipsis...

Alice vanished.

Now I don't know if you have ever vanished, but if you have, you will know it can be quite a fearsome experience. The strangest thing was this: Alice knew that she had vanished, but, even so, she could still see herself! Imagine that, you know that you've vanished, but you can still see yourself! So then, how is it that you know that you've vanished?

But Alice was far too busy to pay much attention to these thoughts; she was presently rushing down -- at an ever-increasing pace! -- a long tunnel of numbers. The numbers flashed by her eyes like shooting stars in the night, and each number seemed to be larger than the last one. They started out from one-thousand-eight-hundred-and-sixty (which was the number of the present year) and rapidly increased until Alice could no longer see where the count was taking her. Why, to count this far, one would need a million fingers! Ahead of her she could see Whippoorwill flying through the cascade of numbers, until what looked like a very large, and a very angry one-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-eight clamped his numbersome jaws around the ever-so-naughty bird. Alice plummeted forwards (if you can plummet forwards, that is) until she felt herself being eaten up by that very same number.

Down, down, down. Through an endless tubing Alice fell. "Whatever shall we do, Celia?" she said to the doll she still clutched in her fingers, and she wasn't all that surprised when the doll answered, "We must keep on falling, Alice, until we reach the number's stomach."

"I didn't even know that numbers had stomachs," thought Alice, "Great Uncle Mortimer will be most astounded when I tell him this news." When suddenly, thump! thump! thump! down Alice came upon a heap of earth, and the fall was over.

Alice was not a bit hurt: the earth was quite soft, and she jumped up in a moment. She looked around only to find herself standing in a long corridor under the ground. The walls and the floor and the ceiling of the tunnel were made of dirt, and it curved away in both directions until Alice felt quite funny trying to decide which way to go. "Oh Whippoorwill," she cried, "wherever have you flown to?" And then she heard three men approaching around the corridor's bend. She knew it was three men because she could hear six footsteps making a dreadful noise. But what should come around the corner but a rather large white ant! He was quite the same size as Alice and he had on a tartan waistcoat and a pair of velvet trousers. (Although I suppose you can't really have a pair of six-legged trousers: you can have a sextet of trousers -- but that sounds too much like a very strange musical composition.) Dangling between the ant's antennae was an open newspaper which completely obscured his face, and from behind which he could be heard muttering to himself:

"Tut, tut, tut! How dare they? Why, that's disgusting! Tut, tut, tut!" The newspaper was called News of the Mound and if Alice had managed a look at the newspaper's date she would have received a nasty shock, but all her attention was focused on the headline, which read: TERMITES FOUND ON THE MOON! Alice was so puzzled by this news, and the ant was so engrossed in his reading, that they both banged into each other!

"Who in the earth are you?" the ant grumbled, folding up his paper and looking rather surprised to find Alice standing there.

"I'm Alice," replied Alice, politely.

"You're a lis ?" the ant said. "What in the earth is a lis ?"

"I'm not a lis. My name is Alice." Alice spelt her name: "A-L-I-C-E."

"You're a lice!" the ant cried. "We don't want no lice in this mound!"

"I'm not a lice, I'm Alice! I'm a girl."

"Are you now? Then I suppose this might very well be yours?" Upon which utterance the ant produced a tiny piece of crooked wood from his waistcoat pocket. "I found it lying in the tunnel, just a few moments ago."

"Why, yes it does belong to me," cried Alice. "It's a missing piece from my jigsaw!"

"Well take it then, and in future may I ask you to refrain from cluttering up the tunnels with your litter."

"I'm very sorry," replied Alice, taking the jigsaw piece from the ant's grasp. It showed the picture of a single white ant crawling up the stem of a flower. "I shall place this in London Zoo, just as soon as I get back home." And she slipped the jigsaw piece into her pinafore pocket.

"But it's only a picture," sniffed the ant, "not a living creature."

"That's quite all right," Alice replied, "because he's going to live inside a picture of London Zoo. Is that today's newspaper?"

"I sincerely hope it's today's paper! I've just paid three grubs for it."

"But it says that termites have been found on the Moon?"