Jeff Noon - Automated Alice

The policedogmen were left far down below, where they could only pant and growl in frustration. Alice waved goodbye to them, with a smile. Once on the roof of the library, Celia collapsed her extended legs back into a neat porcelain pair, and then re-extended them over the side of the building so that Alice and herself could descend to the road below. Once safely on the ground, Celia folded up her legs to their usual size, and from there the two adventuring girls raced along the Oxford Road towards the University and its underfolded passages...

(I do hope I've remembered that little escapade correctly.)

The Uniworseity; a darkling underworld of glimmers and shimmers, a myriad shadows pointing Alice and Celia towards a laboratory called THE DEPARTMENT OF CHROWNOTRANSDUCTIONOLOGY. Alice knocked on the door and received no answer except for a far-off cawing; she pushed open the door and walked, quite brazenly, into the laboratory.

These are some of the things that Alice and Celia found in there: a whole concoction of scientific apparatus wriggling and steaming and fuming in every single corner of the laboratory; a giant heap of computermites noisily chomping their way through a series of terrifically difficult questions; waves of liquid mystery bubbling along a knot-work of glass pipes, until they all inserted themselves into a large wooden box that rested on the floor; some black lettering on the box's side that said DANGEROUS EXPERIMENT!; a dirty black dishcloth of an old crow that was perching on the box's lid (and wearing a bowler hat, mind!), cawing away to itself, whilst at the same time smoking a meerschaum pipe. "Quark, quark!" rasped the crow, through clouding wreathes of tobacco mist.

But the very worst thing that Alice found in the laboratory was the smell! Oh dear, the smell! It was the stench that can sometimes be emitted from the wrong end of a ghastly meat pie, in the high season.

The crow was tap-tap-tapping on the wooden box's lid with the pipe in her nicotined beak. "It's very smelly in here!" Alice commented to the crow, not expecting any answer, and receiving none, except for a further tippety-tapping. "And I was so hoping to find Professor Gladys Chrowdingler! Alice added.

At which point the crow flopped off the box with a piercing cry, "Quark!" And by the time the bird had landed at Alice's feet, it had turned into a fully grown Crow-woman: an ancient, creased-up crone of a human woman, complete with a crow's beak-and-wing accessories (and a bowler-hatted accompaniment).

"I am Professor Gladys Chrowdingler!" the Crow-woman quarked mightily, taking the steaming pipe out of her mouth for a moment (and tipping her bowler hat to the two Alices). "The horrible smell comes from my chemical and physical experiments, I'm afraid. Oh, but I'm so glad that you two girls have safely arrived in my lab; I've been waiting ages for you! Ages! Now then, which of you is the Reality Alice?"

The Crow-woman flapped at Alice and Celia with her wings of soot.

Alice had noticed that something was trapped inside the wooden box. It was banging against the insides, demanding, in a muffled voice, to be let out. Alice decided to ignore the thing in the box for the moment: "Why, I'm the real Alice, of course," she told the Professor.

"Are you sure?" asked the Crow-woman, speaking around the fuming pipe she had replaced in her beak. "You both look almost identical."

"She is the Real Alice," Celia stated plainly, and pointed. "I'm only the Automated version; my name is Celia."

"Yes, that's right," said Alice, equally plainly (although, to be honest, the Real-life Alice was becoming a little confused), "and we have come here from the past to ask you the way back home."

"Quark, quark!" quarked the Crow-woman, impatiently. "Alice, have you read my book in the library, pray?"

"Yes, I have, and that's exactly how I managed to find you."

"Excellent! The plan is unfolding!"

"That is... to be honest..." Alice hesitated, "I've only read the beginning and the end of your book."

"That will suffice for now. Your final story will continue; the timely plan is being mapped-out."

"What do you mean", queried Alice, "by my final story? And what is this plan that you keep mentioning?"

"You know that Lewis Carroll invented you, Alice, in his books called Wonderland and Looking-Glass?" asked Chrowdingler.

"Well, yes... I mean, only partly so."

"Splendid answer! You are more than halfway there!"

"Halfway where?" asked Alice.

"Halfway to not being merely an Alias Alice, of course. Don't you see it?"

"I'm trying to see it. But really, Professor Chrowdingler, all I want to do is to get back to the past."

"Of course you do! That is your nature, Alice; that is what Lewis Carroll instilled in your soul."

"But I'm not just Lewis Carroll's invention; I'm real as well!"

"Alice, you are both real and imagined, and also automated. Your real persona is called Alice Liddell; your unreal persona is called Alice in Wonderland; your nureal persona is called Celia Hobart."

"I didn't know Celia had a second name," said Alice.

"Neither did I!" croaked Celia (rather proudly) before asking, "What does nureal mean, Professor?"

"Nureality is a recent discovery of mine," answered the Professor. "A place where things can live halfway between reality and unreality. I invented the place because of the increasing population of the terbots, you see? Creatures like yourself, Automated Alice, are you real or unreal? Is there such a thing as an artificial intelligence? Basically, the question... can a mechanical being be deemed to live?"

"Well... I feel that I'm alive," responded Celia.

"Exactly so! You feel your aliveness, Automated Alice, therefore you are alive! You are at home with yourself! This is why I discovered the new state of Nureality. Reality Alice, on the other wing..." (and here the old professor waved a blackly dismissive unfolding of feathers at Alice), "is neither here nor there. This little girl isn't sure if she's real, or else just a finishing story and plan inside Mister Lewis Carroll's head. He wrote one final book, you see, in his old age; a book called Automated Alice. In this lingering tome he brought Reality Alice to the future of now; he brought her into 1998! And in this final book, the author deemed it necessary that Alice should meet up with a professor called Chrowdingler! Quark! Oh, I'm so excited!"

Alice decided things were getting out of hand. "Professor Chrowdingler," she interrupted, "would you please tell me how to get home to the past, in time to complete my two o'clock writing lesson?"

"Quark! Am I right to assume, Alice, that you ate some radishes this morning?"

"I did actually," replied Alice, "but it was only a jammy spoonful."

"No matter at all, Alice! That is how you have come to visit the future, you have partaken of the Radishes of Time! They had chrownons within them."

"Whatever do you mean? What are chrownons?"

"Quark, quark!" answered Professor Chrowdingler.

Alice suddenly remembered something she had read on the inside back cover of Reality and Realicey. "Professor Chrowdingler," she asked, "are you hunting for your cat, by any chance?"

"You bet I am! Now where is that pesky feline? Quark!" Chrowdingler began hunting all around as she said this; all around the twisting pipes of her scientifical equipment; all around the stenching fog of gases emitted from spitting pipes; even all around the backside of the wooden box. "Here, kitty kitty!" cawed the professor, holding aloft a piece of raw pork. "It's dinner-time, my little Quark!"

Alice thought it very unusual that a crow should have a cat as a pet, but she didn't mention it. Instead, she asked, "Why is your cat called Quark?"