Jeff Noon - Automated Alice

"Now look here, Mister Snake," she cried (having decided that the snake was male for some reason), "I do believe that you're not very civil at all, keeping my doll under lock and fang." But the snake just carried on hissing and wriggling and writhing and slithering and flickering out his forking tongue and showing off his fine set of fangs. It was then (whilst looking deep into the snake's jaws) that Alice noticed a tiny piece of wood that was speared onto the left-side fang. "I wonder if that's another of my missing jigsaw pieces?" Alice said to herself. "I simply must retrieve it, but how can I when the Lord's Prayer has quite simply vanished from my mind?" She racked her brains to remember the words, but the only "prayer" she could now recite all the way through was the lullaby called "Go to Sleep, Little Bear". The reason she could remember this poem so well had a lot to do with the fact that it had only four lines containing only twenty-two words, many of which were repeated:

"Go to sleep, little bear.

Do not peep, little bear.

And when you wake, little bear,

I will be there, little bear."

So this was the "Lord's Prayer" that Alice recited to the Under Assistant of the Civil Serpents whilst at the same time fixing her gaze, icily, upon his. Only, for this rendition, Alice (quite against her will) changed the words slightly:

"Go to sleep, little creep.

Do not peep, little creep.

And when you're deep, little creep,

I will not weep, little creep."

Alice felt despondent at losing the rhyme between there and bear in her new version of the lullaby, but ever so pleased at having replaced it with the new rhymes between sleep and peep and creep and deep and weep. She thought her creation a much better poem! Not that the Under Assistant paid much mind to the ins and outs of poetic rhyming schemes; he was altogether too very tired to care anymore. His head slumped into slumber. Snakes don't have eyelids of course, but if that snake had had them, he would have closed them then. When Mister Snake was quite asleep, Alice removed (very carefully) the jigsaw piece from his left fang. It showed only a pattern of purple and turquoise scales but Alice knew that it would fit perfectly into the reptile house section of her jigsaw picture of London Zoo. She popped it into her pocket (alongside the badger piece and the termite piece) and then unwound (also very carefully) Mister Snake from Celia's fingers. Alice then carried the snake over to the nearest hedgerow where she placed him gently down in a bundle of leaves. Mister Snake wrapped himself into a reef knot and then into a bow, and finally into a double snakeshank, in which convoluted shape he started to loudly snore.

"Alice, you have released me from servitude!" With that croakment the statue stepped down from her podium with a creaking gait, which sounded very much like a creaking gate. Celia came up very close to Alice and, once there, she shook Alice's hand.

Alice felt very shivery to be shaking a porcelain hand, but shake it she did. "Celia," she cried, "I'm very pleased to have found you and Whippoorwill once again, but how in the garden did you get to be so tall for a doll?"

"I'm not a doll anymore," replied Celia, "I'm a terbot."

"A turbot!" exclaimed Alice. "That's a kind of fish, isn't it?"

"Indeed it is: a European flatfish with a pale-brown speckled one-dimensional body. But that definition only counts when the word's got a U in it."

"Oh, I'm dreadfully sick of words with 'U's in them rather than their proper letters!"

"A terbot, on the other hand, is an automated creature powered by termites."

"Termites?"

"Exactly so, Alice. Termites. I have termites in my brain. Take a look." Celia bent forwards at her squeaking waist and then turned a couple of screws on each side of her temple. She swivelled aside the top of her head. Alice leaned forward to peer into the gaping skull and found inside a loosely packed mound of soil through which a million termites were scuttling, and no doubt passing questions and answers and answers and questions to each other.

"So you're using the beanery system?" asked Alice.

"I wouldn't know anything about beans," answered Celia. "I think I must be an automaton. You know what an automaton is, don't you, Alice?"

"Is it a toy that can move without being pushed or dragged?"

"That is correct, and that is what I have become. I am the automated version of you, Alice. The word automaton comes from the ancient Greek; it means that I'm self-moving; it means that I'm self-improving. In point of fact, I've improved myself so much... I've become rather more intelligent than a human being."

"But surely," Alice said, "in order to equal the thinking of a single human mind, a termite mound would have to be as large as the world itself." (Alice was only borrowing this knowledge from Captain Ramshackle, not really stealing it, so we can forgive her for this slight copycattering, surely?)

"Indeed it would be," replied Celia (referring to the mound-size), "but that argument fails to remember the ingenuity of Pablo the sculptor. Pablo has managed to breed the termites down to the size of pencils."

"But pencils are so much longer than termites," Alice argued.

"Not if they're used up from the tip and nibbled down from the eraser. Eventually a pencil will meet itself in the middle and then it will vanish. Just like us, Alice! Perhaps we faded away from both ends until we met in our middles and then we vanished! I'm a work of art, did you know that?" Celia twirled around quite proudly as she said this. I'm terbo-charged!"

"Celia, why are you dropping the letter 'T' from the word?" Alice asked.

"Because that's how the future people say it," Celia replied. "You do know that we're in the future now, Alice? I must have slipped from your fingers whilst falling through the tunnel of clock-numbers. I therefore entered the future at an earlier date than you did. I landed in 1998 a whole week before you. I had grown to my present size, but I was still only a doll. I could not move at all, or even think for myself. Pablo the sculptor claims that he found me lying in this very garden, in a briar of roses."

"Did Mister Pablo plant this knot garden?" Alice asked.

"He most certainly did. Pablo's hobby is to make terbots, you see? The Civil Serpents look down upon this hobby; they think it very unreal. Only by promising that his creations would be trapped forever in a garden of knots and guarded by snakes could Pablo convince the Serpents that his work be allowed. It was Pablo that put the computer-mites in my skull. Alice, my dear, it was as if I had woken up from a long, long sleep of dollness. I came alive!"

"Celia, I'm very glad that you're alive," stated Alice, "but I simply must get you and Whippoorwill and myself back to Great Aunt Ermintrude's house in time for my two o'clock writing lesson." Just then an almighty commotion took place beyond the knot garden; red and white lights flashed in the sky above the hedgerows and a piercing cry howled through the morning, followed by what sounded very much like a policeman's whistle being blown. "Whatever's happening now?" cried Alice.

"Maybe it's something to do with the Jigsaw Murder," replied Celia.

"You know about the Jigsaw Murder?" a surprised Alice enquired.

"I don't know much about the case," Celia replied, "but I do know that Whippoorwill isn't too happy with the sudden disturbance." Indeed, the parrot was flapping his green-and-yellow wings in a chaotic pattern that Captain Ramshackle would have been very proud of. It was these movements that caused Alice to remember certain words that the Badgerman had spoken. "Celia," she asked, "would you happen to know the whereabouts of a certain Professor Gladys Chrowdingler by any chance?"