Automated Alice

by Jeff Noon

  “Captain Ramshackle!” Alice cried. “What are you doing here?!”

  “A little birdy told me where to find you,” answered the badgerman.

  “Could that birdy be Whippoorwill the parrot?” asked Alice.

  “The very same,” replied Ramshackle. “He told me you were currently playing the flutters at the Palace of Chimera in Rusholme. This matinee show is called ‘Flippety Floppety Comes Unstuck’; it’s a children’s projection, and you, Alice, are this week’s guest artiste.”

  “Questingly Guestingly!” squeaked the rabbit as he climbed further up Alice’s body.

  “But what is Chimera?” asked Alice of the Captain, “and how can I escape this rather rampant rabbit?”

  And the children laughed to see such fun!

  “Chimera is like the theatre or a lantern show,” Ramshackle replied, “except that it’s more real. You have to tickle your nose with a tickling feather, and then you actually become a part of the story. You get turned on to it. It’s called a collected vurtual experience.”

  “But how can I escape being vurtually collected?” asked Alice with a U.

  “It’s quite easy,” said the badgerman, “you must turn yourself off.”

  “But how do I turn myself off?”

  “Just say the words DONE WONDERING out loud.” And as Ramshackle said the words DONE WONDERING out loud he dissolved into the light and disappeared from the Chimera. So Alice immediately followed suit. “DONE WONDERING!” she cried out loud…

  Alice then found herself sitting in a cold, damp seat in the dark beside Captain Ramshackle. In front of them on the vast wall fluttered the images of Flippety Floppety and the children, and all around her in the rows of seats sat the children themselves, tickling their pert little noses with a collection of tickling feathers. The children’s eyes were all glazed over like cup-cakes and filled with wonder-dust. Captain Ramshackle untickled his own nose and then took Alice’s hand, to lead her towards an illuminated REALITY THIS WAY sign.

  Outside, in the grounds of the Rusholme Palace of Chimera, Pablo Ogden’s garden shed was sitting patiently upon the concrete. Captain Ramshackle led Alice to the shed’s door, relating upon the way, “After hearing Professor Chrowdingler’s tale of woe, I decided it best to gather together all the remaining-alive witnesses to the Civil Serpents’ murderously jigsawing plan, in order to best protect them. And here they all are!” At which he opened up the shed door and pushed Alice inside.

  Alice looked around the crowded garden shed, and there indeed they all were! There was Miss Computermite grown to human size; and there was the zebraman (whose name turned out to be Stripey); and there was Long Distance Davis, the snailman, playing a lonesome note upon his trumpet! And there, oh there! was Pablo Ogden, the Reverse Butcher himself, weeping over a pile of rubbish that Alice recognised to be James Marshall Hentrails’s jigsawed remains. “How dare they rearrange my finest creation so?” Pablo was wailing. “Those silly serpents will pay for this undoing!”

  Celia, the Automated Alice, however, was not there: but Alice didn’t even have a second to think about that, because straight away Stripey the zebraman was shouting out (in a black-and-white voice), “Pablo, the police are approaching at a rate of knots on the starboard bow!”

  “And they’re in their whirlybird!” added Ramshackle.

  “It’s not the police,” squeaked Miss Computermite, “it’s Mrs Minus!” (At which news, Long Distance Davis immediately vanished into the shell of his hat, which at least made a little more room in the shed!)

  “All hands on deck!” shouted Pablo, and Alice really did think she was on a ship for a moment, especially when Pablo started to pull upon the series of levers which lifted the garden shed onto its rickety-chickeny legs. “Our destination, Alice?” he called out, taking over the wheel.

  “To my Great Aunt Ermintrude’s home in Didsbury!” replied Alice.

  “I’m not sure if I know the way,” said Pablo.

  “Oh dear,” said Alice, “neither do I.”

  “If I may make a logical suggestion,” said Miss Computermite, “perhaps we should follow that green-and-yellow parrot; he seems to know the way.”

  “Full steam ahead!” bellowed Pablo and off the shed lurched at a frightening pace, along the road.

  “Whippoorwill!” cried Alice, and rushed to the shed’s front window to watch the parrot’s colourfully flashing flight. “What time is it, Captain Ramshackle?” she asked (whilst hardly daring to ask!). The badgerman consulted his wrist-clock: “It’s just gone almost exactly, not quite nearly, half-past one.”

  “Thirty minutes left!” worked out Alice. “I do hope we get there in time!”

  But they were making a tremendous pace by now: the garden shed had already carried them along Oxford Road. (You should have seen how it leapt over the houses!) Now it was transporting them down Wilmslow Road towards Didsbury; and what a marvellous transport a walking, running, hopping, skipping and jumping garden shed can make: how easily it can scamper over the driving droves of auto-horses! Miss Computermite had climbed out of the window (quite an easy task when you have six legs!): she was now perched on the shed’s roof, shouting out directions from there, and keeping her eyes on stalks for the flutterings of the distant parrot. Stripey the zebraman was stationed at the back window of the shed: his job was to keep a look out for Mrs Minus’s automated whirlybird. (“She’s catching up with us, Pablo!” was Stripey’s incessant cry. “Faster! Faster!”) Pablo was at the steering wheel, trying his best to urge the shed forwards. Long Distance Davis was still firmly curled into his shell-hat (which was rolling around the shed’s floor like a corkscrewed bowling ball, and threatening at any minute to fall out!). Alice was trying her best to be useful, but Captain Ramshackle wasn’t trying to be useful at all! Instead, he was dancing around excitedly whilst chanting out yet another verse of his little song:

  “Oh garden sheds may play the fool

  Upon the snakes of big;

  But all I want’s the crooked rule

  That makes a jigsaw jig.”

  But somehow or other the six strange travellers managed to stay on board and to work together in a rather slipshod shipshape fashion. (Or should I say a slipshod shedshape fashion?) Whatever, shipshape or shedshape, the intrepid half-a-dozen made a pretty pace. Through Rusholme they rushed home; through Fallowfield they ploughed a fallow and through Withington they (almost) withered: until, finally, Didsbury and its sprawling cemetery were in their sights. The place where Manchester buried its dead. Alice looked down from the garden shed’s tottering heights, as she tried to locate her Great Aunt’s house. The cemetery looked a lot sprawlier than Alice remembered it, but she supposed to herself (correctly of course) that many many more people must have died since she was last here in 1860. Now she spotted Whippoorwill landing on the broken-down roof of an old, decrepit house. “That can’t be right!” said Alice. “Great Aunt Ermintrude would never let her house get into such an untidy state!” But the house certainly seemed to be in the right place, as far as Alice could remember: it was just that the cemetery had grown so much in the intervening years that it had actually grown all around the old house!

  “Put me down here, Pablo!” Alice said to the shed’s pilot.

  “I don’t think I’ve got any choice,” answered Pablo.

  “What do you mean?” asked Alice.

  “Whirlybird gaining on the stern, Pablo!” shouted Stripey the zebraman. “Her cannon is loaded!”

  “I think we’re about to be fired at!” cried Pablo. “Nobody panic!”

  But of course, everybody aboard did panic, especially when they heard the cannon-ball whizzing through the air towards them! The cannon-ball hit the left leg of the shed! The leg crumpled up like a roasted chicken leg that has been kept too long in the oven, and then the whole world keeled over to one side and crashed to the ground!

  Everybody tumbled out of the fallen shed into the graveyard. The garden shed was splintered into a thousand piec
es and Pablo Ogden was shaking an angry fist at the hovering whirlybird. “How dare you!” he cursed at Mrs Minus, who was gazing down calmly from the safety of the whirlybird; the snakewoman was smiling at him with her evil little fangs. “I’ll get you for this destruction!” Pablo shouted.

  “I don’t care for you,” responded Mrs Minus. “It’s Alice I want.”

  But Alice didn’t want to be wanted by Mrs Minus; all that Alice wanted was to reach the house of her Great Aunt in time for her journey to the past. All around her were jutting gravestones and sculptured angels. The old house was lying in the midst of all these memorials and it looked as dead as a doornail. Why, even the doornails in its rotting door looked as dead as doornails!

  Alice looked around quickly to see that all of her fellow shed-travellers were alive and well. Miss Computermite had reduced herself to her former size in order to scurry into the nearest crevice; Long Distance Davis had become a shiny snail slithering along a gravestone’s edge; Stripey the zebraman had turned into a mere play of shadow and light amongst the tombs; Captain Ramshackle was already burrowing a deep sett into the cemetery’s soil. Pablo Ogden was still cursing at Mrs Minus on the whirlybird as it lowered itself to the ground.

  All amongst the gravestones the policedogmen were gathering in their packs, but they were keeping their distance, and Alice couldn’t work out why. Inspector Jack Russell stepped forwards from the pack of dogs, but he merely looked at Alice along the sights of his long snout; he didn’t even try to arrest her. Alice was puzzled by this uncommon behaviour, but then she heard Whippoorwill squawking from the garden of the house, and Alice rushed forwards to greet him. It wasn’t really a garden of course, it was just an extension of the cemetery. The parrot was perched upon a crumbling gravestone set directly in front of the house. Alice expected Whippoorwill to deliver yet another riddle, but no such thing happened. Alice saw that he had a little something lodged in his beak, which forbade him to make even a single squawk.

  It was a jigsaw piece. Alice realized that this jigsaw piece was Whippoorwill’s last and final riddle. She pulled it loose, and saw that it was a crooked picture of a blur of green-and-yellow feathers. Alice added it deftly to the others in her pinafore pocket, and it was only then that she noticed the names engraved upon the gravestone that Whippoorwill was perched upon:

  ERMINTRUDE AND MORTIMER PEABODY

  NOT DEAD, ONLY RADISHING

  Indeed, there was a rash of radishes growing all around the grave. Alice suddenly remembered Professor Chrowdingler’s ruling that she had to eat some radishes backwards in order to return to the past. But how do you eat a radish backwards? Alice pulled up a knotted specimen by the leaves, and then bent double in order to thrust her face through her legs, backwards: and then she bit into the root. Naughty Whippoorwill, when offered some radish, mimicked her to do the same. Alice laughed, to see such a backwards parrot!

  If Alice was suddenly expecting to be transported back to 1860, she was to be bitterly disappointed. “Oh Whippoorwill!” she exclaimed. “The chrownons in this radish haven’t worked! I fear that we’re trapped in the future forever!”

  But then the door to the old house opened up with a creaking sigh, and Celia the Automated Alice stepped onto the porch. “Fear not, my little sister,” stated the doll, calmly, “we are almost home.” Celia was looking so much like Alice by this time, that Alice really did think she was seeing herself walk towards herself!

  “Celia!” cried Alice, “so you managed to reach our Great Aunt’s house before me? And you managed to escape the snakes!”

  “Not quite yet,” answered Celia, “for isn’t that Mrs Minus creeping through the gravestones towards us, with her fangs glinting in the sun?”

  Alice looked over her shoulder: there indeed was the evil Civil Serpent, and her fangs were glinting! “But why aren’t Inspector Jack Russell and the other policedogmen trying to help Mrs Minus arrest me?” asked Alice.

  “Professor Chrowdingler had posted her evidence of the serpent’s Newmonia crime to the police yesterday,” said Celia, “and the Inspector received that evidence a mere thirty minutes ago.”

  “So the police are now on our side?”

  “It would seem so.”

  “So why won’t they arrest Mrs Minus?”

  “The police are scared of her.”

  Alice looked around at the approaching shape of Mrs Minus. The snakewoman had become even more of a snake than a woman, and she had drawn out an evil-looking pistol. “Well I’m scared of her as well!” said Alice. “So am I!” squawked Whippoorwill, as he fluttered into the house.

  “And so am I!” copied Celia. “Alice, come into the house quickly!”

  It started to rain again (and quite viciously this time, with some streaks of lightning!), as Alice ran into the antique house after her sister.

  Once inside the house, they locked the front door behind them and ran towards the breakfast room from which Alice had long ago vanished. There, still, was the ancient grandfather clock and the empty birdcage, and there, still, the uncompleted jigsaw puzzle upon the breakfast table. Nothing had changed except for the thick dust which settled in waves over the decaying furniture. The rain was still lashing against the window, and the cemetery was still brooding in the downpour, and the lightning was still flashing. The clock was tick-tocking away at five minutes to two (even though it was now covered in horrible cobwebs).

  Alice quickly removed the eleven jigsaw pieces from her pinafore pocket, then proceeded to slot them into place in the mouldy old jigsaw puzzle of London Zoo: the termite into the Insect House; the badger in the Badger House; the snake in the Reptile House; the chicken into the Hen House; the zebra into the Mammal House; the snail into the Gastropod House; the cat into the Feline House; the fish into the Aquarium; the crow into the Aviary; the spider into the Arachnid House; the parrot also into the Aviary. At the adding of that piece, Whippoorwill fluttered back into his cage. Eleven creatures were now feeling quite at home, but still the twelfth jigsaw piece was missing.

  “Oh where can that final elusive piece be?” Alice cried whilst searching all over the room for it. “It must be here somewhere! Help me find it, Celia!”

  Celia had her head stuck in the clock’s case, saying, “I’m doing my best, Alice.” Then she popped back out: “But all I’ve found up to now is this.” She was clutching the very first feather that Whippoorwill had dropped in his flight to the future.

  “That’s no use,” replied Alice. “Quickly! Keep searching.”

  “Four minutes to two, Alice,” whispered the clock.

  “Oh dear!” cried Alice. “The jigsaw piece must be somewhere! Perhaps it’s fallen down the sofa cushions?” Imagine her surprise to find that three identical old and wizened women were sitting on the sofa! So covered in dust and cobwebs they were, and so ancient and withered, that Alice had thought them merely part of the furniture until then! “And who are you three?” she demanded.

  “We are the tripletted daughters of Ermintrude…” they answered all of a piece.

  “My name is Dorothy…” the first woman said.

  “My name also is Dorothy…” the second added.

  “My name also and also is Dorothy…” completed the third.

  “So you’re the answer to my two o’clock writing lesson!” said Alice. “You three are the Dot and the Dot and the Dot of an ellipsis!”

  “That is correct…” answered the three Dots all together. “We are the Ellipsisters…and you must be Alice…” But they were talking to Celia!

  “I’m Alice!” corrected Alice. “That is Celia.”

  “We didn’t realize you had a twin sister, Alice…” the three women said.

  “And I didn’t realize that you three Dorothys would still be here,” replied Alice. “Why have you let this house get into such a state?”

  “Time slowed to a standstill for us since you vanished, Alice…We never married, you know…”

  “Three minutes to two, Alice,” whispered
the clock, and then there was a sudden, furious banging on the front door!

  “Oh no!” screamed Alice.

  “It’s Mrs Minus trying to get in!” added Celia.

  It was all too much for Alice. “I’ll never find the final jigsaw piece now!” she snuffled.

  “But dear Alice,” the three Dorothys tripletted in tandem, “you are the final jigsaw piece…”

  “But that’s impossible!” Alice sobbed. “I’m a girl, not a piece in a puzzle!”

  “I think they might be right, Alice,” said Celia.

  Alice ran to the breakfast table. There was the dusty old jigsaw picture with its little crooked hole where the last piece was missing. Alice saw that the hole wasn’t actually inside one of the various animal cages; it was actually a hole in the pathways between the cages; the pathways where the visitors could wander. In fact the hole was missing from a young girl’s head! And the girl had on a red pinafore! “Well I suppose that might be me,” said Alice, “but I would never fit in such a tiny opening! Especially with Celia!”

  “I’m not coming with you, Alice,” said Celia.

  “Of course you’re coming with me!” said Alice.

  “I’m afraid I didn’t eat the radishes, Alice. But the truth is…I rather like living in the future.” Celia stuck Whippoorwill’s lost feather in her hair, as she said this. “The future is my proper home.”

  “Celia!” cried Alice, as the clock whispered, “Two minutes to two, Alice!”

  “Alice!” shouted Mrs Minus as she whipped her scaly tail at the front door of the house. Everything was happening all at once!

  Celia suddenly said to Alice, “Shall we open the cupboard in my left-hand-side thigh?”

  “The one TO BE OPENED IN AN EXTREME EMERGENCY ONLY?”

  “That’s the one, Alice.”

  So Alice opened up the tiny door in Celia’s thigh: inside, she found only a small lead ball labelled with the words SHOOT ME. “Shoot me from what?” asked Alice. At which question, Celia unbuttoned her pinafore.