Vurt 3 - Automated Alice (14 page)

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?”

“Well. . .” began the professor, “a quark is a set of hypothetical elementary particles, postulated to be the fundamental and invisible units of all carryons and chrownons. Do you understand, Alice? It's quite simple: every single thing that exists is made out of tiny particles, and a quark is the invisible unit inside every carryon particle, and also inside every chrownon. The strangest thing about quarks is that we scientists know that they do exist, but we don't know where they exist!”

“That sounds rather too much like a certain parrot I know,” said Alice.

“Quark, quark!” quarked Chrowdingler. “Come home to me, my kitten!” But the pet of a cat was nowhere to be seen. “This is why I called my cat Quark,” said the professor to Alice; “because he was always so very prone to vanishing, and nothing can vanish quicker than a fundamental particle! I was doing an experiment, you see; one which tried to register the impact of the carryon particles on the innocent people of Manchester. The experiment entailed the encapturing of my pet cat in this particular box of tricks. . .” Professor Chrowdingler was tapping with her pipe upon the wooden box's lid; from within the box's interior came a further dismal call for help.

“So you placed your pet cat inside this box. . .” croaked Celia, “and then what did you do?”

“I funnelled a cloud of carry on particles into the box.”

“And what is a carryon, when it's at home?” asked Alice.

“A carryon is the particle that allows the various species to mate with each other. This is why we are all currently suffering from the Newmonia.”

“So you're a carryon crow?” pondered Alice.

“Exactly so! I uncovered and named that particle after myself.”

“And this is where the disease called the Newmonia came from?”

“That's right; the Civil Serpents introduced the carryon particle into the nation's wavey length. They were hoping to make the populace succumb to quietude, I guess. The original idea was to turn everybody into gentle, law-abiding Mice-people. This inexact science is known as Djinnetic Engineering, on account of it being not unlike letting a rabid genie out of a bottle. The Serpents' silly experiment went dreadfully wrong of course, and the rampant carryon particle transformed the people into a mishmash of mutated creatures. My crowly shape is just one of the various outcomes. So it was that I devised this boxly experiment, containing both a domestic cat and a fog of the dreaded carryon particles.”

“But your experimental cat must have mewled and spat at being forced inside the box of canyons,” exclaimed Celia.

“Oh, how my little Quark mewled and spat! But really, I was only trying to prove the usage of carryon particles in the dissipation of the Newmonia disease. But my dear Quark was viciously attacked by the carryons!”

“What happened then?” asked Alice.

“Quark was mixed up with a chameleon's nature.”

Just then, Alice noticed a translucent something moving through the scientifical equipment on one of Chrowdingler's workbenches. It looked very much like the nebulous smile of a feline beauty, long since admitted to the disappearing realms of catouflage. A soft and plaintive “Meowwwlll!” came out of nowhere as something unseen and furry knocked over a test-tube. “Quark, Quark!” screeched Chrowdingler upon the evidence of her phantom cat's misdemeanour. The professor made a feathery-fluttering move to trap the ghostly cat, ending up with only a few wisps of figmental fur in her pointed beak.

“Quark is an invisible cat!” cried Alice, recalling a certain incident in one of her previous adventures. (Although, never in the life of her, would she have suspected that one day in the future she would discover a scientific reason for the old Cheshire Cat's disappearance!)

“Quite so!” cawed the crow. “Quark has become a chamelecat.”

“So it's the Civil Serpents who are to blame for the Newmonia disease?” asked Alice, returning (finally) to the subject.

“That's correct,” replied Chrowdingler; “the Civil Serpents tried their very best to cover up the carryon mistake, claiming the pandemonious Newmonia disease to be no more than a natural aberration of nature. There are only twelve beings in the whole world that know of the Serpents' real misdeed.”

Twelve! Alice, suddenly enlightened, asked, “Would these twelve beings include a computermite and a Ramshackle Badgerman and a sleepy snake? And would they also include a chicken-powered terbot musician and a Zebraman and a long-distance Snailman? Also, a Spider boy and a Catwoman and a bookish Plaiceman?”

“They would indeed!” answered Chrowdingler. “The Civil Serpents are determined to kill off all of the knowledgeable twelve, in order to hide their misuse of the carryon particles, and their ghastly crimes against humanity. Quark! The Serpents are determined to kill off every single carrier of the carryon clue; this includes myself of course. Very soon the Snakes of Law will rearrange my body into a deathly puzzle.” With this utterance Chrowdingler reached into her wing's darkness to produce a little piece of jagged wood: “This arrived in the post this very morning. . .”

It was the jigsawed fragment from the aviary in the London Zoo puzzle, showing a crow's black feather. Alice took it quite pleasingly. “Oh, thank you, Professor, for delivering this jigsaw piece to me!” she cried. “I now have nine of my twelve missing pieces!”

“To be given such a jigsaw piece,” warned the professor, “implies that the Civil Serpents will be wanting to kill you off for your dangerous knowledge. These are the jigsaw pieces of Cain!”

“But all along I thought the Civil Serpents,” queried Celia, “had been urging the police to find the Jigsaw Murderer? Isn't this why they arrested Captain Ramshackle, and also Alice's poor, innocent, real self?”

“The police are ignorant of the real murderer, and the real crime. The Serpents are merely looking for escape-goats.”

Alice dearly wanted to ask what an escape-goat was, but at that very moment, from the insides of the wooden box, came once more a shrill voice that pleaded, “Please let me out of this box!”

“I'm not letting you out of the box so early!” screeked the crow-woman in reply. “The experiment is not yet over!” Simultaneously to this screeking, there was also a terrible pounding on the stairs that led down to the Uniworseity of Manchester.

“This is the Civil Serpents!” pounded the pounding. “Alice Liddell and Professor Chrowdingler! You are both under arrest for the Jigsaw Murders!”

The pipe fell out of Chrowdingler's mouth! “Quickly, Alice!” she urged. “This is what you have to do next: you must find the remaining three of your missing jigsaw pieces. You must then take all twelve of the pieces to your Great Aunt's house in Didsbury village. Promise me that you will carry all twelve of the pieces to your puzzle back to the past, because only then will we futurites be saved from the Serpents' wrath!”