Near-future Manchester. Along rainshot streets infested by shadowcops roam the Stash Riders, a posse of hip malcontents, hooked on Vurt feathers - the best drug you could ever imagine.

But, as the Game Cat says, BE CAREFUL, BE VERY CAREFUL.
THIS RIDE IS NOT FOR THE WEAK.

But Scribble wouldn't listen.

Now Scribble is searching for Curious Yellow, the ultimate, perhaps even mythical, Vurt feather. A trail which leads him beyond the boundaries of love, self and possibly even return.

In the last years of his life, the fantasist, Lewis Carroll, wrote a third Alice book. This mysterious work was never published or even shown to anybody. It has only recently been discovered. Now, at last, the world can read of Automated Alice and her fabulous adventures in the future.

That's not quite true. Automated Alice was in reality written by Zenith O'Clock, the writer of wrongs. In the book he sends Alice through time, tumbling from the Victorian age to land in 1998, in Manchester, a small town in the North of England.

Oh dear, that's not at all right. This trequel to Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass was actually written by Jeff Noon. Zenith O'Clock is only a character invented by Jeff Noon and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely accidental. What Alice encounters in the automated future is mostly accidental too.....a series of misadventures, even weirder than your dreams.

PLAY TO WIN, PLAY TO WIN

The air of Manchester is alive with blurbflies, automated advertisements chanting their slogans. The loudest of all is for Domino Bones, the new lottery game. Players purchase a handful of dominoes and every Friday night the winning numbers are illuminated on the body of Lady Luck, the voluptuous figurehead of the game. Every Friday night, Manchester stills as the bones tumble into a winning combination, the population hooked on this rampant dream. For the winner, it is unimaginable riches, for the losers, another week to wait for the bones to fall again. But there is only one real winner, The Company, who plays the city's fragile expectations with callous ease and milks it to the final drop.

A group of mathematics students are looking at the odds, at the mind-numbing probabilities involved, and searching for the hidden mysteries behind the game. They watch the city at work and at dangerous play, and slowly uncover the sinister realities behind the mania. The company is devouring Manchester - it has the nymphomation, an evolutionary process which has the power to take over the city's dreams....

Only the lonesome band of students can save the city from takeover. Of course the authorities fight back against this intrusion. They are not scared of killing off a few dumb students here and there....