Caliban

continued to pursue him after their first encounter.

Were they, the Settlers, in any way connected with the deputies? There was nothing in his datastore that could tell him either way. And yet there was something furtive, something secret about the Settlers’ actions. And they were, after all, engaged in the destruction of robots, which did seem to be an offense under the criminal code. It had to have been the deputies that they were hiding from. Was it illegal to be a Settler? Wait a moment. There was a side reference to criminal organizations, and the Settlers were not in it. At least that told him something about what they were not. It was enough to conclude, at least tentatively, that the group in the warehouse was some sort of criminal offshoot of the Settlers.

Which still told Caliban nothing about them except that they wished to destroy robots generally and himself specifically.

But wait a moment. Back up a little. If destroying a robot was a crime—

With a sudden shock of understanding, Caliban recalled his own first moments of consciousness.

His arm outstretched before him, raised as if to strike. The unconscious woman at his feet, her life’s blood pooling around her…

The sheriff’s deputies dealt not in certainties, but in probabilities. They worked with evidence, not with proof.

And there was a profusion of evidence to suggest that he had attacked that woman. The possible charges spewed forth from his datastore. Aggravated assault. Attack with intent to murder. Denial of civil rights by inducing unconsciousness or death. Had she been dying when he had left her? Did she indeed die? He did not know.

With a shock, Caliban realized he had absolutely no objective reason to think that he had not attacked her. His memory simply did not stretch back before that moment of awakening. He could have done anything in the time before and not know about it.

But that did not address the issue of the police who were in pursuit of him. It seemed obvious they were chasing him because of the attack, but how did they connect him to the crime? How did they know? With a sudden flash of understanding, he remembered the pool of blood on the floor. He must have walked through it and then tracked it out the door. The police, the deputies, had merely to look at those prints to know they belonged to a robot.

Staring into the darkness, he looked back into his own past. His robotic memory was clear, absolute, and perfect. With a mere effort of will, he could be a spectator at all the events of his own past, seeing and hearing everything, and yet aware of being outside events, with the ability to stop the flow of sights and sounds, focus on this moment, that image.

He went back to the very moment of his awakening and played events forward for himself. Yes, there was the pool of blood, there was his foot about to go down into it. Caliban watched the playback with a certain satisfaction, congratulating himself on figuring out how the police had done it.

But then, with a sense of utter shock, Caliban saw something else in his memory. Something that had most definitely not registered when this sight had been reality, and not merely its echo.

Another set of footprints leading through the room, out a door he had not used. Footprints he had no recollection of making, and yet the pattern of the marks on the floor would seem to match his own. But how could that be? Caliban snapped out of his reverie, powered up his on-board light source again, stood up, and went back into the tunnel. He had to know for certain. He found a pool of water, splashed around in it, and then walked out of the puddle onto dry floor. He turned around and examined the resulting prints.

They were identical with the prints he had seen in his memory of his awakening. The bloody footprints were the twins of the watery ones he had just trod across the grimy floor.

They were his own. He must have made them, or else the world made even less sense than he thought it did.

But why would he have done it all? Why would he smash down his arm on the woman’s skull, tread through her life’s blood, form a set of prints, go out one door, clean his feet (for there were no prints leading back into the room), then return to his position over the body, raise his arm —and then lose his memory? And how could he lose his memory that cleanly, that completely? How could there be no residual hint of those past actions left in his mind? In short, how could being alive have left no mark on him?

Caliban could feel himself growing more sophisticated, more experienced, with every moment he was alive. It was not merely a question of conscious memory—it was understanding. Understanding of how the city fit together, understanding that humans were different from robots.

It was knowledge of the world, not merely as a series of downloaded reports of rote fact, but the knowledge of experience, the knowing of the details of sensation. No datastore map would ever report puddles in the tunnel, or the echoing sounds of his footsteps down a long, empty, gritty walkway, or the way the world seemed a different place, and yet the same, when viewed through infrared. He turned and walked back down the corridor to the abandoned office and resumed his previous seat, powering down his infrared again to sit in the pitch-blackness. He felt that his train of thought was worth pursuing. He considered further.

There were things in the world, like the strange way seeing the darkness was distinct from blindness, that had to be experienced firsthand to be understood.

And he knew, utterly knew, that he had no such sophisticated experience when he woke up. None, not a flickering moment of it. He had literally awakened to a whole new world. He had come into memory with no firsthand experience.

The first thing he had done was to kneel down and stick his fingers in the woman’s blood, feel its warmth on his skin thermocouple, test his blood-covered finger and thumb against each other to confirm that drying blood was sticky. That moment, he was certain, was his first. There was nothing else before it.

Which either meant that he had not even been awake before his memory started, or else that everything had been wiped from his brain.

A disturbing thought, but Caliban considered it carefully. He had no knowledge of how his mind worked, or how, precisely, it related to his physical being. Beyond question, they were related to each other, and yet clearly distinct and separate. But how, he was not sure.

Once again, he was up against the desperately frustrating absence of any knowledge of robots in his datastore. He had no way of judging the mechanics of the idea, no way to know if there was some way simply to hit an erase button and destroy his mentality.

But if that had happened, if his mind and his memory had been destroyed so completely that even the sense of experience was gone, then could it even be said he was the same being as before?

Memory could be external to the sense of self. Caliban was sure of that. His memories could be removed, and he would still be himself, just as much as he would be if his datastore was removed. But if someone removed all experiential data from his brain, they would of necessity remove the being, the self, who had been shaped by those experiences. Erase his mind, and he would simply cease to be. His body, his physical self, would still be there. But it was not this body that made him Caliban. If it were mechanically possible to remove his brain from this body and place it in another, he would still be himself, albeit in a new body.

And therefore, he, Caliban, had not attacked this woman. Of that much he was sure. Perhaps his body had done it, but if so, another mind than the one that currently inhabited it was in control at the time.

He found that conclusion to be most comforting, in its own way. The idea that he could be capable of an unprovoked attack had been most disturbing. Still, no matter what his conclusions might be to himself, they did little to improve his situation. Peace officers willing to use heavy weapons in a tunnel would be unlikely to wait long enough to listen to his explanation that it might have been his body, but not he himself, that had attacked the woman. Nor would any such arguments make them forget the fire at the warehouse. He had been there, the place had caught fire. Perhaps that was all they needed to know.

From the police point of view, all the evidence shouted out that he had attacked the woman, that he set fire to that building. After all, the police knew someone had attacked her. If he had not, then who had? As best he could see, there was no one else there who could have done it.

But perhaps there were more things in his visual memories of his awakening, other things that he had missed. The woman, for example. Who was she?