Caliban

12

“I have had my fill and more of shambles, Donald,” Alvar Kresh said as he read the action reports over a belated breakfast at his desk. A breakfast he had been looking forward to since the early hours of the morning, and one he was now not enjoying at all.

He had wanted to eat in the privacy of his own home, not at his desk at headquarters. Circumstances dictated otherwise, to put it mildly. Nor did the circumstances of the situation improve his mood.

Minutes after he came out of the Governor’s office, he learned that his officers had lost the leading suspect in the case that might literally decide the fate of the world. This did not make him a happy man.

“We go for a nice, quiet chat with the Governor, you and I,” Alvar said, in a voice that was low and reasonable, in a tone of patently false calm. “I am out of contact with the force for perhaps all of an hour, and come back to find that my deputies have been using the airspace over downtown to practice their aerobatics and scare the hell out of half the population.” Alvar’s voice started to get louder, angrier. He stood and glared at Donald. “I find that one of my officers disregarded all orders and made a creditable effort to kill that suspect before he could be questioned and examined. Instead he made a good start toward blowing up half the city tunnel system.”

He knew it was unfair and illogical to yell at Donald, but he had to take his anger out on someone. And there Donald was, right in front of him, an easy target for his fury, and one that would not fight back.

But even in the depths of his fury, Alvar knew that he was playing to the squad room outside his office as well. It was not by chance that his office was not well soundproofed. Some times it did the force some good to hear the Old Man blow up. By now Alvar was shouting out loud, deliberately shouting not at Donald, but at the thin walls and the men and women outside.

“In other words, the only reason my stunt-flying, trigger-happy deputies have not wrecked everything is that they are lousy shots as well. What is wrong with everyone?”

The rhetorical question hung in the air for perhaps half a minute. Donald stood silently before Alvar’s desk. At last Alvar sighed, sat back down, and picked up his fork. He took another moody stab at his sausages. “I am not a happy man, Donald,” he said at last, in a quieter voice, now speaking almost to himself. “On top of everything else, I have not a doubt that this whole fiasco has set a whole new series of rumors flying. Besides the hundreds of witnesses to our overreaction, there is a civilian we can do nothing to silence, and he is no doubt out there cheerfully telling all his friends about the robot who refused orders. God knows where that will end.”

“Yes, sir. It is most unfortunate. There is some other rather awkward news. There is a current rumor that Fredda Leving’s announcement tonight is related to the events of this morning, though what the connection is, no one seems to know.”

“That’s quite a rumor,” Alvar growled ruefully. “Hell, I’m heading the investigation, and even I don’t know for sure if that’s true. It’ll get her a hell of a big audience tonight.”

“The same thought crossed my mind,” Donald said. “You were proved correct in your concerns over a massive police effort. It has forced the whole situation at least partly into the public view. We have set off the panic that might well have been the perpetrator’s actual goal.”

“Yes, yes, I know. But damn it, what other chance did we have but to respond to the situation? We could not allow this Caliban to go loose—a robot capable of violence against humans—just because a police chase might upset a few people. Not when we had a solid position and a positive ID on him. Expect we blew it, and by now he could be anywhere in or under the city.”

“Sir, if I could interject just a moment,” Donald said in his most deferential voice. Alvar looked up sharply. He recognized that tone. It was the one Donald used when he was going to be his most contrary. “You are proceeding from an assumption that I now feel we must regard as unproved.”

“And what might that be?” Alvar asked cautiously as he used his fork to chase the last of his eggs around the plate.

“That Caliban is a robot capable of violence against humans.”

The office was wreathed in silence once again, other than the muffled noise from the exterior offices that managed to seep in. This time it was Alvar who knew no way to respond. But it was obvious that Donald was going to say no more. “Wait a second,” Alvar said, dropping his fork back on his plate and giving the service robot a half-conscious signal to remove the tray. “You were the one trying to convince me that our suspect was a robot.”

“Yes, sir. But circumstances have changed. New evidence and patterns of evidence have come to light. Tentative conclusions must be reviewed against revised data.”

“What evidence and patterns of evidence?”

“One pattern in particular, sir, that I have not examined as yet. I need to run a thought experiment. I have a hypothesis which I need to test. If you will bear with me for a moment, this experiment will be difficult for me. But to perform this mental experiment, I will be forced—to—contemplate—a—robot doing—violence—to human beings. No doubt that will make it hard for me to speak and think. Indeed, you will note that even offering up the idea causes my speech to slow and slur noticeably.”

The serving robot turned toward Donald, moving so jerkily that the silverware flew off the serving tray. It knelt and scooped up the fork and knife before rising again, weaving back and forth a bit.

Donald noticed the other robot’s reaction. “Ah, sir, before we discuss this further, perhaps you should excuse the serving robot so as to prevent needless damage to its brain.”

“What? Oh, yes, of course.” Alvar waved the serving robot out, and it left the room, still holding the tray. “Now then, what is this thought experiment? If it’s risky, I don’t want to do it. I don’t want you to damage yourself, Donald,” Alvar said, concern in his voice. “I need you.”

“That is most kind of you to say, sir. However, I believe that, given the police-robot reinforcements to my positronic brain, the risk of significant permanent damage is negligible. However, you will need to be patient with me. Nor do I wish to work through this thought process more than once. It will no doubt be unpleasant for me, and the risk of permanent damage will increase should I need to repeat it. So I would request that you pay strict attention.

“I wish to place myself in the circumstances that this Caliban has faced on at least two occasions, once at the warehouse with the robot bashers, and once just now with the deputies in the tunnel. In both cases, Caliban was surrounded by a group of human beings who were clearly threatening his very existence. I intend to work through the circumstances of each event and see how a high-level robot with the Three Laws would react, what the outcome would be. In short, what would have happened if a robot with my mind and Caliban’s. size and strength faced such circumstances?”

“Yes, very well,” Alvar said, a bit mystified.

“Then I will proceed.” He sat there and watched for about a minute as Donald stood there in front of him, stock-still, frozen in place.

With a resumption of movement that was somehow more disconcerting than the way he had stopped moving, Donald came back to himself. “Very good,” he said to himself. “The first part of my hypothesis is correct. If it had been myself in either situation, I would have been destroyed, killed on the spot.” The satisfaction in his voice was plain.

“Is that all?” Alvar asked, feeling quite confused.

“Oh, no, sir. In a sense, I have not started yet. I was merely establishing a baseline, if you will. Now I must come to the far more difficult part of the experiment. I must put myself in the position of a being of high intellect, with great speed and strength, with superb senses and reflexes, who is placed in the same circumstances. But this hypothetical being is willing and able to defend itself by whatever means, including an attack on a human.”

Alvar gasped and looked up at Donald in shocked alarm. More robots than he cared to recall had been utterly destroyed by far more casual contemplation of harm to humans. To imagine such harm, deliberately committed by oneself, would be the most terrifying, dangerous thought possible for a robot. “Donald, I don’t know if—”

“Sir, I assure you that I understand the dangers far more thoroughly than you do. But I believe the experiment to be essential.”

Before Alvar could protest any further, Donald froze up again. But this time, he did not stay frozen. A series of twitches and tics began to appear, and grew worse and worse. One foot lurched off the ground, and Donald nearly toppled over before he recovered and regained his balance. A strange, high-pitched sound came up from his speaker, sweeping up and down in frequency. The blue glow of his eyes dimmed, flared, and then went blank. His arms, held at his side, twitched. His fingers clenched and unclenched. He seemed about to topple again. Alvar stood up, rushed around his desk, and reached out to steady his old friend, his loyal servant, holding Donald by the shoulders.

Even as he acted, he found that he was astonished with himself. Friend? Loyal servant? He had never even been aware that he thought of Donald that way. But now it quite abruptly seemed possible that he might lose Donald, this moment, and he suddenly knew how deeply he did not want that to happen.

“Donald!” he called out. “Stop! Break off. Whatever it is you are doing, I am ordering you to stop!”

Donald’s body gave another strange twitch, and the robot flinched away from Alvar’s touch, backing away a step or two. His eyes flared up, painfully bright, before regaining their normal appearance. “I—I—thank you, sir. Thank you for calling to me. I do not think that I could have broken free of my own volition.”

“Are you all right? What the hell happened to you?”

“I believe that I am fine, sir, though it might be prudent if I underwent a diagnostic later.” He paused for a moment. “As to what happened, it was a severe cognitive loop-back sequence. I understand that humans are capable of holding two completely contrary viewpoints at once without any great strain. It is not so for robots. I was forced to simulate a lack of constraints on my behavior, although the Three Laws of course control my actions. It was most disconcerting.”

Donald hesitated for a moment and looked at Alvar, his head cocked to one side. “It has never occurred to me just how strange and uncertain, how unguided a thing it must be to be a human being. We robots know our duty, our purpose, our place, our limits. You humans know none of that. How strange to live a life where all things are permitted, whether or not they are possible. If I may be so bold as to ask, sir—how is it humans can cope? What is it they do with all the freedom we robots provide?”

Alvar found himself sorely confused and surprised by the question. Still thrown off guard by Donald’s experiment, he answered with more honesty than he would have permitted in a considered answer. “They waste it,” he said. “They do nothing with their lives, determined to make each day like the last.” He thought of the complaints on his desk, civilians whining that the police had disrupted their lives this morning by trying to capture Caliban, quite unconcerned that the disruption had been in the interests of protecting their lives. “They are sure change can only be for the worse. They battle against change—and so ensure there is no change for the better.”

But then Alvar stopped and turned away from Donald. “Damn it, that’s not fair. Not all of it, anyway. But I spent the morning learning how we’ve doomed ourselves with indolence and denial.”

“My apologies, sir. I did not intend to move the discussion into such irrelevant areas.”

“Irrelevant?” Alvar went back to his desk chair and sat back in it with a sigh. “I think perhaps the questions of change and freedom are very close to the issues in this case. We have looked hard, seeking to find how Fredda Leving was attacked, and who did it. But we have scarcely even stopped to ask ourselves why the blow was struck. I’ll tell you the reason we are bound to find, Donald.” Suddenly his voice was eager, excited. “The reason—the motive—is going to be change, and the fear of it. It’s got to be something mired down in the politics of all this. There is some big change coming, and someone either wants to protect that change—or stop it. That’s what we’re going to find out. But damn it, we have wandered.”

But Alvar had wandered deliberately. He wanted to give Donald a moment to settle down, a chance for his positronic brain to be focused on less frightening, unsettling thoughts for a moment. Alvar knew that the question of a crime’s motive, with the insight it provides into the human psyche, always fascinated Donald. “But your experiment, Donald. What were the results?”

“In brief, sir, it confirmed my initial hypothesis—that a a—being with the physical capabilities of a robot, but with no inhibitions on its behavior, and highly motivated to protect its own existence, could have—ki-killed all the Settlers at the warehouse and all the deputies in the tunnels. And, indeed, doing so would have been safer for this hypothetical being than acting as Caliban did.”

“What are you saying?”

“It would appear that Caliban acted to protect himself, but did not seek to harm humans. Whatever harm came to them was incidental to his self-defense, and perhaps accidental. There is no doubt that he set fire to the warehouse. There is no proof that he did it deliberately.”

“You almost make him sound human, Donald.”

“But sir, as I just observed, there are no constraints on human behavior.”

“Oh, but there are such constraints. Deep, strong constraints, imposed by ourselves and by society. They rarely fail to hold. They do not have the rigid code of the Three Laws imposed from without, but humans learn their own codes of behavior. But let’s not go off on another tangent. I’ve been thinking about the fact that Leving Labs is an experimental facility. We have yet to ask what sort of experiment Caliban was meant to be. What was it that Fredda Leving had in mind? Did the experiment fail? Did it succeed?” A thought came to him, one that made his blood run cold. “Or is the experiment under way now, running exactly according to plan?”

“I don’t understand, sir.”

“Robots come awake for the first time knowing all they need to know. Humans start out in the world knowing nothing of how the world works. Suppose Leving wondered how a robot that had to learn would behave. Suppose that Caliban is out there, behaving in accordance to the Three Laws, but with such a reduced dataset that he does not know, for example, what a human being is. Tonya Welton reminded us that it has happened before. Suppose that Fredda Leving set him out to see how long it would take him to learn the ways of the world on his own.”

“That is indeed a most disturbing idea, sir. I can scarcely believe that Madame Leving would be capable of undertaking such an irresponsible experiment.”

“Well, she is sure as hell hiding something. That lecture last night took lots of potshots at the present state of affairs. I’ve got a feeling there will be even more bombshells at the second lecture. Maybe we’ll learn more then.”

Alvar Kresh looked down at his desk and found his thoughts turning toward the routine business of running the department. Personnel reports. Equipment requisitions. The dull humdrum of bureaucracy seemed downright attractive after the chaos of the last few days. Best get to it. “That’s all for now, Donald.”

“Sir, before I go, there is one more datum of which you need to be apprised. “

“What is that, Donald?”

“The blow to Fredda Leving’s head, sir. The forensic lab has established that Caliban almost certainly did not do it.”

“What?”

“It is another part of the new patterns of evidence, sir. There were traces of red paint found in the wound, sir.”

“Yes, I know that. What of it?”

“It was fresh paint, sir, not yet fully dry. Furthermore, according to the design specifications for Caliban’s body type, a given robot’s color is integral to the exterior body panels. With that model robot body, dyes are blended into material used to form the panels. The panels are never painted. The body material is designed to resist stains, dyes, and paints. In short, nothing will stick to that material, which is why it must be imbued with a color during manufacture.”

“So that paint couldn’t have just flaked off Caliban’s arm.”

“No, sir. Therefore, someone else, presumably with the intent of framing Caliban, painted a robot arm red and struck Leving with it. I would further presume that person to be unknowledgeable concerning the manufacture of robot bodies, though that presents difficulties, as everything else suggests that the attacker knew quite a bit about robotics.”

“Unless the red paint was, if you’ll pardon the expression, a deliberate red herring.” Alvar thought for a moment. “It could still be Caliban, or someone else, who knew about the color process for that robot model. Caliban could have painted his red arm red merely to confuse the trail. He would know we would find out about the color issue, and therefore would know we’d think he could not have done it.”

“You are presupposing a great deal of knowledge and cunning for Caliban, especially considering that you suggested a minute ago that he did not know what a human being was.”

“Mmmph. The trouble with you, Donald, is that you keep me too honest. All right, then. If Caliban did not do it—then who the damned hell-devils did?”

“As to that, sir, I could not offer an opinion.”

CALIBAN came to another tunnel intersection and hesitated for a moment before deciding which way to go. He had yet to see a single human in the underground city, but it seemed unwise to be in the company of robots, either. There seemed to be less traffic on the left-hand tunnel branch, and so he went that way.

There had been moments, more than a few of them, since his awakening, when Caliban had experienced something very like the emotion of loneliness, but he certainly had no desire for companionship at the moment. Right now he needed to get away, to put as much distance and as many twists and turns as possible between himself and his pursuers. Then he needed to sit down somewhere and think.

The robots here underground were quite different from those he had seen on the surface. No personal-service robots down here, no fetchers and carriers of parcels. These passages were populated by burlier sorts, lumbering heavy-duty machines in dun colors. They had little resemblance to the brightly colored machines overhead. Compared to these robots, the ones above were merely toys. These underground robots were closer kin to the maintenance units that toiled on the surface only by night. By night, and underground, do the true workers toil, Caliban thought to himself. There was something disturbing about the thought, the image.

He was coming to understand that this was a world where real labor, work that accomplished something, was distasteful, something that had to be done out of sight. The humans seemed contemptuous of the very idea of work. They had taught themselves it was not a proper thing to see, let alone do. How could they live, knowing themselves to be useless, pampered drones? Could they truly live that way? But if they allowed themselves to be waited on hand and foot, then surely they must, as individuals, and as a people, be losing even the ability to do most things for themselves. No, it could not be. They could not possibly be making themselves so helpless, so vulnerable, so dependent on their own slaves.

The ways under the central part of the city were clean, dry, and bright, bustling with activity, robots going off on their errands in all directions. None of that suited Caliban’s purposes. He consulted his on-board map and headed toward the outskirts of the system.

The main tunnels and the older tunnels were lit in frequencies visible to humans, Caliban noticed. Perhaps that was some sort of holdover from the days when humans had trod these ways. The newer ones were lit in infrared, offering mute testimony to the absence of human use in these latter days.

Caliban moved farther and farther, out into the outskirts of the system, where even the infrared lighting got worse and worse. Infrared lights were supposed to come on as he approached, and cut off as he left, but fewer and fewer of the sensors seemed to be working. At last he was walking in complete darkness. Caliban powered up his on-board infrared light source and found his way forward that way.

The condition of the tunnels was deteriorating as well. Here, well out from the center of town, most of the tunnels were semi-abandoned, cold, dank, damp, and grimy. Perhaps the surface of Inferno was bone-dry, but clearly there was still deep groundwater to be found. Tiny rivulets of water ran here and there. The walls sweated, and drips of water came down from the ceiling, their splashing impacts on the walkway echoing loudly in the surrounding silence. Out here, on the perimeter, only a few lowly robots ventured, scuttling through the darkness, intent on their errands, paying Caliban no heed.

Caliban turned again, and again, down the tunnels, each time turning in the direction with the least traffic. At last he walked fully in the dark, fully alone. He came to a tunnel with a glassed-in room set into one side of it, a supervisor’s office, from back in the days when there was enough work of whatever sort had gone on here to justify such things. Or at least back in the days when they could imagine a future with an expanding city that would need a supervisor’s office out here.

There was a handle on the door, and Caliban pulled at it. He was not oversurprised to find that the door was jammed shut. He pulled harder and the whole door peeled away, hinges and all. He let the thing drop on the ground with the rest of the debris and went inside. There was a desk and a chair, both covered with the same moldering grit that seemed to be everywhere in the unused tunnels. Caliban sat down at the chair, put his hands flat on the desk, and stared straight ahead. He cut the power to his infrared light source and sat in the featureless blackness.

No glimmer of light at all. What a strange sensation. Not blindness, for he was seeing all that could be seen. It was simply that what he was seeing was nothing at all. Blackness, silence, with only the far-off echo of an intermittent water drip to stimulate his senses. Here, certainly, he would hear any pursuit echoing down the tunnels long before it arrived, see any glimmer of the visible or infrared light his pursuers would have to carry. For the moment, at least, he was safe.

But certainly he was not so for the long term. What was it all about? Why were they all trying to catch him, trying to kill him? Who were they all? Was it all humans everywhere that were pursuing him? No, that could not be. There had been too many people on the street who had done nothing to stop him.

It was not until he had dealt with that one man with the packages that things had spiraled out of control. Either he, Caliban, had done something that inspired the man to call in the uniformed people, or else that particular man was in league with the uniformed group, ready to call for them if he spotted Caliban. Except the man had not seemed to show any interest or alarm at first, and did not act as if he recognized Caliban. It was something about the way he, Caliban, had acted that had made the man upset. Some action of his set off the reaction of the man and the mysterious and alarming uniformed people.

Who were they, anyway? He brought up a series of images of them, and of their uniforms and vehicles and equipment. The words Sheriff and Deputy appeared several times on all of them. The moment his mind focused on the words, his on-board datastore brought up their definitions. The concept of peace officers acting for the state and the people to enforce the laws and protect the community swept into his consciousness.

Some of the mystery, at least, faded away. Clearly these sheriff’s deputies were after him because they believed he had violated one law or another. It was of some help to get at least that much clear, but it was extremely depressing to realize that it was all but certain that the Sheriff would continue to hunt for him. The other group, the ones who had called themselves Settlers, had not 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?

Sitting in the darkness, he once again brought the scene up before his eyes. Now he did not try merely to play back the events, but instead worked to build up as full and complete an image of the room as he could, using all the angles, running through all the images over and over again at high speed, trying to assemble as much detail as possible using all the momentary images at his disposal.

In the darkness, in his mind’s eye, he effectively made the room whole and then stepped into it, projecting the image of his own body into the imaginary reconstruction of the room. He knew that it was all illusion, but a useful illusion for all of that.

Yet it was flawed, deeply so. He turned around to look at the back of the room, and it was not there. He had not ever looked in that direction in real life. The jumble of objects sitting on this table or that looked real enough when he looked at them from the angles he had used in reality, but as he moved his viewpoint to other angles, that he had not used in reality, they melted into a bizarre mishmash of impossible shapes and angles. It was all most disturbing. Perhaps with further effort, he could refine the image, make reasonable educated guesses that could clear up such difficulties. But now was not the time.

He had other concerns. Caliban went back to his starting position in the room and looked down.

There she was, lying on the floor. Was there any clue on her person, any guide, to who she was? He magnified the image of her body and examined it, centimeter by centimeter. There! A flat badge pinned to the breast of her lab coat. The shapes of the letters were somewhat obscured by her position and the lighting. He stared at it, struggling to puzzle it out. He was fairly certain it read F. Leving, but it could have been E. Leving or some other variant. Did the tag denote her name, then? He could not be sure, but it seemed reasonable.

Still, he had learned that the written word, even when it was incidental, could open the doors to a great deal of knowledge. Spotting the words “Sheriff’ and “Deputy” had cued his datastore to explain the entire criminal justice system. He looked around the image of the room as recorded by his memory, searching for other writing. He spotted a poster on the wall, a picture of a group of people smiling for the camera, with a legend overprinted along the bottom. Leving Robotics Laboratories: Working for Inferno’s Future.

Leving again. That must be the name. He examined the poster more closely. Yes, he was virtually certain. There she was, in the front row. Even allowing for the fact that the woman in the lab was unconscious, crumpled at his feet, while the woman in the picture was alert and smiling, the two had to be one. Leving Robotics Laboratories. Labs were places where experiments were run. Was he himself an experiment?

He continued his search of the room image. He spotted the writing on a stack of boxes and zoomed in to examine it. There was a neat label on each one. Handle with Care. Gravitonic Brain. Reading the, words sent a strange thrill of recognition through him. Gravitonic Brain. There was something, deep in the core of himself, that felt an identity with that word. It related to him. I must have one, he thought.

It came as no surprise whatsoever that his on-board datastore contained not the slightest shred of information concerning gravitonic anything, let alone gravitonic brains.

All this was vague, unclear, uncertain. Knowing the woman’s name was Leving, and that she seemed to run a robot lab, did not get him much further ahead than he had been before. And a guess at what sort of brain he had was of little use, either.

Determined to find something clear, substantial, definite, in the image of the room, Caliban pressed on with his search. Wait a second. On the gravitonic brain boxes. Another label, with what his datastore informed him was a delivery address. Over the address were the words Limbo Project surmounting a lightning bolt.

If he suspected that he himself had a gravitonic brain, and gravitonic brains were being shipped to the Limbo Project… He ran a search over his visual memory, searching for more instances of the words or the lightning symbol. There, on a notebook on the counter. And on a file folder, and two or three other places about the lab.

It was obvious that not only he, Caliban, but Leving Labs had something to do with the Limbo Project.

Whatever the Limbo Project was.

Caliban explored the image of the laboratory in minute detail, but he could not find anything more that could offer him any clues about his circumstances. He faded out the imagery and sat there, alone in the perfect darkness of the tunnel office.

He was safe down here, and probably would be for quite a while. It might be days or weeks, perhaps longer, before they searched this deep into the tunnel system. It might be that he could elude capture altogether simply by hunkering down, sitting behind the desk, out of sight of the door, and staying there in the dark. It was a big, heavy, metal desk. It might even provide some protection against the sorts of detection devices the police used, according to the datastore.

Perhaps this might be even more than a temporary haven. Perhaps, if the police could not find him, they might give up after a while. It seemed not at all unlikely that he could remain safely alive indefinitely, simply by staying exactly where he was, motionless in the dark, until the dust settled over him and the grit worked its way into his joints.

But while that sort of existence might match the datastore’s definition of staying alive, it did not match the one Caliban felt inside himself.

If he was going to live, truly live, he would have to take action. He would have to know more, a great deal more, about his circumstances.

Limbo. That seemed to be where it all tied together. The Limbo Project. If he could learn more about it, then perhaps he would know more about himself.

For form’s sake, he consulted his datastore, but found no information about Limbo there. But he had the street address from that gravitonic brain shipping box.

He would go there and see what he could learn. But this time, he would stay away from the humans. He would ask the robots his questions. It was, perhaps, a rather vague and sketchy plan, but at least it was something.

It might work, it might do no good at all. But it had to be better than dealing with humans.

He stood up and got moving.