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.