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.