Caliban

And therefore, he, Caliban, had not attacked this woman. Of that much he was sure. Perhaps hisbody 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 readF. Leving, but it could have beenF. 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.