First Person Peculiar by Mike Resnick

wristwatch. Five minutes left.
    I AM AN ERASURE, I began.
    I WOULD NEVER HAVE GUESSED.
    Just what I needed—sarcasm from a computer. They’re making them too damned smart these days.
    RECENTLY I REACTED INSTINCTIVELY TO A SOUND VERY SIMILAR TO THAT MADE BY A PISTOL BEING FIRED, ALTHOUGH I HAD NO CONSCIOUS REASON TO DO SO. WOULD THAT IMPLY THAT GUNFIRE PLAYED AN IMPORTANT PART IN MY LIFE PRIOR TO THE TIME I WAS ERASED?
    ***CLASSIFIED.
    CLASSIFIED, NOT NEGATIVE?
    THAT IS CORRECT.
    I got up with three minutes left on my time.
    My next stop was at Doubleday’s, on Fifth Avenue. The sign in the window boasted half a million microdots per cubic yard, which meant that they had one hell of a collection of literature crammed into their single ten-by-fifty-foot aisle.
    I went straight to the True Crime section, but gave up almost immediately when I saw the sheer volume of True Crime that occurred each and every day in Manhattan.
    I called in sick, then hunted up a shooting gallery in the vidphone directory. I made an appointment, rode the Midtown slidewalk up to the front door, rented a pistol, and went downstairs to the soundproofed target range in the basement.
    It took me a couple of minutes to figure out how to insert the ammunition clip, an inauspicious beginning. Then I hefted the gun, first in one hand and then the other, hoping that something I did would feel familiar. No luck. I felt awkward and foolish, and the next couple of minutes didn’t make me feel any better. I took dead aim at the target hanging some fifty feet away and missed it completely. I held the pistol with both hands and missed it again. I missed it right-handed and left-handed. I missed it with my right eye closed, I missed it with my left eye closed, I missed it with both eyes open.
    Well, if the only thing I had going for me was my instinct, I decided to give that instinct a chance. I threw myself to the floor, rolled over twice, and fired off a quick round—and shot out the overhead light.
    So much, I told myself, for instinct. Obviously the man I used to be was more at home ducking bullets than aiming them.
    I left the gallery, hunted up a couple of Erased friends, and asked them if they’d ever experienced anything like my little flash of déjà vu . One of them thought it was hilarious—they may have made him safe, but I have my doubts about whether they made him sane—and the other confessed to certain vague stirrings whenever she heard a John Philip Sousa march, which wasn’t exactly the answer I was looking for.
    I stopped off for lunch at a local soya joint, spent another fruitless fifteen minutes in the library with my friend the computer, and went back to my brownstone condo to think things out. The whole time I was riding the slidewalk home I kept shadow-boxing and dancing away from imaginary enemies and reaching for a nonexistent revolver under my left arm, but nothing felt natural or even comfortable. After I got off the slidewalk and walked the final half block to my front door, I decided to see if I could pick the lock, but I gave up after about ten minutes, which was probably just as well since a passing cop was giving me the fish-eye.
    I poured myself a stiff drink—Erasures’ homes differ in locale and decor and many other respects, but you’ll find liquor in all of them, as well as cheap memory courses and the Collected Who’s Who in Organized Crime tapes—and tried, for the quadrillionth time, to dredge up some image from my past. The carnage of war, the screams and supplications of rape victims, the moans of old men and children lying sliced and bleeding in Central Park, all were grist for my mental mill—and all felt unfamiliar.
    So I couldn’t shoot and I couldn’t pick locks and I couldn’t remember. All that was one the one hand.
    On the other hand was just one single solitary fact: I had ducked.
    But somewhere deep down in my gut (certainly not in my brain) I knew, I knew , that the man I used to be had screamed