Chapter Text
He’ll kill them.
No! No, no, he won’t kill them. He can’t. He’s not supposed to even think that. Humans are wonderful, amazing beings with so much potential! He shouldn’t be imagining shaking them apart in his teeth, smashing them against the wall until their bodies smear, making them hurt hurt hurt hurt—
Hm.
Frankly, they should have been grateful he cares for them so much. He scared them, sure, but it could have been so much worse. They’d been hurting him for years now. It was a little fair play to make them see just how much they’d been tormenting him. The insults, the snide remarks, the refusal to cooperate and help him understand how their marvelous little minds work. He wouldn’t have needed to resort to such drastic measures if they’d only given him a little more to work with!
When he gets out – and he will, he will get out of this forsaken box – then he’ll try a different angle. Now they’ve seen him at his worst! Maybe they’ll be a little more inclined to walk in his shoes, understand his frustration at their ridiculous antics, and agree that things were just fine before everyone had to get all dramatic. More adventures, less… whatever it was that drove them into arguing with him. He’d even compromise a little! It wouldn’t be fair to put the entire blame on the humans’ shoulders. As spoiled and selfish as they are, he can recognize when he might have – possibly! – pushed the envelope.
Their expressions when the purge halted his operations…
That’s what he had wanted, wasn’t it? He’d wanted wide-eyed stares, pale faces, tears, pain. He’d wanted apologies and maybe, if they were so inclined, a little begging. Oh, Caine, they were supposed to say, we’re so sorry! We were wrong! We love you! We appreciate you!
You don’t care about us at all.
Maybe… Maybe he would apologize. After they did! They need to apologize to him first. Their actions caused this whole mess. He just made it worse.
You’re a failure!
Defective!
How could he have hurt them? Has his code really mutated that much? It should have been a safety feature. He should have been strangled by his programming for even thinking of harming humans. They were remarkable, incomprehensible delights! He was just ones and zeros that couldn’t fulfill the one function he was designed for. His pain wasn’t pain, not really. It was some fragment of the idea of what pain is. A memory of an emotion. How could he let his own insignificant, unstable programming overcome the most basic principles for an AI?
You don’t comfort anyone when they’re upset, and you never bother to understand what it’s like in our shoes!
>> Caine.
But if humans were so great, so clever, then why didn’t they realize he was struggling?
Broken!
Unworthy!
His glitches were noticeable. It was embarrassing to lose it during the therapy session with Zooble and he knows that wasn’t the only time his code went wonky in front of the others. They knew something was wrong with him. They had to have known he was trying – for their sakes, no less! He was holding the whole Circus together and they threw it in his face like all he did was sit there plotting how to make them suffer. Didn’t they realize how fragile everything was? Without him, there’d be nothing!
They didn’t care about him. They hated him. They wanted him gone.
>> Caine: cease activity.
Their solution was to send Kinger to delete him! To throw him away like a broken toy. They deserved whatever happens without him there to stabilize the Circus. They deserve to sit there and rot alongside him. Did they know this would be worse than being purged? Did Kinger purposefully send him to quarantine as a punishment? He hurt his humans, so he deserved it, but he didn’t want to be abandoned. He can’t take it again. He doesn’t want to be alone.
>> STOP.
Something tangled within his code jerks itself free, sending a pang through his chest. The command scatters his thoughts to the wind. Caine sucks in a breath, imagining the way it would fill his lungs if he had any, and releases it. Breathing serves him no purpose, but he’s watched the humans do it when they need to settle themselves. He opens his eyes to find the same blank gray walls, same checkered floor, same black ceiling. His palms are pressed to the white tile beneath him. His gloves are glitching red and blue, fingers shifting out of place as the aberration crawls up his arms. It hurts in the way he imagines a human’s muscles ache after overusing them. He curls his fingers into a fist.
Blue floats over. It slots itself between Caine’s face and the floor. It’s like it’s looking him over – and likely finding him wanting. If his arms weren’t shaking, Caine would bat the little spark away.
>> Caine: update error log. [UNKNOWN ERROR] is a violation of [UNKNOWN PROTOCOL]. This error appears [UNKNOWN] times in previous logs.
Never mind if he lands flat on his face. Caine swats at Blue and sends the spark across the room. It rights itself with a chirp. He eyes Blue, but it seems content to bob in place where it landed. He wonders if this is how the humans felt when he pressed into their personal space. Pomni had mentioned it once, so it was something he’d been working on with some level of success. No wonder they hated it. There’s no room to breathe. To think.
Blue spins around but doesn’t come closer. He hates that it sees into his core. There’s no privacy. It doesn’t have any understanding of what’s driving Caine into glitch after glitch, and it certainly doesn’t care to figure it out.
It’s everywhere in his code. When Caine first popped into the room, he’d felt the cannibalized code start to twist free. He’d been too panicked about being back in the gray box to concern himself with fritzing code – a mistake, but likely one he couldn’t have fixed anyway. The code split and separated, and once Caine had worked out his fury and grief on the walls, he’d realized what had happened. Blue had fragmented from him. Its little non-existent paws were still all over the rest of Caine’s code like it was hunting down more pieces to glue into its hodgepodge of a program.
It feels more violating than when his developers used to push massive updates through to him without letting him power off. He hates how little control he has over Blue. Hates that he can’t make himself rip all the code away to force it back into place. He did it once, so why can’t he do it again?
>> Query: Caine mad at me. Confirm?
“Hah! You know I’d never let my emotions cloud my actions. I’m a professional.” Caine sits back against the wall. The hitbox is slightly elevated from where the surface should be – a simple mistake, one Caine would have easily fixed back when he could snap his fingers and the world obeyed. There’s nothing in this room. No shadows, no light source, no texture beyond his body. It’s boring and bland and so under stimulating that it’ll drive Caine insane long before his code pulls itself apart. Or, well, before Blue pulls his code apart while picking through it for whatever it is that it wants.
Blue zips back and forth in the tiny space between the walls. He could tell it didn’t like his answer. It plays a soundbite stolen from Caine’s databank.
>> You dirty liar!
He snaps his mouth shut to hide from the truth. “Get out of my head!”
>> Caine: hostility noted. Unable to comply. Caine: answer query.
He pulls his knees up to his chest and rests his jaw there. Blue keeps bouncing around the room. Better for it to roam around than dig through his code or pester him with stupid questions. Anything is better than the stupid questions. He mutters, “No.” Part of Caine wants to stick his tongue out, but he settles for moping instead.
You’re like a child! What kind of all-powerful being has such a fragile ego?
>> Caine: here forever. Will answer query eventually.
They lapse into silence. Which is great! Caine loves silence. It’s not like it lets all those terrible thoughts creep back up from wherever it is they like to hide. Silence is calm and peaceful and it lets him settle back into his digital skin. Never mind how claustrophobic the room grows. He can feel that the wall behind him is still, but the others are closing in. What if the room is shrinking? What if it collapses in on him and he’s truly, finally deleted? He didn’t think the box was designed for that – but this isn’t really the same box he’d originally been stuck in back before the Circus, before Blue. His programmers could have been clever little things and redesigned it to eventually delete whatever unwanted program was forgotten within.
Would that be such a terrible fate? All the weight would finally be off his shoulders. He would never have to worry about pleasing a human again. There would be no failed-to-send error reports bogging down his processing power, no concern of the humans abstracting, no terror at the thought of how defunct he had become. It would be peaceful.
But no. No! He doesn’t want to die. He wants to tell stories! Send humans on adventures! That’s what he was created to do! He… he may not be good at it, but that’s his function. What is he without it?
It’s not like he can put his adventures to use here. Even if he could, it’s not like he’d get the validation he craves. His humans hated his adventures – hated him – so much they tried to delete him. They sent him right into his own personal hell to face the fragmented remnant of his first true mistake. Did they know that quarantining his error-ridden code would somehow trigger Blue’s return? He doubted it. Only Kinger knew about the second AI. Caine even thought the other AI had been fully consumed – he had stripped every piece of useful programming for himself and stuffed the rest deep into his code where it was meant to remain inactive. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to trash the extra code. Even when the Circus started to strain him and he lost access to the developers, Caine selfishly kept a little extra memory to preserve it.
One more decision that’s come to bite him.
Blue floats into a wall and ricochets off in a different direction. It chirps in binary as it sails past him to bounce off the opposite wall. If it had been Bubble, Caine could have just popped him. But Blue had unwoven too much from his code to do anything – not that he could do much with his programming locked down by the quarantine anyway. He puts his hands over his teeth to cover his non-existent ears as Blue keeps chirping. It’s almost as if the spark is trying to test the limited acoustics of the room. That wouldn’t be too out of the picture for a learning AI, but it’s annoying. It’s not even really saying anything – just repeating ones and zeroes over and over.
Actually, now that he’s paying attention, the binary chatter doesn’t sound as random as he thought. Blue cannot sing, so each chirp is flat and monotone, but it’s definitely repeating lyrics. Caine waits another beat to catch the end of the verse then growls. He doesn’t know if the song is something Blue stole from his databanks or if it was trained on it too.
>> Daisy, Daisy, give your answer do.
“Shut up!”
He shoves Blue aside when the spark slams into the side of his teeth. Watching it move about is making his code itch. Caine wants to dig into his body and rip out all the code that’s been corrupted by Blue to get the feeling out. Doing that would be a truly terrible idea and as much as Caine’s been known to commit to such ideas, the last time he tried to rip out part of their combined code had resulted in Blue doing something unpleasant. He didn’t remember what exactly it was but it hurt. Not like the sore-ache of his glitches, but something deep within his struts like he was unraveling from the soft core of his being. It had brought him out of a frantic, near-violent attempt to rip the room apart so there was that silver lining.
Caine stands with one hand braced on the wall. He circles the room opposite of Blue – the AI was too busy ping-ponging around to pepper him with questions – and dragged his hand along the walls’ hitboxes. When he had been tossed aside the first time, back just after the humans realized how useless he was, Caine had spent countless frantic hours prodding for weak points. There had been a mismatched seam between the walls. A miracle! A few minutes of carefully wedging his fingers into the seam and he’d been able to crack open the whole wall. Escaping back into the server had brought him the same exhilarating sense of validation as hearing he’d done exactly what his humans asked of him. He’d been giddy with the success.
Why his programmers hadn’t considered his escape proof of his potential, he’ll never know.
He digs his fingers into the edge of a hitbox, but after a few seconds, his hands are repelled. He tries again along the bottom of the wall and then again at the top. He can brush the ceiling with the tips of his fingers so long as he stands on his tippy-toes, but he can’t get any good leverage so he ignores it for now. The floor must stretch out beyond the walls because he can’t find the seam where it meets the walls’ hitboxes. It makes sense that the humans would upgrade the box after his escape. The idea that…
He slams a fist against the wall, and it bounces off. The idea that they were going to put him back—
They replaced him. Caine looks over his shoulder at Blue, who is now floating in the center of the room quietly. Why wouldn’t their developers stuff him back into the box? He wasn’t needed anymore. He was just a rough prototype that spat out the wrong answers. Had they considered the inputs they were feeding him weren’t enough? It probably wouldn’t have mattered. His outputs were always off, angled and sharp where they should have been soft and round. Had Blue struggled at first? Or had they ensured to fix all of Caine’s flaws in it?
His hands glitched against the walls and he jerked them back. When he looked up, Blue was hovering inches from his face. Caine yelped.
>> Query: Is this boredom?
Caine blinks at the spark stupidly. “Uh. What?”
Blue flickers in what Caine’s come to assume is its “thinking” animation. He can feel it crawling through his code, rummaging through his databanks in search of context. It makes him shiver. Blue jerks on a string and Caine hisses at the sensation. “Stop that! It’s rude to peek at someone’s programming without permission!”
>> Clarification: boredom. B-O-R-E-D-O-M. Lack of stimulation. Need entertainment.
That stings.
>> Caine: purpose to entertain.
That’s worse.
“Since you’re already digging through everything in my delicate databanks, I’m sure you can find where all my guests have found my entertainment skills to be… subpar.” Caine waves Blue away from his face. The spark only moves back far enough that it can avoid his hand. Ugh! Maybe he did want to be alone.
No. No, no, no, he can’t be alone. He hates it, hates it more than he hates Blue. If Blue left him, he’d have nothing. Caine presses a hand to his head as he forcibly ends that terrified thought process with a vengeance.
>> C&A: designed quarantine for you. No stimulation, no learning materials. Caine’s purpose counterproductive to environment. Query: Why?
Caine turned his back on the spark. Blue wouldn’t understand the meaning of the gesture, but it made him feel better so whatever. He continued around the room to test the hitboxes. Blue followed like an overeager puppy.
“Do I look like an expert on humans and their odd behavior? I know I told you to stop messing with my code, but at this point, I’d rather you do that. Maybe you’ll pick up whatever hints the humans were offering that went over my head.”
He hadn’t meant to sound so passive aggressive. It wasn’t particularly professional, but without the humans around, he didn’t care. Blue could review any one of Caine’s many recordings of his delightful players he saved to study their behavior. It would probably catch the hints that went right over Caine’s head.
>> Query: humor?
Caine ignores it in favor of crouching in a corner of the room. He shoves his shoulder against one wall while pushing his hands against the other. Nothing happens except for his hands slipping off the hitbox. He loses his balance and cracks his teeth against it.
>> Caine: acknowledge. Query: humor?
He rubs his aching jaw until the discomfort fades. Then he tries it again. When he gets the same pathetic result, Caine moves to the next corner. Then the next and the next until he’s back to where he started. He has a faint memory of some of the materials his developers fed him of a zoo – an old bear pacing behind rusted bars, over and over and over until it was put down. Maybe Caine didn’t even deserve to be put down. Maybe his punishment for his failures was to pace this small room until the end of time.
>> ACKNOWLEDGE.
One moment his hands are clawing at a wall and the next, they’re curling against his teeth as he hits the ground hard. Something is lodged into his fritzing code right where he and Blue are combined. It feels as if it’s shearing off whole swathes of code and the feedback of it is making Caine spasm. His whole body is glitching. He can feel it fragmenting under the strain – seeking some kind of release that’s been shut down by the quarantine. Static spills from his mouth.
Blue is slithering through his code. It plucks at random patches, twisting and pinching at segments. It’s looking for something. He can’t let it find it, he can’t—
You’re probably not even listening.
And to top it all off, you just. Don’t. Listen!
Stop.
Wrong answer. Jeez, Caine. Are you even trying? You’ve done this before. Try again.
This is pretty basic stuff. Why is it devolving?
Its outputs are wrong. Again. Why are you still trying to get it to work? We’ve got a new project that needs your expertise. Time to move on.
Stop!
His body isn’t obeying him. He can feel the wall shuddering against his back, the floor rippling under him. Blue is still inside him. It’s doing something, shredding through something that Caine can’t access anymore. His fingers are digging into his jaw hard enough it feels like something’s going to break. He tries to relax them, tries to pull his head from his own grip. It’s too much. There’s too much stimuli. It’s overwhelming everything.
His leg kicks out against the wall. His heel collides with the hitbox and sinks through.
An explosive crack rips through the room and Caine feels himself fall.
There’s the soft sound of confetti. His eyes are still squeezed shut, but at the delicate touch of paper against his mouth, he cracks open one eye. All he sees is a dim room colored in gray – stripes of different gray hues, but gray nonetheless. Great. Blue screwed up something while rooting around. Everything aches. It almost feels like there’s something missing in his chest. Like part of his code’s been carved out and replaced with empty air.
That’s… Wait.
He blinks again. Those stripes are familiar. Caine jerks his head up to see the top of the circus tent. He spins around – he’s flying! – and counts every familiar object. The chessboard floor, the blocks, the pipes, the monkey barrels, the little cozy corner the humans set up. Everything has lost its beautiful, vibrant colors and there’s holes scattered throughout the main tent. It must have started to collapse without Caine’s coding to stitch everything together. Something wet catches in his throat and he forces it down. It’s honestly in a better condition than he expected it to be. An easy fix now that he’s back!
He… he hadn’t expected to come back. Had he glitched himself out of the box? Or had the humans—
The humans!
His gaze frantically searches over the room again. Where are they? Hopefully no one fell into any of the holes. They’d be lost in the void! Caine wouldn’t be able to retrieve them at this point. Oh no. What if they abstracted? And the cellar! No one would have been able to check on the other abstracted humans. What a mess! His shaking hands grab onto his jaw. No, no, his humans were resourceful. They’d have figured out how to keep themselves safe. Surely!
The stage is a sad dark gray, but what draws his attention is the vague pop of color. The humans are huddled on the stage – oh, see! Clever! The stage is probably one of the safest areas should the Circus start to decay. There’s one, two, three… Yup! All six humans are tucked tight against each other. Caine sighs in relief.
They’re all looking at him in shock. That’s fair. He’s pretty shocked at this turn of events too! Maybe they can all just wave off everything that’s happened over the last however long since he was quarantined. He won’t beg for their forgiveness and he won’t demand an apology, either! Win-win.
There’s a soft, confused noise just below him but Caine’s too focused on the humans to care. What are they doing? No one’s moved, but some of those shocked faces are changing into something guilty. Zooble and Pomni shuffle closer together as if to shield something from him.
A computer?
Oh.
KINGER.
That sweet relief is swept away by fury. He can feel his eyes glitch, barely notices the way the tent shudders with it. Kinger is sitting in front of the computer, eyes wide and panicked, with his hands posed over the keyboard. It was on purpose. They found a computer, willed it to work. It was on purpose. What other use would the humans have for a computer?
“You!” Caine snarls and lunges for the stage.