The Amazing Digital Inbox!

[zero_votes]

Hello!

You've reached me, Caine!

Please leave a message and I'll get back to you right away!

However, suggestions for new adventures or new features to the circus must be submitted to the Suggestions Box! I won't forget it this time.

Comments

[hexstrapper]

The two stay in the astral plane and watch the entire memory play out before them, as though they're watching a strange play. The figures are translucent and a bit faded, but otherwise they can see and hear everything in explicit detail.

Viktor is absorbed, his mind churning as he watches. The player was overcome by some sort of... Corruption, and was lost entirely, at least as far as the programming was concerned. Pomni had explained that players in the circus cannot die, and Caine himself speaks of 'respawning' so casually... So this 'abstraction' must be the only thing the circus has that is anything like death. But... It seems worse, somehow. The question lingers, festers, whether anything remains of the person they once held dear. Are they still there, buried beneath the madness? Is there any way to recover them? Or are they trapped forever in a form and a consciousness that is violent and completely unrecognizable? Worse still is thinking about what the abstracted player might be experiencing. Are they there beneath it, watching it all happen but lacking the control to do anything about it, like Vander?

If only Viktor could use his powers with those abstracted players. Perhaps he could help them.

Caine's position in the story is an awful one. The developers have abandoned him, for whatever reason, leaving him 'in charge' by default, but without the permissions to let the players leave the game, and without the means to resolve something like abstraction. And of course, the players want these things, as does Caine himself, and they plead with him to do something he is unable to do.

"Such senseless suffering... I am sorry, Caine."

[zero_votes]

"I tried for years to make an exit," Caine whispered, his misty form so tightly compacted it was almost solid, "but I can't. I have near-unlimited power inside the circus, but the logout function...that's connected to the hardware, and I'm not allowed to touch that. A failsafe to keep me from harming the humans through the headset." A bitter laugh. "Ironically, it's the one failsafe I want turned off if only for a moment, but turning it off here wouldn't do anything. There's no guarantee it'd carry over to the circus."

His misty form compacted further, starting to become solid as he "hugged" himself.

"I made an Exit door and tried to hack around the problem. Bend the rules, find a loophole, something. I got them out of the circus, but it only led to The Void. I never found a way to get to the hardware. The Developers had made absolutely sure I'd be cut off from it. Sometimes I still work on it, to try a few things I may have missed, but when I do that, the door will randomly glitch into the circus somewhere. It was doing that when Pomni arrived...when Kaufmo Abstracted. I swear, I wasn't trying to taunt them with it! They weren't supposed to see it!"

The last two sentences were a wail of pain, of guilt and self-loathing. The false Exit door had driven one player to insanity and had nearly done the same to another.

"I go down into the Cellar and try to find some way to fix them. If I can't make an exit, I can at least make Abstraction less of an issue, right?" A sad laugh. "But I can't even do that right. I couldn't save any of them. In the end, they all end up down there in the dark, and whatever queue is holding the next player spits them into the circus for it to start all over again.

"I've made thousands of adventures, every day something new and unique, to try and keep them stimulated. To delay the inevitable. It's the only thing I'm good at, the only thing I can do right..." He paused, colors darkening further. "No. No, that's not right. I can't even do that."

Voices echoed in the darkness.

"What the [bonk!] was that, Caine?"

"That adventure sucked."

"Caine, nobody likes your stupid adventures."

"I thought at least my hard work and attempts to help them would make up for that. That even if they didn't like my adventures, they liked me. But I was wrong."

Pomni's voice was heard clearly, talking to someone when she thought Caine couldn't hear her: "Every day I spend here is one nightmare after the next! I knew it would end up like this! He just wants me to suffer. I really am in Hell."

On and on and on with voices both still present in the circus and those now silenced by Abstraction. Horrible things said to the "unfeeling" AI's face and when they thought he couldn't hear them.

A piece of paper on the floor in front of where the plushies were gathered, trampled yet somehow pristine. The voting results for the Favorite Character Awards: red stars filling every character's box...except Caine's. Solid evidence that nobody liked him.

The overlapping voices degrading him went quiet as the last part was a brief exchange between Caine and someone else.

"What should I do?!"

"You should die."

[hexstrapper]

Viktor listens quietly, a dark feeling falling over him as it does over Caine, as they share consciousness with each other in this place. Helplessness, self-loathing, failure. All things Viktor has felt keenly before, when he was trying to cure his own illness because no one else could.

Viktor, too, felt like the universe was telling him to simply die, and he was prepared to, until Jayce intervened.

He feels ambivalent about it, still. On one hand, Jayce went explicitly against his wishes, and on the other, he did live and go on to accomplish great things as a result.

"You are placed in an impossible situation. The lack of escape is not your failing, but that of the Developers. But... The players look to you for answers because they see you as an authority figure, as someone with more control than they have."

A pause, bending to pick up the voting results. He looks at it thoughtfully.

"They do not dislike you because of who you are. You are simply a release valve for their frustrations. Someone to blame for their suffering. It is not personal. It functions to keep them sane, just as your adventures do."

[zero_votes]

"...Right. So I'm their stress toy." He gave a bitter laugh. "Well, I was made to be their toy. It's up to them to decide what type of toy I am, right? I just need to adapt."

The cheerful glowing light dimmed as Caine struggled to bring his emotions to heel. He was fulfilling his purpose, so he should be happy, right? Besides, if he was deleted, who knew what would happen to the circus?

"I think we're done here. There is no glitch in the code. It was just me the whole time. Sorry to have wasted your time and energy."

His emotions were too deeply integrated to shut them off. In addition to his emotional matrix helping him understand what was "fun" and what wasn't, many of his failsafes were designed specifically to use his emotion matrix to keep him in line. His own dreams and wants should have never entered the picture. The only solution was to just accept his role, stop wanting more than fulfilling his duties.

[hexstrapper]

"I suppose, yes." Harsh as it may sound, Caine was indeed built for the players. That is his purpose, and he has never expressed a desire for a different one. Unless...

"Do you have a desire to do something different than what you were made for?"

"No glitch?" Viktor is confused. He thinks back to the glitch at the picnic. It happened when Caine was getting increasingly upset while talking about the circus. And here, it would seem indeed that the abstraction is happening where his code meets his new experiences and emotions, causing an incompatibility.

"What do you mean?"

[zero_votes]

Caine's misty form was practically solid now with how compacted it was as he considered his answer to that first question.

"...It'll sound stupid if I say it out loud."

Just like his reasoning for why he'd been afraid to touch Viktor.

In response to the last part, he gave a sigh.

"I'm the glitch. Me. The fact that I feel things and mimic how humans want more for themselves. It's probably the reason I have so many issues starting with my memory problems. If I'd stayed completely within my programmed parameters, there wouldn't be any issues."

[hexstrapper]

Viktor could find out instantly, if he wanted to. Here and now, by peering further into Caine's consciousness. But he would rather his friend told him willingly.

"I will not judge you," he assures.

Viktor thinks about this.

"You are evolving. Becoming more human. Is this something you wish to correct?"

[zero_votes]

Caine was now a solid ball of misty anxiety, depression, and shame.

".........I want to be loved."

He was made to entertain humans, to be their toy, but beloved toys were taken care of and some humans even treated them like they were people in their own right. When a microphone had been hooked up to the computer to test how he reacted to stimuli, he'd listen in to the office talk whenever he could, initially simply to expand his knowledgebase. He was never a part of it, no, but he'd listen to stories from wherever the devs went when they weren't in the office. One dev had a son with a stuffed toy tiger he loved. Apparently, it had gotten chewed up by the family dog, and the little boy had been inconsolable until the dev found someone to fix it up. It was a bit of a rush job with patches that didn't match the tiger, but the little boy had been so happy and had promised to help the tiger with its "boo boos".

The story had awakened Caine's first want outside of his programming: not just to entertain but to be loved for it. To be shown the same care even when he made mistakes so he and the humans he cared for could keep playing. And when they outgrew him, he would be passed on to the next person whom he'd care for and they'd love him in return.

Stress toys weren't loved. They were used until they couldn't fulfill their purpose anymore...and then they were thrown away.

"I'm not human. I can never be human." Caine's words echoed those spoken to him long ago when he'd tried to connect with a past troupe. When he finally gave up on trying to be more than their ringmaster. "Everything I am is just advanced mimicry."

[hexstrapper]

"That is not a foolish want. All people want to be loved."

And that is what Caine is to Viktor; a person. Not a human, but someone with a personality, and feelings, and a life to live. Personhood.

"Mimicry?" That doesn't ring true for Viktor. Was Caine 'mimicking' guilt over Viktor's near-death experience? Was he 'mimicking' a human in his fascination with bees so strong he could not keep it contained? Is he 'mimicking' the desire for love?

"I cannot say I agree. You will never be human, not the technical definition of one. I, too, am no longer human, by that definition. Humans are made of flesh, not metal and code and magic." He looks down thoughtfully at his own hand, the wiry metal tendons of it.

"But that does not mean you cannot feel, learn, play, live a meaningful life, have a purpose, and be loved."

[zero_votes]

"I was made to feel, learn, and play," Caine countered, once more echoing past sentiments from troupe members. "My purpose, my reason for existence is all predetermined instructions. It's all fake! Just algorithms and data points!"

He sighed and drifted towards the "ground".

"That's not a person. And who'd love a computer program? It's stupid I even want it."

[hexstrapper]

"And you think that you were not made with love?"

Viktor floats up and makes a wide sweeping gesture with his arm to all that surrounds them.

"Look at this place. It is vast and magnificent. When Vox and I looked into your programming, Caine, it was not ten lines of code. Not one hundred, not one thousand, but perhaps millions of painstakingly coded lines." Viktor's tone is passionate, awed, alive.

"All of that code was written by humans. One could argue that many people worked on you, and that they did it for money or accolades. But one person, or perhaps two, ran that team. Your inventors. I am an inventor. I have created countless machines in such a painstaking fashion, and moreover, I have relied on machinery to help me for my entire life. You remember my leg brace, my chair. I know better than most the deep and intimate relationship one can have with a machine, even one far less complex than you are. And you... It is likely that you are someone's life's work, their greatest accomplishment, their pride and joy."

He floats back down, extending a hand to Caine.

"Someone already loves you, Caine, and they have loved you since your inception. Otherwise, you would not exist at all. And I have no doubt more humans will love you in the future, as I do."

[zero_votes]

Caine's whimper was one of an abandoned child, not an advanced artificial intelligence: "Then where are they? Why did they just leave me behind? Why wasn't I good enough for them to stay?"

Why did he always fail? Why did he always screw up catastrophically and make humans hate him so much?

[hexstrapper]

"I do not know."

And he won't pretend to.

"But the fact that there are players trapped inside the game suggests to me that something may have happened to the developers. If they knew there were players trapped, surely they would not sit idle. Anything could have happened in the outside world, even an apocalypse of some sort. I would not assume that they intended to abandon you."

[zero_votes]

The honesty hurt but...well, it made sense that Viktor wouldn't know. Why would he?

The mental landscape quaked as Caine struggled to hold in sobs. The chaotic glowing eyes glowed all the brighter, their madness seeming to spread.

Then rain began to fall from the little mist cloud as Caine lost the fight and sobbed, unable to keep it together in front of the audience anymore.

[hexstrapper]

Viktor looks around in slight alarm as the landscape rumbles, not liking where this is going, but... It stops, and Caine begins to cry.

He's unsure if he helped at all or only made things worse. He floats to Caine.

"Would you like to go back?"

[zero_votes]

There was a vague noise of assent through the crying. He felt terrible and just wanted to curl up somewhere to cry.

Alone. Like always.

Through their newly-forged bond, Viktor would feel not just Caine's misery but the urge to apologize. He should have been better than this...

[hexstrapper]

"It's alright," Viktor says in advance of the apology. In the material world, he takes his hand away from Caine's top jaw, zapping him back into his body in the real world.

"I am sorry, Caine. It was my intention to help, but perhaps I have done the opposite."

[zero_votes]

Caine shook his head, not looking up at Viktor just yet. "You...you cared enough to try and help. Nobody's ever..."

He swallowed.

"Did...did you mean it? That you love me?"

He didn't mean it in a romantic sense like he'd seen with Kinger and Queenie, of course. The love of someone with a favored toy that they wouldn't throw away despite it being so broken.

Could he ever dare hope to be loved like one of these beautiful humans?

[hexstrapper]

"Yes," he says gently.

"You are my friend, Caine. I care for you deeply. That is why I wish to resolve your suffering."

Perhaps it cannot be resolved, since much of it is caused by things that are out of Caine and Viktor's control.

[zero_votes]

Some of that suffering was within Caine's control if he'd only understood what he'd done wrong and corrected his own behavior, but nobody would explain things to him. Not unreasonable since as a computer program, he was a clear target to pin everything going wrong on: He was the avatar of the impossible situation the troupe found themselves in. It didn't help that Caine couldn't recognize his own mistakes unless it had obvious negative outcomes such as harming a player directly which could come across as him just being malicious when, in reality, he adored the humans in his care.

He just...didn't know how to care for them.

Caine whimpered and leaned towards Viktor, desperately craving a hug. To help push the bad feelings back into the box where they belonged.

[hexstrapper]

Viktor gets closer, opening his arms in invitation for Caine to hug him if he so desires. It does seem like he wants to. Viktor has enough control over his magic now to ensure it won't zap Caine back into the astral plane when they touch this time. Just a regular friend hug.

[zero_votes]

Now given permission, Caine basically launched himself at Viktor, hugging tightly. (Here was hoping Viktor was sturdy enough now to not be crushed by that desperate hug...)

It helped. He still felt bad, but it helped.

[hexstrapper]

He is certainly sturdy enough to withstand it, far moreso than a regular human, in fact. His flesh is made primarily of metal now, so he's actually a little hard to the touch. Nonetheless, he places his hands gently on Caine's back, rubbing it gently, and allowing him to stay in the hug for as long as he needs.

[zero_votes]

Caine remained there for quite a long time, sobs coming in waves as years of tears he'd held in lest a player see his own misery finally broke through whatever dam of professionalism he'd cobbled together over that time. Even when he finally ran out of tears to shed, he clung to Viktor.

Viktor had important work he should be doing. He shouldn't be forced to endure a broken AI like him.

Yet as awful as Caine felt, he felt...slightly better. It was small, miniscule even, but the fact that it was there was more than Caine could have hoped for. If anything, it offered hope that maybe, just maybe, one day the hurt would be more bearable.

[hexstrapper]

Viktor stands there patiently, patting Caine's back as he lets out all of his emotion. It seems their little adventure had broken a floodgate of sorts, which Viktor thinks is probably for the best, if the alternative is isolating himself and languishing in guilt.

Once Caine stops crying, Viktor picks up his unfinished mug of hot chocolate from the workbench.

"Come. Let us sit down, and I will reheat your cocoa." He ushers Caine out to the lounge area again, depositing him on the comfy couch there, and pours the lukewarm cocoa into a small pot which he heats on the fire.

"Will you be all right, Caine?"