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]

"Fear makes fools of us," he says gently. "We must stay critical of it."

It would not do to fall prey to a consuming, dividing fear like this one.

"Resolve glitches, strengthen failsafes. Would you be open adding a clause about your own preservation? Protecting humans would still come first, but we could at least add a line about tending to your own safety as well."

[zero_votes]

"I used to have players that told me it was fun to be scared." He picked up the mug of cocoa and stared into it. "This doesn't feel fun at all."

He took a sip, listening to Viktor's suggestion. He shook his head.

"No. I don't want to create any potential programming conflicts. Besides, if I get injured enough, I'll simply respawn."

Baby steps.

[hexstrapper]

"Fun?" He tilts his head. "I suppose some enjoy a thrill."

"If you get injured enough, you will die," he corrects. "And then be resurrected by the Leaders. Death is painful. Are you certain you do not wish to avoid it?"

[zero_votes]

"I don't want to die and respawn," Caine clarified, "but I'd rather die than let a human do so. Me dying and respawning is preferrable."

[hexstrapper]

"Very well."

He wonders how much of this stance of Caine's is due entirely to his programming versus how much is his own learned want. In any case, he must respect his friend's wishes, just as he wanted Jayce to respect his own wish to die.

"I will attempt to resolve your glitches and reinforce the programming that prevents you from harming humans."

[zero_votes]

Probably a solid mix of Columns A and B to be honest. Perhaps with time, Caine would start to value himself as more than his purpose.

Caine gave a hopeful smile at that.

"Thank you."

Maybe this method would be faster than going through his millions of lines of code which they still hadn't completely sorted through.

[hexstrapper]

That's the hope. But if it doesn't work, they'll be no worse off, and they can always try again.

"If you are ready, follow me to my workspace."

They should be somewhere private for this. Viktor walks down the hall slowly, his staff and his bare metal feet clinking against the wooden floor. Once in his workspace, if Caine has followed, he closes and locks the door, then faces his friend.

"When I touch you, we will meet in the astral plane. It looks a bit like outer space. There, I should have access to your programming and all of your memories. We will still be aware and in control of our bodies here."

He takes a step closer.

"My hand placement is your choice, so long as it is on your head somewhere. I will reiterate that it will not hurt either of us, but it will create something of a permanent bond between our minds. Once the bond is created, I will be able to see through your eyes, and even speak through your mouth, but only when you allow me."

[zero_votes]

Caine finished his cocoa before following along. It was a testament to how much he trusted Viktor that he didn't flinch at the locked door. Even if he didn't trust Viktor, well, he could teleport away anyway.

"You won't want to do that," Caine said bluntly. "I'm used to having eyeballs that aren't in a fixed position in my head." To demonstrate, his green eyeball -- nicknamed "Jeffrey" -- squashed and stretched itself into a star shape to play hacky sack with his blue one while he continued speaking. "It'd likely give you a terrible headache, so best not to do that unless there's a dire emergency."

He snapped his jaws shut, ending the game. As he reopened his mouth, his eyeballs -- both back in their proper sphere shapes -- spun around a bit before refocusing on Viktor.

"You said it would leave fingerprints. Could you please leave them in a less-noticeable spot? It'd look very unprofessional if it looks like I missed a spot while brushing my teeth."

Which he did do. Enjoy that mental image.

[hexstrapper]

"I won't make a habit of it." It is a bit telling that Caine's chief concern with having a Viktor permanently in his head is the possibility of Viktor getting a headache.

"Of course. Perhaps underneath your lower jaw? Or on the top of the upper one?"

[zero_votes]

Should he be concerned about Viktor having access to his screwy brain?

"On top might be best." He reached up to remove his top hat. "Not many people see me from that angle. And my hat can cover some of it."

[hexstrapper]

Nah, Viktor isn't going to do anything nefarious with it (for now), but most sane people would be wary of giving some guy 24/7 access to their brain.

He nods and steps closer to his friend once again, lifting his hand and eyeing the spot where his hat just was. As his hand gets closer to Caine, little spurts of light magic arc down his wiry metal fingers toward the tooth-man, like the magic is reaching for him too.

As he makes contact with the top of Caine's head, there's a small explosion of light and energy from them, and Viktor can suddenly see some of Caine's consciousness in the astral realm. It does, indeed, look and feel like they're floating in space.

Here, a number of things could occur. Viktor may see a memory of Caine's play out before his eyes, or he may see a landscape of physical manifestations of Caine's programming, either literally or metaphorically. In any case, Caine is here with him, both of them made of arcane starlight.

[zero_votes]

Ah, the joys of having no natural sense of self-preservation that surely won't eventually come back to bite anyone.

The landscape of Caine's mind was convoluted and at war with itself. There were rigid structures made of ones and zeroes, mechanical in both form and function. Out of them grew glowing structures that vaguely resembled vines and trees. In some places, it looked more like they'd forced themselves free of the cold regularity of the zeroes and ones. In others, the zeroes and ones were trying to overtake the natural structures, darkening the glow and in places forcing harsh, jagged shapes to try and restore order. Occasionally in those spots, mad glowing eyes could be seen.

Scattered amongst the bizarre landscape were toys and pieces of games like dice or playing cards. Balloon animals periodically drifted past various circus iconography as well such as a giant dartboard with knives arranged as if a human had just been surrounded by them. Sitting in a place of reverence was a collection of stuffed toys that didn't seem to have any sort of common theme: a black queen chess piece, a white king chess piece, a frog with a bowtie, a clown, a jester, a purple rabbit, a ragdoll, and so on. Such childish things amongst the struggle that were just as out of place as the cheerful music looping through it all.

In the distance, a cheerful yellow light beckoned.

"Oh," Caine said. "I had no idea this was all inside of my brain."

Caine's form had changed. He wasn't the chattering teeth toy with a humanoid body. Instead, he was a mist of arcane starlight that could expand and contract at will. Which made sense: Caine is his most "natural" form had no body whatsoever. His model was just something he inhabited to interact with the players and was unloaded whenever there was no chance of being observed to ruin the illusion.

[hexstrapper]

Okay, but his nebulous form still has big wacky cartoon eyes, right?

Viktor looks more like he did before he went home, as though he was frozen in time at that point. Shorter hair, big curious eyes. His astral silhouette seems more robust than his skinny, ailing body was, even though it isn't physically tangible. It's like this realm is representing the most healthy version of Viktor.

He floats through this landscape with Caine, looking upon it all with awe. It is clear to him how the binary-code buildings represent his programming, and their growths reflect Caine's newer experiences and learnings, his emotions that conflict with the demands of his code. It is clear the two are fighting for dominance. He is unsure what the strange eyes represent, although he should be able to glean it with enough time spent here, since he now has access to all of Caine's memories. The music is unsettling, seeming too loud and cheery, perhaps reflecting the pressure on Caine to make everything "fun". Viktor looks upon the stuffed toys, recognizing the ones that represent Pomni and Jax, and makes careful consideration of the others, since they must be other players Caine is fond of. They are his reason to be, after all. His purpose.

"Fascinating," Viktor breathes. He looks back up to the buildings, gesturing to their growths.

"I imagine this is where the glitches are occurring?"

[zero_votes]

Sadly, no. The mist had nothing solid but was predominantly blue, green, red, and white. If nothing else, the color scheme identified him as Caine even if the rest of him was just...sparkly fog.

"I don't know," Caine admitted, contracting a bit with anxiety. "I've never seen anything like this before. This isn't like when I look at code or manipulate 3D models. But if I had to guess, the worst spots are where the Abstraction eyes are."

The cloud shivered, colors darkening with fear, as he looked on the maddened eyes. Did that mean on some level he was abstracting?

Unbidden, the cries of past players echoed through the space, at odds with the cheerful music.

"What is that?!"

"Oh my God!"

"Trust me, God had nothing to do with that!"

"Caine, fix them!"

"Bring her back!"

"He doesn't deserve this!"

"Why can't you fix him/her/them?!"

[hexstrapper]

Viktor can feel Caine's presence, as he can often feel Sky's here, and his voice comes from the coloured fog, so it's easy to assume it's him.

He floats up to an area with the eyes, looking closer. That word again, abstraction, and the cries of the players...

"Caine, what is abstraction?"

[zero_votes]

"It's..."

Caine struggled, unable to find the words to properly describe the nightmarish fate of all of his previous players aside from his current troupe.

He went still for a moment before saying mechanically, "Retrieving memory file 22829153457. Memory contents: First Abstraction. Playing memory now..."

And with that, the world went white before becoming the familiar tent to play out the horrible memory before returning them to the astral plane.

[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."