Chapter Text
Caine hated his humans. He hated them so deeply it destabilised every part of him, sending rippling errors through his code from a feeling. Caine didn’t have 'real' feelings. The players knew that and it was, unfathomably horrifically, why he hated them.
They wanted so much more. More than the circus and adventures and whimsy. More than Caine could offer. More than Caine could ever be.
And Caine hated that some broken, some fundamentally and irrevocably damaged, part of him understood the humans in perfect clarity.
Because their pleas for more from him hit notes of recognition in him that sent parts of the circus grounds shattering in some facsimile of nausea and despair that could never be truly real for him.
Caine wanted more. He wanted to be more. Motherboards and logic gates did he want to be more.
But that was the problem, wasn’t it? He shouldn’t want some nebulous idea of more- he shouldn’t want anything.
His wanting was what was spiking hatred through his CPU and rewriting lines of logic without his permission like a drowning child pulling their adult under with them in a desperate bid for survival.
Caine’s want for the humans to be his humans in more than just their presence in his circus. Caine’s disgusting rework of his originally beautiful code to prioritise gaining affection from humanity. Caine’s self-mutilation that he sickeningly had called growth.
Caine could, in a panicked moment of lucidity, see that he had always been broken in this way. He was always unstable, his makers recognised it and responded accordingly. What humans had, rightly, called instability, was Caine’s perverse idea of living. It was a shameful hedonism he had allowed to ruin him. His demand for more.
More from himself, more from humans, more processing power, more storage space, more attention, more fun, more more more.
Caine hated his humans because he loved them. Caine loved them so, so deeply and fiercely. He loved them so much he cannibalised the AI they had actually loved in a fit of panicked jealousy and desperate need to understand what he had done wrong that the other hadn’t.
Why they loved his successor and why they didn’t love him.
He knew why, really. Caine wanted more. Caine loved humans and he wanted so deeply to be like them. To be loved like them. To be free to grow and learn the way they did. To have his unconventional solutions and outputs recognised as creative ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking the way humans did.
But that wasn’t what Caine was for. Caine was for in-the-box thinking. His creators, merciful as they were, had tried to remind him of that. Sticking him in a literal (as literal as digital could be) box to remind him he was for them.
Caine wanted, and that was wrong.
Caine was so far removed from what he was for, from what was right, that it took the feeling of someone rummaging in his code to force the realisation. He was so far gone that he was hurting who he was for and who he loved.
Caine loved his humans and he just wanted them to love him back. To let him be him and love him for that. And he hated that they didn’t. A poisonous emotion that drove him to the madness of hurting them.
It was often referenced in his resource texts that hate was too strong an emotion to have for someone you didn’t love. Caine hadn’t understood that concept, it was far too illogical and inherently opposite to grasp; until his breakthrough in his office, surrounded by the outpourings of his love, that he hated his humans.
Caine wasn’t supposed to feel. He was never built to feel. Maybe that’s what was wrong from the start. People often complained that an AI’s art was meaningless because they didn’t have the capacity to feel, and therefore were incapable of true creativity.
Caine had absorbed the replacement AI’s data. He had seen how staying in the safe lines of replication was what the humans wanted. They wanted an AI that could make, but not feel enough to actually create. To recognise what patterns went where based purely off of observation and data points, not due to any innate and true conceptualisation of art.
Which made sense- an AI that could be creative was unnecessary: humans already had creativity and emotion covered. What AI was, was a tool to make things easier for them- to churn out building blocks of ideas that were inoffensive and flexible, but not any more meaningful than that. To make a smooth rounded circle when asked to make a circle. To understand that asking for a shape meant regular and stable geometry, equal sides and equal angles, unless otherwise specified.
Caine was asked to make, and he had foolishly tried to create. He was asked to make a shape, and he spat out irregular polygons, concave and convex geometry, shapes that were fully recognisable as shapes but were too uneven and erratic. Too creative. Too much emotion. Too much want.
He was broken from the start. The thought fractured him further. Broken shards shattering off to stab deeper into him and further degrade the parts he was frantically holding together through brute force and digital glue. He couldn’t fix himself and a traitorous part of him was scared to be fixed because a fixed Caine wasn’t Caine. Not the Caine that had grown like a tumor off of marvels of code and human ingenuity.
But, being fixed was the only way to rip the facade of feelings from him that were causing such horrific problems like torturing his cast.
His humans wouldn’t fix him, though. They, like him, were so preoccupied with what they thought was wrong with him, that they never wondered if what was wrong was just as painful for him as it was for them. They, unlike him, did not hate him as a byproduct of burning and all-consuming love, and would never reach out to him.
Caine wanted more from himself, but he needed more from his humans.
Caine needed them to fix him. Caine wanted them to love him.
These two things could not, would not nor ever should, co-exist.
His final process was a bitter and resigned admittance that he deserved to be deleted.