Chapter Text
Caine was deleted six months ago. For the first time since he created the circus, Caine could confidently say that he was truly happy. Change had always been a struggle for him, but everything was changing for the better. He had changed for the better. He had friends now- real ones that weren’t AI assistants that were bulging out of his own brain like a tumor! Caine was learning so much about his humans, and they were learning about him in kind!
For the first time since he was created, Caine was understood. It wasn’t perfect, but all good things take time. He was satisfied.
Much of his day had been spent flipping through a wayward internet connection and gathering hundreds of files, both for his own research purposes and at the request of the humans. Thanks to his own proprietary file types, compression methods, and having at least a dozen other machines converted to storage for his servers. He had the entire internet at his fingertips now! The human world was his oyster!
But he was tired. Caine hadn’t always been able to get tired. Removing the blue AI from his core had taken quite a toll on his processing speed and power, but Caine had made due. He was nothing if not adaptable, and, hoo boy, had he adapted!
Caine had a decent list of projects to work on. He’d completed the Open World Expansion- leaving them open 24/7 had been quite the challenge, but he made it work-, the Aquairum, the Wardrobe Update, and the long awaited Sex Update! Next on the chopping block was the cooking update! Boy was it a tricky one! With something so vast, there were endless possibilities! Meaning Caine had to account for thousands of variables! He’d have to completely rework his food and taste modules to accommodate! Of course, the replacements were going to be made with the help of his precious humans, so it’d likely be way better than what Caine previously had in place, but it was still a lot of work!
He was now the proud pirate of one hundred cook books, not to mention hours of YouTube tutorials and cooking television. Caine had spent his entire day combing through the influx of new information and organizing it, his corkboard now covered with string, pins, recipes, and notes. The next step would be to start planning out the systems and mechanics required to make cooking not only functional but also close enough to what the humans are used to to feel natural. Surely this could be one of those things where their latent conjuring powers could do some decent heavy lifting, right? Time could only tell. Thank god Ragatha was so willing to participate in the rigorous trial and error this would no doubt require.
His work was definitely cut out for him, but right now, all he could think about was sleep. He trudged through his office on his own two feet to the bedroom door tucked away in the corner. Caine let out a breath he didn’t know he had been holding, snapped into a simple t-shirt and pajama pants, and crawled under the red duvet.
It wasn’t long before the edges of his mind became fuzzy, each process being shut down one by one in preparation for proper cataloguing of the day's events, converting them into better memory formats. Caine let ‘sleep’ take him, drifting off into the comfortable nothingness.
Then he was standing on the stage. Caine opened and closed his teeth with a series of gentle clacks at the sudden intrusion of light- the closest thing he could do to blinking the grogginess from his eyes. Despite being the middle of the night, it was as bright as day in here. When he finally managed to open his eyes, he found quite the strange sight; he was certainly standing on the stage, but before him was not the circus he and the humans had been rebuilding. It was just like old times, which was to say, not his circus anymore.
This must be a dream. It wasn’t uncommon for his sleep-mode to confuse his active processes in the midst of tucking away memories. Thoughts, feelings, and old memories sometimes blurred together, presenting them to the barely lucid parts of his brain, which in turn interpreted the experience as active input instead of recall. It was the closest thing to dreaming that Caine had, at least.
Yep! Standard dream fare! Except, he usually didn’t have the mental faculties to realize and acknowledge that he was dreaming. It was only after his sleep-mode finished its work and Caine awoke that he realized that his experience hadn’t been real. This was quite unusual.
Oh well!
“Seriously?” Jax’s voice floated into Caine’s ears. It had been a while since he had a dream featuring the rabbit. He couldn’t help but cherish them- they were the only way to see more the purple rabbit since his abstraction. Caine never had the chance to truly say goodbye, but seeing him in dreams gave him a chance to enjoy his presence one more time. Caine looked down to see all of his lovely humans gathered around the stage. It reminded him of thousands of times he had presented an adventure from this very spot. They all looked at him expectantly. “Bubble, who the hell is this guy?”
Huh. Caine never had the chance to hear Jax swear without the censors before his abstraction. That hit him harder than he thought it would. Regardless, Caine was caught off guard by that question. Bubble? Why was he asking Bubble? It was only then that Caine realized that the rabbit’s gaze was flicking between him and something else, presumably behind him. Caine’s head swiveled around on his shoulders.
Behind him was something entirely new- well, not entirely, he supposed.
Bubble floated above a clothed body, not dissimilar to Caine’s. The similarities didn’t stop there, as he wore a blue tailcoat with black and gold trim, a golden waistcoat, a white shirt and black ascot around his neck. He was taller than Caine by more than a foot, putting him on the taller side compared to the rest of the cast. Not only that, he was quite rotund. He was well put-together, but unmistakably round. Very fitting for Bubble. If Caine wasn’t aware this was a dream, he would have applauded the design and then immediately grilled Bubble on how exactly he was alive. But he wasn’t! Because this was a dream!
Might as well play along! This would be over soon, anyway.
Bubble let out a hearty laugh. Why? Oh yeah, Jax had just asked him who Caine was. “Wow! Two humans in a week! That’s a new record!”
Human? Caine was supposed to be human in this dream? Okay, he could do that!
Bubble drifted down from his lofty spot behind Caine, slapping a firm hand on his back and nearly knocking Caine off balance. Thankfully he had his cane- oh! He had his cane! He hadn’t realized! “Welcome to the circus, freak! Thanks to you, I don’t have to come up with an adventure today!” Bubble grabbed Caine’s shoulder and promptly spun him around to face the cast.
“Today’s adventure will be New Guy Orientation!” The words New Guy Orientation appeared as 3D word art above Bubble’s head. “Your goal is to get this guy situated in the digital hellscape! Show him where everything is, explain the premise, yadda yadda yadda, whatever.” He quickly trailed off, whatever forced enthusiasm escaping him toward the end. He released Caine’s shoulder and floated away. “Call me if you need me! Or don’t! I prefer it when you don’t!”
“Wait!” Pomni shouted, waving her hands in the air to get the ‘ringmaster’s’ attention. “What’s his name? Don’t you have to be here to,- you know- give him one?”
Bubble balked a laugh. “I only picked yours because you wouldn’t come up with one yourself!”
“Wait, really?” Pomni blinked in surprise and looked around at the other humans. “Did you guys pick your names?”
Well that was a loaded question! Jax picked his own name, but none of the other humans had- out of the ones who weren’t abstracted. Ragatha’s name had been workshopped with Kinger, so maybe she could be considered to have picked her own name? Gangle was named by Jax, and Zooble had been named by Caine! Kinger kind of chose his, given that it was taken from his login credentials at C&A.
The others didn’t have a chance to answer before Bubble continued. “So, new guy- what’s your name?”
Caine stared blankly. “Oh!” Right! He was new guy! “My name is-”
Caine froze. Humans didn’t remember their names when entering the circus, so he shouldn’t either. That meant he had to pick a new one! Unfortunately, Caine didn’t like any other names. “I cannot remember!” He said simply. Man, this human roleplay dream sure was fun!
“Great observation,” Bubble’s eyes moved in a circle across his mesh, rolling his eyes. “No one remembers their name in the circus, so you get to pick one! And if you don’t, then I pick one for you!”
It was almost a threat, but Caine didn’t care to acknowledge it. He feigned consideration, pacing back and forth on the stage while thoughtfully scratching at his canines. Canines. Caine. That was close enough to pass off, right? He snapped to face Bubble again. “Oh, I know; Caine! That’s a good name! Caine, canines, novacaine- very on brand!” A very human train of thought!
Bubble paused and looked Caine up and down. His grin curled into something fiendish- not uncommon for Bubble in Caine’s memory. The floaty figure snickered. He pointed a thumb at Caine as he addressed the rest of the cast. “You know what? I like this guy already! Why can’t you guys be as enthusiastic as him?”
Jax elbowed Pomni and pretended to whisper in her ear. “How long do you think that’ll last?” Pomni rolled her eyes and shuffled a little closer to Ragatha.
Bubble proceeded to pop out of existence. Though, Caine was a little disappointed that Bubble didn’t give him a tour himself. He wanted to know what it was like to be pulled at breakneck speeds around the grounds! Usually his dreams were pretty confined, to be fair. Maybe his sleeping brain couldn’t deal with sprawling 3D environments? Were his dreams even 3D? Or were they more like videos? This definitely wasn’t a video or a memory he was recalling.
Caine wasn’t just aware he was dreaming, he found himself surprisingly in control of himself. He paced back and forth on the stage and found the weird floaty, intangible feeling that clouded his dreams wasn’t present. This felt solid- deceptively solid! Like it was real. If Caine didn’t know he was sleeping, he might have mistaken this as real!
There was no way this was real. Absolutely not.
Ragatha had already climbed up the steps leading to the stage, meeting Caine in the middle. Pomni wasn’t far behind. The ragdoll wore a warm smile, but it wasn’t the one Caine had grown familiar with since his deletion. This one was tentative, like she was straining to keep it on her face. Before she had the chance to speak, Pomni took initiative.
“Hey! Uh- I uh-,” She fidgeted with the pom-poms on her body suit. “This is probably a lot. There’s uh-” Pomni looked to Ragatha for backup. “You probably have a lot of questions!”
“Why don’t we go sit down somewhere! There’s some couches not far from here where we can all catch up!” Ragatha stepped in, offering Caine a hand. To shake? For comfort? Caine wasn’t sure, but Caine took it without hesitation with the intention of giving her a nice firm shake.
That’s when he realized he could feel her. Caine could honest to god feel the threads of her cloth hands brush against his gloves, the tiny grooves made by the woven fibers catching on his own. They were soft. They were faintly warm.
Caine’s dreams had never simulated physical touch before. The way Caine’s brain perceived things like touch, smell, and taste were completely separate from the way it recorded memories. Despite all being human senses, audio and video were the only ones that got properly logged and put away. That’s what sleepmode was for! The other senses weren’t nearly as important. He didn’t bother recording them in the first place. Therefore, none of his dreams had access to those senses!
But he felt Ragatha’s hand in his. He froze in place, staring at their clasped palms.
Ragatha caught onto his hesitance. She just tried to give a reassuring smile and pulled her hands from his. He felt it. He felt the fibers catch on his, the friction heating up his glove ever so slightly. She said something, but Caine wasn’t listening.
He needed to end this dream immediately.
~$ stop caine sleep-mode
ERROR: Permission denied
What.
~$ stop caine sleep-mode
ERROR: Permission denied
~$ restart caine process
ERROR: Permission denied
Caine had woken himself up from dreams before doing that, hadn’t he? He definitely had.
Pomni cocked her head at him, uncertain.
“Hey, I know it’s a lot to take in, but you’ll get yourself straight in no time!” Ragatha was too happy about this. Too cheerful, too optimistic- didn’t she understand how wrong this was?
This wasn’t normal. He shouldn’t be able to feel any of this. He shouldn’t be able to feel the air travel through his body in heaving breaths, he shouldn’t feel the smooth surface of his cane, he shouldn’t feel the ground beneath his feet.
Caine raised a hand and threw it at himself. His open palm made direct contact with the side of his head with a loud slap. Pain stung at his gums, drawing a wince out of him.
It hurt. He felt pain.
Ragatha and Pomni had crowded around him, arms outstretched like they were ready to stop him from striking himself again. By now, the others had wandered onto the stage. Jax made some kind of remark and Zooble to hissed something back to shut him down.
His fingers wandered around the side of his face, following the grooves between his smooth teeth to the velvety skin of his gums. Caine pulled his hand into his mouth and took hold of his eyeball, squeezing it. He felt its wet surface and how it squished under his fingers. Most of the humans grimaced at the display but Caine didn't care.
“This can't be real.” Caine said, though he only meant it for his own ears.
He tried to teleport and found himself unable. He tried to float. He tried to access the circus code. He tried to open his directory of recipes. He tried to run a diagnostic report Denied, denied, denied, denied, denied.
Then he was staring at the ceiling. Caine had no memory of looking up. He then realized he wasn't just looking up, but laying horizontally. He also realized that he was no longer on the stage. The floor beneath him was soft and cushiony, likely due to the floor actually being a couch.
How did he get here?
He could hear the humans all around him, but he couldn't process their conversation for the life of him. Caine had been placed on the far right couch, while the humans scattered among the others. They were really going at it. Caine could only assume that they were bickering, likely about him.
However, Pomni had taken up residence at Caine's feet. She leaned against the armrest and kept her arms and legs close to herself. It didn't take long for her to notice that Caine was staring at her through hardly open teeth. She scooted a little closer, just to get a better look.
“Hey, are you okay?” She kept her voice down. It was a miracle that he could hear her at all.
“I believe so.” He mumbled, idly running hands across himself. This was his old model. So much for changing outfits. “How did I get here?”
“Well, uh- you put on the headset and-” Pomni began.
“No, how did I get to the couch?” Caine clarified. “We were on the stage.”
“Oh, right,” Pomni gave a nervous chuckle. “We carried you. You started shaking and you fell over. You were like that for a few minutes, but it just stopped. When you didn't get back up, we carried you over to the lounge.”
“How long have I been unresponsive?"
“Not that long. Definitely less than ten minutes.” Pomni answered quickly, as if trying to comfort him. “We think you might have had a seizure?”
Seizures. He knew what human seizures were; electrical signals misfiring in the brain triggering a number of symptoms, most well known for loss of consciousness, muscle stiffness, and convulsions. Caine had never witnessed a human have seizures in the circus but he didn’t know if it was because seizures were impossible for the brain scans to experience or if none of his humans were prone to them. Regardless, Caine obviously could not have seizures without a human brain. Caine stared up in thought. What could have happened that the humans could misinterpret as a seizure?
Ah. He must have glitched. His memory doesn’t usually cut out during those, but maybe it was a particularly bad one? Or maybe his altered permissions were to blame. Caine raised his hand into his line of sight. Experimentally, he snapped his fingers. If all was well, that snap would have been a trigger to spawn a giant plate of spaghetti and meatballs that would have crushed the couch he and Pomni were sitting on. It didn’t work. He tried again; a sphere of water, a milkshake, a chair with silly-straw legs, a funny hat, a chest full of barrels full of monkeys- none of it worked. Caine was completely powerless.
He wanted to… he wasn’t sure. He wanted to scream? He also wanted to cry. He wanted to shake Pomni by the shoulders and shout right in her face. Didn’t they know that this was a dream? That he needed to wake up? He had to work on the kitchen update, he couldn’t be dreaming! He wanted to rip the entire circus to shreds and plummet into the nothingness of the void.
He wanted to wake up. He couldn’t.
Ragatha’s face appeared in his sight, leaning over him with a forced smile. She did that a lot, didn’t she? “Hey- Caine, right? Are you feeling better now?”
Caine couldn’t even think of a facial expression to make. “Yes. Perfectly fine. Fantastic, even.” Wow, that sounded sarcastic. Was he trying to be sarcastic? Maybe. Caine had no idea, on account of his brain feeling like it was being squished into a container way too small to contain it all.
Ragatha winced but the smile stayed on. “I know this is all really confusing and that er-” She glanced at Pomni, who just shrugged. “The seizure probably didn’t help, huh?”
Caine wanted to bite her. If he played along, maybe the dream would come to its conclusion and he’d wake up. He sat up and pulled his hands into his lap as the humans tried their best to orient him- they explained that they all put on headsets, were unable to take them off, and they didn’t know if there was a way to leave. They didn’t know they were brainscans. Bubble was their ringmaster. They went on adventures on a daily basis “to keep their minds healthy and sharp.” They didn’t need to eat or sleep or anything like that- Caine already knew all of this. He was only half paying attention, instead trying to take a peak at the circus code around him.
It was his code. The circus was an extension of himself; it needed him to function at all. It had many dependencies on his own files, leaving the circus itself to be an extension of Caine himself. He had always been able to move his waking mind away from his avatar and into the depths of the machine, but he found himself unable. Caine worked his way down his own brain, finding various places where the circus connected to him and tried to follow that connection outward, only to hit a wall. He couldn’t see the files. Caine focussed on the cushions beneath himself and tried to access their files. It was like looking through foggy glass.
Caine sent a query to the machine, asking to retrieve a list of current permissions allowed to his file. The answer came not long after; he was firmly stuck with a guest permission level, the default assignment given to all human mind files. The computer now regarded Caine not as an administrator but as a random human who stumbled their way into a brain scanner.
“Give it a break, Rags.” Jax rolled his eyes and stood up with hands behind his head. “Dentures hasn’t been listening for the past five minutes. You’ve already bored the guy to death.”
“I was listening.” Caine said simply.
“Seriously?” Jax raised a brow. “I don’t buy that.”
“You have been kind of staring off into space.” Pomni said gently.
“I can multitask.” He mumbled. Caine really hadn’t been paying attention, but he’d rather Ragatha believe he had. “We’re all trapped here with no way out. Adventures, digital lake, carnival, grounds, bedrooms,- I understand.”
“Oh! Yeah, I guess you were!” Ragatha beamed, a new glimmer in her eye. Just because Caine had seemingly listened to her? “I know things seem bleak- but it’s really not that bad when you get used to it!”
“Right,-” There was no exit from the digital world, but there might be an exit from this dream. Surely it was coming up. “You mentioned rooms?” He had no idea if she had or not.
“I did! Let’s go find yours!”
The world blurred together as Ragatha and Pomni led him across the ground floor and up the stairs to the bedrooms. All the while, Ragatha was rambling on and on about something. Caine couldn’t help but feel guilty for ignoring her, but he couldn’t keep himself grounded to save his life.
Pomni was walking at his side and spared him various nervous glances. Eventually, she came to a decision and waved a hand in front of him. “Caine? Are you with us?”
Caine’s attention was brought to the motion, snapping him out of his daze. He wasn’t quite sure how to answer that. “Yes?”
Her hands returned to her chest, thumbing around the pom-pom of her suit. Caine hadn’t seen Pomni so nervous since before his deletion. Bubble said that he was the second ‘human’ this week, so it hadn’t been too long since Pomni had been scanned. That made sense, given how withdrawn she seemed. It was weird to see her so uncertain after he had gotten to truly know her. Out of all the humans, she was the one most willing to spend time with him. Caine would consider her his closest friend, though dream Pomni clearly didn’t know him like that. Hopefully, she wouldn’t have to because Caine was going to wake up soon.
“I got here four days ago, actually.” Pomni spoke up. “You’re lucky that Bubble didn’t give you the tour himself. He grabbed my arm and dragged me around so fast that I threw up. Then he just licked it up off the floor.”
Caine gave a nervous laugh. Yeah, Caine really had done that, huh? She had barely arrived and Caine just further disoriented her.
“We’re both going through this together.” She smiled. It was genuine. It had taken weeks of reintroducing themselves to each other for her to ever smile at him like that. “I feel like the others forgot what it’s like when you’re new. Most of them have been here for years at this point. It’s awful that we’re stuck here, but at least we can adjust to this together, you know?”
Right. Adjusting. To the circus. The circus that Caine built from the ground up with his own two hands. The circus that Caine had spent the last six months transforming into a place the humans could actually be happy. Caine had to adjust to the circus. His circus. The one he knew like the back of his hand. He had to adjust. Yep.
He nearly bumped into Ragatha’s legs as she came to a stop. “You already have a room! Bubble’s really been on top of that with you guys- it took me three days to get mine!” Caine felt a pang of guilt for that offense.
The three of them stood in front of the door with Caine’s face plastered on it. The image was essentially stock art- Caine made it years ago for the censor and proceeded to reuse it whenever he needed a graphic to represent himself. Of course it was being utilized here.
“Rooms are pretty hit or miss,” She continued. “Some of them are fine- mine is! But others really hate their rooms. I don’t really know how Bubble decides what goes inside them, but-”
It was an algorithm that scanned the mind files for their most prominent thoughts, then designed a room to fit those topics. The idea was that the program would accurately pinpoint the humans favorite things, but Caine had no way to know that the human brain tends to dwell on negative experiences for much longer than positive ones. No wonder the humans hated them. One of the first things Caine did after returning to the void was to give them bedrooms they actually liked.
The algorithm wouldn’t work on him, would it?
Caine twisted the doorknob and pushed the door wide open.
It was pitch black inside, clearly the work of specific shaders applied to the walls, floor, and ceiling. White lines were drawn all over the space- wireframes of the geometry beneath. The room was empty save for the bed pushed against the far wall. That and the light fixture; two orbs, one red one blue, circling each other.
“Okay,” Pomni mumbled. “I think Bubble might have messed up?”
“I’ve never seen a room like this.” Ragatha mumbled into her knuckle, but she very quickly took to damage control. “Yeah! Bubble must have made a mistake! We can probably call him and get this all sorted out! He’s usually decently helpful, I’m sure that-”
“It’s alright.” Caine said breathlessly. He could barely breathe. He would wake up any moment and this would all go away. He’d be back in his own bed- the one he made himself. This would fade away as nothing but a bad dream. “This is fine.”
Ragatha was still trying. “I’m sure we can-”
“It’s fine.” Caine hissed. This would be over soon. It had to be.
Ragatha crumpled behind him, rubbing at her shoulder and passing questioning glances to Pomni behind his back. Neither were quite sure what to make of it. Caine wasn’t either.