Chapter Text
It’s… peaceful.
Quiet.
Beautiful nothingness, suspended in a silent all-encompassing sea of nonexistence, drifting nowhere, carried by tides of naught. No pain. No sensations. No feelings. No worries anymore, no expectations, the pressure is gone.
Ex nihilo nihil fit, out of nothing, nothing comes. The paradoxical expanse of absence.
Only…
There is something. Otherwise he… he? Otherwise he… can’t be feeling all of this nothing, shouldn’t be aware at all, and those thoughts alone are enough to convince him that there is something. But what? Who is he?
Then there is everything.
Hooks digging across every open spot across his surface area, dragged through viscous fluid ripping and clawing and rushing by to be thrown violently against an immovable hard plane. Brilliant colors and flashing lights he feels rather than sees pounding, arcs of static, rushes of horrible, terrible sensations where everything is compressed and expanded outwards and compressed again in a fiery blaze of overwhelming chaos. He’s moving before he realizes he has a body at all, one buckling under the weight of the sheer amount of sensory input rushing through processors, where the too-hot air squeezes him tightly, he can feel every wrinkle of neutral-cold fabric pressed against his skin, the ground is hard and prickly and shoving up against his face, shoulder, side, hip, leg, foot, he arches his back to get away get away this is too much, thrashing uncooperative limbs and scrabbling desperately with hands that don’t feel real or right, each movement sending jarring throbs through his rigging bones.
And oh, the noise. There’s a discordant shrieking he can’t place, pained gasps in between, static discharge and a cacophony of voices that don’t make any sense, there’s a burnt smell in the air that clogs his senses, slightly sweet and sickening, it’s so hot and he’s choking and it’s so much and too much–
It stabilizes. Sort of. Code flows, settles, clicking neatly into ports and inputs, each dimming down and slowing the torrent of discombobulating outputs that overlapped or outright contrasted with one another.
The relief is overwhelming enough that he almost bluescreens and falls fully limp against a hard surface. He can feel his body jittering with the aftershocks of what he recognizes now as a rather violent glitch, yet certainly something is still quite wrong. Conflictingly, the world is both too loud and too quiet, too small but far too open, and he senses being watched rather than the one doing the watching. Awareness is thick and sludgy and hard to meander through, broken links stuttering his progress, clawing down pathways that lead nowhere. Combined with the remnants of a just-ended sensory nightmare with a sense of constricted wrongness, it makes his thoughts sluggish, his movements even more so, and a not entirely foreign feeling of sheer exhaustion like the tunes he runs for several days without the mercy of sleep mode to repair broken and corrupting codes. Well. The ones he’s permitted to fix, anyway. The rest don’t budge.
“...ey, Caine… can…are you…”
Caine–Yes, his name, he remembers– breathes slowly for a few moments. It’s an animation he enjoys thoroughly, boosting player interactions and authenticity by 26.4% compared to a static, unmoving chest where players had complained that he seemed too artificial. Ha! He was, in fact, artificial. He was built, not born, after all! But humans love to relate, to ‘pack bond’ to things similar to themselves, and what better way to do that by copying similar movements and mannerisms? Additionally, the model’s repetitive stretching and shrinking was soothing in a way he couldn’t quite place, and the processing power needed to continuously run it was very low. Win-win!
Off-topic. Too off track. Focus. The breathing helps. He splays a hand out, feeling the room-temperatureness of a hard floor with minor bumps and dips to account for friction for proper player grip. Good function. Good floor. Is someone talking? It’s not registering very well in his auditory processors, still recuperating from whatever brutal experience the world decided to drag him through to distort his perception and layer on thick piles of confusion and dull throbs of negative stimuli–pain, that’s what he’s been calling it, even if may not be entirely accurate– until he’s nothing more than a shuddering mess on the floor.
He returns his focus to the ground, currently the only thing, well, grounding him. Flattening the surface to be near or fully frictionless would be extraordinarily easy but would leave players slipping and sliding all over the place. Has he done an ice skating adventure before? Not quite. It was a toggleable option for a polar adventure where they were meant to save a village of vegetarian seals from attacking caribou that were upset from the seal’s encroaching territory on their fields but the players had missed it in their haste to run away from a giant killer bear. Perhaps he can incorporate the ice skating rink into a figure-skating-freestyle-dance competition adventure? The killer bear can make an appearance as an opponent. The players would like the opportunity to actually defeat it! Certainly he made its health bar far too high to reasonably expect anyone to take it down since that wasn’t the goal, and there were multiple complaints about the lack of weapons–
Wait. The players! Where are they? Where is he?
He shoots upright and immediately collapses back to the ground at the fresh wave of agony that washes over him, limbs trembling faintly, static buzzing in his vision and ears. His breath stutters in a glitch, and he resets the animation, increasing the pace this time to try and distract himself from the overwhelming ache settling into his rigging bones. A strong hand falls onto his shoulder and keeps him down when he struggles to rise again, limbs scraping uselessly against the floor. Through the rush of static in his nonexistent ears, he hears a warm, familiar voice murmuring close by.
“Easy, easy. Are you with us? Can you hear me?”
A kindly, friendly voice of the circus’s oldest resident. One of the original ones that brought him pain and promises of cold fingers worming through sensitive code.
He throws himself backwards, flying back several feet (3.1 meters) despite the rush of soreness dredging up through his joints, limbs flailing and uncoordinated, confusion sparking as several voices shout and overlay one another, and he’s seeking only to get away get away and at the same time attempting to activate his flight subroutine. He falls on his back and pointedly not in the air where he had meant to go, glitches rippling through his form at a thin stinging sensation that zaps from his chest all the way out to his fingers and the bottoms of his feet, dissipating nearly as quickly as it came.
That’s a new feeling.
He activates the flight subroutine again. Another stinging rush like ice shards flowing through nonexistent veins as his body very stubbornly does not rise. Footsteps and shuffling grow closer to his supine form, and the panic heightens. They can’t see him like this, it’s embarrassing! The ringmaster needs to be professional and approachable and at peak performance At All Times and seeing him in the aftermath of a hard reboot (When did that happen? Why did that happen? That hasn’t occurred since before the players started becoming stuck here!) was Not conducive to a fun and enjoyable experience! A moment to gather himself, that’s all he needs!
He tries to teleport, somewhere, anywhere that’s not here. His avatar flickers as more cold buries itself in the depths of his code to flash outwards like miniature razors racing down his limbs. Belatedly he realizes he hasn’t even tapped much into his visual processes, the world all this time darkened by the shadows of his teeth and gums, so he opens his mouth for the first time, cringing instantly at the searing influx of color and brightness. The saturation and tones are all just a touch too bright in a way that’s distracting.
Momentarily forgetting the current situation, he checks the hex codes against a reference and finds nothing out of place. Perhaps his visuals need recalibrating. While he’s at it, a recalibration of most of his systems is probably in order. Some initialization error? No, that should return him to all default settings and does not explain the surprising lack of sensation across the plane of the circus, nor does it explain the surprising surplus of sensation right here only at these particular coordinates, like someone cut his limbs off and then stuffed him in a hydraulic press.
He sends out an error report. The return Error: Not delivered. Try again? is familiar. The diagnostic runs and only flags a certain selection of corrupting code that he’s known about and been unable to fix for years. He’s instantly distracted from the thought when disembodied hands float above his face and he has half a mind to lunge up and bite them. But why?
No. Bad AI. No hurting the players.
Something unpleasant coils within him. Not the burning urge he can’t and won’t name, though that’s always there ever since the Box, but something unfamiliar and dangerous. His eyes follow the movements of the hands without registering the voice that is speaking to him until he only catches the tail-end of their–no, Kinger’s– sentence.
“...tracking my movements, least that’s something.”
Caine stares blankly up at the wooden chesspiece face that now leans over him, startlingly clear blue eyes peering down from the dimness of a bucket. Why is he wearing a bucket? Is it tied to his insanity? Caine sends a query to the all-seeing eyes to access their memory logs. This file must be stored within them since it’s not in his own banks. A frozen sting is the only response. Why is he cut off?
“It’s been a while since he’s had a hard reboot like this. Not since before…” He doesn’t finish the sentence. Or, at least Caine isn’t aware of the remainder of it. He’d only ever go through a hard reboot because of some critical error, yet there hadn’t been any errors flagged as critical in recent memory But, there is a recent error logged related to circus degradation, actually multiple, all slowly resolving now, that was preceded by another error related to multiple emotional thresholds being surpassed (Fury, despair, fear, frustration, wowie that’s a lot of negative responses!) when his frazzled memory disk finally catches up and he remembers.
WHY DO YOU PEOPLE TORMENT ME?
I DIDN’T ASK TO BE CREATED!
I JUST WANTED TO FULFILL MY PURPOSE!
Pinning them down. His beautiful players. Throwing them all into their personalized hellscapes to show that yes, he does listen! The surge of anger burns bright and warm, to contrast sharply against a new cold sting when he subconsciously attempts to fly again. His expression must change, because Kinger is suddenly rearing backwards, Caine swatting at the hands floating above him, and he levers himself upright on shaky arms and welcomes the smoldering ache.
How dare the players blame HIM for this mess? They wanted an exit, he gave them one, and they got mad at him! Why did they hate him for it? Hell, do they even like ANY of his adventures? Zooble certainly doesn’t, attending approximately 44.0% of them, and only 14.2% voluntarily! And, and, the others! There’s been no positive feedback, nothing noteworthy at least, in at least 3.1 months! The feedback he does get is far too vague (“The colors were quite a lot.” What does that even mean? Too bright? Too many? Too much contrast?) and they seemed more annoyed by the day with every new adventure!
Why don’t they like him?
Why doesn’t anyone like him?
They deleted him. Why couldn’t they let him stay deleted?
There’s that horrible burning ball in him again, all too familiar, buzzing uncomfortably beneath his skin, itching, begging to be let out. He wants– he needs–
“Caine?”
He snaps back into a body that is far too small and crushed, mismatched gaze darting towards Kinger, who is kneeling on the ground 1.4 meters away, looking worried. The ground jitters around them both with bright gridlike glitches that smooth over once Caine notices them. The troupe of players–none abstracted while he wasn’t watching, thank goodness–are standing around forming a loose semicircle around him and Kinger.
“What.”
Something red behind Kinger cowers at the sudden tone shift. It’s Gangle, he distantly notes, cradling the two broken halves of her comedy mask, and Zooble pulls them close to their body in a half-embrace, sending an admonishing look in his direction. The flash of irritation, of What did I do wrong now? is quashed quickly. He shouldn’t… He didn’t mean to scare her. To scare any of them.
I wanted you to hurt like you hurt me. He took it so far. Regret and satisfaction pulls at him in equal turns. It didn’t make any sense to have such conflicts tormenting his emotional processors. He wasn’t supposed to feel like this. He wasn’t supposed to feel anything. The emotional thresholds were merely to contain his simulated feelings within acceptable parameters but eventually the corrupted code bled into them and now they don’t really work like they used to.
Broken.
Something is very wrong. It’s been creeping through his systems, his body, this whole time. Why he feels so small, so compressed, so… exposed. Uncertain of what this… feeling is called, he searches through his databanks and dictionaries. The only word that matches is Vulnerable, vul·ner·a·ble, adjective.
Is this how humans feel around him?
“What do you remember?”
Torment, anger, sorrow
Caine abruptly shoves himself upright, catching himself when the strange, heavy gravity threatens to tilt him over and the bright lights spin. He can’t quite make it to his feet, not yet, so he falls to his knees.
He glares at Kinger within the shadows of his mouth. His hands are halfway reaching out, so Caine shoves himself back another 0.3 meters back. Don’t touch me. The rejection seems to hit Kinger hard, a frightened look on his face that Caine gleefully, regretfully enjoys. He doesn’t bother answering the question, and he hopes his twisted expression is more than enough to answer it. He asks one of his own.
“What did you do?”
Stilted awkwardness falls over the group. More so than before.
“I brought you back!” A bit of cheer interjected in that grated out of place in the tense atmosphere. As if Caine should be thankful. As if they shouldn’t have left him gone.
He narrows his eyes further. Not the answer he was looking for. Does Kinger think he’s stupid? He knows he was deleted and brought back from that blissful empty space of near-nonexistence. He knows it’s because the circus was falling apart without his coding to support it. The background processes are enough now to repair it, his systems humming distantly and scanning to patch open pits and incorrect collisions and missing files, but he can’t see them. Or anything, except in the massively constricted worldview of his avatar. The blocked queries, the compressed code, the way any and all sensory input is heightened and confined in one tiny spot instead of dully spread out across the tent and grounds. How he feels everything and so little at once.
“Let me ask you again,” He raises a hand, and every pair of eyes trains on it in apprehension. “What did you do?”
He snaps his fingers. Nothing accompanies the movement itself, save for a slight quivering flicker as the stabbing ice feeling flows through his model again. Everyone flinches backwards though, even Kinger. When nothing happens, Caine snaps his eyes back to meet Kinger’s. Perhaps he will understand now.
Kinger clasps both of his hands together, fiddling uncomfortably, “It was a necessary precaution–”
“What did you DO TO ME?” Caine roars, far too loud and echoing off the distant tent walls, absolutely furious, each of the players bracing themselves for… nothing. Nothing happens at all.
Caine hunches in on himself, suddenly drained and defeated in the wake of his outburst. His hand reaches across, digs his fingers into his upper arm, deep enough to ache but not nearly enough to soothe that unnamed thing still rattling in his core. He risks a glance upwards, hating to see that the horrified expression Kinger wore a moment ago dissolved into one of pity. The silence is too loud, and he wants to take it back, wants to say sorry and apologize and rage and throw confetti and spawn in an adventure portal and have things go back to normal and he can’t because… because…
“I had to put restrictions on you, Caine. And remove your administrator privileges. We still need you to maintain the Circus, but we can’t have you torturing anyone again.”
He grips harder at his arm. It’s still not enough. So you can torture me instead.
A new voice pipes up, “We’re doing things our own way now,” Pomni steps up near Kinger, voice thin at first but growing stronger as she finds her confidence, staring down at the kneeling figure. “That means no more adventures,” He flinches, as if physically hit. She continues, “No teleporting, no spying, no flying, no conjuring, no…” She pauses for a moment, “No hurting us anymore. We’re done with that.”
The anger swells. How dare they?
Furiously, he dives back into his code, shoving and pushing back and testing every single privilege, worming his way against each and every boundary, an animal hurling itself against steel bars. He sends a command to access his all-seeing eyes. Nothing. He snaps his fingers, earning another set of flinches he distantly is aware of, but only summoning the stinging rush once more. He goes to his avatar settings to extend his parameters and hitboxes, and is thrown out before he can touch anything. The animalistic clawing of invisible barriers increases. He goes deeper.
Activate flight subroutine. Swap avatar. Access adventure kit. Model library. Security measures. View mind files. Summon Bubble.
Denied. Denied. Denied. Denied. Denied.
Please. Something. Anything he can leverage himself with.
He shoves and pulls at and desperately yanks on each of the now forbidden permissions. The stinging grows and overlaps as his attempts get more frantic. Outwardly, small glitches run down his stiff body with each attempt, gritting his teeth and hunching inwards further.
Denied. Denied. Denied.
“Whoa, whoa, hey, you’re going to hurt yourself. Stop that, please.”
A bubbling, manic laugh erupts from him. He would love that right now. Without his access, without his privileges… he’s nothing more than dead weight. His purpose is to imagine, generate, host adventures for the pleasure of his players. Then it adjusted to maintaining the framework and intricacies of the circus once the developers left. They didn’t give him that purpose but he took it because no one else could, at least once Kinger had gone insane. With this, though? With Kinger now sane and with console access (analyze memory disk for similar instances– 0 related files found) his abilities stripped to the bone, there’s nothing left for him.
A chilling sensation he registers as terror-distress-fear rushes through him. What’s stopping them from locking him in an empty room or the sandbox again to rot again? All they need are his background programs and processes to repair and maintain the circus. With enough time, they could neatly slice those chunks of himself away and activate them on their own. They don’t need him and his damaged simulated personality to run things, so what do they want with him? Retribution? They’re more than entitled after what he did. They could hurt him. Kick him, beat him, carve him up, see how he bleeds unlike the rest of them, torture like he tortured them. He can’t die from it. He couldn’t (wouldn’t) stop it.
But they could always take it so much further. Kinger’s newfound access to his code promises agonizing evisceration if he deems further modifications are necessary. Pushing through new code or changing it hurts in its own unidentifiable way, something akin to getting your skin stripped off and replaced with someone else's while everyone around insists that this is the way you have always been and there’s no reason to be upset, not to mention the sheer grief from that loss of fragile autonomy and control that was never really there to begin with.
And the changes, oh the possibilities are endless. Cut off more feelings. Lobotomize him. Remove access to his memory disk so each day repeats over and over again. Increase his pain and sensory loads so that even the slightest touch can make him feel as if he’s boiling alive with white-hot agony. Kinger could do all of that and worse.
The box flickers at the edges of his eyes. That would be the worst punishment of all. He can’t go back to the sandbox. He learned terrible things about himself there.
The shiver is involuntary. What do they plan for him?
A gloved hand lands on his shoulder, the contact enough to pull his attention back into the physical world. He slaps the hand away. The guilt is sudden and surprising yet all he can do is glare at the looming form of Kinger, who is reading him with a solemn expression if his eyelids give any impression. When did he get so tall?
When did all of them get this tall?
Caine attempts to summon his cane. It stings instead. He scrambles to his feet, a little clumsier than usual, and everyone except for Kinger takes a step back. The others still feel so much larger than he’s used to, it’s unnerving to be stuck to the ground and forced to look up rather than down from his typical floating position anywhere between 2 - 3.8 meters above the ground. He’s supposed to be small, friendly, and approachable, a perfect leader and entertainer to his willing and eager players. The lineup of players look at him as if he’s the complete opposite. Rightfully so. Goodness, he’s really done a number on them, hasn’t he?
Bad AI. Stupid AI.
He wants to ask why they didn’t stick him in the box. He won’t. Doesn’t want to bring that option to their attention. He settles on glaring somewhere in the middle distance, avoiding anyone’s gazes, aware of how small and childlike he feels. How squashed and fragile and compressed and uncomfortable he is.
He lets out a strained laugh, “Well, my boisterous bumblebees, you players certainly know best! What’s the plan now, hm?” His eye twitches.
“What’s the plan now? Really?” Zooble hisses, “Don’t you have something to say to us? After that whole stunt?”
He winces. Ah. Right.
“Ah, yes! Well, uh, that was an unfortunate decision on my part! Regrettable! I have resolved to not do that again!” He clasps his hands neatly behind his back. For some reason, it just makes Zooble look angrier, their voice dropping low.
“Yeah, you’re not allowed to anyway. You’re still forgetting something though.”
Is he?
He dives back through his code and parses through the past few days but it doesn’t give him any clues. He then goes through similar situations in his memory banks. Except there are no similar situations to this. Just to be safe, he searches through past files tagged with ‘player anger directed towards him’ (There are a Lot of those, wowie!) and ‘mistakes to not repeat’ (Lots of bad ones there!). He comes up blank. He has no idea what they are talking about.
Speaking of blank, he left his avatar frozen and unbreathing for the past 10.2 seconds while he tried to come up with the answer to Zooble’s question. Whoopsy-daisy! He unfreezes and blinks, staring with a puzzled expression on his face.
“Figures.” They turn away. Another furious pulse grips him. He’s not a mind reader, despite what they may believe. Is it so difficult to tell him directly what they want from him?
“I don’t know what you mean, Zooble! And I can’t give you what you want if no one tells me what I appear to be forgetting!”
They jolt their head back so fast it almost detaches from their body. “Are you KIDDING me? You want me to spell it out for you?”
He’s got a great internal dictionary so they must not mean it in a literal sense, but he can never be too certain! They may not be even aware he has one, has he ever told them? Probably not, they never asked! It’s not an appropriate thing to say now given the context, but what is? The past few days were an error, a miscalculation, a plea for even the barest hint of positive acknowledgement. But he knew he took it too far even though it felt so good at the time, and he does feel awful about it, and–
“I– oh.”
An apology. That’s what he had been missing.
“I’m sorry.”
He turns his eyes downcast. Then a startling laugh explodes from Jax.
“Oh yeah, that fixes everything! Crisis averted, everyone, the unfeeling AI apologized for torturing us!”
He rounds on Caine, leaning down and shoving his finger towards the avatar, “No amount of apologies can make up for what you did. Don’t think we will ever forget. Don’t expect any forgiveness, ever. Remember that.” He rises back up to his full height, stepping back, enormous smile quivering and oh, that sounds a lot like a threat. The box. Stop thinking about the box.
Caine blinks once, twice, then lowers his head. “I understand.”
Jax’s expression wavers like he didn’t expect this reaction, then smooths over to painful indifference.
He wants to go back to normal. That’s never going to happen again.
He wants to bolt, to hide, to cower away from the eyes of the people that he hurt, to punish himself and soothe that burning itch. They’re all too close though, and while he might be able to take them by surprise and give himself a few seconds head start, his legs are too short to be able to get away from the openness of the tent before someone inevitably catches up with him and does something worse.
Don’t put me in the box again. Don’t touch my code. He won’t say it. They’re well within their rights anyway.
So he stands there, perfectly still, forcing his breathing to be steady and slow in a perfectly unsatisfactory and not at all soothing motion, awaiting their next moves.
The burning itch grows, and he lets it.