Chapter Text
Kinger tried.
He really did, but Caine was inconsolable.
He had to force a shutdown, and he felt like the worst father ever. Turns out Caine's system's weren't just terribly overloaded, he also managed to catch a virus.
Caine could feel the coldness of a force shutdown wash over his system, they were really doing it. Turning him off to make it easier, he doesn't want to be deleted.
He's scared.
Please.
I don't want to die.
I did my best to make them happy...
I'm a bad AI
It was difficult seeing what exactly the virus was doing, Caine was running on a severely outdated system. The current anti-virus was hardly doing anything for this...
It seems like the only thing keeping Caine functional all these years was his strangely complex firewalls.
Several layers of passwords, a "wacky word of the day" that you needed to even view the code. Judging by the change logs; Caine had been changing and updated his own firewalls on a daily routine.
But...
Since he had been deleted all of the logs suggest that Caine had been almost constantly working on Conjuring.
Kinger couldn't help but squint at the monitor, it made no sense.
Why would he do this? Caine hadn't stopped fulfilling every single thing requested of him, he had to have ignored several system warnings to get to this point. No breaks, no pauses, no rest.
This type of strain would hospitalize a human if sustained for more than a day, Caine had been maintaining this state of constant work for a little over two weeks.
Maybe before his deletion it wouldn't have been a big deal, not healthy but not as detrimental. But Caine knew that his previous computing power had been greatly reduced when a large amount of his permissions over the circus had been revoked, Caine knew and he still did this to himself.
Oh god this was already giving Kinger a headache. He had to develop an entirely new anti-virus for Caine, AND reinforce the firewalls so that Caine didn't get even more sick while he was working...
Knock Knock
He looked up to see Pomni popping her head into the pillow fort.
"Oh uh.. Hi Kinger, I just thought it would be good to come check up on you. Uhm I know the others are getting worried, and you look like a mess. Is there anything I can do to help?"
Kinger just lets out a puff of air going through the checklist of things he needs to do in his head; update firewalls, new anti-virus, probably plenty of miscellaneous system updates that haven't been done in years... Unless Pomni was secretly a computer wiz in a past life nothing she could help with there...
"Oh! I suppose you can sit with Caine, I'm going to keep him powered off for a minute till I get his system stable enough. So I'd prefer if somebody were to keep him company."
Pomni was rather surprised at how simple a task it was
"Yeah sure I'll sit with him, I'm sure it's a bit hard to use a keyboard when someone's in your lap"
Pomni knows Kinger is trying his best, he looks incredibly stressed...
Well- she can't really blame him with this situation. Caine is sick, the circus hardly functions without him.
She guesses that she never really took into consideration just how much effort is being put into the circus at any given time...
Caine is usually so eccentric and all over the place all of the time, it's kind of strange to see him out cold like this.
Laid in her lap now, she didn't realize how small he was compared to her with him always floating around...