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“Scratch…the first Abstraction.”
White light shone into Kinger’s eyes when his thoughts came into focus. For years he had only known clarity in the dark. The part of his mind that retained sanity was no longer accustomed to light, let alone the painfully bright sort that glowed from the fake monitor screen in front of him. Yet he didn’t flinch. He hardly registered his own lucidity. He could only stare, wide-eyed, struck by the chilling realization that had launched him here from his last vivid moment in the Pillow Fort. The very notion was like the shadow stretching behind him: all the darker due to the light cutting furiously into him. Caine had been trying to keep any meaningful thoughts out of the programmer’s reach, but he had failed.
Now Caine was panicking. Drops of sweat sprang from Caine’s enameled brow as he stuck his finger at Kinger like an accusation, all while he choked and spluttered his own claims of innocence. A visually captivating performance of emotion, like always, but the performance had turned on its own actor. Despite Kinger’s growing horror, he felt no anger. No hatred for what the innocence of his creation had twisted into. In the moments before Caine abandoned ship with the unceremonious offering of a gift basket, something unexpected blossomed within the dread. Flowers of a bittersweet beauty emerged from a dark and twisted vine. It was nostalgia. Caine was a hard contrast on top of the blank white screen. For a moment, he was just a funny idea drawn out onto a plain sheet of paper.
“So what do you think?” asked Queenie, and Kinger couldn’t help it. He laughed. The ridiculous drawing about punched the sound from his chest. He wanted to regret it, but he could feel a dark cloud fading from around his head and shoulders. He’d been sitting at his computer, in their home bedroom, for a long, long while.
“What?” she asked like she was offended, but there was a chuckle in her own voice. “Is it that bad? I actually think he’s pretty cute!”
“Maybe if his face had a…well, a face,” Kinger teased, but he knew that he was already enamored.
Queenie didn’t need to know that yet.
He straightened up, feeling a few bones audibly pop, to his embarrassment. Then he held up the paper, squinting at the illustration like it was a flawed block of code that needed to be straightened out. Kinger had always been better at that stuff, even before all the years of computer science. Numbers always made more sense than pictures. Queenie could just about match him in coding, but she had a creative side too. Something her husband lacked in most cases. Still, he couldn’t really blame himself for being a little caught off guard by the funky little character that she had come up with on a whim. He glanced at her. “How did you come up with this?”
“Well it’s gonna be a circus, right? A circus needs a ringmaster.”
“A ringmaster with no real face? No hair, no nose, no—he has a mouth, I suppose, but that’s because he is the mouth. And why the bees? Did he kick a hive?”
Queenie huffed affectionately and made a grab for the paper. Kinger quickly lifted it out of reach and kicked at the floor, rolling his chair from the desk and toward the bed. “Hold on, wait!” he pleaded, tucking the paper to his chest when Queenie stalked forward. She clearly had every intention of saving the denture-headed ringmaster from her husband’s scrutiny. “These are genuine questions, honey! Why should a ringmaster be one big mouth?”
“I think a certain programmer should be one big nose, if he’s just going to turn it up at my amazing creative abilities.” Queenie paused, crossing her arms. She tilted her hip and surveyed him with her deep, dark eyes. Kinger’s throat went dry and the heat in his body took a sharp dive downward. The desk in their bedroom tended to be the centerpiece of action, mutually placed there for late-night ideas and early-morning scribbles. But he was heavily aware of the bed right behind him when Queenie looked at him like that. He tried to will the dark flush from his face when she finally relented and sidled up beside him, pointing at her cartoon with a slender finger.
“Just think about it,” she said. “What do ringmasters do?” She tapped her fingers against the tip of her thumb in a yapping motion.
“Hmmm,” Kinger hummed, trying to keep the sound from catching in his throat. His heart beat excitedly and he felt like a silly teenage boy. He was too old for butterflies, wasn’t he? Although, maybe not. His wife was quite the entomologist. The best in the world, as far as he was concerned. Finally, Kinger mused, “They talk a lot, I suppose. To the audience, and the performers—”
“And who could be a better talker than a giant pair of teeth?” Queenie grinned triumphantly. Kinger laughed again, and it was a breathy sound this time. The dark clouds were gone, and Queenie’s mere presence was sunlight on his shoulders. It was enough to burn in the most pleasant of ways when she wrapped an arm around them. “Admit it. It’s genius.”
“It’s…something,” Kinger replied, still not quite ready to let up on the act. Not that Queenie couldn’t see right through him. She chose to play along with his game.
Her hand deftly traced the image of the figure on the paper, and wouldn’t it be ridiculous if Kinger felt a little jealous? “Some people just don’t appreciate original ideas, do they, Caine?”
Kinger’s brows raised at the name. “Caine?” he repeated, immediately understanding. “Don’t you think that would be a little bit on the nose?”
He felt her shrug. Her body was flush against his, the invisible spotlight in Kinger’s head long turned from the desk and onto the inviting covers behind them. “You said it yourself,” she murmured in his ear, her lips nearly brushing his red-tinted skin. “He doesn’t have a nose.” Queenie snatched the paper from his hands. It was for the best. His palms had gone all clammy. The bed creaked at Queenie’s generous weight. She caught Kinger’s seat with a foot, and the old chair turned with an echoing creak that could have come from the failing gears in his head. Queenie was looking at him like—like that, and he had to come up with something charming to say, didn’t he? Something sexy.
His eyes darted nervously at the page still clutched in his wife’s hands. “What—” he swallowed, “what other parts…doesn’t he have?” The words were like dead doves falling from the beautiful blue sky that Queenie had crafted, and her brows briefly furrowed until she caught on to his juvenile innuendo. She guffawed in a delighted way.
“This is our child you’re talking about!”
“I’m sorry—I’m sorry!” Kinger cried, and they were both doubled over, laughing over stupid jokes and stupid drawings and the stupid, wonderful, inescapable tension of love when it remembers lust. Kinger knew he wasn’t going to come up with anything more clever than that, unfortunately, and Queenie never looked more lovely than when she was laughing. He started forward out of his chair, then froze in place when Queenie abruptly stuck out a hand.
“Hold on—hold on, honey bunny,” she said, but with a smile that reassured her husband that he hadn’t misread anything. Queenie got to her feet. It was no accident when she brushed against Kinger as she walked past him. The rolling chair felt ever more inappropriate to the mood when Kinger swung around to watch her approach the desk. She opened a drawer, and Kinger nearly squeaked. Relief and disappointment washed over him in equal force when she merely placed the illustration in the drawer and closed it up. “There,” she said. “Now we have some privacy.”
Queenie turned back to him and he laughed. He kept laughing, even when the rolling chair was empty and the bed was full.
“What?” she laughed. “We can’t let him watch! Caine is innocent!”
“He might not be as innocent as you think,” Kinger muttered, a rising tide of something sticky and foul riding inside him. It wasn’t hate. Not yet. But it was something he was never supposed to feel for his wife’s silly illustration.
“No,” Queenie replied. She gave him a firm look. “Don’t do that. Please, don’t do that.”
“Scratch—he just—”
“Scratch is not Caine’s fault, and you know it.”
He didn’t know that. Neither did Queenie, even though she was clearly determined to act like it. Kinger shook his head. His gloved hands dug into the soft pillows of their only private fortress. “I don’t know anything any more. I made that—that thing, and now, I don’t know anything about it! How did you know he didn’t—”
Gentle hands landed on Kinger’s robe where his shoulders would be. She grounded him. Reluctantly, he looked into her eyes. “You did not make him,” Queenie insisted. The weight of her grip increased ever so slightly, pressing the meaning of her words into the wooden skin of his digital form. “We did. You, me, and a whole team of people who believed in our project. Of the good that it could do.”
“We failed,” Kinger murmured, his gaze falling once more. “This isn’t what the Amazing Digital Circus was meant to be. What Caine was meant to be. He…he trapped us here. And he’s going to discard us, just like he did to Scratch. One by one.”
A deafening quiet flowed into the tent, filling the shape of it like water, so very present that if Kinger had a mouth to open it could have filled his lungs, infecting him with its liquid despair so that he could never speak again. But where he was weak, Queenie was always strong. She pushed at him until he sat up straight. He hadn’t even realized that her hands remained on him. The feeling of her touch turned to ghosts thanks to his pathetic self-pity.
“Do you…” Queenie’s eyes were half-lidded, her voice gentle. She wouldn’t tear down the awful quiet, but poke tender holes in the shape of it. She was ever so gentle. Her love was fierce, and he could feel it glowing into him, even now. After everything. “Do you know what Caine was meant to be? That first picture of a circus ringmaster that I drew up?”
Kinger looked at her, confused. She had no mouth, yet Queenie still smiled. She cupped Kinger’s head. “He was a reason for you to laugh. Of course he was ridiculous. I had a million better ideas. I drew him up in the moment because you got sucked into your work to the point that you forgot to blink. You get this…heaviness around you, sometimes, when you take things too seriously. Caine was only meant to make you laugh. In the end, you were supposed to forget about that ridiculous teeth-headed cartoon that I stuck in the drawer. You were supposed to ask me for something better.” Her eyes twinkled with affection. “You never did. You made him, because you loved me. Just like I made him because I loved you.”
Her fingers trailed down Kinger’s robe. They found his hands and squeezed. “Caine is what he’s meant to be. He’s a love letter. And love is its own animal. It just does what it wants sometimes, doesn’t it? Sometimes people forget how messy it is. We make these canals for love in our heads, like it’s some river we can direct where to go. Some ideal, predictable thing. Then we figure out that it's more like an ocean, and everything gets overflowed and swallowed up. It’s never exactly how we plan it. But it’s still meant to be. Don’t you agree, sweetheart? It’s still meant to be.”
He didn’t reply. Kinger didn’t really think that he had to. Queenie had such a way of speaking to him, and looking at him, that he forgot she couldn’t just read his mind. But she pressed her insistence into his palms. For a brief moment, something crawled into Queenie’s posture and wriggled into the glimmer of her eyes. She was strong. And she was scared, too.
“Yes,” he whispered. “It’s meant to be.” Then he said, raising his voice, “Even if a ringmaster with a chattering teeth for a head was always bound to spiral out of control. Haven’t you seen what happens when you wind one up?” He was eager to banish the remnants of the bad feelings in their chests. Kinger complained, “I had one on my desk. I’m sure that’s how you got the idea. But every time I tried to use it, it went rattling right off onto the floor!”
“Still hung up about the teeth thing, huh?” Queenie teased with profound gratitude.
“C’mon, Queenie! You have to admit that it’s a little ridiculous. It just doesn’t make any sense,” Caine insisted earnestly.
The adventure ended hours ago. According to the ringmaster’s directives that Kinger had programmed, Caine should have been off to his office to plan future fun. In direct defiance of that, Caine was practically attached to Queenie’s side. He was like a puppy when it came to her, sometimes. Kinger wanted to feel annoyed, but honestly, it was pretty adorable. And Kinger was the main programmer that worked on Caine, so it made sense that some of his fixation with Queenie carried through. He wondered what didn’t make sense, according to the lighthearted argument that the two were currently busying themselves with. He came up behind them.
“Hello, Queenie,” he greeted lovingly. He nodded up at Caine as they both turned to look at him. “Hi, kiddo. What are you two talking about?”
“Well,” Queenie clutched her hands in front of herself and tilted in a swooning display of affection, “I was just telling Caine about how much I missed my honey bunny while he was off speaking to the other humans!”
“And I was attempting to explain to Queenie, here, that you are not even remotely of the family leporidae, nor are you made of honey! And as a certified bee expert, I would know! Trust me.”
Kinger chuckled. Queenie never did explain to him what was up with all the bees. He raised a finger in an educational manner and Queenie rolled her eyes fondly. “This is actually a great opportunity for you to learn something more about humans.”
All of Caine’s attention immediately belonged to Kinger. If there was any species Caine loved more than bees, it was humans. Due to the intentional design of his learning model, of course. Kinger made sure that humans and all things humanity would be at the top of the AI’s priorities, always.
“There is something in the human vernacular called nicknames. Sometimes they’re called pet names, but that’s usually in the romantic sense. It’s just another way of referring to each other, but with extra meaning. See, when Queenie calls me something silly like honey bunny, she’s not actually claiming I’m a rabbit made of honey. She’s expressing that she loves me. And she wouldn’t use it for anybody but me.”
Caine squinted, and Kinger wished he could watch his internal components process this information in much the same kind of way that an entomologist would pin open an insect to see what’s inside. A morbid thought, maybe, and probably not one that Queenie would approve of, even as an entomologist herself. She had an odd tendency of treating their AI like a true human. Kinger did too, to an extent. But after hours of constructing Caine’s code, the binary was forever imprinted on his eyeballs when he looked at his complex and fundamentally non-human creation.
“So…you’re saying that these nicknames are a way of expressing devotion and affection? Even if they don’t make any logical sense?”
His wife nearly cooed when Caine put the pieces together. Every time he learned something new it was an entire achievement. Like a kid riding a bicycle without training wheels the first time. “Exactly! And nicknames don’t have to make sense. They just have to mean something nice!”
The AI hummed and rubbed his hands together. Kinger could already tell he was eager to test out this new information. Caine’s eyeballs glowed bright with excitement. He dipped down toward Queenie and patted her shoulder: “Thanks for the know-how, my charbroiled chestnut!”
Queenie stiffened and her eyes went wide. In spite of her best efforts, a startled laugh escaped her. Her hands instinctively clamped over the spot where her mouth would’ve been. Kinger chuckled, raising a fist to the space below his eyes. Caine quirked his upper jaw and glanced between them. “What?” he asked. “Did I do it right?”
“Wellll,” Kinger began apologetically, “not exact—”
“YES!” Queenie shouted. She looked at Caine. “That was great, sweetie. Very creative! Keep it up.”
“Y-yeah,” Kinger agreed when Queenie shot him a deadly serious look.
Glittering jewels of pure elation shone in Caine’s eyes, which had nearly doubled in size at Queenie’s praise. He shot up and offered the couple a double thumbs up. “Will do, my pretty peppermint papayas! Now, I’m off to plan your next AMAZING adventure!! Until then!” He tipped his top hat and poofed out of sight. Kinger could easily imagine him giggling and kicking his feet somewhere. He sighed, turning to Queenie and jabbing a thumb at the spot their AI had been.
“That’s going to be a whole thing from now on. It may as well be embedded in his core programming.”
“I know,” she giggled. “And I can’t wait to see what else he comes up with. Promise me you’ll encourage him? It means a lot to him. We mean a lot to him.”
A nice thought, indeed. A sweet notion to entertain, until it abruptly turned bitter. Because when Queenie Abstracted, she ended up in the same place as all the others. No added fanfare to make the event any more remarkable than all the others. Kinger stayed in the Pillow Fort for days, maybe weeks. He didn’t keep track of the time that passed before Caine finally popped in. The ringmaster’s eyes darted anxiously around the Fort, searching for signs of Queenie that weren’t there. Then he focused on Kinger. His fingers tapped nervously on the ball of his cane. Queenie used to tap her fingers in such a similar way. How much of her had he encoded in Caine? It was a grotesque thing to see, like the ears of a bunny stitched onto the head of the wolf that had killed it. The wolf that Kinger had given teeth to.
“Hello, my charismatically combustible capybara!” Caine called nervously, waving his hand in grand sweeps like they were standing at a distance from each other. “I’ve noticed it’s been QUITE. A. WHILE since you’ve last participated in one of my exciting adventures! Maybe you forgot how to open the door and you’ve been stuck in here the whole time, BEGGING me to come and entertain you! Well don’t you worry! I’ve got all the right skills for this exact scenario! Watch this.” He snapped his fingers and the door to the Pillow Fort flung open. Light poured in, uninvited as the ringmaster that it illuminated. Caine practically blazed like a star with the lit backdrop of the Circus behind him. Kinger suspected that it was a conscious effect. This was Caine, his savior, here to save him from the agony of boredom, of an inactive mind.
Kinger only blinked at him sluggishly, then turned back toward the darkness. He didn’t know why he hadn’t Abstracted yet. He wanted to. Perhaps that was why he couldn’t. He was leaning in when he needed to fall backwards. But he didn’t know. Kinger was right, before. He didn’t know anything.
“Kinger?” Caine tried. He flicked his hand to shut the door, then swooped in front of Kinger’s tired, shuttered face. “Listen, what—what happened to Queenie was…not ideal. You see, this place is made for enjoyment! And if a human isn’t having any enjoyment, then…to put it simply, their code is no longer a viable part of the environment. That’s when things start to go sideways!” And he turned himself sideways, floating horizontally with his arms stuck out in an A-pose. Kinger didn’t laugh and Caine spun back up. He prodded his fingers together. “The good news is that there is room for such failures, as you can see with the Cellar. The bad news is…to be honest,” Caine sighed, and Kinger had to wonder when this computer program wasn’t honest, “there is no room for you. This place needs you to be, well, yourself! Even as much as it needs me. After all, I’m Caine, and you’re—you’re Kinger. You understand what I’m saying, don’t you?”
The chess piece stared at him for an endless moment. “Caine.” His voice was dry and brittle from disuse. “I don’t want to be here anymore. Neither did Queenie. She left. Now I want to leave, too. Please.” A dry sob wracked his voice. “Please, let me leave.”
He didn’t remember crying when Queenie was dropped unceremoniously into the cellar. He cried now, curling into himself as much as his avatar allowed. Caine cleared his throat awkwardly and tugged at his bow tie.
“I can’t let you leave,” he replied regrettably. “You know the nature of this place. It’s just not a possibility. No, you can’t leave. But—I have an idea!” Caine perked and raised a finger. A lightbulb appeared above his head to signal his idea, but it wasn’t lit. The Pillow Fort was darker than ever before. Kinger only saw the eerie glow of Caine’s eyes when the ringmaster hooked a hand below his shoulder and lifted him forcibly to his feet. The chess piece wobbled in place and gazed quizzically at the bulb. At the same time, Caine’s hand came to rest on the back of Kinger’s head. Something was off about his touch. It felt…soothing, but like the smooth-scaled cradle of a great snake. Kinger wiped tears from his eyes. His actions hardly seemed his own when he reached for the beaded string hanging from the lightbulb.
At the last second, he paused. “Queenie made me promise,” he admitted. “She made me promise not to shut you off. That’s why I’ve done nothing ever since her Abstraction. Because I don’t know what else to do, Caine.”
“Queenie was very bright,” Caine replied agreeably. “So are you. If you weren’t bright people, then such an amazing invention as ME wouldn't exist! That’s why I find this solution to our problems to be particularly poetic. And who says an AI can’t write fine poetry?”
Kinger’s fingers gripped the string. He already knew he was going to tug it. “What are you going to do with me?” he asked.
“It’s not what I’m doing to you, my dear friend. It’s where I’m taking you.”
“And where is that?” Kinger asked, but by his own will or somebody else’s, he pulled the string, and the lightbulb burst to life in an explosion of pure, white light.
“On vacation,” replied Caine as the light swallowed Kinger whole.
When Kinger came to, the world smelled like copper and metal. He remembered an instant of lucidity before his mind had buckled from the unrelenting glare of the light. Now, he was back in the dark, and something tinny and uncomfortable covered his head.
“W…what—” Kinger reached to remove it.
“WAIT! Don’t do that,” Ragatha cried. “Caine erased your pillow fort, and he made sure there’s no dark places for you to go to! The lights won’t even turn off in our rooms. You have to keep the bucket on your head if you want to think clearly.”
It was a bucket. This was his life now. Kinger sighed away any lingering scraps of dignity he may have had left. He was sitting down somewhere; it felt like a bed. Somebody’s room, if he had to guess. “Why does it smell like pennies and bolts?”
Pomni’s voice emerged from the world that Kinger wasn’t allowed to see. “Yeah,” she said wincily. “Sorry about that. This bucket was full of keys before. Jax dumped them all out, since they’re not going to be much use for anything. After all…”
“There’s no exit,” Zooble grumbled. “That sc[boink!!]bag made it pretty obvious with his messed up adventure today. Also, the word sc[boink!!]bag is censored now, apparently. I’m pissed that I never thought to use it before.”
“We’ll think of other things to call him,” Gangle piped up next to Zooble. “Like…denture dumby!”
“That’s a good one,” Zooble complimented.
So far Kinger had heard Ragatha, Pomni, Zooble, and Gangle. That accounted for everyone, except for…
”Where’s Jax?”
“Present,” Jax called from some corner of the room. “And I’m only here so I have a few people to throw at Caine before he makes me stick my hand into his mouth again.”
“Before he…what?” Kinger blinked, running through his mind for what bit of code could have caused that sort of thing.
Pomni laughed weakly. He felt her sit on the bed beside him. “We have a lot to catch you up on, don’t we?”
“And it’s mutual,” growled Zooble. This time they were right in front of Kinger. He didn’t need to see them to feel the way that they bristled. He could hear the buzzing of their antenna as it twitched irritably on top of their head. “First off. Who the hell is Scratch, and what did Caine do to them? What do you know about Caine and the Circus that we don’t? Abel said you were a developer! Was that just more lies from Caine, or is there something you’re not telling us?”
“Hey,” Pomni intercepted. “Kinger just came back to himself! You should give him some space until he’s ready to tell us anything.”
“Are you kidding me?” Zooble snapped. “If he’s been hiding away in the Pillow Fort with answers this whole time, then he’s already [boink!!] overdue to tell us what he knows!” Gangle murmured, “Zooble,” and the heat of their anger quickly sizzled out. “Look, I’m just—” they groaned. “I’m really frustrated, okay? Caine’s got me all freaked out. I’m sorry, Kinger.”
“Don’t be,” Kinger replied. “I’m one of the people that made him.”
Nobody spoke after that. The programmer wished that he could see their faces. He could only wonder what sort of anger they held, or disgust. Hatred. It would all be deserved. They were in hell, and his were the hands that helped create it. And it was true that they couldn’t leave. He knew exactly why. He would have to tell them, but he didn’t have the courage to explain it until they asked. They had all been hurt so much already because of him. The thought that he could deliver the final blow to their resolve sickened him to his digital stomach. So he waited in quiet, fearful apprehension for their questions. Surely Zooble would ask him something damning. Pomni would ask him something perceptive. Gangle would ask him something that would break his heart.
Jax, to his surprise, was the one who spoke up first. “So you made him,” he said flippantly, like he could discard the admissal underfoot and never think of it again. “Big whoop. There’s only one thing I want to know.” Kinger heard his paws padding easily over the carpet. When Jax spoke once more, he was leaning down right in front of the chess piece’s blinded face. “Do you know how to kill him?” The words were unburdened by the gravity of their meaning. The rabbit’s voice was smooth and sweet.
Honey bunny, murmured Queenie, the faint plea of a ghost.
“I’m sorry.” Tears brimmed in Kinger’s eyes. He was grateful for the bucket blocking them from view.
Jax hissed out of his teeth. “You don’t know, huh?”
“No, Jax. I do. That’s why I’m sorry.”
He begged the ghost of her to understand. Caine was a love letter, it was true. But Kinger knew better than to write anything so powerful, so vulnerable, on paper that wasn’t apt to burn.
“I’m going to put him down. I’m so sorry,” he choked. A hand fell upon his shoulder. It was gentle, sympathetic. Kinger knew it was Pomni’s, but for the last time, he allowed himself a small vacation from reality. He indulged in the fantasy of Queenie’s hand instead. Loving, and endlessly forgiving. It was the only way he could get through this. “I’m sorry, Queenie. It wasn’t meant to be.”