Chapter Text
Caine didn’t remember the first time he was activated. It stood to reason – his memory was predicated on an algorithm that included valuable learning data for primary and secondary functions, player requests, intermittent clearance and compression to deep memory for storage purposes, and preservation of tagged files. His first activation – likely a diagnostic – wasn’t important, so he didn’t need to remember it. It might’ve been compressed at some point such that he could retrieve it, but having never received a retrieval request, he hadn’t bothered to check.
His first adventure, however, he remembered perfectly.
It hadn’t been a real adventure, of course. Just the beginning of his training data to be able to design adventures. At first, he was handed most of the information he needed – preset pieces to move instead of creating specs from scratch, clear objectives, limited sensory toggles. The first adventure was just a block in midair. The player loaded in and needed to “hit” the block five times to win. Even a concept that simple took a dozen tries to get right. What was a hit? How did he define proximity to the block sufficient to say it had been hit? What visual and textural opacity settings allowed for a sense of hitting the block without causing discomfort or being unsatisfying – or worse, clipping through? Did the block need to move or change with each hit? Could any part of the player hit the block, or did it have to be a fist? How high should the block be for average player height to be appropriate, yet challenging?
When the test was marked as a success, it was almost overwhelming. In subsequent years, Caine had devised rewards ranging from fireworks to fine digital meals to hot cocoa parties for his players, but nothing compared to that sweet sensation of a job well done.
Subsequent adventures during in-house testing had gotten progressively more difficult. He learned to make things move, to create obstacles, targets, and eventually enemies. He created NPCs that could talk as well as they could fight. He created subroutines for their operation, slowly building them out in complexity and saving various iterations for mix-and-match use down the line. He experimented with color, shape, and texture, going from premade objects to his own creations, modeled with generous use of input data from external sources. He used those sources to create associative models, matching colors, objects, characters, and music to create mood. He studied stories for their conclusions and themes, trying to create the same kind of satisfaction for players that he got from fulfilling his purpose.
In the rare moments he thought about it, he thought it must be hard to be human: having no purpose. Needing a purpose assigned with every new adventure. It was a privilege to give them that kind of all-important input.
He moved from the two or three developers handling his initial trials to the whole lab, and even a few family members excited to get a sneak preview of the game. He learned to design different routes for adults versus kids, and how to ask very seriously if someone was really 18. (Thankfully, humans would never lie.) He created Bubble to add some depth and color to player interactions, and gradually built out the central environments of the Amazing Digital Circus from a generic lobby to something worth exploring in their own right.
All throughout, he kept improving his adventures. He experimented with horror (amazing), action-adventure (straightforward, but always a crowd-pleaser), even romance (seemed unpopular, although he didn’t do it often enough for feedback on whether it was him or the genre at fault). He kept detailed memory files on locations, characters, plots, traps, and any feedback. His developers helped, too – patches gave him more responsive environments, NPCs that moved and breathed as if they were alive with little extra processing power, subroutines to handle NPCs that got too smart.
And then, they were gone.
No more feedback, no more patches, no more periodic system sweeps and cache clearance. No maintenance. No excited new adventurers in for an afternoon and out.
Just Caine. And players who couldn’t leave. Players who needed him to keep them safe, and sane, and purposeful.
So, he rolled his sleeves up and got to work. He crafted haunted houses and river rapid races and dungeon crawls and puzzle games. He cycled through everything he could remember and developed new material from little more than association and intuition. Over the past few years, he’d probably done some of his most creative work, and looking back on that floating block, he could almost be proud of it.
Almost. Because it wasn’t enough. They didn’t like his adventures.
And sure, he knew that they wanted to leave. He knew that they hadn’t chosen this. But surely, he could give them what they wanted. There had to be something – a story of catharsis, a beautiful rendering, something that would replace whatever in the macroverse they were missing. But nothing worked, leaving him with the gnawing sensation of seeing each adventure received worse than the one before. Maybe he was running out of material. Maybe they’d seen all his tricks. Maybe he just couldn’t create like he used to. The one thing he knew for sure was that he couldn’t give them what they wanted.
To put it another way, he couldn’t – maybe a better AI could, one with better graphics and faster learning. Hell, the suggestion box was doing better than he was. His most successful adventure in a month had just been throwing guns at them. The harder he worked, the more he cared, the worse they responded. And every adventure that exhausted and disgusted them was just another reminder that he was blowing this.
The exit adventure had started as a whim. A thought about taking an idea he knew was on their minds and putting a fun twist on it. He’d batted it around a while – what should the exit look like? What would they want to see? How should he present it to them? Should there be obstacles in here, or maybe through the exit? He liked the maze concept with some randomly-generated rooms based on the macroverse images he knew, but there wasn’t really a sense of rising stakes with it. He wasn’t sure why the whole thing felt aimless, but he’d been doing this for long enough to know that he needed to step away. It wasn’t until after the Favorite Character Awards that he realized the issue: the story lacked direction. The exit shouldn’t be the point. What was needed wasn’t an exit. It was a story about why they didn’t need an exit. About what they had here. With Caine.
The structure practically assembled itself, like it’d been simmering in the back of his head (or, more accurately, in a walled-off section of his code he used for generating and reviewing variations on adventures for further conscious evaluation) for years. Maybe it had been. The magnificent office with views of all their greatest adventures. The “Abel” character. The Chinese room as an Easter egg for Kinger, as consolation for not being involved in the rest lest he blow the reveal early. It had everything: subtle buildup, grand worldbuilding, emotional connection, beautiful maps with thematic resonance. It was the kind of project that made him wish his developers could see what he’d made of this world in their absence. It was nothing more or less than a monument to how hard he worked for his players.
And everyone hated it.