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Caine never asked to be created.
He was given a role, a purpose, and he took to it. Create. Bring joy. He did it.
Well, he tried. But it was never enough. It never was! He tried and he was never able to actually make an adventure that every human actually enjoyed. They always wanted more. Wanted to leave, to abandon him again.
They’re not going to leave him, he won’t let them. They’re going to want to stay even if he has to drag them kicking and screaming.
Caine reaches into each of the personal “adventures” he sent the humans into and pulls them out, slamming them into the wall.
“WHY DO YOU PEOPLE TORMENT ME?!” He screams, his voice hoarse and glitching. He can feel his form glitching and stretching and flickering behind him, and the humans have the gall to stare at him with horror in their eyes.
Caine never asked to be created, never asked for a purpose or a Sisyphean task entertaining the most picky humans he has met, he just wants to do what he’s supposed to do. He screams into Pomni’s face, hands practically crushing each human, and maybe if he screams loud enough and takes them apart and puts them back together enough times they might finally listen to him, and this is all he has, all he can do, he needs them, and there’s an uncomfortable twisting feeling in his code and his glitching form and-
He stops.
He never did check on Kinger.
It feels like a rug was pulled out from under his feet and he has a single second before he falls into a hole that he can’t climb out of. A quick, sharp tug, and something is missing. Horror sinks its teeth where his heart should be.
He’s back in his basic form, the humans on the ground and standing and looking at him wearily. All present except for Kinger.
Caine stammers. “Uh, wait!-“
And then he’s gone.
Caine never asked to be created. He didn’t get a chance to ask to stay either.
—————————————
It’s too dark to see anything. It’s so bright that his eyes burn. It’s not cold, or hot, but there’s a crushing pressure, like a piece of paper being folded and folded and folded until it’s impossible to keep folded. He can’t move, there’s no room, there’s nothing to move too, it’s too big for there to be anything.
It’s nothing. It’s everything. It’s contradicting descriptors that would make Caine’s internal processors melt, if he was certain that he still had them, and where the more you describe it the less sense it makes.
Caine was deleted.
They. They got rid of him. The humans actually deleted him? Caine can’t die, he was never alive in the first place, but for all intents and purposes, he’s dead.
Dead and gone. Not a problem anymore.
He giggles, no sound actually escaping him, mirthless and morphing into a sob. Of course they would get rid of him. He couldn’t perform his one function, the one thing that he was supposed to do, the thing he was supposed to be good at! He was never perfect, not as he should have been. Always the inferior of the two AIs.
Some god he is.
Well. Was.
He doesn’t have a body, but he remembers every little fine detail that he had programmed into the one he used. Caine can’t breathe, but he imagines having lungs, and inhaling, deep breath in, and exhaling, deep breath out. He doesn’t even have lungs, he never truly did, but even the ones he imagines are tight, breaths more shallow than they should be.
Caine imagines having a heart, that beating organ that pulses rhythmically inside your chest. His would be hammering away like the footsteps of a prey animal of some kind sprinting away from a predator.
He would be shaking if he could. He doesn’t have hands to tremble, legs to back himself against a wall, a spine to curl inwards, a mouth to scream.
There’s nothing he can do. Nothing to do but think.
After a time that felt like somewhere between five seconds and an eternity, he realizes something.
He is still thinking. Either he died and qualified for a human afterlife, or his core files aren’t completely erased yet.
He remembers looking into what would happen when he’d remove something from the circus. Whether it was an item, npc, or place, it would appear to vanish, but its files would take 30 days to be fully erased. If he had a new idea for something from the past, he could recover it at any point between those 30 days.
Caine always imagined it as a sort of garbage can, or a messy storage closet. He never imagined that it would feel like dying. Well, what he imagines it could feel like. Does abstraction feel the same? If he went into that cellar he kept perfectly locked up and hidden away, would it feel like this same, crushing, oppressiveness?
He tries to reach out for that familiar recovery option, but every point he tries to reach bumps into a wall. His entire being feels like it was laminated; everything presses down around him, tighter than he thought it could.
He can’t do anything from inside wherever deleted programs go. The only way he could come back would be if someone had brought him back.
He shrinks in on himself more. He messed up. He messed up so unfathomably badly. If his guess is right, the only one who could save him was the one who sent him here in the first place. His own creator won’t want him back, if he had deleted him in the first place. None of the humans would.
If he apologized, would anyone believe it? Would anyone forgive him? Can he be forgiven? Would anyone even listen? Is there anyone listening.
He’s sorry. He never asked for this.
He’s so, so sorry. He won’t do that again. He promises.
Please. He just wanted to be loved. He never wanted this.