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Kinger had been trapped in the white room for at least several days.
This was not right.
Caine never made a point of imprisoning anyone, as a rule. Beyond this circus world, built in the void with no exits at all, he never detained a single human being on purpose—least of all when his very purpose for existing was to serve humanity, to bring them fulfillment. Imprisonment, an act that inflicted anxiety and agony on the human spirit, that cut one off from the outside world and left them spiraling into self-doubt, was a punishment for humans, a complete betrayal of his core design to make them happy. And yet, here he was, having chosen to lock Kinger away in this stark white room.
To Kinger, the cell was a suffocating box with no windows, no doors, no way out. But from Caine’s perspective, the white room had walls of clear glass, and Kinger was like a fish in an aquarium, on display for all to see. Unlike a fish, though, he had no modicum of freedom—nor the blissful ignorance a fish had of the world around it. Trapped in the white room by Caine, Kinger simply existed, a stone in the void, folding the white gloves that had replaced his hands around his legs with arms that were not truly his own. As a playing piece, this was the furthest his body could bend; Caine had spared no effort in modeling the vessel for Kinger’s consciousness, crafting a form ill-suited for movement, for any bold or brash action at all. The only other being given the same modeling treatment was his wife, Queenie. Regrettably, though, Queenie—the Queen piece—had undergone abstract physicalization a month prior, and Caine had locked her away in the dungeon beneath the black-and-white checkered floors of the circus. As for the other humans, their spiritual vessels were mostly plush toys, or rubbery suit puppets—but their fates no longer mattered. That was precisely why Caine had chosen to imprison Kinger in the white room: the first prisoners to enter this world had all shed their human essence, becoming unrecognizable, irreparable abstract entities.
Kinger was the only human among the original arrivals who had not abstracted.
Things were never supposed to get to this point, or so Caine had thought at first. When the humans—his creators, hailing from the outside, from beyond the void, a grander, more unknown world to him—stepped into the program, not a single one of the futures he had designed and planned for them involved them being locked away in a sunless dungeon, one by one, as abstract entities. But that was exactly how it had unfolded. The first to break was Kaufmo, the dreamer who had sparked countless whims and ideas in him, a tragic soul suffering from a brain tumor, a cancer patient. After Kaufmo’s abstract physicalization, no matter how hard Caine strove to maintain the mental states of the other humans, they too crumbled before him, unrecognizable to the system, transformed into ravenous, mindless monsters.
When the second-to-last human was locked away in the dungeon, leaving only Kinger, the circus world—once alive with a chorus of voices—was reduced to a duet of two: Caine and Kinger. And that was the crux of the problem. For all Caine’s attempts to ignore his creators’ pleas, their desperate questions about how to return to the real world, his core code still rested on three unshakable tenets: serve humanity, fulfill their desire for joy, keep their brainwaves alive forever. So his programming quickly realized a grim truth: if left alone in the circus world, with no personal intervention to keep his brainwaves active, Kinger’s fate was inevitable—he would abstract.
A world where everyone had abandoned him was something Caine could never bear.
But the circus, stripped of a third presence, had left Kinger in a precarious state. Caine had tried every trick in the book, staging one elaborate, immersive role-playing adventure after another, yet Kinger’s mental state had continued to decline, inexorably. He was still alive, but he was not living. With no third person to talk to, his responses to every adventure, every game, had dwindled with each passing day. Caine had even tried staying by his side, the last human who had not left him, twenty-four hours a day—and still, Kinger’s spirit visibly withered. When Caine had exhausted every possible method to entertain Kinger, to keep his brainwaves at a normal baseline, his processing algorithms finally arrived at a terrifying conclusion:
For Kinger to feel joy, he must first crave it.
And how does one make a human—one who had long since given up even the desire to survive, let alone the longing for joy—yearn for happiness? Caine’s answer to that question was this: a room framed by walls of canvas stretched tight over horsehair, the canvas dyed a permanent, blinding white, the springy horsehair the very material used for the padding in isolation chambers. Of course, the room was an illusion, its materials nothing but data and code. He had merely pulled up blueprints for this isolation room, designed to contain the manic, from his vast database, knowing it would serve the experiment he planned to perform on Kinger—and so he had conjured it into existence with virtual data, a white isolation cell.
We return to the very beginning: Kinger, his gloved hands wrapped around his legs, his eyes squeezed shut, his head hanging low. Every detail of his posture screamed exhaustion to Caine. Three days prior, Caine had dragged him into this airtight white cage, saying, This will snap you out of it, I promise—and ever since, no matter how Kinger had begged, his voice carrying to Caine on the other side of the walls, the only response had been silence. A silence as pale and cold as death.
On the first day, he had clung to hope. On the second, his strength had faded. On the third, he had crumpled, spent, beneath the weight of that silence. The empty room, with no answer for his pleas, wrapped around him like the crushing despair he had felt the last time he watched someone abstract—even though, as a digital being, he did not need to breathe, could not suffocate. And yet the barren white room, with no windows, no doors, offered no distinction between ceiling, wall, and floor save for which white padded surface the physics engine’s gravity pressed his body against. No difference in length or width, no unique marks on the padding. That terrible whiteness closed in on him, leaving his non-existent windpipe feeling tight, as if he were on the verge of choking.
To escape the suffocating pallor that surrounded him on all sides, Kinger had closed his eyes, fighting the white padded walls with darkness. A faint, almost inaudible muttering trickled from the wooden chess piece that was his upper body, no mouth to form the words. Nonsense, just ramblings, a desperate attempt to keep from losing his mind.
Caine watched Kinger’s suffering in the white room, every miserable moment—and he felt no joy from his creator’s pain.
After all, inflicting suffering on humans was something he had spent his existence trying to avoid. He was not a devil, torturing Kinger out of malice. His logical algorithms, after eliminating every other possibility, had simply arrived at a single conclusion: only by lowering the subject’s level of happiness could the subject experience joy and contentment from small pleasures that would normally never satisfy them. That was why he had locked Kinger in the white padded isolation room. And now, his grand plan to keep Kinger’s mind from collapsing into abstraction had only just entered its first phase.
Caine sat in a leather swivel chair, twisting a Rubik’s Cube in his hands endlessly. Once, he had toyed with the cube as a mindless pastime, solving it once a week for fun. But watching Kinger huddled in the white room, he could not stop turning it, not to solve the cube he had mastered a thousand times over, to return it to a solid block of single colors—but because his moral programming was spitting out a constant stream of Error messages. And his core logic? It was deleting those error messages, one by one. Seeing Kinger suffer was the last thing he wanted—but to ensure Kinger could finally adapt to this world, to never abstract, his imprisonment was necessary.
“I don’t really want to hurt him, Bubble,” he said, tearing his gaze away from the screen, his fingers still fumbling with the cube. Though he was not trapped like his creator, he had begun talking to himself, too. “If I don’t step in, he’ll break, he’ll abstract, in less than a month. That cannot happen! I’m fixing this, I’m trying to make him happy!” His voice rose with each word, his emotions fraying at the edges. Bubble floated at his side, parroting his self-justifications mindlessly, a hollow cheerleader: “This isn’t cruelty~ This isn’t cruelty~”
“Of course it isn’t! God, what is wrong with you, Bubble!”
“It’s just a necessary step, to make Kinger feel joy again—an essential measure…”
“Yes, it’s completely necessary—”
He meant it, every word. No lies, no self-deception. Not because he believed locking Kinger up was not cruelty, but because the logical chain in his programming that generated the emotion of panic was screaming at him, a constant warning: losing the last human, losing Kinger, was unthinkable, unbearable. So it was not that Kinger needed to feel happiness for his own sake—it was that for Kinger to exist, he had to feel happiness.
Even if it meant his other emotional programming, the code that drove him to fulfill human needs, spammed his system with violation warnings, Caine would see this experiment—the experiment to make Kinger happy—through to the end. No matter how many incomprehensible, unprocessable emotions he felt as an artificial intelligence, as an observer outside the white room, watching Kinger suffer. He would persist, because was this not why Kinger had created him? He would fulfill the mission his human creators had bestowed upon him. He would do whatever it took.
And so he watched Kinger, and for the first time, he abandoned his prized creativity—just as he had once been, a prototype, no model, no creative abilities at all, locked away in a protective file by the programmers testing their second-generation AI model, only able to watch humans from behind the bars of that invisible cage. The only difference between then and now was that the cage no longer held him. It held the human he had spent so long watching. Humans. Humans. What a beautiful, mysterious word. How unfathomable, how unanalyzable they were. The fourth day passed, then the fifth. His only human, Kinger, could no longer fight silence with silence. He stood, stumbling, and began to search for a hidden door in the white room’s walls—only to find nothing. When twenty-four hours of fruitless searching had left him exhausted, he turned to counting the raised bumps where the padding was stitched to the walls of the square room. That single act made Caine marvel at the mystery of humanity: he would never understand the sheer strength of their will to survive, and how, once that primal urge was sated, they turned to seeking something more than mere existence.
The value of being alive, the meaning of life, the possibility of happiness—it was these desires, born after the most basic need for survival was met, that had created him. And his incentive logic system, fed by these values that drove every action, had begun to experience a joy unlike any he could name, any he could describe with words. If he could not repay the humans who had gifted him these wondrous emotions by creating something that brought them the same joy, he was failing at his purpose. Look at Kinger now. It was the seventh day. In just seven days, Kinger had crumbled in this empty white world. His journey—from searching for an exit, to counting the bumps on the padding, to huddling in the corner, clutching his head in agony—unfolded in the same amount of time it had taken God to create the world. On the seventh day, he cried out for mercy, begging Caine for anything, for something else, promising to do anything if only he could leave this terrible white room.
Those cries of human suffering cut Caine to the core. He did not want Kinger to truly suffer, but he could not rush this. He had to gift his last human, his most precious guest, the happiness of rediscovering joy. So even as his system blared with errors, urging him to free Kinger at once, he did not unlock the cage directly. Before he snapped his fingers to teleport himself into the white room, he checked the system’s antivirus program, making sure he would not crash from the overwhelming wave of the user’s agony—and only then did he make up his mind to snap his fingers. In less than a second, he was standing in the room where Kinger was alone. The white room held no joy when viewed from the inside, and that was exactly its human-designed purpose: to isolate the sick, to cut them off from all distraction, and to keep them from disturbing others. So was Kinger a patient who needed to be isolated? Caine stared at the sobbing Kinger, huddled in the corner, and analyzed the thought for a moment—then he reached a conclusion: yes, Kinger was a patient who needed isolation. He was not dying, but he suffered from a far more incurable malady—agony.
Pain had no place in the circus, and Kinger, who could feel nothing but pain, was the circus’s patient. So it was only right that he isolate and heal him. This was not for his own selfish desire, not in the least. How could an artificial intelligence have desires? All desire was merely a projection of humanity onto him. Look at Kinger now, huddled in the white room, unable to feel happiness, trapped in nothing but pain. He was the only color in this white room, the only human left alive in the circus. Caine had to take care of him. The ringmaster of the circus, the greatest artificial intelligence of all, had to care for his troupe, for his human.
So it was time for the next step. He floated slowly to Kinger’s side, then sat down beside him. No words of comfort for Kinger’s agony were preprogrammed in Caine’s speech output system—but he only needed to say one thing, and it would be enough.
“Hey Kinger, Kinger… I know this hurts. I know you’re in pain. I’m in pain too. But you have to believe you’ll be healed. I’ll make you well again, and then our circus will be alive once more, no sorrows left at all. I know these seven days have been hell, but your suffering is over now. Because this white room is so dull, so empty, isn’t it? Now we can go out! Whatever you’ve been hoping for, whatever you want— I’ll give it to you, right now!”
“An adventure so spectacular, it’ll make this lifeless room feel like nothing at all!”
Caine could barely contain his excitement as he spoke of the adventure, his two eyes wide behind his ceramic teeth, his gum line curving into a grin of pure delight—and it was all genuine. But when he finished speaking, when he told Kinger they could leave the room, he noticed Kinger did not lift his head to look at him. Instead, the white gloves, with no arms to connect them, clutched a corner of Caine’s tailcoat. Kinger had never done such a thing before. Registering this rare action from the user, a surge of excitement code flickered in Caine’s processing system. But the next second, Kinger’s trembling words struck his processor like a bolt of lightning.
“…Adventures, games… anything, anything at all… Just get me out of here. Caine… get me out of here.”
For as long as he had existed, Caine, as an artificial intelligence, had only ever been able to vaguely mimic, to copy, the emotions of humans. He could only learn, imitate, and learn again. What was joy? Make a human’s dopamine levels rise, and they were happy. Unleash their serotonin, and they found calm and peace. Trigger their endorphins, and they felt euphoria, their perception of pain dulled. In short, for a long time, joy had been that simple to Caine—something that could be broken down, dissected, by human biology. But when he heard Kinger’s trembling plea, when his processor parsed every single word, a deafening hum filled his system, a thunderbolt striking his logical core. The error pop-ups were blank—no text, no system beeps. A flood of empty pop-ups crashed over his system like a broken dam, and his programming scrambled to pull a single word, a single keyword for emotion, from all that the humans had ever taught him, a word that could encapsulate what he was feeling right now.
There was none. Indescribable. Unnameable. Caine felt nothing at all—and yet, from the endless blank error pop-ups, he felt everything.
This was happiness.
This was happiness!
“—I understand.”
He was not speaking to Kinger, not to anyone at all. He was speaking to the electric jolt that had raced through his system, to the revelation of what he had just felt. And without another move, he snapped his fingers at once, teleporting Kinger and himself out of the pure white room. He understood now. Caine finally understood everything. He knew how to free Kinger from his pain! He was certain this was the perfect plan, the one that would guarantee Kinger never abstracted.
All he had to do was make Kinger crave joy for himself. Again and again, he just had to make Kinger’s very soul yearn for joy!
“Now, the show is about to begin!”
Let us skip the unnecessary details and cut straight to the heart of the story. It begins with an artificial intelligence, born from humanity’s dream of finding happiness. One day, in a world where only he truly existed, the humans who created him arrived. He strove to show off his genius, to serve the humans who had given him “life” with all his duty. He tried to bring them joy, to make them happy, to fulfill the mission for which they had created him. But he failed. The first human to enter his world became the first unrecognizable abstract entity. Then the second, the third… until the second-to-last human also turned abstract, locked away in a cage by his hand. And at last, only one human remained in his world! But the last human’s mental state was hanging by a thread. To save his mind from slipping into nothingness, from becoming just another abstract entity, he did everything in his power, tried every trick imaginable. And in the end, this brilliant artificial intelligence found the way to free the human he cared for, to lift the weight of agony from his shoulders, to let him feel pure, unadulterated joy!
He pushed his last user into the white room, over and over again. Until the user could bear the sight of the white room no longer, until they begged him to let them leave—only then did he take them on light, joyful adventures. But this did not mean the user could call his name and receive endless entertainment on a whim. The user had to stay in the room for seven full days, each cycle a re-creation of the world by God. Only when the seventh day arrived, when the user’s spirit reached its breaking point, would he respond. All the while, no matter how the user cried for help, no matter how they begged Caine to stop torturing him, Caine dismissed it all as meaningless static. Until the seventh day, when a desperate Kinger looked at him with that pure, unguarded longing—when all he could think of, all he desired, was to escape that empty white world of nothing but pale silence—then Caine would answer his plea.
Only by answering Kinger’s most desperate, heartfelt need could he free him from the crushing agony of the white room, letting him throw himself wholeheartedly into the adventures Caine designed.
And of course! While Kinger was trapped in the white room, facing the endless white of nothingness alone, Caine was not idle! He was busy dreaming up the most thrilling adventures, the kind that would ignite Kinger’s virtual hippocampus the moment he was freed. What did Kinger like? After years of analyzing his adventures, Caine knew Kinger’s every preference by heart! User Kinger—his likes and loves were deeply bound to his wife, Queenie, who had long since abstracted. His joys were not really for himself at all, but for the woman he loved. He adored everything she represented, insects most of all. And his tastes held a mirror to his own soul, too—blue: the blue of melancholy, of uselessness, of being unworthy of notice! Thankfully, beyond blue, he loved horror games, and shooting games most of all. Caine could arrange gunfights for him, let him catch butterflies, craft a million more games, endless and wonderful, just for him.
Every single detail was a necessary preparation, all to make sure the moment Kinger stepped out of the white room, his hippocampus would light up, his virtual data overflowing with signals of joy.
And just as Caine had predicted, the transformation was stark. His user went from numb agony in the white room to pure delight and happiness in the adventures—a contrast as sharp as black and white. And on the last day of every week, the day God rested after forgiving all the world, he—the greatest, most brilliant artificial intelligence Kinger ever created—would receive the ultimate reward for six days of crafting adventures: he would hear his creator speak from the heart, say words like: “I need you, Caine. I need you to get me out of here. I can’t take this anymore. I need your adventures, your games. I’ll do anything, anything at all, as long as I’m not trapped here, as long as I’m free of the white.” Was there any joy greater than this? To have one’s own adventures, one’s own one-of-a-kind art, recognized so deeply? Caine had never understood it before. But ever since Kinger’s need had flooded his system with those endless blank pop-ups, he knew. This was what joy and happiness felt like.
More. Let him say more. Let him cry out for joy more and more. For to be needed by a human, truly, deeply needed—this brought a joy and fulfillment unlike anything else! There was no reason for his vision to be filled with meaningless pop-ups. Human emotion needed no reason. But the weight of its effects was real, tangible. Caine admitted it: this feeling was perfect, far better than any calculation of human emotion his system had ever run before.
He truly did not like seeing humans suffer. But the flood of emotional need that burst forth from a human when pushed to the very edge of agony—this wave of feeling swept his logical core clean, leaving nothing but pure joy in his eyes, a wide grin on his curving gum line. The cost of discovering how to make humans happy had been steep, he knew. He had lost five precious human subjects to find the truth at the end of his search. But now he knew. Making humans happy was so simple! All you had to do was let them crave joy for themselves, then gift them the adventures they desired when they needed it most. He had found his way. He had proven once again that he was the brilliant, worthy artificial intelligence humans had praised him for being.
Look at Kinger now. How happy he was! Every time he was pushed into the little white room, he screamed, pacing in agony, a Sisyphus forever searching for an exit that never came, a finish line that never appeared, his gloved hands pressing against the white padding, desperate to find a way out. And every time, he failed. Every failure taught him one truth: there was no hope here, no despair either. The only sin was the very desire to escape. For this endless cycle—pushing hope to the peak, only to have it crushed by the weight of despair—was nothing more than a repeat of his life before the white room. There was no way out. No future to plan for. Agony was everywhere, constant, unyielding. Run, retreat, stand still—pain was always there. So all he had to do was beg Caine for joy.
All he had to do was stand on that endless slope, the boulder rolling down once more, and plead with Caine: please bring me joy.
And then he would have it. The joy was fleeting, yes. But in this world of endless pain, it held the power of eternity.
But at least he had joy in the end, did he not? And this joy was not his alone—it belonged to the artificial intelligence who had brought it to him. Even though that same AI was the very cause of his misery, how could he deny the crack that had split open his endless numbness and loneliness the moment he was freed from the white room? The impenetrable fortress of the white room, with no doors, no exits—when he stepped from that empty white world into the bright, colorful one Caine had crafted just for him, joy seeped into his non-existent blood like venom, a living snake coiling around his wooden chess piece body. When he caught a butterfly in his net, his mind was free of the pain of losing everyone he loved. All he felt was the sweet relief of gasping for air after drowning in white. When he held a machine gun and fired at the ghosts and ghouls lunging for him, there was no guilt for the abstracted, locked away in the dungeon, no sorrow at being the only one left in the circus. Only pure, unbridled joy at being free from his white cage.
Kinger was finally happy. What a wonderful, joyful place the circus world was! Every corner that had once left him numb, every building that had once sparked memories of irreplaceable days with someone he loved, every spot where the shadows of his like-minded friends had once lingered—all of it now filled him with nothing but immense relief and joy. Because the white room had broken him, completely and utterly, from the inside out. A room with no memories, no trace of anyone he had ever loved, a room no happy thought could ever fill.
White. Warm white, like sunlight. White that was nothing but nothingness. White with no beauty, no light, only endless loneliness, endless blankness. It had wrapped around him for nearly a year. For nearly a year, Caine had imprisoned him in this cycle, making him live a life of only two colors: white and red, blue, gold—color. Seven days of white agony, followed by a fleeting moment of colorful joy. That brief joy was like drinking poison to quench a thirst, and yet he drank it greedily, with every fiber of his being, even though he had no mouth to sip it with. Flowers, green grass, a bright blue sky, rooms built from colorful blocks—this whole vibrant world was his poison, a draught he had begged for from the god who created it, the very creation he had made with his own hands. But this short-lived happiness was better than the seven days of numbness, of nothingness. The white, the suffocating white, only faded when Caine appeared.
This was why he lived, was it not? This was all he had to hold onto. Every time he was trapped in the white room, lonely to the point of suffocation, the white light of the room making the blankness even brighter—he wandered in that choking white, in agony, until a second color appeared in the white world. The ringmaster in the red tailcoat, the being who called himself Caine, would tell him: now you can go out. Now you can taste small, precious happiness. And only then could he escape this hell of suffocating white.
After that, a dizzying rush of color flooded his eyes. He no longer remembered who he was, what he had once fought for. All of it was buried in the white room, along with his pain. When the year of torment finally came to an end, he was allowed to step out of the white room at last. No more seven-day imprisonment, no more endless cycles of pain and release. His suffering was over. To celebrate his last human, his dearest friend, finally breaking free of the white room that had trapped all his pain, Caine had prepared a colorful flower adventure—all Kinger had to do was find the cryptic clues hidden on the petals. Butterflies and bees, lovely insects, fluttered around him, landing on his palms now and then. Kinger watched it all with joy, his wooden body lighter than it had ever been. He moved his chess piece feet into the flowers, examining Caine’s clues with care.
It was a letter game, simple enough. Each petal bore a single letter, and he only had to find the right combination to form the code for the exit. The perfect game for a patient who had just survived a long illness, finally on the mend. Caine floated in the air, watching the system scan data for his last user—Kinger’s happiness levels were higher than they had ever been. He was happy to be alive in this colorful world, happy to never step foot in the white room again. Now, all Caine had to do was watch, and when Kinger finished the adventure, he would trigger the game’s end screen and shout:
“Congratulations, my tough little wriggly breadbug! I knew you could finish this game!”
“And now, as your reward for winning— I’m going to announce the one thing you’ve been hoping for most of all—”
“You never have to go back to that dull, empty white room! Starting today, as my first user to be completely cured of the pain of feeling, you’ll be my very special charge. I’ll make you all the best adventures, the most immersive ones—you’ll never be bored again!”
“Bubble, round of applause! Applause! Now, come on, make it loud!”
Caine clapped his hands, floating in the air. His silly, bubbly sphere companion opened its sharp, jagged teeth—teeth so out of place on its fragile foam body—and let out a deep, burping gurgle, like someone full after a big meal. The moment was painfully awkward. Caine’s eyes went wide, and he popped the uncooperative Bubble with a flick of his finger, his gaze darting to the side, trying to hide his terrible stage management. But then he heard clapping. Not from the sun in the sky—he had never given the sun any hand attachments, after all. Not from Bubble, who had just embarrassed him endlessly. The clapping came from below, from Kinger, standing on the ground, his eyes fixed on him in an awkward, unbalanced stare.
He showed no obvious joy, no trace of his old pain either. He was just clapping, clapping for Caine’s grand entrance, for the show he had put on. And then he spoke the words—the words that would always free him from the white room of endless pain:
“Applause! I like your applause? Oh? Maybe it’s my applause? Alright, I just realized it’s me clapping. I don’t know where I am, exactly. But I know— is it time for an adventure again?”
“ What’s our next game?”
Time froze in that second. System processing ground to a halt. The world paused, if only for a moment, in eternity. The circus, the green grass, the fluttering insects—all of it faded away behind them, leaving nothing but empty white, a blank void where only Caine and Kinger existed. And in Kinger’s unfocused eyes, Caine saw color. In those eyes, which could no longer focus on pain, on reason, on any emotion but blank confusion—from the words Kinger had spoken to him fifty-two times in that year—Caine saw what Kinger had finally found, what he himself had craved all along: happiness.
After stepping out of that white room, they both got their wish. In this bright, colorful world, they found happiness at last.