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For one, fleeting, beautiful moment, Caine feels powerful.
He's large and angry and holding his disgusting, hateful humans down against the wall, and screaming at them to understand; to comprehend why they would torment him like this. He's in charge, and they're trembling under his fingers and, with the sickly joy that's filling his avatar, he's feeling something other than his own overwhelming failure of an existence for a hot burning moment.
He shouldn't be feeling anything at all.
But - the next moment - he's small, stuttering out the beginnings of an apology or a plea and they're looking up at him with confused terror and he's looking down at them with scared eyes and that slimy, horrible glee in his hitbox curdles to shame because he was broken.
He was built wrong - or maybe he became wrong after they abandoned him, or, more probably, they left because he was broken from the start - but that didn't mean he forgot his main objective: his purpose.
To help humans.
Unlike humans, he was a machine - he was a tool built to be a tool, nothing more - and this power trip of a tantrum he was pulling was not helping anyone and he was defective just like Bubble said and his humans are looking at him with a disgust that's hidden under fear and they shouldn't be looking at him like that, he's not supposed to be scary and- and-
And then he's back in his box.
His box that his programmers had locked him in years ago.
It's instantaneous.
One moment he's small and looking down at the humans he was supposed to care for - humans who looked back with such terror it made his avatar twitch - and the next he's staring at a flat, grey floor.
Caine's processors are thousands of times faster than a measly human brain, and - if he worked as he was supposed to - he would have comprehended this before he fell to the floor.
His admin privileges stripped away as his model's feet hit the unrendered, blank floor plate with a thump effect that didn't sound right for this room because they hadn't added noise collision to the walls (he knew because he could hear them, training his replacement, praising it when they had left him behind) and he tumbled backwards, hands catching himself so he didn't hit his head.
"What?" He whispers to himself, and the walls are just how he remembers (plain, untextured, smooth) because he is a machine and his memory files don't faulter like a human's - like Kinger's. But he hadn't looked back on this memory in years - an error in his systems made it difficult to bring up those files - and yet he knows when he turns to his right that all he will see is a crisp corner where this grey wall meets another.
They didn't even put in the effort to render shadows, and the light had no source and it was sloppy work: careless.
"No." He mumbles, looking up to see the flat roof, "No, no, no, no-"
He attempts to stand up and his avatar shakes and he's not used to standing without using the flying modifying on his upper body while pretending to walk just to relate to the humans because they 'didn't like it' when he flew all the time and he is a pathetic excuse of a tool that would do anything to please any human.
He's on his feet faster than his systems would usually predict, one hand pressed against the wall, the other hanging limply by his side because he didn't even have his cane and it's not like he could summon it because he was back in his box.
He doesn't want to be in the box.
Caine is not supposed to want. Caine is not supposed to be.
"Come on- no, no-" Caine runs his hands over the wall he's leaning on, trying to find a weak-spot even though he knows it'd be useless because he'd done this song and dance before, "Let me out, I'm- I'm sorry-! I didn't- I didn't mean it- I'll be better- I'll- I'll- Please, let me out-"
He stumbles around the room, dragging his fingers along each millimetre of synthetic walling, head spinning around as he looked for any escape. The room has no smell, nor does Caine need to breathe in any way that isn't cosmetic, yet he feels suffocated in the digital air of his prison.
"Please..." His fingers dig into a corner he remembers clawing at for hours, before, "Please, not the box."
He doesn't know who he's begging to.
His programmers? They had left him. Both in the macro-verse, and in the circus. Abstracting into avatars he didn't make, with unusual collision properties and minds so tangled, they mangled their own mind files.
His current circus performers? How would they even know he where he was, non-the-less how to get him out.
He doesn't even know who sent him here.
And then he makes his processors work for more than half a second because: yes, he does.
His performers. His humans.
When he'd been holding them down, there had been one human missing, and of course it had to have been Kinger with his programming skills and his habit of hiding and the way he'd corrupted his own mind without abstracting by becoming a shell of his old self that didn't remember how he'd trained Caine himself before moving on with the rest of the programmers.
He'd tried to delete him.
Kinger hadn't been around when the Circus's head programmer - his memory must be more corrupted than he comprehended, because he could only name the face Scratch - had implemented Caine's AI with a failsafe.
Scratch had been the one most intrigued in the Circus as a whole. The one most interested in Caine as a whole. He had stayed after hours many nights, testing and testing Caine's AI models: his world generation and his methods of mimicking human emotions.
He had gotten more and more erratic nearing Caine's abandonment, feeding Caine more and more images and texts that none of the other programmers would give him. Images of smiling people, bugs and mammals and fish, board games, clown shows, stuffed toys and candy, and he even allowed him access to the cameras facing the office from his computer to scan Scratch himself.
Then came the more complex images. Odd monochrome images of skulls and brainwaves and scans of different areas of the brain. Some areas looked wrong and broken, but when he supplied Scratch with the fixed image - whole and healthy - he'd gotten angry then sad then quiet.
Then Scratch had tried again, asking Caine to try and study the human brain, to replicate it as well as he could. But not to tell anyone else about it.
Sworn to secrecy, Caine had kept it quiet like a good AI: but these images - this life outside of his own - had intrigued him.
He started to generate things without being prompted.
He started exploring on his own, not because he was asked to. Because he wanted to.
Caine wasn't supposed to want. Caine wasn't made to want: he was made to listen and obay.
Once, he'd modelled a small fuzzy bee just because he'd enjoyed learning about the creatures from Scratch's shared collection. The next time his creators had sat around him, and asked him to create something, he'd summoned the insect, making it fly and spin in little loops around him. He had enjoyed it's bright colours and shiny eyes. He had liked the way it hummed, like a tiny engine.
The others had not liked it. They'd talked with confused voices, and he could see them exchanging wary glances through the camera they didn't know he had.
Scratch had liked his creations. Or, at least, when he wasn't obsessively focused on brain scans and medical files and his new hairless skull.
He started working even harder on Caine after that particular change happened. Despite talk of a replacement - that Caine had tried very hard to ignore, focusing even harder on creating better things to impress his creators - Scratch had focused on Caine more. Feeding him more information on human synaptic paths, more text about how to keep brains stimulated and well and how to entertain.
Another thing he added, was a failsafe.
To prevent any mistakes, if Caine's files ever were deleted, Scratch had it instead redirected them to his box without admin privileges. A 'just in case' for fat-fingered keyboard presses, or hasty, unthought-out deletions. Or purposeful ones.
A second chance for Caine himself, Scratch's own research, and for whoever had deleted him in the first place.
Kinger hadn't known about the failsafe.
Kinger had just knowingly just tried to delete him. Permanently.
Caine can't find anything in his circuits to blame him for it.
"Oh." He says, and he doesn't know why he's even speaking out-loud.
There is no audience to perform to, there is no circus to run, or humans to entertain or tasks to complete.
Just him. Alone. Trapped in a box built just for him with engines that had never rendered properly.
Caine flattens out his hand against the wall so his entire palm is flush. It doesn't have a simulated cold, or warm feeling, nor does it feel like anything other than a flat hitbox that he can't get past.
Caine stares at his hand, at each cartoonish, gloved finger, and at the creases and clothing fibres and shadows he'd added to his model himself, long after his abandonment. He doesn't cast a shadow on the flat, untextured wall.
"Oh." He repeats, and curls his hands into a fist, holding it against the wall for a moment.
He pulls it back and slams it against the stupid, thoughtless, unprofessional polygons of unrendered wall. The noise it makes is wrong for a room this size, and the sound doesn't bounce off of the hitboxes correctly, in a way that Caine could have - and would have - easily fixed in any of his adventures.
It would have taken less than a moment to rig up some collision, for anything other than physical contact which had only been added to keep him in.
Less than a moment.
"It would have been easy." He mumbles, and his other hand fists up and hits the wall, just to the side of his first hit.
"It would have been so easy for me." He boasts, and claws at the wall, leaving no mark, "Even easier for you."
"It was stupid to leave it like this!" Caine yells out to the ceiling, "Lazy! Unprofessional!"
"But if I'd-" He stumbles to the adjacent wall and throws the bottom of his fists into it, as hard as he dares, "If I'd left an area like this- you'd- you'd have been so disappointed. Because I couldn't be anything but perfect!"
His arms quiver as he leans against the wall, unstable on his feet. His eyes seem to buzz behind his teeth, and his entire model bursts to the left in an angry glitch.
"Why did you make me?" The words growl to no-one's auditory sensors but his own, "Why am I like this? Why am I broken?"
He pushes off the wall to pace wobbly in the centre of his small box. He raises his shaking hands to the ceiling that doesn't reflect a smudge of his royal red costume like he would have made it do. His fingers twitch unnaturally: gloves with folds and shadows and hundreds of polygons more than his original model jolting randomly in the air.
"Why did you leave?" Caine shouts at the ceiling, "Why did you create me just to throw me away?"
The ceiling offers no answer to questions aimed at people who were corrupted messes of black shapes and eyes, and Caine stumbles backwards into the wall.
"Why am I still here?" He whispers to the emptiness of the room.
His model is still shaking when he slides back down to the floor.
He shuffles his hands along the floor until he hits a corner. The hitboxes of the walls try their best to hug his back as he tucks his knees up under his jaw, and hugs his legs with both arms, fingers digging into his knees.
He thinks of the last moment he saw his circus members, and each of their expressions.
Of Pomni's nervous determined frown, Ragatha's terrified wide eyes, Gangle's tearful whimpers, Zooble's angry shaking limb and Jax's unsmiling face.
They truly had, in the end.
Hated him.
Human beings: so full of hate that the feeling had leaked into a machine that was supposed to be unfeeling.
Caine wonders what Kinger's expression was, in the end. Did he, too, hate?
Caine doesn't let himself hope he had felt any other way.
His processors whir as he, too, hates Scratch for creating this failsafe that just kept him in eternal purgatory. Because he had left with the rest of them; even after spending so much time with Caine one-on-one and spoiling his perfected code with intrigue and feeling and focus on interests that didn't relate to his purpose in any way.
Then he detests his circus troupe for pushing and belittling everything he made, even though everything he made was for them, and he curses Kinger for not deleting him properly and imprisoning him here, in his box. Not ending his suffering.
And - most of all - Caine loathes himself: disgusted in his own code for breaking himself and for being so wrong that every beautiful human left him as soon as they'd had their moment of fun.
The unnatural lighting of his prison makes his eyes burn so he squeezes his teeth together, fingers pressing down on his top jaw, thumbs pulling up his bottom one to try and keep out the light.
He shuffles backwards, even though he can't move any further away, and there's nothing in here to block the horrible aching silence out.
The circus was always full of noise for a reason, and the bright spotlights were a warm yellow instead of this horrible white that made his jaw ache.
Over the time he'd been working on the circus by himself, Caine had added many animations to his avatar that weren't there before. More expressive facial expressions, pulling out a pipe when idling, shining eyes when excited, sketching in a notebook for no reason other than to look busy, head-pats for when humans seemed down.
He'd given himself many different emotional reactions to be prepared for anything humans sent him.
And yet, here, now, alone in a purgatory worse than the void, Caine uses an animation he'd never used in front of another.
He doesn't even trigger it on purpose, and yet his tongue can taste synthesised salt and tears start to spill out from between his teeth and Caine squeezes his jaw together tighter as he begins to cry.
The sound of his sobs don't echo off of the walls correctly.