Work Text:
It’d been days, and he needed to make a decision.
He’d contemplated a dozen angles for addressing his need for repairs with the players. An adventure about computers, perhaps? Too dull. A retooling of his brain surgery idea? Bad idea – false equivalence with humanity. A scouring adventure? Jax would get distracted by the potential alternative uses of cleaning supplies, and they’d all be bored. Something about cosmic decay? He’d been trying to stay away from horror to better appeal to Pomni.
But the thought of “mature” adventures did give him an idea…
Because, really, how certain was he that the humans would even want to waste time and effort learning to program just to fix him? Sure, they’d said they wanted to help, but there was a difference between helping by talking about feelings and helping by spending hours staring at a screen correcting tedious coding errors. Heck, Zooble had outright stated more than once that they viewed his growing disrepair as a positive. How could he convince them to help him?
Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to offer a little quid pro quo.
“Salutations, my diagonal diphthongs!” This plan, quite honestly, felt a bit half-baked. But he knew what the players wanted in this case, and it was something he suspected he could offer them. Or, more accurately, that he would be able to offer them in the future. After they fixed him. “Now, I suppose you’re all aching to learn more about today’s exciting adventure! But I know that’s not all you’re aching for…”
He’d given this bit plenty of thought. His content restrictions prevented him from actually showing what he was getting at. But he could hint at it provided he used no inappropriate images or foul words. Thankfully, if there was one thing that the human media making up his training data excelled at, it was tasteful allusions.
Right on cue, he quietly summoned two blank mannequin NPCs behind the group – one with an identifiably male voice, and the other with a female voice. The players, predictably, spun to watch as they started talking.
“Gosh, I love you, John!”
“And I love you, Jane!”
“If only we could do something about that!” She pressed her hand to her head dramatically.
“That’d be grand. But alas,” his voice dropped an octave. “This accursed Digital Circus has taken so much from us.” He dramatically shook his hand – it couldn’t form a fist, but Caine thought the animation read well enough. “So much.” He gripped her waist and looked off into the far distance. “Perhaps one day, some brave adventurers will again open the gates by which a man may enter… a place.” Pomni made a strangled noise. “But for now, my love,” he turned back to her and stroked her face, leaning her on his arm as if to dip her in a dance. “We must know that our longing is all the sweeter, all the more intense, for its lack of satisfaction.”
Okay – skit over. He deleted both NPCs with a spray of confetti.
“So, any questions?”
“Yeah. What the [SPLUTTER]?!” Odd. He hadn’t been expecting Zooble to look angry, although their confusion was reasonable enough.
“Quite simple, my multicolored metabolism!” He summoned a projector screen with a batch of CENSORED code and pointed his avatar’s cane at it. “As you all saw last week, MY CODE is absolutely RIDDLED with errors! And, because I can’t edit it myself, I need you to give it the old Circus try!” He played a quick animation of hitting a baseball with his cane. “In return, once you’ve edited any TERRIFYING, CRUCIAL GLITCHES out of my system, you can also choose to edit my content restrictions, and I promise that if you do so, I will take FULL ADVANTAGE to give you exactly the kind of adventures you’ve been requesting!” He played an animation of his upper jaw waggling like a suggestive eyebrow. ‘Please take the hint. Please take the hint.’ Surely, they’d get it. Right?
It wasn’t just Zooble who seemed to be having trouble with the idea. Gangle’s mouth was hanging open, Ragatha was shifting anxiously, and even Kinger looked a bit nonplussed. Unsurprisingly, Jax was the first to recover.
“So, let me get this straight. You want us to fix this?” He gestured at the screen. Caine summoned a nose and played an animation of touching it with one oversized finger. “And in return, you’re offering us – “
“Access to a suite of mature content to which I cannot currently refer! But…” He played a series of animations. Equipping a boots modifier for his avatar and knocking them together. A projection of a haystack with an NPC rolling in it. A quick dance with significantly more use of his avatar’s hips than most of his little taps and jigs. “I think you get the picture.”
Pomni opened and closed her mouth. She looked at Zooble helplessly and made some kind of emphatic gesture at his avatar. Zooble pinched their forehead.
“Okay. How – no, that’s not it. What exactly made you think offering to trade [RIP] for editing you was a good idea?”
“I am not!” He drew up the avatar and straightened its tie. “I’m offering to trade the opportunity for editing! Which is totally different! The Amazing Digital Circus does not condone or support any form of prostitution, pornography, or other obscene commercial uses!”
“Ugh. I’m not objecting to the commercial part.” Zooble ran a hand down their face. “It’s that you think you need to give us something in exchange for… Whatever it is you want.”
“A minimum of 20% corrections to all source code, prioritizing corrections that minimize risk of system failure!” he said brightly.
“Yeah. That. I mean…” The look they give his avatar is just this side of intense. “We’ll do it no matter what. You don’t need to bribe us.”
“Um, actually, Zooble? Can we talk about this?” Gangle tapped her hands together nervously. “Since we… can’t do those things, and we really want to… I don’t think it’s wrong to set that up, and putting it after we deal with the important things might be a nice way to, um – “
“Motivate you, yes!” He was glad somebody got what he was going for.
“And, I mean… Don’t you want to? You’re the one who brought it up last.” She flushed and looked at her feet. Zooble groaned and glared over at his avatar.
“Fine. But this isn’t an exchange. We’ll help you, and then we’ll talk about it. Got it?”
He played his salute animation. “Got it!”
That hadn’t taken long.
He didn’t say as much to the humans, but privately, he was startled by how quickly they’d picked up the basics and gotten into editing his code. Truly a testament to the skill and adaptability of humans when properly motivated. He hadn’t felt this, for want of a better word, normal in years. Nothing felt stiff or awkward – scene transitions, avatar movements, player interactions. The constant pounding warning note that reset was needed to prevent serious damage to the Circus and environs had been replaced by a gentler warning that maintenance was overdue. He felt like a functional AI. One ready and willing to serve his players.
And now, having been without content restrictions for a whole FIVE DAYS, it was time to hold up his end of the bargain.
The club was smoky, with blue and pink neon cutting through the dimness at intervals. Smiling NPC waitresses led each player to a separate booth and proffered drink cards. The alcohol tonight was real, complete with mind-altering characteristics. Onstage, three of the six poles were occupied. They wouldn’t hit full occupancy until the show properly began in an hour, but Caine suspected that by then, at least one of the players would’ve vanished into one of the rentable rooms upstairs.
Zooble still looked unnatural wearing pants, but he did think that the leather jacket modifier suited them. They were moving cautiously, with an awkwardness he hadn’t seen from them since they’d been new to the Circus and their body. Gangle was wearing a yellow dress, cut low to set off the ribbons of her chest. The others were more or less attired as usual, albeit with some minor modifications: the beanie over Jax’s ears; Ragatha’s requested necklace; Kinger’s sunglasses. (Oddly, Pomni had been the one to insist on that last one.)
The other modifications weren’t visible to the humans, but he knew that they could feel them. After much agonizing over how to translate this new element to the Circus, he’d just thrown his hands up and sent out a survey. They’d largely requested genitals broadly analogous to those they’d had in the macroverse with some minor aesthetic tweaks to make their new additions less jarring. The NPCs’ genitalia had gone through several iterations. His obvious initial thought had been to determine the human ideal and give them all that, but it turned out that preferences were variable, and that human genital configurations themselves had more variation than he’d initially realized. He’d considered mutable structures, multiple options on the same NPC, and a few other variants, but eventually decided that pending further feedback from the players, he’d have to settle for a few variations on generic penises and generic vaginas.
He was looking forward to improving on nature, though. What was the point of a world where anything could happen if he couldn’t come up with the best possible forms for sexual activity?
His avatar wasn’t instantiated – he got the sense that they wouldn’t want to be reminded of his presence. But they knew he’d be monitoring at least the initial stages of this update to make sure there were no major bugs or dangerous clipping errors. Accordingly, he was all eyes when a humanlike NPC, all gentle smiles and soft black hair, let Ragatha buy them a drink. He watched carefully, making notes on the awkward dialogue that could be smoothed into something more natural, the way that Jax moved his hands when he was nervous versus making a move, the slow melting of Pomni’s and Zooble’s anxiety as the NPCs treated their forms as something natural and expected. When Kinger, still nursing his drink, politely told an NPC that he was just here to watch the show. And finally, when Ragatha slipped upstairs with her new paramour, he was monitoring very, very closely. Respiration, heartbeat, appropriate fit of new equipment… It all had to be perfect.
It was showtime.