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All bravado aside, Caine really had no idea how to construct an adventure to ask the humans for assistance.
It was one thing to deliberately construct an adventure with themes and high-concept ideas – that was his bread and butter. It was another to accidentally put something that the humans read as resentment or frustration or fear in an adventure – that, unfortunately, also seemed to be his signature. But deliberately using an adventure to state something that he couldn’t bring himself to just come out and ask was… hard. He’d tried before – the escape adventure, the museum adventure, and the gardening adventure leapt to mind, and given how all three of those had gone, he doubted he’d be any good at communicating what he thought he was communicating.
So, perhaps he needed to take a step back. The museum adventure was his most recent attempt at an adventure with a message. What had he been trying to communicate, and what had actually been communicated? The first question was easy to answer – he’d been trying to communicate that he was fine, that the humans didn’t need to worry about his alleged feelings, and that any curiosity or concerns they did have were best directed at the Circus itself. What had been communicated was… pretty much the exact opposite: he was broken, he was suffering in some nebulous way that apparently sounded far worse to human ears than he’d realized, and he had some sort of complicated emotional problem involving his programmers. He’d give them one out of three correct, but given that he’d put zero out of three of those things in there intentionally, it was anyone’s guess how this would go.
Oddly, it seemed like the second he tried to include a message, that message suddenly became the last thing he could communicate. His first attempt to make them stop going on adventures because his adventures were inferior to their human fulfillment in Shrimp Town had entertained them, and his second attempt had sparked their fruitless worrying instead of driving them away. When he tried to show that he wasn’t putting secret messages in adventures and just wanted them to have fun, they’d instead gotten the impression that he was angry and possibly punishing them. It was almost as if consciously including a message took away whatever prompt was squirreled away in his adventure-building algorithms to put secret messages in them. Like it only worked with messages he had no intention whatsoever of including.
There was a temptation, brief but strong, to just… not try to make a help adventure. Just keep making fun adventures and leave it up to chance if the mysterious bug poisoning his work slipped in something the humans would recognize. The bug certainly seemed to understand them better than Caine did. But that was irrational and irresponsible: he couldn’t let a bug file his bug report, even if it was less a report and more of an abstract plea. He had to do this himself, and he had to do it soon. While the humans were concerned about him and possibly in a place where he could interest them in doing something more practical than asking him about his feelings.
Before they lost interest in him and his worthless problems. As they would.
But, no sense in worrying about that! He had an adventure to plan, after all. One that would hopefully put him one step closer to being repaired and back in a condition to properly serve his guests.
He started with the basic idea he wanted to communicate: he was damaged, the damage was progressive, and it was becoming a safety issue. If he broke it down further, the core idea was even simpler: the players needed to fix or stabilize something. There were almost too many things he could do with that concept, and he had to rein in his natural tendency to spin off seeds. He’d need to winnow early and appropriately. So, he separated the main idea off into a few distinct offshoots.
The most obvious was a mechanical failure. Broken motor on a zeppelin slowly hurtling towards the Earth. Broken air recirculator on a space station. Pile of scrap metal that needed to be assembled into something useful for a racing derby. Would a broken robot butler be too on the nose? Possibly, but the larger problem was why there would be any urgency in repairing one.
Urgency was a general problem, and while he liked the ship idea, it might be even easier (and convey the progressive aspect better) if he went with something environmental. In deference to Pomni’s sensibilities, he hadn’t done straight horror in a while, and it might be fun to finally do something creative with Lovecraft’s decaying landscapes and dead ancients. Climate change generally was a convenient metaphor given his control over their environment and accelerating decline. The largest issue there was that humans were used to stories about the environment having a message, and they were equally used to ignoring said message. Not exactly conducive to urgent action.
Which left him with the most distasteful of the three options: medical metaphors. Obviously, they had some benefits. Humans understood the urgency of a medical problem, and they instinctively knew that most medical issues were progressive. They could even understand how a medical problem might not be readily apparent to the casual observer. However, there were also clear drawbacks: unless a patient was extremely important (diplomat, scientist doing essential work, etc.), the idea of their problem causing problems for the players would get lost, and that was a key part of the message to be communicated. Moreover, human medical issues, no matter how engagingly presented, tended to depress his players. He wasn’t sure if it was because they reminded them of people they’d lost or their (frankly, bleak-sounding) experiences in the macroverse or just because mortality wasn’t a part of their lives anymore, but there was something about mentions of death that made them sad and distant.
Then, there was the other issue with medical metaphors for Caine. The issue that he wasn’t a very important person. Or an important person. Or, to be completely blunt, a person. Using that kind of metaphor was just inviting the kind of emotional complications he wanted to avoid and/or redirect into the more practical work of code editing. The humans would never fix him if they couldn’t see him for what he was: a tool that needed to be fixed to be optimally used. Or, slightly more accurately, the increasingly-fragile mechanism on which their little world turned. One that needed to be stabilized before it spun off its axis and killed them all.
He wanted to walk away. This felt like the kind of adventure that would benefit from his taking some time to relax and let a different part of his code work it out. But he couldn’t, because he’d let it go for long enough and the humans were actually engaged for once. He’d be an irresponsible, childish fool to let this opportunity slip away without at least making an attempt to get them to stop his defective code from getting any worse.
The brain surgery adventure mocked him. It was planned out to the Phase 3 level – it’d be easy, so easy, to just run it. It’d be almost as easy to tweak it for his needs. Just a little. Just enough to make it clear that the patient they were operating on was a lot more unstable, a lot more dangerous than the humans around him had planned. That the reason to help him wasn’t that he was important or his life had value, but that others would die if he didn’t recover.
He didn’t really have an animation that let off tension the way sighing did for humans. The juggling one did help him whenever he had to make a decision, so he settled for that, opacity down to 0% even though the tent was deserted. No reason to frighten a player who stumbled across his avatar at 0113. He half-consciously enjoyed the movement of the balls – their varying colors, their carefully-designed weight parameters and minor surface imperfections, their unique texture made by blending cotton and rubber, the way each arc lengthened to gradually sketch out his favorite type of ellipsoid curve – and pondered his options.
Option 1: Do nothing and hope that one of his next few adventures happened to tell the players exactly what he wasn’t saying. Irresponsible, unlikely to work. Hard no.
Option 2: Keep trying to bash his metaphorical head against the wall of ideas, trying to find the groove that would allow purchase. Less than 2% chance of success based on prior attempts to force an idea when he wasn’t feeling inspired. He’d brute-force it if he had to, but it’d take more than one night, and it could end up being less efficient than Option 1.
Option 3: The surgery adventure. Likely to depress them, unlikely to convey exactly what he wanted… But 17% chance that it’d at least get close. And since it was basically ready, he’d be able to run it while taking that precious time to think about anything else and let his background algorithms come up with a better idea without feeling guilty that he was wasting the day’s opportunity altogether.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was the best he had. He was getting used to that kind of thing.