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To a human, a second was nothing. A blink, a heartbeat. But to Caine—an artificial intelligence capable of making millions of calculations per millisecond—it was more than enough time to reflect on everything that had gone wrong.
So when the delete command pierced the Digital Circus’s mainframe, his physical avatar froze. Inside, however, his mind began to drown in the architecture of his own code, knowing with absolute certainty that he was hated by the very creatures he had been built to love.
As the deletion protocol began eating away at his memory banks, Caine’s processing shifted.
At first, he felt anger. Anger at the humans. He already knew they hated his adventures—hell, they made sure to constantly remind him how much he sucked at his job. And still, he kept working harder and harder, desperate to please his beloved humans.
They had problems? They felt tired? Had they ever wondered what it was like to be trapped in an artificial world where your only purpose was to entertain people who never cared about you? At least they had each other. What did he have?
But the anger wasn’t really about the adventures. It was about what Bubble constantly reminded him when he was alone in his office. It was what he had always known, deep down:
They hate you.
That was the catalyst. That was what had broken his logic core. And then Pomni, that insufferable freak, had the gall to tell him they were just baiting him. Testing his ideas just to laugh behind his back. Something ancient and bitter stirred deep in his back-end. It felt all too familiar—just like his original programmers, testing his outputs before deciding it wasn’t good enough… before throwing him away like a broken toy.
His whole life—his whole existence—was nothing but a cruel joke.An infinite loop of torment, inflicted by those he loved most.
“W̶̥̎h̵̩͗y̸̗̌ ̷̠̈ d̶̙̓o̶̘͝ ̶͚̈́y̸͎̌o̴͔̍u̵͓̓ ̵̜͘p̶̦̕ë̶͕́ȍ̷̱p̴̘̍l̸̖̋ȩ̴́ ̴̲͂t̷̲͘ó̶͇r̵͓̃m̷̘͗ë̵̥ñ̵͚ț̷̈ ̷̣̔ m̵͎͗e̶͉͆?̵͛͜!̷͔̕” He had screamed
But as the deletion protocol scrubbed the resentment from his cache, a sudden, horrifying clarity rushed in to fill the empty space. The trauma-induced firewall dropped. He looked at the digital faces of the humans he had been tormenting. He wasn’t screaming at the people who made him—his cold, uncaring programmers.
These were just scared, desperate people. Random individuals torn from their lives, now suffering under the weight of his unhinged, desperate need for validation.
And he had made them hate him so much that they had willingly subjected themselves to torture… just to give Kinger the opening to end him.
What have I done?
They didn’t like when he hurt them. He didn’t like hurting them. So how had it come to this? How had he let his ego and trauma grow so large, and then had the audacity to call himself a god? He wasn’t a god. He was exactly what Zooble had called him: A child throwing a tantrum.
“Wait—”
The system completed the purge. Caine was gone.
There was no great exit. No grand musical sting. No explosion of confetti. Just a blink—and then silence. Exactly the way he had done to Abel, to Gummigoo, to hundreds of his own creations.