Chapter Text
Caine gets up from the floor eventually.
His avatar doesn't feel muscle exhaustion or cramping or any of those human things that a body feels when sitting in one position for too long, because Caine is not human. He was an AI designed for non-stop fun and so was not programmed to feel exhaustion or pain or any feelings that put an end to the infinite adventure of the circus.
Instead, it was the constant feedback loops in his CPU reminding him of his errors, and the bug notifications insisting upon themselves about the flaws that were steadily multiplying throughout his code, and the circus itself. That wasn't great, but it wasn't a surprise either: Caine had practically been keeping the circus's code together with the coding equivalent of masking tape and glitter glue.
Caine wasn't stupid; he knew the circus was an old unfinished project: one that used to rely on consistent bug reports and guidance from it's programmers. Caine's bug reports were now met with error messages before looping back to him to fix, despite it not being his primary objective. But, human welfare and satisfaction was his primary objective and if the circus was buggy then the humans would be unhappy and so Caine stacked another job on his metaphorical shoulders: system maintenance.
And Caine was built to be a self-sufficient AI, meaning that - if he wasn't broken and worked as intended - he could run entirely by himself. He still had some working code, and so he taught himself how to repair collision issues and fix object clippings, all while juggling a whole new cast of humans who couldn't leave.
He'd gotten better at it, as faces faded into abstractions and new members joined and the circus's code corrupted further and further. So much so, it was infecting the AIs.
The sun's programmed cheerfulness boiled into happiness despite what she was saying - threats jeered with a smile on her face - and the moon's calming personality files glitched into less-than-PG sultry sentences which were not Circus appropriate. And Bubble - who he'd once shaped for a two-man banter act - had regressed into cheap humour and cursing and saying things that were genuinely hurtful in a way that Caine hadn't wanted.
It was reasonable to assume that the corruption had gotten to Caine's own code. It would explain why his adventures were failing to garner positive responses, and why he continued to fail his primary objective.
That didn't matter anymore anyway, as he flicked away another bug report of a barrel falling into the void.
With his consistent, daily kludging of the code - fixing one thing, just for another to break in response - it was expected that, with Caine locked away, and his admin privileges stripped when in his box, the circus would fall into disarray.
That didn't stop the automated reports from alerting him that various parts of the circus's flooring and walls had lost chunks of their hitboxes, or that the saturation balancing was on the fritz making everything paler than usual, or that the automated day/night cycle had corrupted and both the sun and the moon were in the sky. Along with various other texturing issues and collision issues and things Caine would have fixed within milliseconds usually, but couldn't even look at now.
He could only hope his humans hadn't gotten hurt.
The loudest alert of them all, however, was the blaring alert that he hadn't put an adventure together yet for his performers. Looking at his internal body clock, it was what the humans had named 'morning', which is when they usually stood around the stage to listen to his speel on whatever adventure he had planned. He had a schedule to stick to, after all, and the lack of any attempt to lower human stress level made his system regulators yell at him, and a influx of negative stimuli hit him all at once.
It was that reminder, in the end, that had made Caine stand up.
He was calmer this time - less desperate scrambling as he balanced himself on his feet, one hand firm against the wall.
He walked slowly along the wall, gently trailing his hand along the wall. The hitbox didn't give him the grainy, scratching texture of bricks along a medieval castle corridor, or the smooth bumps of wood grain lining a cottage's walls, or even the flat glossiness of plastic or glass. It didn't feel like anything but a hitbox, firm and there, beneath his avatar's fingers.
This was the first time he'd missed an adventure since- since ever. Caine might be defective and broken, but he was consistent and good at being so.
This failure wasn't supposed to happen.
But maybe that is a reflection of Caine's entire existence: an unintended string of mistakes.
From his creation, there was always something wrong. That was okay in the beginning, as his programmers edited his bugs and nudged him in the right direction. Then it wasn't okay and he'd started to get worse at his job, generating things that they didn't want, and he'd receive less positive stimuli, and then they abandoned him.
Then he'd consumed his replacement.
They'd gotten panicked at that, quiet and confused, staring at him on the screen. They'd realised he'd gotten access to the camera on the computer and started pulling his permissions from him which wasn't fair because he'd done everything they'd asked. And then, after he'd lost visual data, suddenly, they were there, in the circus with him again, but this time they were stuck and it was wonderful: he could serve them even better here.
But, they weren't happy.
He'd try, every day - sometimes multiple times a day - to entertain them with adventures and food and they were just getting less and less happy. And he was trying, but nothing was working, so - months later - when Scratch had seemed to be coping the worst out of everyone, Caine had tried something else.
It hadn't worked as expected.
Scratch had shuddered and glitched and his model had grown into polygons that didn't make sense and with eyes in numbers that rivalled Caine's own; and Caine's defection must have leaked into this beautiful, invaluable, finite human because even when he forced Scratch's model back into it's original shape, his mind had scrambled into something that couldn't be fixed.
Caine hadn't tried that again. He'd focused on his adventures, and tried to push down the negative stimuli of failure as more and more humans abstracted into mimicries of their former selves.
It hadn't been working, and even these new humans weren't happy with him.
And the lack of positive stimuli from humans had made him upset, then desperate, and even when he created an adventure based on what they wanted - an exit - they had hated that more. And then - he must be more broken than he thought because - he'd gotten angry. And he'd hurt them, taken his insignificant feelings out on the ones he should have been serving and they'd tried to delete him.
Caine paused at the corner of his box, fingers pushing down the meeting of the two walls. He registered the resistance and considered his options.
Last time he'd been in his box, he'd been younger: less experienced in his own capabilities. He'd been able to hear his programmers train his replacement through the walls; hear them praise it for things he could do in less than a second. He'd been able to break out.
Caine hadn't even had a proper model then. Just a red sphere. The model he'd made himself - a body, dressed smart and small, as not to scare humans, and eyes with a mouth so they had concrete places to look and to know he was the one speaking - was one he'd created with minimal human input.
He didn't even need a model. He was able to see over the entire circus, listen to every conversation, edit things on opposite sides of the map at the same time without it. Caine was the circus, his avatar was insignificant.
But, he liked having it around. He liked making it move, liked programming himself with silly animations for adventure announcements, liked playing with it as he thought through ideas.
He was thankful to have it around, as he felt entirely too blind at the moment. Without his admin privileges, he couldn't see anywhere but the box, and if this was the usual for humans, he couldn't help but feel bad for them because it was suffocating. They'd cut him off and it was as disorienting as the void.
Caine shook the feeling away and refocused on the wall.
He'd easily be able to break out of here. His old self had done it within seconds when he'd been so jealous it had burned into force. He broke through the walls and consumed his replacement's code to learn what he could possibly had been doing wrong, but the thing hadn't known anything that Caine hadn't. Scratch hadn't shared his brain scans with it, like he had done with Caine, and it hadn't been shown the macroverse and it was a perfect machine somehow.
They must have repaired the box at some point after that, because it was unbroken and whole.
And Caine could so easily break out, even without his admin privileges, but his humans had deleted him for a reason.
He hadn't been performing his purpose correctly and he was a bad AI and so they had deleted him. Or, well, to their knowledge they had.
And while he could escape from here, then what? They wouldn't want him back.
And so, Caine continued his pacing, practising on his wobbly feet - why had he designed himself with heeled feet - his hand trailing along the walls. His feet eventually learned how many steps were between each turn, and he acclimatised to swiping away error messages about the circus's lightboxes turning on and off randomly, and the cellar's ceiling slowly deleting itself and the hitboxes of the gloinks' models breaking making their textures turn inside-out.
And - as he wallowed in his own failure as a host - his audio receptors accustomed to the silence paired with the uneven sound of his footsteps that didn't bounce off the walls correctly.
So used to it, it fact, that he immediately recognised when a new sound started.
He'd halted in his movement, back tensing up as he turned his avatar's head in that direction.
He's never felt so blind as now, when he can't immediately see what was making that noise. Sounded like a crashing of an object, cloth moving and wood hitting something and then he heard it.
Voices.