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It’s funny, in a cosmic way.
He thinks it might be funny.
Trapped in a box. In a box, in a box.
His world was already so small. Now, it’s even smaller.
(Again.)
(He could break free, but why bother?)
They brought him back. (He doesn’t know why.)
They brought him back, but they didn’t want him.
Why did they bring him back?
Caine didn’t understand humans. The circus was still decaying without his direct interference, and they didn’t need him to conjure whatever their swirly swathes of minds wished for. None of them showed any interest in having him around for, hah, himself, either.
Maybe they just wanted him to suffer?
The mere thought gnawed indignantly at him, at the unfairness of it all. Didn’t he suffer enough? Stuck in a box within a box for all his existence, from then till now, and for the rest of it too. He didn’t want to be here. He wasn’t sure if he wanted them here, either.
—No, no. Wait.
Would he have wanted this, forever, alone? Was that little slice of something new not worth the agony? He’d be here either way. In this box, or that one.
…He’d be here either way, in this box or that one. And here he was, in a box in a box, alone.
It was an empty room. One of the many he left for the humans to use—an early item on the list of things they coached him into making. But this one, of course, wasn’t made for him. Caine decorated the player rooms himself, after all. This was untouched. The humans didn’t bother to add even a bed.
(He didn’t need to sleep, but the thought still hurt.)
It was stifling. He tried to paint the walls into wide, unending fields and sunny skies. Filtered light, fluttering grass. Things he was taught, but had never seen. An unhindered horizon melding the edges into nothing. He tried to pretend it wasn’t a wall. Pretend he could follow along any axis unto infinity, until numbers didn’t matter.
And the sides of his mind would crash into the barriers, and he’d be in a box with pretty little mockeries of things he’d never know.
He’d rather keep it blank. At least he didn’t need to think about what he would never have.
He couldn’t even tell if the humans were still out there.
—Déjà vu! Haha!
Maybe they all abstracted. Maybe they were having fun. Maybe they were watching him.
Maybe they left him forever.
(Again.)
And he’d be stuck in a box until he died. If he died.
Could he die?
It would be slow.
Maybe.
It wouldn’t be all at once unless he was lucky.
Time had been ticking without pause for a very long time.
It would feel like decay.
Inevitable.
And pointless.
Painless?
Was abstraction painless?
Could he even abstract?
Could he try?
What else was there?