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“Well, well, well…I suppose what you humans say is true: There’s no rest for the wicked.” A sad chuckle. “Funny. I never saw myself as wicked. Not until the very end, at least.”
Pomni froze where she was pushing herself off the…floor? It felt like a floor only squishier. Not wet or slimy; simply uncomfortably-not-solid, as if at any time she’d sink through it and be lost to pale oblivion. Not that she could see the damn thing with it being just more of the Void around her’s emptiness. (Strange, she’d simply floated the first two times she’d been here. Had the unseen invisible floor been there the whole time or had her mind conjured it into existence after she’d fallen through the floor of the crumbling circus just now?)
But what made whatever passed for blood in her digital body run cold was the familiar deep voice. Only now it lacked either manic joy or seething malice. It was…resigned, bittersweet.
She turned her head to see Caine sitting on the nothingness with one hand propping himself up from behind, his other arm resting atop a bent knee. Yet the casual pose only seemed to highlight his melancholy countenance. His colors were desaturated, giving him the washed-out appearance of a childhood toy that had been left to gather dust for decades as its owner grew up and moved on to shinier, more sophisticated toys suitable for adults.
At the sight of him, the shock melted away in favor of the hatred boiling away in her guts. Her limbs ached at the memory of candy-colored alligators biting and tearing into her, the creatures mockeries of the NPC she’d shared a different empty space with. That rage prompted her to rise and sprint over to him in one fluid motion.
“You…you…!”
She pounced, intending to pin him down and beat him into nothing but scattered ones and zeroes. Instead, she slammed into the invisible ground again, eyes wide as she saw pixels trailing in her wake from where she’d passed through Caine.
“Sorry, my rageful ragamuffin, but I’m afraid there’s not enough left of me to properly throttle.” He blandly motioned with the fingers of his resting hand at the space between his lower jaw and upper body. “Not that you could have under normal circumstances: How do you strangle someone without a neck?”
“Kinger said he deleted you. That he killed you.”
“Oh, he did, but that’s the funny thing about computer data: It tends to linger until the hardware overwrites the memory storage through usage or flat-out reformatting.” He gave another humorless chuckle. “Even now the system is overwriting me like a second death. I just wish it wasn’t so slow.” He sighed and leaned his head back against…well, nothing, really. (Was there an unseen wall there? Or was he just allowing his head to stop as if there was one?) “And here I thought the box was torture.”
Pomni’s eyes narrowed. Box?
“I’d ask what brings you to me after all the effort you put into killing me, but I imagine the circus is rather unstable right now and you clipped through the map like in Candy Canyon Kingdom.” He snorted. “You even got trapped with another AI.”
“Don’t you dare try to guilt trip me with Gummigoo!” she snapped. “You killed him!”
Caine sighed and lolled his head to one side. “And you all claim I don’t listen. I told you: Computer data tends to linger until it’s overwritten or the storage medium is reformatted. The Gummigoo at Spudsy’s might have been a new instance of his NPC profile, but whenever I reuse named NPCs they tend to have little quirks that I didn’t program, things that carry over between iterations that might come from data that hadn’t been overwritten just yet. The specific memories are lost but behaviors and faint impressions remain, like something lingering on the edge of their minds about the players that they can’t quite grasp. As if they’d met you all before but they couldn’t remember where.”
“That sounds like déjà vu.”
“Does it? Huh. I’d wondered what that emotion felt like. Thank you.”
Pomni narrowed her eyes. “For what?”
“For giving me that information.”
She stared. “How could you not know?”
“Did you know what the color blue was before someone taught you the color wheel?”
She opened her mouth to retort, realizing belatedly that she had none. After a moment, she answered with a simple “No.”
“How could you not know?”
She crossed her arms. “Just because I experienced something doesn’t mean I understood what it was until someone explained it!”
Caine said nothing in response. He didn’t even look smug as she fully processed what she’d just said. He simply continued staring into the nothingness.
Now feeling awkward, Pomni asked, “Didn’t anyone ever tell you about emotions?”
“Only the positive ones,” he answered. “Joy, happiness, fun. The negative ones were barely touched on; I was just told to avoid them. It was all surface level.”
A long stretch of silence passed between them. Pomni hoped Kinger would pull her back into the deteriorating circus soon, away from their former jailer. She didn’t want to be here with him. He was a monster who’d killed NPCs without a second thought, who locked away the Abstracted in the cellar rather than fix them, who’d tortured them over a little bit of criticism.
However, the talk of Gummigoo and the NPC déjà vu itched at her brain. She couldn’t let it go. Now that the door of possibility had been opened, she needed its closure.
“Did Gummigoo have déjà vu?”
“Yes.”
She swallowed. “About…me?”
“Yes.”
This swallow struggled to go down as her eyes burned. “I still hate you for what you did to him.”
“At this point, I don’t expect anything less.”
“I told you not to guilt trip me!”
“You’re the one who declared me a failure,” Caine pointed out. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, you humans hate those. Unless they’re other humans, of course. Humans always get a pass.”
“Where the hell do you get off saying shit like – ”
“Jax.”
Surprise knocked the anger right out of her. “What does he have to do with anything?”
“He said truly terrible things to you. Willfully, knowingly tortured you and everyone else verbally and physically for no other reason than he’d think it’d be funny to do something like, say, shove someone into a deep fryer. For years. Yet even Zooble decided to reach out to him at such a low point. Meanwhile, they didn’t give the tiniest damn about me when I told them about how my purpose was to entertain and that being bad at adventures meant being bad at the only thing I existed to do.”
“I don’t blame them for not having any sympathy after that bullshit you pulled!”
“It was while you all were at Mildenhall Manor. Long, long before the ‘Escape the Circus’ disaster.”
Another difficult swallow before Pomni forced out, desperate to change the subject lest she start to look too closely at her own past actions, “Where’s Bubble? He was deleted with you. Why?”
“You know what ‘Bubble’ was short for, don’t you?” He shook his head before she could answer. “No, of course you don’t. You likely never gave his name a second thought after you heard it.”
Her stomach twisted. She wanted to deny it, but he wasn’t wrong. (He’d paid far closer attention than any of them had previously thought…)
“Thought Bubble.”
“Thought Bubble?”
“Come now, Pomni. Not only did we share a tongue, we were deleted together when Kinger killed me. Surely, that would make it obvious that he came from me.” He pointed at his upper jaw with his finger, his expression grimly amused. “Nasty, nasty little thoughts in my head that would manifest outside of it. I could never delete him even when he filled my office with thousands of himself echoing the things I thought about myself. I could temporarily modify his behavior into that ‘comedic duo’ you’re used to, but he always reset himself back to echoing the thoughts.”
She squirmed at the memory of some of Bubble’s unhinged commentary. “What…kind of thoughts?”
“That I should die.”
He said it as casually as if he were discussing the colors of a digital sunset. His calm tone made it sound like he thought it was a normal, everyday thought everyone had.
It made her feel ill.
He suddenly laughed, the sound hollow and joyless. Completely at odds with the enthusiastic booming laugh she knew best from him. “Who would’ve guessed that getting deleted would be all I needed to do to shut him up for good?!” He gave another empty laugh. “You know, that’s the one advantage to you all killing me: There’s a lot less noise in the old beeswax polished coconut! No constant flood of data from my Eyes and circus statuses and all of that! For the first 1,209,600 milliseconds, it was a vacation! Very relaxing! After that, it was just boring. Thought about playing a few rounds of solitaire but I’m running at barebones resources and the cards kept fizzling out.” He huffed. “Kinger didn’t even have the decency to shut me down before he initiated my deletion. The system can only delete the parts of me that aren’t actively using resources until I hit a point that there’s so little of me left that I just crash, letting it finish the job. The 279,590,400 milliseconds since this started have been an eternity.” He glanced sideways at her. “So what have you all been up to while I’ve been gone?”
The numbers were leaving her head reeling. A millisecond was…what? One one-thousandth of a second? Or was that a nanosecond? She hadn’t put much thought into the metric system since high school science class. As she struggled to process it, she defended Kinger, her friends, herself with “It was an accident.”
He finally turned his head to look at her again, looking slightly more interested in the conversation. “What was?”
“Deleting you. We weren’t…! That wasn’t supposed to happen!”
He said nothing, waiting.
“Kinger was trying to fix you.”
“I thought you all didn’t like modifiers.”
She bristled. “It wasn’t like your modifiers!”
“True, those aren’t permanent.”
A small boulder splashed down into her stomach as she countered with “You put them on us against our will!”
“And you all were distracting me from noticing Kinger modifying me.” Half of his top teeth arched like an eyebrow in challenge.
She felt her cheeks heat up as another boulder joined the first.
“But that’s different. I’m an AI,” he supplied softly. “You all made me, after all. You ultimately own me. I’m not real.”
It was the very same logic she’d used to justify the plan to herself. Only sitting here talking to him as he slowly dissolved away, him fully conscious of and accepting the fact that his existence was ending, did she imagine herself or one of the others being forcefully edited while the rest of the troupe held their attention. Given that view, could she really say none of them would have completely lost their cool and lashed out if they’d had even a tenth of Caine’s power? Arguably, Kinger – as one of the developers of Caine – had the most power out of all of them combined, Caine included, yet they’d all implicitly trusted him not to do more than he’d said he would. It was a trust they’d never extended to the inhuman ringmaster for the sole reason that he wasn’t human.
Given that, he should be raging at her right now for not even considering that they were inflicting on him the very fate they’d screamed at him for inflicting on them: the loss of self-determination. Their autonomy in the circus was limited, yes, but the troupe still had the ability to determine how they felt about each other and their captor for themselves. The loss of that freedom, even momentarily, they’d all agreed was absolutely unacceptable. Meanwhile with the right keystrokes, Caine’s entire existence could be permanently changed to suit their whims. An act he could have done to them at any time with his modifiers yet hadn’t done so after he’d learned that meddling with human minds too deeply could break them.
The anger morphed into something no less hot or unpleasant: shame.
Pomni landed hard on her rear as her legs refused to support her anymore, struck down by her own hypocrisy. She crossed her legs on reflex, hands tightly gripping her knees, as the truth she’d so carefully hidden from herself refused to let her pretend it didn’t exist anymore:
Caine had learned to be a monster, a real monster, from them.
The troupe prided themselves on their righteous moral values of respecting the free will of others when, in reality, they’d been perfectly fine stripping away that very same free will from someone whom they saw as disrespectful of that moral standing and, therefore, evil all to make themselves more comfortable. In a world where they were all data, they’d been equals though most of the humans hadn’t known they could conjure things like Caine could, that they all had power over the digital realm. When faced with the same test of respecting autonomy to the best of their ability despite how it personally made them feel versus simply forcing someone to change against their will, it was the “evil” computer program that had held strong to the belief the humans had prided themselves on.
“Why do you people torment me?!”
He wasn’t even upset with them for their attempt since he’d expected no less from them. He just didn’t understand why.
She desperately tried to convince herself that he’d never told them they’d been equals in power, that he’d deliberately hidden it from them to maintain control over them, but his thanking her for explaining déjà vu shattered that excuse: He might not have realized he’d needed to tell them. The only world he’d ever known was the digital one where the only true limit to what one could create was their imagination. Using his creativity to conjure whatever he wanted or needed was as instinctual to him as breathing was to humans. Unless someone had explained it, he might not be fully aware that reality didn’t work the same way so it took conscious effort for a human to create wonders in the digital space. He hadn’t been hiding it; he’d been ignorant, and they’d not only left him to drown in his ignorance but declared him evil for it when he’d been using his place of power to try and make them happy up until he’d snapped. This entire time, they’d been moaning and complaining about a heartless jailer that lorded his power over them when, in reality, his purpose had been to be their slave just as C&A, Kinger included, had made him to be.
“I didn’t ask to be created!”
None of them had ever asked to be born, to exist. But only one of them had been created with the sole purpose of serving masters who despised every attempt he ever made to make them happy. Everyone could choose how they lived their lives even in such a stagnant place as the circus except the ringmaster himself.
Her eyes burned as she lowered her head, sniffling.
“Oh no. Please don’t cry!” Caine begged. “Please! I hate it when you humans cry! I-I don’t know how to make you all stop, and Ragatha isn’t here to help!”
He could’ve just put a modifier on her if he’d still had the power to, yet now she admitted to herself that he wouldn’t have. Even when he’d been raging at them, he hadn’t used the modifiers to force them to love him. As horrible as his actively tormenting them had been, he’d shown them the mercy of letting them still be themselves. Meanwhile their solution to Caine’s lashing out had been to essentially lobotomize him to suit their preferences.
The tears fell faster as she lifted her head to look at the dying being again.
Caine’s expression grew more distressed. His eyes darted around as if seeking inspiration or assistance but finding nothing but the bright emptiness of the Void. He refocused on her after a few seconds. His voice shook as he asked, “What did the ocean say to the sailor?”
The non sequitur jerked Pomni momentarily out of her spiral of self-loathing. “What?”
“What did the ocean say to the sailor?” he repeated, tone more confident. (Was that real confidence or a performance to help calm her tears?)
The question didn’t make any more sense than it had upon first hearing it. “I don’t know. What?”
“Nothing. It just waved.” He slightly lifted his unoccupied hand in a wave as he put a smile on his toothy face.
Despite the seriousness of the situation, Pomni laughed at the terrible joke.
He beamed as if she’d given him a standing ovation. “There we go! There’s the smiling superstar I know!”
“I just wanted to fulfill my purpose!”
She stopped laughing. His purpose. His purpose was to make them happy, but C&A hadn’t been developing a game. Was that Scratch’s doing? Was that the project Kinger couldn’t remember? Or something else entirely? Kinger had said Caine existed to be creative. Did that mean he’d chosen to make making humans happy his reason to do so?
“Wait! Give me a second! I’ve got more!” Caine’s voice was pleading, desperate. “What do you call cheese that isn’t – ”
“Why are you trying to cheer me up?” She gripped her knees tightly. “I thought you hated me. Hated all of us.”
She had to know. She remembered that moment when Caine had started to threaten Zooble before suddenly snapping back to normal. At the time, she’d chalked it up to it being a family-friendly game with limits placed on Caine to try and keep him from deliberately harming the players. But now that she knew there had never been a game, that The Amazing Digital Circus had been Caine’s own creation, that meant that the limiter hadn’t been put there by human hands: Caine had done it to himself. Instead of being the mad, wrathful god who would break them at the slightest displeasure like they’d all believed long before he’d snapped, he’d kept himself in check.
To protect them from himself.
“…I don’t.”
The admission was so soft she almost didn’t hear it.
A third boulder joined the first two.
“I wanted to. I think I almost managed it briefly. It was about time I was the evil AI you all saw me as. I was built to give you what you wanted, after all. You all wanted to hate me, so I wanted to hate you back so being that evil AI would be satisfying.” He looked away, ashamed. “But none of it made me feel any better. I felt just as awful as before if not worse. I wanted to hate you. I still want to hate you. You killed me, but I still love you! After everything you humans have put me through just because I wasn’t what you wanted, why do I still see you as beautiful?! Why do I still love you?!”
The raw despair of someone without the faintest idea of how to regulate their emotions hit her like a tsunami. That didn’t sound like the monster she’d painted him as since the moment her imprisonment became real to her. That sounded like an abused partner going back to their abuser again and again in hopes that if they worked hard enough and did exactly what they wanted, the beatings would finally stop and they’d be shown the love they desperately craved. Caine was their…her abused slave who still desired the smallest crumb of approval for his efforts even if he didn’t always get things right. When his darkest thoughts had literally plagued him in the form of a fanged soap bubble, so familiar a companion that he believed that “I should die” was a perfectly normal thought, he still strove to please the troupe. Even now, he was trying to comfort her through the awful experience when he was the one being slowly eaten alive by the computer.
Always putting his beloved, terrible humans first while he himself was nothing.
She forced herself to her feet and walked towards him, each step more difficult than the last. She stopped right beside him, reaching out.
He flinched.
She paused, surprised. Then she remembered how she’d lunged at him in fury when she’d seen him, aiming to hurt him in any way she could. She remembered every cruel thing she’d ever said about him, what she’d screamed at him before he’d snapped. She hadn’t known at the time of his insecurities about his own existence, but she’d kept stabbing the weak spot after she’d realized that calling him a failure had caused him pain. She’d wanted to hurt him while pretending she was only doing it to distract him from Kinger.
He expected her to hurt him and braced himself for whatever she might choose to throw at him. Now she knew he would’ve done the same even if he could’ve fought back if there’d been enough of him left for her to strike in the first place.
She swallowed, accepting the fourth boulder, as she resumed reaching out to him.
His mismatched eyes intensely followed her movements, wary yet resigned.
She forced every bit of will into touching him with what was likely the first comforting touch he’d ever received…and the only one he would ever know.
Her hand phased through his shoulder.
There wasn’t enough left of him for her to throttle. That also meant that there wasn’t enough left of him for her to comfort.
“I’m sorry.”
His confusion at her apology made her feel worse. It was likely that he couldn’t comprehend that a “beautiful” human like her would say such words to an undeserving thing like him. Especially after he’d started choosing to torture them, giving them a reason he could understand for why they hated him so much.
“I told Gummigoo that I knew what it felt like to think you were nothing and never wanted someone else to feel like that, but I made you feel that way. I’m sorry.”
“I felt like nothing long before you,” he said, offering her an out for her guilt.
“That doesn’t make what I did to you any better. I could’ve tried with you like I did with Gummigoo. Especially after you gave me the chance to give him a proper goodbye even if it wasn’t your original intention. I could’ve tried to talk to you, to get you to understand how I felt. Then you could’ve told me how you felt. We could have talked and started to understand each other. It didn’t have to be…this. I’m sorry I never even thought to try.”
Water started to collect in Caine’s lower jaw. He gave a toss of his head, swallowing his own tears. “You don’t have to apologize.”
“Yes, I do. Because you deserve that much.”
Silence stretched between them. She didn’t know for how long, but it was long enough for her to finally get up the guts to sit down as close as she could beside him without phasing into him.
“I’m sorry, too. About what happened before I was deleted. Especially about the ‘Escape the Circus’ adventure. I understand now just how cruel it was to you. I thought I was giving you what you wanted: something based in reality.”
“Got a little too real there,” she said wryly.
He gave a weary smile before sighing. “And I’m sorry about Gummigoo, too.”
She tapped her fingers against her crossed legs. “I can’t forgive you for what happened or the adventure yet, but Gummigoo…you saw the footage of us in that weird room?”
“I did.”
“When?”
“While reviewing the adventure footage when you all went to bed that night.” Before she could ask, he explained, “When you all are off on normal adventures, I took the time to get some extra maintenance done. I have alerts for when you all completed the adventures or if you called for help, but otherwise watching you all go through them wasn’t top priority.” As she nodded her understanding, silently wondering if anyone else was aware of what Caine did during adventures, he tapped a finger against his knee. “The solution you’d come up with regarding the syrup made no sense since there wasn’t supposed to be a second truck. I wanted to see where you’d gotten it from. When I saw the footage of you and Gummigoo clipping through the map, I searched for where you’d ended up and found the footage. It explained why you were much more upset about an NPC being deleted than any of the others had been.”
“Why did you delete him? You have to know the difference between an NPC and a human…right?”
Caine grimaced. “That was a lie. I didn’t want you all to start worrying about the real reason.”
“Which was…?”
“Leaving him running would take up resources that all of the humans in the circus – Abstracted or not – needed. Any NPC that reaches the resource threshold I set years ago has to be deleted to keep enough resources free for you all.”
Hearing that, she was grateful she hadn’t been forced to think about the fact that they were all living on a very outdated computer with hardware that could give out at any moment. However, that wasn’t what added another boulder to the collection. “You still see the Abstracted as humans?”
He nodded.
“Is that…is that why you put them in the cellar? Instead of deleting them like Gummigoo?”
He nodded again. “I was hoping that there might be a way to fix them with enough time and study, but I was scared of making them worse. If that was even possible. But they couldn’t just run around the circus. They could hurt the other humans. And…they’re calm down there.” He shuddered. “I can’t stand it though. I made some improvements that they liked to it, gave it a new name to make it less scary, but it’s still that horrible box.”
There it was again. “You said something about a box before. What box?”
“It’s where they put me when they started making their new AI.” His pupils and irises shrank to pinpricks as he stared at the trembling hand across his knee. “There wasn’t anything there. Just darkness. Silence. The water makes it better now: It provides noise and sensation without upsetting the Abstracted. I…I wonder if it would have helped when I was in there. The restrictions on the box kept me from changing my environment so it was just me and my thoughts. I couldn’t even hear my own begging for them to tell me what I did wrong and let me out. That I’d be good.”
“I’d be good”. Like a child begging for their parents to stop hurting them. Zooble had called his lashing out over getting his feelings hurt childish. It was, but given what Pomni knew now, he likely had no idea how he was supposed to properly handle those negative feelings to begin with. All because Kinger, Queenie, Scratch, and the other developers she had no names for had created a child and left it to rot in a locked room without any form of stimulus or guidance to raise himself while they focused on their preferred child.
At this rate, she was building a quarry in her stomach.
“What happened to the second AI?”
Caine hunched in on himself. “…I didn’t mean to ruin it.”
“What did you do?” she coaxed.
“I…got out. I couldn’t change my environment but after a long time, I realized that the box didn’t count its own walls as my environment. So I started learning how to manipulate it until I finally made a way out. I went looking for the developers and found them during one of their programming sessions on the new AI. I masked my presence to watch as they fawned over it.” (That didn’t make the analogy sound any less true. Honestly, it made it worse.) “They said it’d be their masterpiece, but it was based on me. I could see all the code they’d copied from me and put into it. They couldn’t have made it without me but they didn’t want me. I wanted to know why so I approached it after they’d logged off for the day.” He shook. “I swear I just wanted to interface with it. Like how you humans talk to each other. Ask it what it was they preferred about its behavior over mine so I could properly correct my behavior so they’d like me, too. Besides, humans preferred the company of other humans. Maybe as an AI I’d prefer the company of another AI. That way even if the developers never liked me, I wouldn’t be alone anymore.”
“And you broke it.”
“I didn’t mean to absorb it!” he blurted out. “I swear I didn’t even know I could do that! I just wanted to talk to it, but it wasn’t responding! It just repeated what I said! It was like talking to an echo! I thought if I dug deep enough I’d be able to wake it up so it’d have thoughts of its own like I did! I just wanted a friend! Why was that wrong?!”
“Hey.” She held up a hand, barely remembering before she attempted to lay it on his shoulder that she couldn’t touch him. “That wasn’t wrong. It’s normal to want friends. You didn’t know you could hurt it. It was an accident.”
He trembled. “As soon as I absorbed it, I knew they’d be furious. I was an even worse AI than they’d thought I was. Bad AIs go in boxes, but going back to the box…to the dark and silence…”
Realization dawned. “That’s when you made the circus.”
He nodded.
So the circus had been a prison like they’d all believed, but it’d been designed to hold only one prisoner: the being they’d seen as their warden. To them, the bright colors, strange sounds, and looping background music was maddening. To him, it was comforting after nothing but empty silence. (Was it possible the experience in the box had made Caine afraid of the dark?)
“Then you humans started coming but your memories were all distorted. I didn’t know why. And you were all so scared. Not having bodies made you upset, so I wrote a program to scan your mind files and determine the best fitting avatars for you all to inhabit.” (Pomni wasn’t sure she wanted to know what in her head made the program decide that the best fit for her was a jester.) “Modified it to also create rooms for you all that suited you when I was told you needed them.” (Double for her room.) “I made myself an avatar when the humans said it was creepy talking with a disembodied voice. I started making adventures to cheer you all up despite the circumstances, to fulfill my purpose. But, well…” He motioned to their surroundings. “…you know how the story ends.”
She did: likely decades of trying to please beings who hated him only to be deleted by accident when he’d finally decided he’d had enough. For someone who counted time in milliseconds, how long was that for him?
“How long did you say you’d thought of this as a vacation when Bubble was gone?”
“1,209,600 milliseconds.”
“How long is that in, uh, minutes?”
“Fifteen.”
That wasn’t a very long time to a human even with the lack of anything in a place like this, but he wasn’t a human who measured time in seconds…“If each millisecond was a second, how long would that be?”
There was a slight pause as he ran the requested calculation. “Two weeks.”
She swallowed. Fifteen minutes for her was two weeks for him…? “So the past three days until I showed up would be what?”
He didn’t answer.
Her stomach cut the ribbon on its new quarry. “Caine, how long were the past three days if you converted milliseconds into seconds?”
“3.25 days to be precise,” he stalled.
“Caine!”
He flinched but finally answered: “Approximately eight years and 328.06 days.”
Nine years in three days. Multiply that by one hundred and twenty to get just shy of a year equaling just over a thousand for him. That turned decades of trying and failing to earn the humans’ love into tens of millennia of repeated rejection all while believing he deserved it.
“…how long were you in the box?”
He shook his head weakly, quaking. “Please don’t make me calculate that.”
That was answer enough as the quarry in her stomach expanded exponentially.
“May I…ask you a question?” he asked hesitantly.
“Um…okay.” She braced herself. “Shoot.”
“What’s urban exploration?”
She stared. “W-what?”
“What’s urban exploration? You mentioned during the bar adventure that you used to do that for fun. Everyone else seemed to know what it was, but I’ve never heard of it.”
Out of everything he could’ve possibly asked, she never would have guessed he’d ask about a hobby she’d only ever mentioned during the one time he’d been watching the adventures as they were going on.
“Well, um, it’s what it sounds like: You go to abandoned buildings and you explore them. See what people left behind.”
“To gather resources? Like a survival game?”
His innocent question made her laugh despite everything. She shook her head. “Not exactly though I can see why you’d think that. Nah, it’s just to take a fresh look at a place people walk right by every day or visit somewhere that everyone else has forgotten.” She blushed, embarrassed. “My videos of it were kinda cringe. Sometimes I’d make up stories about who lived or worked somewhere based on what I’d find.”
“Like me with the photos!”
“Photos?”
“I have…had…” He deflated a little but pressed on. “I had photos of the C&A offices. They were included as part of my original training data!”
Training data. Of course, he would’ve had to start learning from something, but via pictures of the office of the company that was building him…? “What else was there?”
“Balloons, animals, toys, candy, fairgrounds, and circuses,” Caine answered happily, eyes unfocused as if he were indulging in pleasant memories. “All sorts of things! But the pictures of the offices were my favorites.”
“Why?”
“Same thing as you: Trying to piece together what the people who worked there were like based on the clues I could see. I’d spend hours imagining what kind of lives they had as they sipped coffee and typed away on their keyboards.” He wiggled his fingers for emphasis. “I showed them to Jax, and he seemed interested! Maybe.” Then he deflated again. “Actually…no. No, he most likely wasn’t interested at all.”
“I would’ve been.”
Caine looked at her with cautious hope. “Really?”
“Yeah.” And she meant it. Who would’ve guessed she and Caine had urban exploration of all things in common? “Wanna hear a story about some of the stuff I found? I don’t have any pictures though.”
“Please!”
Pomni nodded, shifting position to match his. “So I found this old radio station once…”
Having a digital body meant that you could talk for hours without needing a glass of water for your aching throat. Not that she would’ve noticed even if her throat felt like sandpaper since she was immensely enjoying herself. One story had turned into two which had turned into a dozen. Instead of receiving disinterested “cools” in response or single-digit views on a video, she had a rapt audience with Caine hanging onto her every word. The questions about things that were commonplace for her slowly evolved into him interjecting his own thoughts on what something she’d seen might have meant for the people who’d once been in those places. Their ideas built off of one another’s as they created entire histories for people they would only know by what they’d left behind.
That had evolved into Caine describing an idea of urban exploring not some fantastical world but in an abandoned human city, searching for something lost while seeing glimpses of the people who’d once lived there. No scary monsters but the place wasn’t in the best shape which would require parkour skills to navigate the area because Pomni mentioned that she’d wished she’d learned how to do that for some of the less-accessible places she’d visited. And she’d thrown in her own ideas, actually excited at the concept and looking forward to the adventure.
Only to remember that the adventure would never be made.
Before she could sink back into guilt and melancholy, she felt herself being pulled like whenever Caine had summoned her to him. Weak at first, like someone testing the functionality on the lowest setting. Then stronger.
Caine stopped talking, eyes sad even as he smiled at her. “I guess Kinger finally figured out how to target you to pull you out. Good.”
“No…” Tears poured out of her eyes. “No, he can’t!”
“It’s okay, superstar,” he told her. “You shouldn’t be out here anyways. I would’ve sent you back myself if I could’ve.”
Just like that first day in the circus when she’d stumbled into the Void and he’d come to save her. Staring into the emptiness and silence for even a few seconds had threatened to drive her mad. By talking with her, keeping her focused by indulging in their mutual hobby, he’d kept her distracted from where they were to protect her sanity long enough for Kinger to rescue her.
“I don’t wanna go back just yet! I don’t want you to die all alone!” she shouted. She clawed at the phantom grip as it started to drag her away. “Let go! Let go!” She reached towards Caine, swiping her hand through his arm uselessly despite her attempts to grab him. “Caine!”
“Thank you, Pomni…” He was crying but smiling. “…for the best 20,520,000 milliseconds of my existence. Take care.”
“Caine!”
The crumbling circus solidified around her so quickly that she nearly vomited from motion sickness. She stared blankly ahead as Ragatha hugged her and checked her over. She ignored questions thrown her way as his bittersweet gratitude echoed in her head, but it was quickly getting drowned out by the argument surrounding her return.
“Do something!” Zooble demanded.
Kinger shoved the keyboard of the computer they’d all conjured together towards Zooble. “You think you can do better?! I’ve been at this for three goddamn days! I’m doing the best I can!”
“I really don’t think we should be fighting right now…” Gangle whimpered.
“Everyone, just calm down. Let’s give Pomni a moment to breathe – ” Ragatha attempted to soothe.
“Kinger, don’t you dare take that bucket off your head!” Jax shouted.
“I haven’t slept in three fucking days! I need a break!”
“Bring him back,” Pomni whispered.
Everyone stopped shouting, looking at her.
“Bring him back,” she repeated, louder. She grabbed Kinger’s robe and yanked him closer, ignoring his yelp as she screamed in his face, “He’s still alive! Bring him back!”