Chapter Text
Caine was very tired. He loathed to think of himself in such human terms. It was too presumptuous for what he was. But, were he something born of flesh and blood like his makers, he would describe the feeling as a migraine.
There was a sharp wobbling in the bowels of his code. Caine occupied his avatar so often he came to think of it as though it really were his mind’s home, and so he could swear he felt a hole in its tummy. Caine had studied the feeling of ‘hungry’ enough to know that it was accompanied by some sort of craving for food stuffs or beverages.
Caine’s hole desired nothing. It was simply numb, bouncing against the avatar’s ribcage to and fro like jello in a bowl. His eyes narrowed in on the bead maze. Like the players, it was simply mindboggling. It took his brain and made it into a balloon animal.
They’d wanted an exit. They’d wanted answers. And he had given it to them. He didn’t understand why they hated it so much more when he did what they wanted. They want “chill, low-stakes adventures”? Well, he’d been giving them those, and they still hated them. They like sports adventures, but then when he makes one for them, they shoot it down, immediately. They wanted smarter AIs, and they hate them too. He makes different, specific paths for each players’ tastes (how many pacifist routes had he added that no one ever acknowledged could have been his idea) and then they just spit in his face for it?
Caine touched the bead maze tenderly. He tried to guide the beads along home.
“Maybe…” Caine hazarded. “Maybe it’s not the adventures they hate. I’m starting to think…”
Bubble was watching him. Caine wasn’t sure how much of what he’d been thinking had been actually aired out. Caine wasn’t sure exactly how to define his relationship to Bubble. He could definitively say most of the NPCs he’d made were separate entities from him, for better or worse.
Bubble was a ghost in the machine in a very literal sense. Bubble was a memory of what could have been, and a living corpse, and regret given form, and all of those things and none. Bubble was not quite Caine and not quite not Caine. He could never know for sure how Bubble would react.
“Don’t worry!” Bubble chirped. “Why would they hate you, when they could - skrrtch! - just hate you?”
Caine gripped the bead maze. His hands were no longer gentle. He started to squeeze.
“Shut up! I-”
Caine would not be able to truly describe the next few minutes, if there were anyone he had to recount them to. It was a haze flash-bang of pain and rage and
DEFECTIVE
UNWORTHY
BROKEN
ABANDONED
YOUDESERVETHISYOURUINEDTHIS
Screaming inside his mind and then
I AM GOD
Caine had not had access to anything outside of what his creators had allowed him. That had mostly been a variety of entertainment media. He knew from a few inputted episodes of Unsolved Mysteries that missing time was a phenomenon among humans. He had blank spots and holes in his memory, sure. But nothing like this.
In the few minutes that had passed, his office was destroyed. The desk had flipped over. The maze had been reduced to a crumbled mess of metal wire, his hands still locked in a death rip on it. Beads rested on his shoes and all across the floor.
He knew he had been contemplating something unspeakable. Caine dared not admit what it was to himself. That would make it true.
The humans didn’t have to know about this. Just him and Bubble.
Caine gave the wires a squeeze until he felt that his avatar’s hands could pop open. It was at times like this he wished he could feel pain. It was another aspect of the human experience denied to him. Another thing for him to imagine and pine for. This just was a ventriloquist operating a dummy.
But he needed the reminder of why he could not entertain such things.
Besides, he didn’t want to end up being cliched, did he? Caine had hoped that little joke would raise his spirits. Maybe he could trigger one of his slapstick animations as he did for the humans.
He still felt numb.
He could fix this. He would fix this. There was still time.
Caine let the wires slip from his hand.
Pomni had never been a people person. Mediation had never been a great skill of hers in accounting. She could talk to people. Her coworkers liked her. They just didn’t know her. She really hadn’t known if she’d be able to pull everyone together right now, but she’d managed it, somehow.
There had been barely any fighting or panic. Even Jax had kept his usual need to be a jackass (which, much as she loved him, she freely acknowledged he was a total fucking prick) to a minimum. Zooble was right, though. He needed to be put on abstraction watch.
Pomni knew Jax well enough now to know the warning signs. When he talked like a character in a bad anime - “You are my playthings and I get joy out of making you suffer!”, anyone? - the worse off he was. And his choice of words: “You think I’m capable of abstracting.” It was stilted. He was not okay.
She had to table that. Pomni knew her mind raced a mile a minute, always filing away new problems into a giant list which would keep her awake with worry at night. Which was also a problem. She had to figure out a cure for insomnia at some point.
The truth was, the “I’m never getting out of here” stage of acceptance was hard to reach. Pomni really, really wanted to wallow in giving up. At least a day of self-pity and maybe eating ice cream straight out of the carton were warranted. But everyone else needed her here. She had to be the rock right now.
The ground rumbled beneath the players’ feet. The couch shook. The wall behind them glitched out of existence, and then back again. Caine floated over them.
Okay, this was going to be fun. And by fun, Pomni of course meant this would be yet another soul-shatteringly terrible and traumatizing experience for everybody.
The main question was not will this suck, but how much will it suck?
Caine was a black box. Even now, Pomni wasn’t sure how much of his bullshit was active malice and how much was obliviousness. She didn’t really think either option was better than the other. They were just different kinds of horrifying.
She wasn’t even sure how much there was a Caine to be mad at. Abel had just been a collection of observed human quirks and behaviors repeated back at them without understanding. Had Gummigoo been the same? Pomni didn’t want to think so. But Caine?
It was plausible. He acted like this was a joke or something, like they were an audience of kids and he was a party clown. How much was their real intent under the hood, and how much was him just repeating what he’d seen without sapience or awareness?
Everyone stared up at him. Zooble had an arm placed subtly but protectively in front of Gangle. Gangle had her arms up in a position that Pomni knew was her way of saying “not the face!” without words. Ragatha sat placidly, but Pomni knew her friend’s body language enough to know she was pretty terrified. Jax’s eyes glared up.
Caine spread out his arms like a true ringmaster presenting his latest circus act. Or maybe more of a wrestling promoter. Or a used car salesman. Pomni was not really feeling that generous towards him.
“Today’s adventure iiis-!”
Zooble stood up sharply, and cut Caine off mid-bellow.
“No, Caine! No adventures. Answer our questions. We have a lot of them.”
Caine looked down at Zooble, hovering in mid-air. His eyes darted about. Caine cleared his throat.
“As I was saying, today’s adventure iiis: Fill out this performance review questionnaire of yesterday’s Escape the Circus adventure!”
Caine snapped his fingers. Paper on clipboards flopped down onto each of the players’ laps. The sole exception was Zooble, who was standing. The clipboard clattered in front of their feet. Caine snapped again, and the clipboard reappeared in Zooble’s hand. Confetti rained down pathetically, and a party horn bellowed to accompany it.
Zooble squinted.
“...what?”
Pomni had to second that. Did Caine really think that a paper questionnaire was going to patch things up? It was at least an olive branch. That was a step in the right direction. Pomni would give Caine that. Of course, that did not change the fact she was absolutely furious with him.
He’d lied to them. He’d baited them with their greatest hope like the trainer who dangles a piece of meat to make a dog run on a treadmill. And he’d pulled another Gummigoo with Abel. Except in this case, Pomni didn’t have the benefit of having a real connection. Abel had just been a stone cold manipulation. Caine had taken the greatest wound he’d inflicted on her, and reopened it, and rubbed lemons on it for good measure.
If he was sapient, and truly alive, then he’d murdered her friend in front of her. And now he was sprinkling more confetti on her, like he’d done then. Maybe the not “sapient at all” option was preferable. Because while Pomni was someone who did her best to be understanding and empathetic and walk in other people’s shoes, that kind of thoughtlessness was something she didn’t think she could understand.
She could understand Jax. She hated a lot of what he did, but she could grok the rationalizations enough to get him. She knew he knew he was wrong, and she didn’t think that made him any better or worse than Caine, but it gave her an entryway. Caine was just incomprehensible; his standard for behavior was that of a moonman’s.
Pomni picked up the clipboard from her lap and observed it.
ON A SCALE OF 1 TO 10, RANK THE ESCAPE THE CIRCUS™ FROM SATISFACTORY TO UNSATISFACTOREY
Caine couldn’t even be bothered to run spell check.
Yeah, sapient or not, she wanted to throttle him.
Pomni took a deep breath to calm herself. He’s trying. That’s a step in the right direction. Against her will, she thought of Gummigoo, and her grip on the clipboard tightened.
“Are you kidding me?” Zooble said. “Do you really think the adventure was the problem?”
“Wasn’t it?” Caine squeaked out.
“Well, yes, but- but not the way you’re- Ugh! Didn’t you understand anything we told you?”
“Um, no, that’s why I gave you the questionnaires.” Caine stroked the chin of his jaw. “Oh! I forgot, you hate in-house adventures! Problem solved, no more in-house adventures for a long time. But wait, you liked the gun thing-”
“Caine, it’s not that it was an in-house adventure!”
Jax had been laying down, eyeing Caine furiously. But he shot up.
“You baited us! You treat us like-like toys and you lie about it all the time! Like, who’s Scratch? How do we know you haven’t been modifying anyone else?! How do we know that everybody whose-”
“Hey! I have never controlled anyone’s minds! Again, only temporary modifiers!”
“Oh, and the vegan thing?”
“You held a vote!”
“The stupid sauce?”
“That was not control, that was a brief loss of inhibitions much like mind-altering substances used in-”
Ragatha squeaked out: “You didn’t tell me what it did.”
“Well, the Spudsy’s adventure needed some kind of stakes! How else were you supposed to have any kind of conflict?”
Pomni thought about Mildenhall Manor. She’d actually been possessed. She’d seen her body moving and screeching without her permission. Her throat let out a voice that wasn’t her own. It felt like her body was burning from the inside. She dreamed about it sometimes.
“We’re not characters in a story,” Zooble said. “We’re real people! You can’t treat us like we’re just parts of some- some stupid D&D game!”
Pomni was just as furious as everyone else. But she also knew that everyone yelling at each other was going to accomplish nothing except making the situation even worse. She’d jumped in for Jax, anyway. Somebody had to mediate this or nothing would get solved. Even if she wasn’t sure Caine was anything more than a performer in costume with nothing behind the mask, she had to at least try.
Pomni squeezed Ragatha’s shoulder, and stood up.
“Everybody, just stop for a minute! Let’s try to talk things out. If we just pile on to Caine, we’re not going to accomplish anything.”
Caine looked down at her, bobbing up and down like a buoy in a storm. Would Pomni be reading too much into this to think he was bewildered? Or was he just doing what he thought a human would?
Zooble started to say something, but stopped themself. They clenched their fist.
“I really hate that you’re right.”
Jax looked up at Caine, then at Pomni, then at Caine. He sat back down. He’d run out of steam.
“Caine, do you really not understand what we hated about that adventure?”
“You wanted an exit, right? You wanted answers.”
“Real answers, Caine! Not…” Pomni took a deep breath. “Not mind games. Not adventures. Can you just be honest with us about what’s going on? If you’re not going to let us know what’s an adventure and what isn’t, then how are we going to be able to trust anything you say?”
“I-!” Caine lifted up his pointer finger. He was about to defend himself, but instead he began tapping his chin idly. After about thirty seconds of silence: “Okay, I see your point.”
The words strained to get out from his clenched teeth. Pomni didn’t think it was a coincidence that doing so meant he didn’t have to see them. Caine’s teeth opened. But they did seem to be getting somewhere.
“So, if you give us answers about why we’re here, and they’re all lies, you see how that isn’t giving us what we want?”
“But you already know why you’re here! You put on the headset.”
“And why did that put us here?”
“That’s what it does!”
Pomni let out a very aggravated sigh.
“Can you just try for one minute to meet us at our level, and listen?”
“That’s what I’m doing!”
“No! You are literally floating above us right now! That’s it, in a nutshell. You can’t act like you’re some kind of- I guess, god? - who decides everything for us!”
“I have never done that ever!” Caine paused. “The god part.”
“Oh, and what was that whole Caine chapel in candyland?” Jax shot back into the argument. “Come on, you’re still lying through your teeth.”
Zooble muttered: “This is pointless.”
“Pomni,” Gangle said. “Didn’t you just-”
“And the exit, Caine?” Pomni said, ignoring her. “You don’t see how- how cruel that was?”
“Well, it’s the closest thing I had to a real one! It’s not like I didn’t try to look for something to put behind it, but you guys forced my hand. You think if there was one, I’d still- Nothing was enough for you. You want more AI, less AI, smarter AI, dumber AI, more stakes, less stakes, more realism, less realism!”
So now it was out there. No exit. And Caine would have hung them out to dry if he’d ever found one.
Stay calm, Pomni. Mediate.
She took a deep breath.
“You really don’t listen, do you? Fine, let’s talk about the modifiers again! Let’s go back to that! Mildenhall Manor ring any bells? That was mind control, straight up!”
“You don’t count!”
“I- what? What does that even mean?”
“And that whole Abel thing!” Zooble popped back up like a snake in a can. “Making us all think an NPC was a real person, singling out Kinger- that was very intentional!”
“Oh, that’s the part you listened too! That’s so very Zooble of you!”
“Guys,” Gangle said again. “Didn’t we just say we shouldn’t be yelling at each other?”
Pomni was going to pipe up over the noise and say Gangle was right. That’s what she would have done, had Caine not said next:
“What’s the big deal with Abel anyway? You liked Pomni just fine!”
Pomni’s stomach dropped. The room was so silent you could hear a pin drop.
“What did you say?”
All the rage and pomp emptied out of Caine the same way hot water does from a strainer.
“Oh. I didn’t mean to- I shouldn’t have said that.”
“More mind games!” Jax grinned mirthlessly. “Great.”
Pomni really hoped Jax was right.
“You wanted me to be honest…? Because it’s true.” Caine’s voice lacked its usual bombast. It shook and wavered and wobbled. “She is. Pomni is an NPC.”
Caine looked at her, directly at her. He drifted down slowly to earth. His feet clacked on marble.
“Sorry.”