Chapter Text
After a dozen aborted attempts, Ragatha had finally worked herself up to it again: she was going to tell Pomni how she felt about her. But then as soon as she began looking for the jester she ran into Caine.
“If you wouldn’t mind,” he said, pausing mid-flight, “will you meet Kinger and I at the couches in… oh, say, seven-ish minutes? And tell the others if you see them! We’d like to talk with you all about something we’ve learned about our leporine friend.”
“O-oh, sure. I was just going to talk to Pomni…”
“Well that’s perfect! Thank you, Ragatha!”
He was gone in a blink, twisting out of existence with a gentle pop. She sighed, defeated. So much for that.
She had briefly considered checking Pomni’s room first, but she knew better. It hurt to accept, but she knew exactly where she’d find the jester. Approaching the half-opened tent flap, Ragatha stretched on tip-toes to peer over the ridge of pillows obscuring her view. Inside, she could barely see the red and blue tails of the jester's hat nestled next to Jax's dark, slumbering form. Pale light from Jax's eyes shone through the cracks in his eyelids, bathing Pomni in a faint iridescent glow.
Ragatha frowned, her brows furrowing.
How long had it been now? Three months? Four? Ragatha couldn’t really remember how long it had been since that rollercoaster day when she found Pomni latched onto Jax's abstracted body, glitching violently, as he stumbled blindly amongst the shattered glass of a half-dozen broken lights.
The sight had turned her legs into rubber and her brain into simmering mush.
Somehow, she had managed to round up everyone else in the Circus, and they had put together an impromptu plan to pull Pomni free, thanks largely to Zooble's seemingly endless collection of arms. When Pomni finally landed on the floor in front of her, limp and lifeless, Ragatha went totally numb. It wasn't until after the jester opened her eyes and looked at her, and she saw the glimmer of recognition, that the adrenaline really hit. It had taken her the rest of the day to calm down, and even then she wasn't 100% right for longer than she had let on.
That was right before Caine came back, wasn't it?
Right before everything got better.
It had taken a long time for Ragatha to accept that their eccentric ringmaster had had a genuine change of heart and now saw them as equals. Even now she struggled to believe it at times. So far though, at least, he had been better than his word, and for the first time since she landed in the Circus, things had started to feel stable. Even good.
Well, except for this.
Everyone had taken Jax’s abstraction hard. Even Gangle and Zooble, despite having subdued reactions, had mourned in their own ways.
For herself, Ragatha hated that she hadn't been on good terms with Jax when he abstracted. Even now she wished she could've cleared the air with the rabbit, even though she knew he probably wouldn't have let her. Despite how much he had tormented everyone around him, and despite how miserable and selfish he could be, a part of Ragatha still loved him and felt sorry for him.
Ragatha knew that Pomni had gotten a glimpse at Jax's demons while she was attached to him. The jester never elaborated in detail, but occasionally she would drop hints that implied Jax's demeanor had been a desperate coping mechanism that concealed a deep well of suffering and trauma. Ragatha didn't know what his life outside the Circus had been like, but evidently it hadn't been good; between Pomni's reactions to seeing into Jax's abstracted mind and the details they had gotten from Caine about Jax's real-life counterpart Leeroy, Ragatha had been able to piece at least that much together.
So, despite all he had said and done to her and everyone else, Ragatha still felt sympathy for Jax. She had known him forever, and they had truly been friends, once. He was basically family to her, for better or worse. None of that excused his behavior, but she couldn't help but wonder what might have happened if she had been a little more persistent with him or maybe put her foot down more.
It had been a lot of heavy emotions to process.
But when Jax abstracted, Pomni had suffered.
Ragatha knew Pomni viewed her relationship with Jax as something special, but even still the depth and persistence of the jester’s grief had honestly surprised her. Pomni spent all her free time sitting with Jax, talking to him and treating him like he was still there. And it was clear that when she wasn’t with Jax, Pomni was still thinking about him.
This broke Ragatha’s heart, not only for Pomni’s sake but also for her own. When Jax abstracted, Pomni didn’t react like she had lost a friend. She reacted like she had lost a soul-mate.
There had been a handful of moments since Jax's abstraction, frustratingly few but precious to her, when Ragatha and Pomni had shared a warm moment together that reminded the ragdoll of why she had attached so strongly to the jester in the first place. A genuine smile, a held hand, a warm hug that lingered both longer than hoped and yet not long enough. Yet, Ragatha knew that Pomni didn't see her as anything more than a friend.
A close friend, certainly. Maybe even her best girl friend.
But clearly she was in love with Jax.
Ragatha sighed and stepped through the opening into Jax's tent.
“Oh, hey, Pomni. Sorry to bother you, but apparently Caine and Kinger want to have a meeting by the couches. It’s something to do with what they’ve been working on. You wanna’ head over there?”
Pomni turned to meet Ragatha’s gaze. Her eyes glistened in the pale light, and Ragatha could tell she’d been crying again.
“Hey, Ragatha, Hi. Uh, why don’t you go on ahead? I’m gonna’ take a minute, and then I’ll meet you over there. Save me a seat!”
“You betcha’,” said Ragatha, pausing only a second to give a highly-practiced, hollow smile before turning and walking away. As soon as she was out of sight her frown reappeared.
Why did she keep doing this to herself? It wasn't Pomni's fault she felt the way she did about Jax, anymore than it was Ragatha's fault she felt the way she did about Pomni. But it was foolish to keep torturing herself by continuing to give her feelings air. She was afraid she would subconsciously push Pomni away if she kept carrying this weight, and she didn't want to jeopardize the friendship they already had.
As Ragatha took a seat on the couch, she felt a sinking feeling in her stomach. For the sake of her friendship with Pomni, she had to bury this sadness, no matter how much it hurt.
A moment later, Zooble and Gangle arrived together and sat down on the sofa next to hers, holding hands. Ragatha looked away and bit her finger to stifle a sob.
~
Pomni watched as Ragatha disappeared from view, her red yarn hair swaying for a moment as she turned away. She had been feeling miserable all morning, yet she found herself smiling now. She loved that hair.
It was weird how well she had adjusted to the Circus: its inhabitants, its places, its tortured but consistent internal logic. Removed from the context of the Circus, it seemed weird to see Ragatha's yarn hair and feel that giddy flutter in your stomach you'd get from seeing your crush. She was, after all, a ragdoll. But Pomni had apparently adapted quickly, and whenever she saw Ragatha she felt herself light up a little. Pomni associated her with a lot of things. With sweetness, and friendship. Comfort and contentment. And longing.
You're in love with a ragdoll. You absolute freak.
Then again, Pomni was fairly sure that Jax had been in love with an anthropomorphic frog. And in his more lucid moments, Kinger still seemed to pine for an oversized chess piece with disembodied eyes and hands. Maybe people were just adaptable.
Pomni could see Kinger and Caine at the other end of Jax's tent, gathering some instruments in a box and heading for the exit toward the lounge where they'd be meeting. Behind them, a small passage lead to the duo's 'lab'. The archway framed a desk holding a big stack of old CRT monitors. The pale blue glow they made reminded Pomni of her family’s computer room from when she was a kid.
Caine and Kinger were calling a meeting about their work? She wondered if they'd made any headway, or if this was just another ‘nothing’s changed yet’ update. The two had become a constant pair in the past few months, obsessively trying to understand what happens to people when they abstract. The day after Caine returned to the Circus they had conjured up a bank of computers, a pile of technical instruments, and a pillow-fort Lab to put it in, and it was there that they now seemed to spend most of their time. They placed their new laboratory adjoining Jax's tent so they could study her firsthand. Pomni didn't understand anything about what they were doing beyond the broad strokes, but she talked to Kinger a lot during their downtime, and he seemed optimistic about their work. He made it sound like they were learning a lot. A couple weeks ago, while they were sharing a cocoa in the café, he'd even insinuated that it seemed possible to reverse abstraction. Of course, he had been very careful to emphasize that it was just a theory and there were no guarantees, but Pomni had ridden the high of that revelation for days.
Pomni stood and stretched her legs before turning back to Jax.
"Do you even know I'm here?" she asked. Jax didn’t stir, and Pomni frowned.
She knew it wasn't her fault that Jax abstracted. In retrospect, she could tell that he—no, she, Pomni reminded herself—had been circling the drain for a long time before she finally broke. Pomni doubted that any amount of meddling on her part before the fact would've changed the outcome. She might have delayed the inevitable, but she didn't think she could’ve saved her.
Yet, she wondered…
Pomni had felt something that day, when the two of them stood in an island of golden light from the nearby lamppost and embraced each other. Being inside the rabbit’s mind, Pomni had felt it like a change in air pressure: something shifted inside of Jax. There was a sudden warmth coming from her, one that hadn’t been there before, like a radiance.
Pomni thought Jax had been on the cusp of finally accepting himself. Herself.
But then suddenly Pomni was being pulled back to reality by Zooble and the others. She was grateful to them for pulling her free. They had probably saved her life, truthfully. But the timing frustrated her.
Had Jax been close to reverting to normal? To unabstracting?
She had asked Caine and Kinger about it several times, omitting the parts that would've outed Jax but sharing everything else, and emphasizing the feeling that something was about to happen with Jax when she was pulled free. They both told her the same thing: ultimately, there wasn't a way (yet, at least) to reverse an abstraction. The underlying cause of it was a corruption of the data in a person's avatar, and no amount of love or good intentions would be able to undo it, even if the abstracted person was willing and even if they were stable enough to resume their normal form.
But she couldn’t help wondering. Nor could she stop blaming herself for not trying harder. Jax had put her hand out, hoping Pomni would catch her, but she hadn't. The thought killed her. Jax deserved another chance, one surrounded by loving friends who supported her and accepted her for who she really was. Things could have been so different—
A loud laugh from Zooble snapped Pomni out of her thoughts, and she realized she was almost to the couches already. When had she even started walking? Oof.
Maybe she had been spending too much time with Jax lately. It felt like a way of coping with her sense of guilt, but honestly it was probably making her feel worse. She knew that she was withdrawing from her friends. She knew they were probably worried about her—
Oh, no—
Ragatha was talking to Gangle and smiling, but Pomni could tell that it was a hollow smile. Her eyes looked so sad, like she would cry at any moment. Pomni’s stomach knotted as she suddenly felt the weight of her recent fixation.
She suddenly realized why Ragatha had been more aloof lately. The one person in here she wanted to get to know as more than a friend. The person who made her smile whenever she saw her face, or heard her voice. She had alienated her, pushed her away, by losing herself in guilt over Jax.
As Pomni sat on the couch across from Ragatha, she saw the ragdoll turn and look at her out of the corner of her eye. Pomni clenched her fists and stared at the floor. She couldn’t bring herself to meet the ragdoll's gaze.
~
It had taken a minute for Caine and Kinger to get their ‘presentation’ set up, so by the time Kinger turned to the group of friends and started talking, they were already anxious to hear what he had to say. Ragatha knew he and Caine had been working with Jax, trying to find a way to reverse his abstraction. By the effort they had put into setting up the projector screen and small table of instruments, Ragatha felt like it was pretty clear they had figured something out. She wondered if it was good news or bad news.
“Hi, everyone," said Kinger. "Thank you for coming on such short notice. It’s been a little while since we last did one of these briefings, but Caine and I have made some discoveries recently that we think call for an update.
“So, first things first: an update about Jax. As you all know, because Jax is the most recent person to abstract, we’ve been monitoring him closely and using his data as the primary focus of our research.
"As we talked about at the last discussion, our preliminary scans suggested that Jax’s personality is still present in his abstracted form, although it’s starting to diffuse somewhat. Well, Caine and I have done some more research and we’re confident in saying this is in fact the case. Additional scans on the other abstracted people suggest that this ‘diffusion of personality’ we’re seeing in Jax is a normal part of abstraction, and the process takes place over a long period of time. Many months, or maybe even years.”
Ragatha snuck a glance at Pomni. Her eyes were locked on the projection screen that was currently displaying an instrument readout, presumably of Jax’s scan data. Her eyes were wide and she wasn’t blinking. Ragatha wondered how much she was even absorbing of what Kinger was saying; was she there, or was her mind just floating away like she said it did sometimes when she was anxious?
“But one of the most important things we’ve learned in the past month,” Kinger continued, “is that not only is this personality diffusion a consistent part of abstraction, but it also seems as though it doesn’t fundamentally alter the components of the individual’s personality in any way. Everything that made up Jax before is still present in Jax now, and we’ve even found that certain stimuli can temporarily cause the personality to reform and emerge. On some level, the abstracted are aware of their surroundings.”
Zooble gently elbowed Ragatha and nodded towards Pomni. Ragatha followed their gaze and saw that the jester’s face was beginning to darken, and Ragatha realized she was holding her breath. Ragatha raised her hand for a moment, thinking of interrupting, but then stopped, unsure of what to even say. She watched helplessly as Pomni’s face began to slowly cycle through a rainbow of shades.
“… and this data also aligns closely with what Pomni reported from her time spent with Jax, after he abstracted,” Kinger finished, gesturing to Pomni, who nodded, finally releasing her breath but still staring past him. It looked like she trying to burn a hole in the projector screen with her stare.
“So, that brings us to our next, and most recent finding,” Kinger said, and at this he turned to Caine. The two exchanged an uncertain glance, and Ragatha could tell there was something being said between them even though she couldn’t tell what it was. A knot was starting to form in her stomach.
“Uh,” said Kinger before drifting off into a long pause. For a moment Ragatha wondered if he’d suddenly lost his lucidity like he did when he wasn’t wearing the new sunglasses that Caine had made for him. But then, he took a deep breath and continued.
“Yes. So, file compression.”
The seated friends glanced around at each other. Each of them looked equally confused.
“Back when Scratch first told us about his brain scanner, one of the points that bothered the rest of us the most was how small the scanned files were. The human brain—nearly limitless storage capacity, at least in terms of computer systems of the time. It seemed impossible you could fit the depth and nuance of a person’s entire mind in a file that small."
Kinger held his hands in front of him with his palms barely touching, emphasizing the miniscule size he was describing.
"Okay?" said Zooble.
The screen behind Kinger changed again, this time showing an intricate flow chart that Ragatha didn’t understand. The caption said “An Overview of Brain Scan Compression.”
"Well, Caine and I have discovered that the reason for this is that those scan files are actually compressed. It turns out that there's a fair bit of redundancy in the data representing the human mind, apparently. Those small files hold a lot of data because they're compressed, like a ZIP file on steroids. And notably, that same data compression we see in the original brain scans also exists in all of us, right now.
"When we started trying to find a correlation between abstracted people’s brain functions and the data from their initial brain scans, the brain scans looked totally random, which made no sense. As a programmer, that's not something you'd expect to see, except in a few certain cases…
“Scratch was... so strangely evasive about this stuff at times. Always secretive, always paranoid. For the longest time I assumed that his brain scan files must’ve been encrypted, because of that randomness, and because it seemed totally like him to lock down his data like that. That’s what Caine and I have spent a lot of this time trying to crack. But as you know, we've hit dead end after dead end.
“Well,” said Kinger, and he paused for a moment as his eyes unfocused, as if the pieces were still coming together in his brain. “Caine suggested we spend more time comparing each person’s real-world brain scan to the scan data of the same person post-abstraction. We also scanned my brain as it is now, and compared that to my real world brain scan to see what we could learn. From all that, we’ve been able to determine that the randomness we see in Scratch’s scans, which is the same randomness we also see in our minds currently, isn’t from encryption, but rather from compression.
“And once we realized that, we were able to determine that the difference between people pre- and post-abstraction is a specific type of corruption in a person’s container data. Which makes intuitive sense, given how it affects a person’s avatar.”
There was a long pause as Kinger looked to each of his friends seated before him. Ragatha gave him an apologetic shrug; she appreciated the explanation but didn’t really understand what he was trying to imply. Kinger then looked at Caine, who gave him a thumbs up. The chess piece turned back to his audience with a sigh.
“I know that this is probably confusing for all of you. It’s confusing for me, and I’m a computer programmer. I know it’s a lot to wrap your head around.
“But the important takeaway is that abstraction isn’t the result of a corruption of your mind. It’s the result of a corruption of your avatar. The code in your avatar that handles your mind’s compression gets corrupted, and your mind spills out into abstraction. Your avatar gets broken, and you’re no longer able to communicate with the world. But you—the person inside you—is still there.
“What this all ultimately means is that we have all the pieces we need to repair Jax, we just need to put them together correctly. If we altered Jax's code, replacing his corrupted avatar data with fresh avatar data Caine has on file, but maintained the actual mind data within, then theoretically—"
"We could restore his body to its factory form,” said Caine, “but keep his memories and personality intact."
"Correct," said Kinger.
For a long time, no one made a sound. Ragatha looked at Pomni again. She was back to holding her breath. Her fists were balled up tightly, and she looked like she was about to jump out of her seat.
“Unfortunately,” said Caine, “There is a wrinkle to all this. Back when... we lost Scratch, I looked at some of this, briefly, and I learned something that made me believe that reversing abstraction would always be impossible.
“Part of what triggers abstraction is a loss of internal integrity: an emotionally distraught person lets go and loses their identity, allowing their mind to spiral into pieces. We see that in our scans of the abstracted: the gradual scattering of the parts of a person’s mind, until it’s atomized.
“Your minds—human minds—need that internal structure in order to live here in the Circus. Without it, you abstract. And if the mind is already broken up like that, it becomes virtually impossible to rebuild it correctly, regardless of what we do to fix your avatar. If we tried this on Jax right now, for example, he would simply re-abstract. And that’s the best-case scenario. It could go worse than that. Much worse.”
“We could lose all of him, permanently,” Kinger clarified.
Ragatha watched Pomni timidly raise her hand. It was trembling. For the first time since she sat down, the jester looked completely present and engaged.
“Y-you said that abstracted people are aware. That if someone interacts with them, their mind can come back together. Right?”
Ragatha saw Caine frown at Kinger. It was the same expression he had given him before. She clutched the sides of her patchwork dress tightly, suddenly sensing the discussion bearing down on her like a thundering locomotive at the far end of a tunnel. Caine wouldn’t be able to stop it, either, and he knew it.
“Oh, yes Pomni, that’s right,” said Kinger. “It’s a subtle effect, but measurable. Obviously it’s not the same as engaging a person—”
“Inside their mind, while they’re abstracted,” said Pomni. She was standing now, her fists clenched tightly to her sides. “Like when I went into Jax’s mind, and talked to him. He was there, I know it was him. He talked to me there, like you’re talking to me now. In a situation like that, what happens to a mind? Does it come back together fully?”
“Well, we don’t know for certain, but that seems like a fair supposition to me. It would be temporary of course, only lasting as long as you were engaging with him directly. And it would be very taxing on both him and you. But the idea seems plausible.”
In her periphery, Ragatha was sure she saw Caine mouth a four-letter word.
“If he was like that, then. Back together. Then you could fix him?”
“Theoretically,” said Kinger, “I think I'd say… on paper, yes. Taking the human element away, these are just files after all. File repair is a thing we had to do fairly regularly. The level of complexity doesn't change the fundamentals."
Caine floated down from above to hover between Kinger and Pomni.
"Pomni, my dear,” he said, “it’s critical to remember that trying something like that would be tremendously dangerous. We could end up losing Jax. Or you. Or, something even worse could happen!"
Pomni turned and made eye contact with Ragatha. The jester’s face was blank, completely unreadable. The expression made Ragatha’s skin tingle. Pomni turned back to Caine.
“I’m going to do it. I’ll handle bringing him back together. You and Kinger just take care of the technical stuff.”
“Oh, Pomni. Pomni—”
“Caine. Please, don’t,” said Pomni. “If someone volunteering to go in and talk to Jax means you can bring him back, then I volunteer. I’m not taking ‘no’ for an answer.”