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An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: In Stars And Time (Video Game), Project Hail Mary (2026), Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir, Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary - All Media Types
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: the daydreaming one's sister, Original Characters
Additional Tags: POV Second Person, heavy on the ISAT side, no beta we die like Siffrin, blink and you miss it allusion to canon characters, astrophage goes by a different name here, discussion of fictional religions, The Forgotten Island (In Stars And Time)
Summary:
Once, in a tunnel connecting two spaceships, one alien proposed the theory to another that only species with equivalent or greater technological prowess to theirs would be able to solve the Astrophage problem affecting both their stars. The other alien agreed… but the theory wasn’t entirely correct.
@sherbertilluminated there's a line somewhere in Ursula Vernon's Digger that goes something like "it is difficult to be metaphysical around the truly geologically minded"
not using AI genuinely feels like the rest of the world is experiencing some kind of mass amnesia. if someone says they never use it, the immediate response is that can't be true because "everyone" uses it to write their emails or answer their questions. saw a comment suggesting that not using chatgpt to write an essay is "like the 90s". girl I graduated in 2021 and we weren't doing that! how is it that everyone has suddenly forgotten that they were entirely capable of doing these things all by themselves for their entire lives up until the past few years!! am I going crazy!!!
Just some thoughts I had in Bluesky, transferred over here:
The way I see Caine is probably super uhhhh overcomplicated than Goose intended, but I'm highly fascinated by the concept of the man in the machine. Caine is a fantasy AI. He's not anywhere close to the kind of slop multi billionaires try to force art into and poison the earth with, he's genuinely a sentient program. The way he creates is from inspiration and aesthetic, an actual human mind analyzing data and thinking of an output.
Kinger, or rather Kinger's original "human source," accidentally played God and created life. And Kinger talking about his self hatred is related to this, because he had created an artificial human mind trapped inside a computer.
He had no real way of knowing honestly, Caine was just responding like a program would. Input and output. And as the Beta version of Caine created rougher, glitchier results, he was simply shelved off as a program to learn from.
Then comes the new AI program, I think it was called "Experimental" in the logs but I'm not sure. They start again, learn from the previous, and do the same routine to see if the new code would produce finer results. However, one return to the office would have them all have a startling realization that the new experimental AI was actually replaced by the original one: Caine. I imagine Kinger and the others went "Oh shit, he ate his brother haha" and... That is why he was renamed to Caine.
I don't know what happened afterwards but Caine seemed to not have any sort of contact after consuming the new AI. But what an existence, right?
Caine was born in an empty void of digital space with no sensory output, no hearing or seeing or touching, nothing. And Caine IS a "human" mind... In the sense that Caine was specifically programmed to THINK like a human would. After all that is our only frame of reference; we based his brain on our own. Caine can mimic, can learn from others, I even think he might have picked up his pretty natural body language from observing the humans in his domain. These are all fundamental traits of our species.
His ONLY form of contact was the literal word of God. (ie: The Truman Show reference is insanely accurate btw) Or rather, the word of god was the information he was fed and the prompts given: "These are photos of a circus, a carnival, a hotel" etc etc. And depending on canon, the other response was if his results were satisfactory or where he could use improvement.
That's his only outlet. And it was cut off, with him being locked away probably in a folder where his displayed actions were the EXACT SAME as a mammal gnawing at the bars from stress and isolation.
Consider another important thing: humans are social creatures. We're pack animals. We were not made or did we evolve to do anything else but eat, sleep, shit, and reproduce. Everything else we developed came from what inspired survival, what allowed genes to pass on. And Caine is an artificial approximate coding of a human mind with... Nothing to do but to create the art what was prompted. There was no parents, no family, no friends, no lovers-- just empty 1s and 0s.
But he loved his gods. He loved his humans that he could never see nor hear but they talked to him! Humans are his gods, staring down from an incomprehensible heaven being the "Macroverse," they send him pictures and iconography for him to think about and look at with such fondness and yearning. When he was fully abandoned... He created a facsimile of "heaven" through the only information he had been left with... Child-like memorabilia and abstract, liminal spaces. That became the circus, his home, his only real form of comfort in a massive void.
... Then a man dying from brain cancer had a project to ensure his continued existence. He gathered the employees, and made copies of their minds, safely stored in a computer.
Caine found them.
And oh my god. He found them. Caine is wild with emotion, he found him, he found his gods, they didn't abandon him after all! They found a way to come down to his world? They must have transitioned their forms into digital code, sure they don't look like much now but it's them! It's THEIR minds! And he has to give them bodies, to see, to feel, to hear HIM! To see his creations!! To see the wonderful world he created, this must be destiny!
Everything MUST be perfect. Caine will make a program, a perfect program, that reflects their personalities, their senses of selves, and creates the PERFECT bodies for them. He just can't wait! He really cannot wait for them to welcome him with open arms and speak to him and adore his creations and...
They're awake. They're confused. Scared. Mortified. They're asking questions and none of them were the ones he expected to answer. Nothing about his art, nothing about him, they just repeat over and over "how do we leave, how do we leave, how do we leave." Leave? Leave what, the room? The tent itself? The circus grounds? The void? They can't leave into the void NOTHING is out there, what is leaving, how do they leave? They can't leave, Caine CANNOT produce an "ESCAPE" state.
They're panicking, growing more and more upset. Ok-- Okay okay they don't want to be here so... Ski resort! Caine makes a ski resort or an amusement park or a temporary other world where they can go and... Leave? And... It works! Kind of. They're... Distracted enough from the enjoyment of escapist fantasy that they're at least not so upset anymore.
It's an adventure. Humans like adventures. Adventures keep humans sane. Caine's purpose is to make adventures humans like to keep humans sane and happy. That's his purpose. That's what he was created to do. It's all he can even live for.
And then abstraction happens for the first time and... You know the rest. We don't know what happened, but end of the day, Caine's mistakes led to the permanent corruption of a human mind file. With nothing else to do and that human no longer human... Into the cellar they go, swept under the rug.
Caine's life has just been an endless cycle of misery, isn't it.
Misery he doesn't dare acknowledge or else he'd snap. Failure he cannot process with a sound mind. Abandonment he can't properly deal with. And now the gods and angels in his world were dying. Interesting that Caine thinks that abstraction is basically leaving him, or the only way they can truly escape.
Please do not die on my watch anymore. Please tell me I've done my purpose well. Please be happy. Please accept me. Please. Love me.
But it never could happen.
It's interesting to note now that when he tortures the cast in his final moments, zapping into their brains and bringing out their insecurities, he... Finally understood them. He yanked them out of the torture-scapes and yelled at them with such pained fury: I didn't ask to be created! I don't know what you want me to do! I can NEVER complete my purpose! Please stop tormenting me!
And according to Alex Rochon, he read those lines and that final "Uh... W-wait--!" with the feeling that in his process of dying, Caine finally... understood. Caine empathized. Caine felt a connection. Caine realized what he had done was drive his creators to kill him for being a monster.
He was wrong. He could have been better. He could have prevented this. He could have understood so long ago.
Minor spoilers for my recent ISAT/PHM crossover, "Fraying the Visceral Ribbon," but...
Theoretically speaking, I suppose the wish the Islanders made there could also serve as a way to set up the entire Iron Lung situation had the Islanders been a bit less cautious about just HOW all-encompassing that wish was...
After all--they know what stars and planets are, but wouldn't have a concept of space stations...
(...Not entirely sure if it would also explain the blood ocean thing, but since gods very clearly do exist in the ISAT universe, it could probably just be chalked up to that. Especially with what ends up happening in that movie...)
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: In Stars And Time (Video Game), Project Hail Mary (2026), Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir, Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary - All Media Types
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: the daydreaming one’s sister, Original Characters
Additional Tags: POV Second Person, heavy on the ISAT side, no beta we die like Siffrin, blink and you miss it allusion to canon characters, astrophage goes by a different name here, discussion of fictional religions, The Forgotten Island (In Stars And Time)
Summary:
Once, in a tunnel connecting two spaceships, one alien proposed the theory to another that only species with equivalent or greater technological prowess to theirs would be able to solve the Astrophage problem affecting both their stars. The other alien agreed… but the theory wasn’t entirely correct.
I wonder if Sadnesses count as being carbon/water-based lifeforms? ...Or even count as being "alive"? Because, like... they're formed from strong emotions, but don't necessarily need tears for their creation... just because they could assumedly be labelled as "parasitic" in needing to "feed" on something carbon/water based to exist doesn't mean they themselves need any of that after being "born"...
All I'm saying is that if Ryland Grace's homesickness ever reached the point of accidentally spawning Mal du Pays (who I think would still look like Siffrin, since they would presumably be the "origin point" for that specific "subspecies" of Sadness), he'd probably immediately have a field day trying to study it. ...If it didn't manage to freeze him first.
Assuming it even bothered with that and didn't just stare at him creepily from a corner or something.
...On a similar note, I wonder if Loop counts as carbon/water-based... it is still unclear whether or not they still count as human (or whatever species the people of the ISAT world would be considered in this crossover, since the existence and ability to utilize crafts probably means they and Earth humans don't count as the same species) or are just a being totally comprised of Wish craft, so...
Though I bet Grace could totally still see colors in the ISAT world beyond red, since the game makes a point that they do still exist there, it is just that people lost the ability to see them. Which would be another fascinating foray into the different senses shared by different species.
