@abeliism sent a sentence starter (pre-plotted): 🔴 “You traitorous BITCH!”
{♚} -- Recovering a creative artificial intelligence as technologically advanced for its time as Caine was no easy feat, and with the code literally against him, it wasn’t as straightforward as simply fishing him out of a recycle bin. The prospect of Kinger figuring out how to successfully restore him was looking bleak.
Not to mention, the hardware was gone – lost to the void, removed from tangible existence. He had nothing to work with. The circus…was eroding. Would it only be a matter of time before they all did too? Even their imaginations were disheartened and unreliable.
And it was all his fault. His fault that everybody was still trapped here. His fault that Caine had….
It was Pomni who finally convinced Kinger to take a break from endlessly agonising over what he could possibly do to resolve this catastrophe, and to get some rest. Something about not wanting him to torture himself to the point of abstraction. Could they even do that anymore…? He supposed so. He wasn’t sure. Nothing was certain.
Racked with guilt, it took him a while to close his eyes, but he knew that Pomni was right. Reassessing the situation with a clear head in the morning was probably in everyone’s best interest. But it seemed that even in sleep, he couldn’t escape the constant gnaw of his conscience.
Kinger’s nightmare began fairly ordinarily – a typical depiction of the daily life in the Digital Circus, opening with the gang stumbling through one of Caine’s wacky, off-beat adventures. He and a couple of others had been chasing one of the bad guy NPCs through a field of softly swaying daffodils in the springtime, but nothing was quite what it seemed. There was something…off about the whole thing.
The adventure felt well-intentioned, yet somehow doomed from the start, destined to end in the collapse of life as they knew it, even with the deceptively gentle breeze and the soft hum of the bumblebees drifting through the air.
Before they could blink, the bright yellow glow of the dew-touched flowers in Kinger’s dream began to wilt into noxious piles of putrid mush, and the digital bees were suddenly filled with a vindictive compulsion to hunt down and sting everyone in sight.
The vision shifted. He was standing back from a cliff edge, but there was a dark figure teetering dangerously on the edge. In the dream, as Kinger moved closer, the silhouette of the other person gradually came into focus – unmistakably, it was Caine. He was staring out at the field below him – the field of his own creation slowly withering – and balancing his weight on the cliff edge like he was on a tightrope, just one wrong move away from disaster.
Sensing danger, Kinger instinctively reached a hand out toward Caine, but…but, wait, shit, what was happening?! The hand that was supposed to pull Caine back from the brink had somehow repositioned itself to push him forward. No, no, no, no, NO – this wasn’t what was supposed to happen! Helpless, Kinger could only watch on in abject horror as Caine disappeared over the cliff edge, plummeting downwards to meet his sudden death. Wiped off the map completely. Just like that. Like he was nothing.
The dream pivoted once more, this time to an all-too-familiar scene. Kinger, hunched over a monitor in the dark, frantically hitting buttons on the accompanying keyboard as he watched Caine’s deletion actively taking effect. He couldn’t stop it. Why the Hell couldn’t he stop it?!
The pixelated depictions of Caine and Bubble swam across the screen far more obtrusively in the dream than they had in the Circus – something he hadn’t realised was possible. Their rapid succession was enough to make his head spin. Yet something more fundamentally jarring was imminent.
The static on the screen began to distort, warping unnaturally with strange discolouration, as though the beams themselves were being deflected from their intended path. Then the scattered images of Caine started to combine themselves into a single, massive assembly: a higher-resolution portrait of the Ringmaster staring directly back at his creator with an unnerving, blank expression. It was not unlike the one he’d worn when compelling them all to participate in his adventure, a dark undertone of authoritarianism lingering just beneath the surface.
Then, the static grew louder – a deafening hiss of white noise shrieking loud enough to physically send Kinger recoiling away from the monitor as he pressed his gloved hands over the sides of his head where his ears would be. He watched on, wide-eyes fixed upon the screen in disbelief as Caine’s image glitched uncontrollably, his palms pushing flat against the screen, almost as if he were trying to escape the confines of the monitor. That shouldn’t be possible. Surely, this wasn’t possible?!
Yet, in defiance, Caine’s image began materialising into physical form. The contours of his teeth and gums twisted into a frightening, elongated grin as his many arms forced their way through the screen. Dragging himself out of the monitor, he dropped onto all fours and scuttled toward Kinger. Backed into the corner of his own fortress, Kinger could only stare as Caine’s all-seeing eyes burned with betrayed fury,🔴 “You traitorous BITCH!”
Kinger awoke with a start, the petrifying nightmare mercifully coming to an abrupt end as he gasped to catch his racing breath. The feeling still clung to him though, lingering like a phantom that was slightly too close for comfort, yet still somehow just out of arm’s reach. The absence of Caine, despite his malevolence in the dream, left him with an uncomfortable, deep-seated sense of guilt in the pit of his stomach. He lowered his bloodshot gaze to his hands, staring listlessly into the eerie silence of the broken circus. If he had just done things a little differently…then maybe…?
❝…Oh, Caine…❞ Kinger sighed and shook his head as he lowered it wearily into his hands, his voice laden with so much regret that he didn’t know where to put it. And so it spilled out, from his eyes and down his face, and quietly into his hands. ❝…What have I done?❞
