hi! I might’ve missed something in ur CTRL alt del au because im confused
what did Caine say about the “other circus”? How do they not know hes an AI?
Imma be really thorough in my explanation just for clarity. I can't fit everything in the comic without being overly rambly and wordy, so you have opened the flood gates here buddy, lol.
He basically told them there is another instance of the circus program running. One where everything is slightly different, but other versions of everyone exist.
(Except at the very start, before humans were involved, Caine broke into the running programs (accidentally making a copy of himself in the process), and in one version, he lost to the blue AI. The humans are unaware of this.)
It's like if you accidentally opened two tabs of the same thing and then never closed either one. Maybe minimized one instead or something.
They have no reason to think he himself is an AI (except for Kinger, he picked up on it since he helped make both the 'Caine' and 'Able' (nicknamed Bubble) AI programs.) They just think he is extremely strange. Now that it's been revealed that he has been in the circus longer than Kinger, they have lost all suspicion of him and believe his strangeness is explained by his years spent in the circus slowly going insane (using Kinger as a reference for near insanity). Caine and Kinger also behave very similar on adventures, and both have similar interests in things like bugs, so they have additional assumptions from that as well.
What the humans think is going on but is infact very wrong:
They think he is a human who has been in the circus since before Kinger. Likely an employee as well (hence his skills in programming). They also assume he has memory issues like Kinger and that he may be at risk for abstracting. (Since a version of Caine doesn't exist in their circus, that must mean he at some point abstracted.) (They also suspect he may have picked a new name for himself to hide his identity from Bubble.)
They think an incident happened in the other circus (a fight with 'Bubble', but it was Caine vs humans obviously). They think the incident was likely traumatic and that Caine doesn't want to talk about it yet.
What's actually happening:
Caine got booted via 'deletion' from his circus to Bubble’s circus (changes made by a programmer are copied to any running instance, but since that was technically impossible the program didn't function as expected yadda yadda) and immediately panicked and never corrected anyone or their assumptions because the truth was definitely way worse. He is basically constantly in a state of fight or flight. He is not doing well emotionally, and the humans don't really know how to help him.
(Also, you can assume that there is lagg or something latency related that makes Bubble’s circus run a little slower/behind than Caine's if you really want to pick at the technicalities ig. But that is likely never going to be relevant.)