A followup/partner to my first ELIZA comic [read that one for more context.]
I was thinking about Kinger, Caine, and creating life you don’t understand that grows in a way that frightens you-- Kinger creating a sentient AI that gradually broke down over its imprisonment, Caine waking the humans’ brainscans only for them to break down and abstract over their imprisonment. Kinger’s role as the father figure of the circus, and how the circus’s cycles of harm all started [unintentionally] with Caine’s abandonment. I was also thinking about that bit in Ep 7 where Kinger is the only one to chuckle at Caine’s Chinese Room/AI programming history humor.
ELIZA was a 1964 “therapy chatbot.” Unlike modern chatbots, it was a relatively simple text program that gave you basic parrot-like outputs. Despite being rudimentary by today’s standards, ELIZA was very influential. You can talk to an interactive recreation of ELIZA online here.
In this comic Caine starts by repeating stock ELIZA responses, but then begins slowly creating his own content in a way that she never would. [he starts with the canned ELIZA phrases like “please tell me your problem” and “are you saying no just to be negative” and “is it because [x] that you came to me” but then gradually, without fully being aware of it, drifts into more creative & human conversation.] This is also influenced by my personal headcanon that Kinger’s conversation with Ragatha about relationships in episode 6 is a reflection of his perspective on Caine at the time.
What I was trying to go for was to have Caine and Blue be like how they were in the opening scene of episode 8. Caine/Red is messy, a little bit all over the place while Blue is neat.
But with this neatness comes less of the messiness that made Caine more human-like, and so Blue is more of the “unfeeling machine” between the two. Because, Blue was never anything at all except for something Caine used in order to stabilize his power (<- this is just my take on Blue lol, see ramble here).
But Caine wants to believe that if he could be something more than just the Red dot, then Blue can also be something more than just the Blue dot. They were whole, together as one, once. Caine misses Blue in a way, and wants to believe Blue has the ability to see humanity like he did.
But it’s not, and Caine at some point started to realize that this was more about him trying to reassure himself that he is more than just his purpose, that he can be someone. So he projects those feelings onto Blue.
Blue is just a Blue dot, but Caine still wished he could’ve seen how much the circus has grown. They made it together after all.
Like an actual recycling bin, there will come a time when the deleted file will be gone permanently. Maybe it’s longer than normal because Blue is also a powerful AI, but it’s only a matter of time.
(This scenario has been in my mind for a good bit now lol)
NEXT →
Ok I was supposed to make another comic that takes place BEFORE this but I felt too guilty leaving the asks collecting dust in my inbox for so long so idc (this is what the masterpost is for aha!!!!!!!)
Both my recent comics ended up on Scratch's door and I swear that was not intentional, the last asks just coincidentally made me think of grief gghhhh...
Also!!! Kinger's glasses! They're pretty much a temporary modifier, similar to the stupid sauce and such! I've been waiting to finally reveal that detail lol
Some thoughts on the idea that "Caine needed to be killed to learn his lesson in Episodes 8 & 9".
I think what Caine really needed then was spending some time away from the humans. Away from his self-imposed purpose to please them, to be responsible for them, and to do everything for them. Because when he was around humans he was always masking, always performing, always working—and he'd been burning himself out without realizing it.
In the Void, however, where there's no one there to judge him, Caine actually felt like he could just be himself. And we see that Caine as not The Ringmaster but himself is… surprisingly calm, introspective, smart, resourceful, and still powerfully motivated by his love for humans, which was what led to the Circus being created in the first place. Recalling that love made him want to learn more about the humans and go back to do right by them.
And on the humans' side? They needed to spend some time without Caine. There's the fact that Caine just tortured them and they didn't feel very safe with him, but also Episode 9 is the first time the humans are handed responsibility for their own lives in the Circus.
Episode 9 is a direct call back to the Pilot in plot: in both episodes, a crisis occurs in the Circus involving someone abstracting while Caine was away. Whereas in the Pilot the humans chose to helplessly wait for Caine to return like lost children, and let Caine unceremoniously dump Kaufmo into the cellar even though none of them liked how he dealt with Abstractions, in Episode 9 they took responsibility to rebuild the Circus themselves and created a more compassionate solution for Jax's abstraction, signifying their growth as a community. I think the humans came away from this experience having a better idea of what Caine had been doing for them all this time that they took for granted, and realizing that while they have no choice in being in the Circus, they still had more power and agency than they realized, and building a home where everyone could be happy is indeed possible.
Basically, both parties could use some breathing room to cool down and reflect, and I feel the way it happened in canon worked out for me.
Am I saddened that Caine only felt safe enough to be himself in his solitude in "death"? Absolutely! Am I disappointed there wasn't more conversations between Caine and the humans addressing their new-found understanding of each other? You bet! Do I think Caine being killed for the only time he openly expressed anger for his own treatment over the years would fuck him up and add another trauma to his growing list? Most certainly. But what I did get from the finale regarding Caine I find okay.
Popular fanon seems to hold that as powerful as Caine might be, he could still be subdued by the devs' editing or the superior Blue AI, his intended successor.
Well, neither of those things are true by canon. Canon!Caine is by far the single most powerful being in the digital plane he inhabits.
Allow me to break this down.
The developers (and more specifically, Kinger)
There are lots of evidence for Caine having superior coding/decoding skills than anyone on the devs team, even when he was a young AI.
The devs, for one, couldn't get the brain scans to work, yet Caine managed to do so with seemingly little effort.
They had no hand in the Circus, either. In fact, their entire world is one that Caine created out of absolutely nothing, independent of input or support.
Heck, what was the one thing Caine did shortly after his creation? Breaking out of a box that the devs locked him into.
Now, you might ask, what about the fact that Kinger managed to delete him? Episode 8 was what convinced everyone that admin privileges are real and could be used against Caine, right?
Well, you see, Episode 8 actually drives home the fact that Kinger has no control over Caine's code AT ALL.
Keep in mind that Caine's deletion was completely accidental on Kinger's part. He couldn't hack through Caine's code. Every command he wrote was denied by Caine, apparently protected by his "57x immersive AI defense system."
Instead, the code wrote itself to say purge, and Kinger just pressed the confirm button.
(Yes, that means that at the height of his agony, Caine was killed by his own suicidal ideation manifested as code.)
The fact that Caine still experienced this as being killed, however, speaks to my point even more.
Because apparently, the feat of blocking and resisting all of Kinger's editing attempts was all automatic for Caine, similar to how blinking or heart pumping blood work for humans. Caine required no effort to do so; he wasn't conscious of it at all.
And finally, yes, there's the fact that deleting Caine won't get rid of him for good. It just sends him off somewhere in the void, unscathed even, and he could freely come back with the only matter being whether or not he wants to.
Terrifying! Imagine if our digital eldritch abomination teethguy was anything less than sweet or forgiving. The humans wouldn't stand a chance.
With that out of the way, it's time for my second, and arguably more important argument.
The Blue AI
It's a myth that the Blue AI is more powerful than Caine. A myth we are led to believe, and intentionally so, but a myth nonetheless.
In the Episode 8 opening scene that shows Caine's origins, we see the Red AI swallow the Blue AI... and they actually battled fiercely for dominance before Caine's red won out.
Even all those years ago, Caine was the stronger one. And now that there has been 21 years of learning, adapting, innovating and evolving happening with Caine but not with Blue, that power gap has only widened.
What had made Caine stronger? Well, I believe the answer was right in front of us all along.
He grew beyond his programming and broke free. Figured out a way to break containment from the box, from what the devs had in mind for him, with sheer will power and what Goose confirmed to be his creative problem solving. A manifestation of autonomy and free will.
We were misled to believe Blue was the stronger AI because... for the longest time, Caine believed it. All this time, Caine had been hung up on being "the lesser of the two", a notion planted in him when the devs replaced him with Blue, one that haunted him for 21 years... and it couldn't have been further from the truth! Blue was good at following instructions, but it was never going to be a person the way Caine became a person. What Caine believed to prove him defective—disobedience, inability and even refusal to be what the devs wanted—were the very things that marked his personhood and made him powerful: the ability to think for himself, and grow, and change.
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