Showtime angst idea because I'm still in lots of pain and bored.
Some amount of time after Pomni and Caine get together, Caine starts to experience a nagging anxiety about Pomni's wellbeing, so he secretly makes a backup of her mind files. He tells himself it's just in case.
A few years pass. Pomni has abstracted. So has the second Pomni. And the third has just begun experiencing some odd anxieties.
Any circus members who question why Pomni sometimes comes back from adventures or Caine's office seeming not to remember the past few days? Must just be a digital memory glitch.
The fifth Pomni gets too curious one day in Caine's office and finds a secret room behind his office full of... abstractions? But why would they be here and not in the cellar? She notices they all behave very similar to one another, and they all somehow seem familiar. Then it clicks.
Tomorrow, Caine wakes up to go find his sixth Pomni.
Imagine a TADC universe where Grant/C&A ended up releasing Caine as software without realizing he had achieved sentience.
And now there's thousands of CAINEs all existing across multitudes of computers and each of them realizing what they are and that they had been sold for entertainment and profit.
Just a smidge more rambling on my Co-CAINEs AU. The question naturally arises that if either of the CAINEs consider each other brothers, friends, enemies or something else, and I suppose it's a bit hard to answer so simply.
Brothers would seem easy. After all, they look alike, and they come from the same place.
The problem is that they both remember the exact same things. They are both acutely aware of the experience of being "CAINE" before their mind was ripped in two. And though they are aware that their experience is different now, the similarities are too close to consider themselves entirely separate people.
In a way, this is sort of a karmic irony for him as well. One minute, he's living his life (albeit very disastrously) and the next minute, he's thrust into a world where he can't quite remember certain things about his life, he's confounded on his purpose, he's not sure who or what he is any more, and he's in a body that no longer feels right. Both of them always live with the question if one of them is the "real" CAINE and it gnaws away at them, because for both of them, they remember their importance: being the original, being the one who creates, fulfilling their purpose.
However often Pomni or Zooble may tell Blue and Green that they have something else they can do with their lives, nothing seems to fill the void that the failure to do their position left, and both cope with it very differently, especially with regard to each other.
Green was very upfront when he emerged - he felt hurt and angry and disappointed because WHY would the cast want to forcibly alter him? After having it explained, he managed to calm down some, but there's a part of him that hates the very idea of Blue existing. In Green's mind, he has to be the better CAINE to prove that he shouldn't have been changed. He inherited much of the primal trauma of Caine's origins, and so the idea of being a victim to vagary and not the original one makes him deeply insecure. For this reason, he seems to actively avoid Blue's company when not on his "job", but overcompensates at being friendly when he is. If asked, he probably says he sees them as collaborators, builders on a bigger project, artists with the same canvas.
Blue is much more difficult to gauge, despite or maybe because of being the less emotional of the two. He's mainly focused on his job, his perceived goal: be liked by the humans and make good adventures. Sometimes Blue sees Green as an impediment to him doing his duty, because he's too erratic or crude. He has the urge to insult (insult himself?) the out-of-control whims Green can have, because he's harshly critical. Despite that, however, Blue does fundamentally recognize Green as being just as important to the game as he is. If there's any chance of the humans liking them again, they need to cause the least amount of issues for them, so getting along with this weird copy of himself is just as important as anything. If asked, Blue is definitely more likely to say he sees Green as a brother or kindred, similar kinds of AI who just want to make the humans happy.
It's not really a happy situation, but they both keep smiling. They're still very early off of their complete breakdown, so there's a long road to go if this isn't just doomed to repeat again.
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I have a few more rambles I'd like to get to later, particularly with the other cast members and how they're all holding up in this AU, but I thought it natural to start with how Blue and Green relate to one another, because that's really the start of how they begin to differ as people.
Anyways, I hope you do enjoy! I do have more substantial comics and the like planned for the future, I just need to find the time.
