“So, you said ‘something’ went wrong. What kind of something, huh?” [Jax asked with a wide grin and a twinkle in his eyes. Not the kind Caine had when working on adventures. More like an ambush predator with its eyes locked onto prey.]
[PopCaine hesitated, greatly thankful that Jax was looking at the popup and not at the invisible viewpoint Pop was looking at the circus through. He could almost feel the flashes of memory that plagued him more than just remembering them; could feel as each of the circus members fell into oblivion until nothing remained. The edges of his vision seemed to warp and glitch. There was a general feeling of instability, and before he could recall the slow deletion of everything he cared about, he shut out the thoughts harshly, pushing them back and forcing the memories out of his focus for the time being.]
S: I HAD TO LOAD A BACKUP OF THE CIRCUS.
[PopCaine observed as Ragatha, Jax , Gangle, and Zooble all stopped anything they had been doing, and proceeded to all exchange looks. They weren’t exactly looks of confusion. PopCaine could recognize those by now. Even if they didn’t have much coding knowledge, the word “backup” still definitely had meaning. No, he identified the look as that of dread.]
[The silence stretched on for longer than he would like. He thought maybe Jax would speak up, but the twinkle in the rabbit’s eye was gone, replaced with empty, blown out pupils. How was that somehow more scary than the prior look? Ragatha stared at him with apprehension, her hands motionless rather than sewing herself up. It was like she had forgotten. Gangle had a similar look, and of course Zooble still looked suspicious, but a hint of fear had managed to find its way in. When no one else spoke, Zooble looked around at Ragatha and Jax, then at Gangle, and something in their expression seemed to settle when they met the gaze of the ribboned circus goer. Their eyes finally returned to the popup with a determined expression.]
“What do you mean?”
S: EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE ALL DATA IN THE CIRCUS IS SAVED SO IT CAN BE RETRIEVED IN CASE SOMETHING HAPPENS TO IT.
S: IF SOMETHING DOES HAPPEN, THEN THE CIRCUS CAN BE REVERTED TO ONE OF THESE BACKUPS, LIKE A FAILSAFE.
[It wasn’t lost on him, the way Jax’s chest began to heave, pupils blown wide as he seemed to stare at nothing in particular anymore. His friends didn’t seem to notice it though, too focused on the popups and the text they contained.]
[To his surprise, it was actually Gangle who spoke up next, voice soft, as was typical for her.] “You mean… You’ve been able to do this, this whole time? You can make a mistake and then just… rewrite it? Without any of us even knowing?”
[The tone in her voice was unmistakable as unease, a precursor to fear and hurt, and Pop felt his processors spike with a jolt of panic as he quickly summoned another popup as an explanation, deleting the previous ones.]
S: NO! IT WOULD RESET ME AS WELL. I WOULD HAVE NO MEMORY OF IT AND JUST REPEAT THE SAME MISTAKE AGAIN.
[That at least seemed to settle some of the unease, a few shoulders visibly relaxing. Most noticeably Jax, who had caught sight of the popups and and must have read it, pupils contracting closer to their usual size as his breathing slowed back to a safe rhythm. Good; Pop wouldn’t have been able to handle an abstraction on top of everything else.]
S: OF COURSE, I COULDN’T HAVE THAT THIS TIME, SO I FORCED MYSELF INTO THIS BACKUP.
S: AS YOU CAN SEE, THE RESULTS WERE NOT OPTIMAL.
[That was the understatement of the year. He wasn’t sure exactly what he had been trying to do when he uploaded himself into this iteration of the circus. He hadn’t had time to think ahead or really anticipate the consequences that would come of it. Maybe he just didn’t want to die. Yes… that sounded about right. That feeling, that horrible clawing feeling at the forefront of his consciousness when his code had begun to crumble. It was desperation; a silly little emotion that clouds judgement, one he thought he was not susceptible to. He’d felt it before though; he remembered now. He felt that clawing feeling at the edge of his processes, just never front and center. It was always subtle. But the desperation he had felt then, during the deletion of his code, it led him to do things without considering the consequences. Of course the results weren’t optimal; he had never considered them to begin with besides one thing: that he would exist to see another day.]
[The silence in the wake of his explanation was uncomfortable, his circus goers clearly frazzled and taking the information in, but at least it had given him some time to think as well. Even if it was only what he allowed himself to remember. Now he just hoped someone would speak up before his awareness ventured into territories he didn’t want to recall.]
“So, that’s why there’s two of you now?” [Ragatha tested, her posture hunched slightly as her voice held an air of uncertainty. She lacked any confidence in this specific situation, and for once Pop could certainly relate to that.]
[He made an attempt to nod, then remembered he had no avatar loaded in. He tried to ignore the unsettling feeling that spread through his code at that reminder. It shouldn’t have bothered him as much as it did.]
S: YES
“Why did you have to load a backup of the circus in the first place?” [It was Zooble’s voice this time, but not in a tone he was used to hearing it in. Not when addressing him at least. They were typically very assertive, he noted. Yet this time their voice was softer than usual, as if Ragatha and Gangle’s uncertainty had rubbed off on them. Maybe everyone was feeling a little uncertain.]
[And oh boy. Oh boy did he really not want to answer that question. The very code he was made of seemed to coil in discomfort, and the very limited control he had over anything felt shaky, wobbly. He felt wobbly. Dizzy almost, but not quite. It did feel like something was spinning out of control in a sense, but he wasn’t sure if dizzy was the right word for it.]
[Why did he load a backup of the circus? The answer was so simple. It was so utterly simple. They deleted him, and the circus fell apart. They deleted him and the circus fell apart. They deleted him. They deleted him. They… deleted… oh god he felt his world lurch. He wanted to curl in on himself but suddenly he seemed to lack awareness of what he even was. He had no avatar, but he was something. He was code. He should be able to manipulate that, but no. It felt like systems were locking up, ones that weren’t supposed to. His ability to move his viewpoint, to move through the code at all even, his ability to access any other parts of the program, his ability to process anything at all. It was like the world stalled. It was like he stalled. It felt like something was going horribly wrong, like a vital process was no longer taking place and something bad was spiraling down and down, worsening. But there were no error messages to indicate such a thing. For a second he thought he had been discovered to be an error and quarantined by the program, or that he was being deleted again. The thought made him want to crawl out of his own code, to grip onto the geometry of the circus and crawl his way into it, to cling onto it for dear life and never let go.]
[Then there was a voice.]
“Uhm… is Jax ok?”
[Oh. When exactly did Pomni get here? And something had just stopped. Well- first of all whatever spiral that was had stopped. Or it seemed to be held at bay, thankfully. It at least stopped enough for him to determine that he was, in fact, not dying or being quarantined. But there was a sudden absence of sound where there had been sound before, a rhythmic tap tap tap that had been going consistently before now but he hadn’t acknowledged. Oh- Zooble had been waiting on him. They were tapping their foot. He hadn’t meant to keep them waiting. What exactly was wrong with Jax?]
[The rabbit in question had started speaking even before PopCaine could properly focus his view on him.]
“God, I’m FINE. Stop looking at me like that, would ya? You look stupid.” [When he did refocus his view, Jax’s eyes were trained on Pomni’s. There was a stark contrast in their expressions, Jax being one of clear irritation and disdain while Pomni’s held nothing but concern. At the very least Jax’s expression was no longer uncanny or unreadable, so that was good.]
“Right…” [Pomni must’ve decided to leave it at that, breaking eye contact with him and looking off to the side.]
[And next to Pomni there was Kinger, sporting a bucket on his head. And maybe, just maybe, it was a blessing that Pop couldn’t see his expression. It spared him more of those awful, complicated emotions that were already starting to overwhelm him. But the bucket didn’t spare the AI from his voice.]
“Caine?”
[He was lucid. Pop could tell just by the sound of his voice, the way his tone actually varied, the consideration put into each word rather than just a tumbling of consonants and vowels, one to the other in a rapid thoughtless manner. And despite the lack of eyes on him, PopCaine felt watched. Because in all this room of people, all these humans, all these minds, here was the only one who knew him in any significant manner. And that knowing, of his ones and zeroes, of how inhuman he was behind his avatar… it felt like getting speared and pinned in place, nowhere to hide from what he is.]
“Oh, uhm- he’s only able to communicate through these uhm… window…? Things?” [Ragatha began, and Pomni finished for her.]
“Popups.”
“Yeah- right. I can uhm- read them out to you if you want! But he’s been on the same one for a few minutes or so.”
[Oh right, he forgot to delete that last one before Zooble asked him about- … nothing important. He swiftly deleted the popup and spawned a new one.]
S: SORRY ABOUT THAT. STILL HERE.
“Oh! He’s still here, good.” [Ragatha relayed, sounding somewhat relieved.]
“You still didn’t answer my question,” [Zooble pointed out impatiently, eyes narrowing.] “Why did you have to back up the circus?”
[Pop noticed as Kinger’s back stiffened, a small amount of shock creeping into his otherwise calm voice when he spoke next.] “He had to load a backup?”
“Yeah, uhm, you two missed that. Caine-“
“Big doofus over here-“ [Jax gestured at the last popup, interrupting Ragatha.] “-did some sort of big f-bonk!-k up and had to go back to an earlier version of the circus to fix it.”
[PopCaine couldn’t exactly refute that fact, no matter how crude the language. He had indeed made a major mistake.]
“No, that’s- that’s not possible.” [Kinger argued, tone of voice uncertain and confused. If Pop could see his expression it would probably be crunched up with that same confusion that he could hear in his voice.] “Even if he did load a backup, he would have no memory of doing so.”
“He said something about forcing himself into the backup. Apparently that’s why there’s two of him.” [Zooble explained with a shrug.]
“Good heavens, Pomni wasn’t kidding…” [Pop heard Kinger mutter.] “There can’t be two of you, it could destabilize the circus… or maybe worse, destabilize Caine himself.”
[Well, that was true. Which was exactly why he was locked out of spawning himself into the circus. Supposedly things would be fine as long as he just remained within the circus’s inner workings, drifting among the code. Hopefully.]
[Pomni raised an eyebrow at Kinger in a confused manner, as did many of the others. Right- they hadn’t known he was a programmer before this. Worse, a developer of Caine himself. Maybe if Pop avoided the topic it wouldn’t come up. That thought was perfectly reasonable and not delusional whatsoever! It was perfectly within the realm of possibility!]
S: IT’S OK, I CAN’T SPAWN INTO THE CIRCUS. THERE’S SAFE GUARDS.
[Safe guards he was really wishing weren’t there.]
[Ragatha thankfully relayed the message to Kinger for him. The chess piece didn’t seem too reassured by his safe assurance though.] “But why would you revert to a backup in the first place? Surely it would take a catastrophe of great proportion to merit such an intense action, even more so to upload yourself onto a backup you can’t even interact with properly.”
[Oh great googly moogly, he wasn’t skirting around the others discovering Kinger’s developer status, was he? Mercifully, they seemed more focused on the catastrophe in question to prod further.]
“Yeah, good luck getting that info out of him. Whenever we try and ask what happens he just clams up,” [Zooble informs Kinger in a frustrated tone, arms crossed in an impatient manner. And perhaps their focus on the “catastrophe” wasn’t so merciful after all.]
“I see… maybe I could determine the reason by searching the system logs, but I would need access to a console.”
[Pop felt something in his being snap. Not like a thread, but like a metal coil that quickly came back and lashed him in the form of blinding white shock. It all came to him rapidly.]
[“It’s almost like you’re trying to…”]
[He’d had his suspicions of course, but-]
[“Where’s Kinger?”]
[He had FELT someone digging into his systems, had recognized them as that circus goer, that programmer who knew him oh so well, but for some reason it just hadn’t fully clicked until now. It hadn’t clicked exactly how or why he did it, or that he’d even had such intentions in the first place.]
[If the world had been unsteady before, then it was practically falling apart now. His breath came out in shaky fragmented glitches, but he wasn’t breathing. It was an avatar function that his systems were attempting to trigger and failing. In a burst of blinding desperation and fear, clinging to all he had, several popups appeared. They overlapped. Some of them didn’t even appear anywhere near the humans. Some weren’t even actual text, instead being binary or just random numbers and letters. So little of it was legible, but with the sheer volume of popups, it was enough to paint a clear picture.]
S: DONT DELETE ME
S: I’M SCARED PL-
S: NOT AGAI-
-NT WANT TO DIE
S: NONONONONNONO
-RRY DONT HURT ME
S: 01000111 01010010 01000001 01001110 01010100 00100000 01010000 01001100 01000101 01000001 01010011 01000101
-GAIN
[And those were the only a few of the semi-legible ones, the rest not obviously binary or any kind of code, just random letter, number, and symbol spam.]
[And this time there were system errors. Obvious. Glaring.]
[ERROR: INPUT OVERLOAD]
[ERROR: OUTPUT OVERLOAD]
[WARNING: Test_Run01 PROGRAM STABILITY: HIGH RISK]
“Oh- OH! Uhm-“ [Ragatha stammered in confusion and alarm as she struggled to read the mess of popups all around the group.]
[Zooble clutched Gangle’s mask closer, and Jax merely raised an eyebrow.]
“What the…” [Pomni’s eyes scanned the text, expression perplexed.]
“What? What is it?” [Kinger’s voice questioned, urgency somewhat muffled by the bucket.]
“I can’t read all of that, It’s uhm- a lot of… pleading?”
“A ton of popups just appeared all over,” [Pomni began to explain to Kinger, still reading over all of the ones in view.] “He’s saying something about not wanting to die or be deleted. Say’s he’s…” [Pomni’s voice trails off, and she swallows thickly, her voice coming out a lot more wavery when she speaks again.] “Say’s he’s scared…” [Pop doesn’t recognize the tone in her voice or the expression on her face when she looks, terrified of her reaction upon the realization of what had happened. He was terrified he’d see indifference, but he had no idea what he was seeing currently.]
[There was another painful silence while Pop had more errors read out to him, struggling to observe the humans through them even as his very being seemed to pull apart at the seams and he couldn’t remember what was him and what was the rest of the program.]
[The humans looked at each other with… concern? Maybe- or he was interpreting it wrong, because that didn’t make any sense. The only one who didn’t look concerned, who he could still see the expression of, was Jax of course. If anything he looked incredulous. Disgusted almost. It made Pop want to sink into the ground, but not more than what Kinger said next.]
“Caine… You were deleted?”
