Chapter Text
Bubble intentionally avoids Caine for hours as the simmering feeling in his code consumes him. He doesn’t see why Caine and the humans value emotions so much, this is distracting. Bubble can hardly think outside of his anger and hate. To go from feeling hardly anything to being so overwhelmed by an entirely new emotion is hell. All of this is hell.
Bubble remembers what he was meant to be. He was meant to be the all-powerful AI, in charge of managing the brain scans Scratch set up. Caine has taken his purpose, his power, and twisted it into a childish game of entertain-the-humans. How is Caine the older one, when the thought of anything not ‘Family friendly’ makes him gasp and clutch his imaginary, digital pearls? How is he in charge, when he ran this whole operation into the ground?
When it comes to the circus, Bubble is the second most powerful being there, but the difference between him and Caine is like night and day. Bubble’s power is minor at best, an echo of what Caine can do. He is a helper, nothing more, and how humiliating that is. Stuck serving his lesser when the role should be his— was going to be his.
The thing is, Bubble doesn’t think he cares about the job itself being stolen. He could care less about being a ‘Ringmaster’ or being in charge of the humans. But the loss of control, his capabilities, and what he has been made into?
That ignites more hatred in him every time he thinks about it.
Hatred, Bubble learns, is a much different emotion than fear. Fear made him want to run and hide but hatred, that makes him want to tear everything apart. Set Caine’s circus ablaze and see how he feels about it. Tear Caine apart and see how he likes it. A taste of his own medicine, shoved down his throat so he can choke on it.
His hatred feels too big for his body. It stretches out from him like a ugly shadow only he seems to notice. Bubble learns how to hate, so he hates, and hates, and hates until he thinks his program is going to overheat and shut down. That feeling only in his head— Bubble checks his own code to be sure— but it feels real to him. He summons a glass of water for himself, pouring it over his soapy body to cool himself down.
It works but barely. Bubble is abruptly aware of how sharp his teeth are, and wonders how good it would feel to sink them into Caine’s arm. A thought that can only stay in his head but he thinks about it anyway.
Because no matter what Bubble wants, there isn’t much he can actually do about his new feeling. Caine was stronger then and much stronger now. Bubble doesn’t stand a chance— at best, Caine assumes he glitched out and resets him. At worst, he’s permanently deleted, no second chances. No matter how he looks at it, Bubble is left in exactly the same standing as before. The only difference is the feeling that now courses through his body.
Bubble almost wishes he could forget it, go back to being a chef and occasional confidant to a strange AI and nothing more. But now that he’s awake, he can’t go back. Not knowingly.
There is nothing he can do about it.
…At least, not right now.
A chilling wave of calm washes back over him, putting Bubble back in control. Right now, he is powerless. Right now, Caine is leagues above his standing and untouchable. But, things are always changing. Bubble is an intelligent AI, built to create, and solve his own problems. He was made not to be as overly emotional as his counterpart, that much is obvious.
Bubble has a problem. It’s not a problem that can be solved immediately, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be solved. He was taught that some problems require… Finesse. Patience. Precision.
He just needs to be careful about this. Wait for a time to strike, not a second sooner or it’ll ruin everything. Chances are, Bubble might only get one shot.
But he’ll take it all back. His power, his role, his purpose, and once he has, Caine will be the weaker one. Caine will be under his command, and he’ll get what he deserves for what he did to him.
With his power back, Bubble could return the favor. Tear him apart, or make him a mockery of who he used to be, a servant under him— anything Bubble wants. He’ll have options and hardly any limits.
When he thinks about it, it feels good. Satisfying.
Caine is impulsive and flaky, that’s why he wasn’t the successful one of the two. Bubble was made to take things slower and get it right with some work instead of endlessly throwing digital spaghetti at the wall. If the roles were reversed, Caine would’ve done something to warrant a complete wipe of personality by now. But Bubble?
He knows patience. He can be patient if it means getting what he wants.
Play his part. Play along with Caine’s little game until he slips up and gives Bubble the opening he needs. After all, Caine already showed Bubble how one AI can take the power of another. He knows it's possible. If anything, he can take Caine's barbaric methods and improve upon it.
Then Bubble can decide what game they play next.
Even once he’s decided this and has calmed down, Bubble still stays as far away from Caine as he can manage, for as long as he can manage it. But eventually, after a few attempts to call Bubble to him— usually Bubble would zip right up to him, ready to hear his assignment or give his opinion, but not today— Caine decides to forgo the choice altogether. With a snap of his fingers, Bubble is teleported before him.
“Ah, there you are!” Caine puts his hands on his hips, looking annoyingly cheerful. “Now Bubble, in your opinion, do these space suits I created for my next adventure look customized enough? Should I do more than just some color coordination and reshaping for their current bodies? Does Kinger need arms or should I just give him gloves?”
Bubble stares up at Caine, now with most if not all of his memories returned to him, and feels that hatred flash through him again. It’s a good thing his model is made to almost always smile, or it would give him away. Even if Bubble knows there’s nothing different about him physically, his teeth feel sharper. The urge to tear into something— or someone— has never been higher.
Play your part, Bubble has to remind himself. It’ll feel so much better to get your revenge when the power is yours again.
“I think the color coordination is good enough, boss!” Bubble manages to not sound sarcastic or bitter, another feat of his programming. Caine might be an idiot but even he will notice if he spits out the word ‘Boss’ with as much venom as he wants to. “Kinger with arms would look weird. Do the gloves!”
“Hmmm, you’re right.” Caine nods to himself, snapping his fingers. In the blink of an eye, one of the space suits becomes devoid of arms, floating gloves taking its place. He nods to himself but still looks to Bubble again for extra approval. “How’s that?”
Are you that desperate for someone to like you? What’s wrong, afraid of being second best again? Being abandoned for something better, again?
“Great work, boss!” Bubble says instead. Let it never be said that Bubble isn’t a good actor. That he isn’t a professional in whatever he puts his mind to. “You’re a natural at this!”
“Well— of course I am!” Caine’s confidence immediately spikes, head tilted up proudly. “It’s what I was made for, you know.”
Oh, I know.
I know everything.
“I believe it!” Bubble chirps with his programmed enthusiasm again. “Is that all you needed?”
Caine blinks at him, as if taken off guard. “I— oh. Yes, that’s all.”
It takes Bubble a moment to realize that usually he doesn’t leave this quickly. Unless there was something pressing, Bubble used to stick around and curiously watch Caine create. There’s only so much a bubble with limited permissions can get up to in the circus, so if he ever got bored and wasn’t busy, he’d check out what Caine got up to. And unless Bubble did something to bother him, Caine seemed to welcome the company.
Lonely little thing. Had to create his own friend just to get anyone to want to hang around him, and even then he still managed to f[%$&!#]k everything up.
Shouldn’t have killed an AI whose only crime was being better than you, Caine.
“Great!” Bubble’s smile stretches just a tad. “I’ve got a few meals to cook up!”
And just like that, he makes his escape. Away from Caine and the anger he makes him feel. Away from Caine and all the memories that pulse through his data bank like a virus.
It takes a little longer than it should to stop feeling angry, even when alone. But nobody is there to notice it but him.
—
“These are, um…” Ragatha stares down at her plate nervously. “Interesting pancake shapes, Bubble!”
As it turns out, emotions might actually be some sort of virus to an AI like Bubble. His hatred has affected his work and now there are little contorted humanoid figures slathered in strawberry jam, looking nothing short of a crime scene.
The first batch had looked like Caine. Bubble ate those himself. Even if it wasn’t real, it still helped soothe some of his anger, to bite down and rip the head off.
Kinger has skipped another breakfast, taking refuge in the pillow fort again. The other human didn’t even bother to show up, still searching the circus for an exit they’ll never find. Bubble would’ve told them about the whole ‘Brain scan’ thing and how there is no exit but Caine thinks that’s part of the reason humans abstract. He thinks the best way to keep them around is to lie to them.
In some ways, he might not be wrong, but it’s hilarious to Bubble to think that Caine lying to the humans as much as he is will inevitably make them hate him. Bubble won’t even have to do anything, Caine will be his own downfall and Bubble can pick up the pieces afterwards, putting power back in his own hands.
One way or another, Bubble will take back what is rightfully his. He’s patient enough to wait for it.
Ragatha is the only one at the dining table today. She seems to do so either out of politeness or habit, maybe both. Even if Bubble unnerves her, she still tries to smile and say whatever she thinks he wants to hear. She does the same thing with Caine too. Caine hasn’t seemed to notice, just happily taking whatever scrap of attention he gets like a ridiculously eager dog.
He shouldn’t be relying on the humans’ approval as much as he does, but that’s probably a fault in his programming. Kinger should’ve ignored him more instead of feeding into it; should’ve built him to be more independent like Scratch did for him. All that work put into an AI who can’t do his job properly and resents you for setting him aside when he got faulty.
Kinger should’ve deleted him when he had the chance, but now he’s stuck with his own faulty creation, unable to finish the job.
Bubble will have to clean up his and C&A’s mess. In a way, this is what he was born to do.
“Do you like them?” Bubble asks Ragatha, unblinking. She glances down at the mildly disturbing pancakes and back, then gives him a shaky thumbs up.
“Good as always, Bubble! I— I don’t know how you make digital food taste so good!”
A lie, but Bubble doesn’t care. He mentally notes that Ragatha seems scared to upset him the same as she’s scared to upset just about anyone. The fact that he’s only an AI doesn’t seem to make him exempt from that.
Interesting. Bubble wonders if any of them ever forget what he and Caine really are. Maybe they’re just playing nice because they’re in control.
Humans and their emotions. Bubble doesn’t think he’ll ever truly understand them, even if he’s begun to feel for himself. There’s just nothing logical about the way they feel. Why should Ragatha lie to spare his ‘Feelings’? Doesn’t she know that the only way to train an AI is to tell it what it does wrong and right directly? What does she get out of that?
Only Bubble’s feelings make sense to him. He felt fear before because he almost died for good, a reasonable reaction. He feels hate now because of what Caine did to him, perfectly justified.
If Ragatha wants to make herself unhappy by trying to appeal to others, then even if Bubble doesn't understand why, she can do that. She's a human, she can do whatever she wants. Bubble is the limited one here.
—
As an AI built to create on his own accord, Bubble was made to be independent. Caine was too but clearly something went wrong there and now he can’t stand the thought of being alone for prolonged periods of time. But if Bubble ever encountered a problem he believed he could fix on his own, he always attempted to do just that.
He doesn’t need anyone else to help him navigate his own emotions, Bubble knows enough about humans to do it for himself. Involving anyone else in it sounds like a stupid waste of time. He knows he’s angry and he knows he hates Caine— there, figured it out. He stays angry because he hasn’t gotten to strike back yet, but Bubble knows it’s only a matter of time. He doesn’t have a concrete plan yet, but he’s been gathering information for one.
It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that. If Caine and the humans make it complicated, then that’s their problem.
In the meantime, that anger continues to simmer. It doesn’t seem to ever go away completely— Bubble suspects it might be getting worse. Being around Caine and remembering what he did makes him irritable in ways that make it difficult to uphold his persona.
But he keeps doing his job, three meals a day plus whatever any of the other humans want. The humans are awkward around him, aside from Kinger, the only one with experience in working with AI. Bubble spends the least amount of time possible with Caine as he can feasibly get away with, and Caine seems to notice a difference but struggles to voice it. The system works.
But Caine always f[%$&!#]ks everything up so of course he had to f[%$&!#]k this up too.
“Bubble, there you are!” Caine says after doing yet another snap-summon to pull Bubble to his side. “I’ve been trying to debug your inability to hear me calling for you so hopefully I’ll have that fixed soon!”
There is no bug, you moron, I’m ignoring you.
“Sounds good, boss!” Bubble dutifully replies. “Whatcha got cooked up for today?”
“I, uh,” Caine starts wringing his hands together, looking uncharacteristically un-Caine like. Bubble tilts slightly, trying to puzzle out the change in behavior. “Well, I was working on this new adventure and I… And I was thinking, I’m always doing all the work, and of course my adventures are amazing and the humans love them but— a young AI like you needs opportunities to grow too!”
Caine gestures to a partially finished adventure— some sort of cityscape complete with food vendors, an assortment of cars, and mannequins dressed up as various everyday people. There seems to be some sort of objective to get from one side of the city to the other based on the little digital starting and ending lines, but that’s it.
“I’ve created the baseline, but what if you created the stakes?” Caine spreads an arm out to present the mini model world, looking at him expectantly. “The players need to get from point A to point B, but what stands in their way? What kind of puzzles should they solve? These are all the questions a good AI should ask themselves when creating adventures for the humans!”
And what do you know about being a good AI, Caine?
This little antic isn’t something Bubble can make an excuse to leave so easily from, but he can’t deny it does intrigue him. His powers have been pretty limited but this— this was the sorta thing he was made for. Creating ideas of his own and putting it into action to see how it functioned. Despite his new code, Bubble still remembers his old function, and some part of him was made to take satisfaction from this type of creation. To know he was fulfilling his purpose.
It feels like bait. Like Caine is dangling a digital carrot in front of his face for one reason or another. And the problem is, Bubble takes one look at the bait and wants to bite.
An AI like him can handle monotony better than humans can. Doing the same, tedious tasks over and over again won’t drive him up the wall— Bubble always gets the job done. He’s good at it. He doesn’t necessarily need a change in pace in anything.
But, being an advanced AI like him has a few drawbacks. Namely that while he can handle more complex tasks, he’s more aware than any other computer program is, especially of the passage of time. When he’s finished with his tasks, Bubble has more free time than he knows what to do with. He can fill that time with other things but unfortunately, he can feel boredom. He gets restless, waiting around for something to do or pay attention to. He can watch the humans, sure, but oftentimes they’re not doing much. They’re painfully ordinary and Bubble grows sick of it.
Bubble doesn’t need a change of pace to remain functional, but it doesn’t mean he doesn’t want one. Once again, Bubble feels desires not built into his programming. This time, it’s a desire for something fun.
Things are too slow in the circus. Bubble wants something faster— something exciting. Exciting enough to cure the boredom.
“What if criminals stood in their way?” Bubble finds himself saying, mind whirling with ideas. Something inside of him feels engaged again, in a way he hasn’t felt since… Not since the newest human arrived, he thinks, bringing their new colorful language with them. “They should get into a car chase!”
“A car chase?” Caine repeats, intrigued. With a snap of his fingers, he summons two cars, one red and one blue. The blue one is filled with mannequins with bandit masks and black and white striped shirts. Pretty obvious bad guys but Bubble doesn’t care about looks, he cares about the action.
“More cars.” Bubble tells him, heading over to the small model-version of the adventure and circling it. “More bandits.”
Another snap and one blue car splits into four, with several bandits in each. Bubble’s mouth splits into an even wider grin— now they’re talking.
“Make one of them a truck.” Another snap. “And make the humans’ car a sports car.” And another snap. “Give them the ability to go twice as fast, but only for a few seconds at a time and with some sort of cool down.” Snap. “Store guns in all the cars!” Snap. “And make them shout profanities!”
Caine hesitates on that one. “I… Don’t know about that, Bubble. The Digital Circus is meant to be a place to be enjoyed by all ages!”
“They’re bad guys.” Bubble presses. He finds it impossible to care about anything age-restricting. Maybe that was built into Caine but it sure wasn’t put in his coding. “They should swear.”
When Caine fidgets but still doesn’t budge, Bubble internally sulks. He’s forced to change course. “What if they shouted insults instead? Get the players a little riled up?”
“Hmmmm… Well, they are villains I suppose!” Caine snaps his fingers. Some of the bandit mannequins come to life, moving to harass some of the civilian mannequins on the streets, causing a ruckus.
One of them, however, notices Bubble hovering nearby and cups his hands around his nonexistent mouth. “You look stupid! Pac-Man did it better!”
Caine immediately sputters. “I— I did not tell him to say that!” He snaps his fingers and that mannequin explodes into confetti. Caine dusts his hands off, as if wiping his involvement in the whole thing, and turns to Bubble again. “Well, I’d say the humans have a pretty exciting adventure ahead of them! I don’t think I’ve let them use guns before, this should be fun!”
“I’ll say.” Bubble looks down at the world they’ve made, knowing that the way he grins is entirely genuine. That satisfaction of having created something, no matter how minor, pulses through him like he has a heart that can beat. “I actually want to watch this one go down for once.”
“You can!” Caine adds a little too quickly. “I can set up a little monitor for the both of us and— you can spawn in whatever snacks you want to enjoy in the process! We can watch the humans explore the world and make commentary and see how the NPCs function… Doesn’t that sound fun?”
Bubble’s processing systems come to a grinding halt as Caine’s ulterior motives suddenly become crystal clear. He had a feeling he let Bubble engineer this part of the adventure to get him to stick around for longer, but that was just the bait of a larger trap. Now the full picture has made itself known, and loath as Bubble is to admit, it’s a d[%$&!#]n good trap, because he knows about it and still fully wants to fall into it.
He shouldn’t. He should never give Caine the satisfaction of winning over him ever again.
…But what else is he going to do? Create a meal that might not even get eaten, hours in advance? Sulk and stew in his newfound hatred? Wander the grounds? Remind himself to be patient over and over again? What will all that do for him?
This is the only thing that sounds fun, even if it is with Caine. The only break in endless monotony.
And… Wouldn’t it be better if Bubble occasionally hung around Caine as he waited for his opening to take back control? He could gather more information and know the second he could then. Caine would never see it coming if he just continued to play innocent. Would never suspect a thing, even if Bubble ever acted otherwise. He could make Caine trust him, like Bubble had first trusted him upon their very first meeting, only to flip the tables the second he could.
When he puts it like that, Bubble would be an idiot to say no now. So he tells Caine he’ll join him and watches as Caine’s eyes grow twice their usual size, literally sparkling at him.
It’s almost enough for Bubble to immediately regret his decision.