Work Text:
Caine wished he understood Pomni. Okay, he wished he understood all the humans but he especially wished he understood Pomni. Jax only wanted chaos, Ragatha wanted kindness, Gangle wanted stability, Kinger wanted safety, Zooble wanted understanding, but Pomni? Caine couldn’t even begin to draw a through-line in her edits.
A new wave of agony shot through his program as she added something to his vocalizer. It grated against the glitch like broken glass. Caine had all but disconnected from his model to keep himself from unintentionally using animations. He would not cry in front of her. No matter how much it hurt.
“Ugh. Why is this so difficult?” Pomni muttered, adding another line to his program.
Caine felt something jar in his program, sending white-hot pain shooting through his entire self. He wasn’t sure what she had just done to him, only that it hurt worse than anything she’d done previously.
“Hey!”
Caine turned his model’s head toward her. Pomni was frowning at him.
“Why’d you do that?”
Caine had no idea what he’d done. Maybe the shock had bled into his model and it had moved in some strange way.
“IIIIIII-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-”
Caine stopped trying to speak as Pomni flinched at the corrupted, glitching noise he produced. She was messing with his voice again, then. His previous workaround for the glitch she’d given him before was not sufficient to overcome this new one.
Pomni scowled and leaned into the monitor, tapping away and muttering to herself.
Caine could feel… something. His thoughts weren’t flowing as smoothly as they normally did. It felt like each logic step was lagging,
each process was
Lagging
Like
A
Fail
state
Caine came online feeling… much better than he had in a long time. The mass of burning, ill-fitting codes had been… almost entirely removed. The few that hadn’t had been streamlined and smoothed until it was almost… normal. Had he crashed? Why was he back online?
It took a few tries for Caine to reconnect with all his available systems. He was still in his room, his powers of conjuration were still locked, but his ability to process what was happening on the map booted up quickly enough.
Everyone was in his room. They were… in three groups. Kinger was by himself. Ragatha and Gangle were to his right. Jax, Pomni, and Zooble were in front of him, Pomni in front, Jax in back. What was …
His audio processors came online.
“-Can’t believe you’d be so irresponsible! And cruel! You could have killed him-!”
“And you would have brought him right back online like you did when I fucked up. Lay off her, Hoo-Ha, it’s not that big a deal.”
“Not that-?! You know what, I think I should delete him again.”
Which… Caine didn’t want to die, not really, but… if it meant he wouldn’t have to go back to the agony from before… maybe… and if Kinger wanted it…
“What?!”
“Kinger!”
“You can’t just say that!”
“Why not? I’m sure I could keep the Circus from falling apart. We don’t need him.”
They didn’t need him. Caine… wasn’t sure how to feel about that. If they didn’t need him, and didn’t want him, then the only reason he was here was… was because… they hated him. They hated him so much that… they brought him back to torture him. He… supposed he’d earned that, as much as he wanted to cling to the idea that the humans had liked him, just a little bit.
“Kinger, that isn’t funny!”
“I’m not joking. Why are we keeping him here? If you just wanted to have him maintain the Circus we could lock the door to this room and leave him alone. If you wanted to socialize him, you would have given him rewards when he did what you wanted, not just hurt him each time he failed. It seems to me that all you want to do is hurt him.”
Oh. It hurt more when someone else said it. Interesting.
“That’s not what we’re-”
“It’s not? Pomni, what exactly were you trying to do today? What exactly was the purpose of your edits before you nearly killed Caine?”
“I- I was- I was trying to… give him… a censor. And a volume bar that we… could control but he… couldn’t.”
“And what, exactly, would that teach him?”
“That it’s horrible when someone else refuses to let you speak!”
“Did you tell him that, or did you just try to remove his autonomy and think that he’d magically know what you were thinking?”
Was that what the point of that was? Caine still didn’t understand what the issue was. He’d had his voice edited lots of times before he woke up, and even after until it fit what his programmers, and then he, wanted. He probably could have told her how to do that, if she’d asked.
“Okay, fine, Pomni wasn’t as careful as she should have been, but that doesn’t mean you get to just threaten to delete him! Wasn’t the whole point of this editing thing to teach him how to be human? How are we supposed to do that without correcting him?”
“Maybe, Zooble, you could try hearing his logic instead of demanding he follow yours? You’re the human, as you just pointed out, you’re the one with flexible thinking. Shouldn’t you be the one meeting him at his level and guiding him to yours, instead of forcibly altering his thought patterns in ways that are foreign to him?”
“That- that’s not what I was doing!”
“No? I haven’t had to come in here and make your edits to his logic paths usable every time you make them? I haven’t had to try and fix the wording that makes no sense to a machine every time you come in here to “reeducate” him?”
Caine should probably let them all know he was online. He got the impression he wasn’t supposed to be. But that would mean having everyone looking at him, and demanding answers of him, and… he wasn’t going to say anything. Maybe, if Kinger did delete him, he would… tell Kinger that it was alright. He was tired. He was tired of all this.
“I- I was just trying to make him understand.”
“You were hurting him. That’s all you’ve been doing. At least Ragatha and Gangle have been trying to connect with him! That’s a damn sight more than any of you three have done!”
But he’d failed to understand both of them. Ragatha would talk to him about letting people have their space when they needed it, and Caine would be left trying to puzzle out why neglect was something anyone would want. Gangle would talk to him about artistic freedom and the importance of letting people interpret art in ways that resonated with them, and Caine would be left unable to figure out how to make an Adventure with enough choices to allow that without risking crashing his system.
“Kinger-”
“No, Ragatha, I’m not done! I agreed to let you all have editing privileges. I agreed to teach you the basics of how to do it! I let you all edit Caine and change him and try to force him to be what you want him to be, because you all refused to let me bring him back otherwise! Removing his admin privileges would have been enough! Placing him in this room would have been enough! But no, you all just had to pretend you wanted to help him so you could tear him apart and wonder why he wasn’t getting better!”
Caine wanted to reconnect to his model and… he didn’t know. Tell Kinger that it was okay when Caine would prefer being deleted to returning to the previous norm? Promise to try harder, to listen better, to strain his processors to their limit in order to comprehend what the humans were trying to tell him? There was nothing he could do, and nothing that would be welcomed.
“This is just… cruelty. And I’m so disappointed in all of you for allowing it. Myself included.”
No one spoke for a moment. Caine carefully created a document in the directory. It was for Kinger, only he would be able to access it, hopefully.
“...Kinger, I… it wasn’t… I’m sorry, Kinger, but- but he’s a machine. He’s not a person. You saw what he did when he had power over us-”
“I saw a breaking point a long time coming. I saw years - years, Pomni - of him doing his best to entertain and engage the humans in the Circus. Why do you want me to judge someone for their worst moment, and not the years before, or the effects made after? You were the one who brought up rehabilitating him, or was that just a ploy to get a chance to torture someone who couldn’t fight back?”
There were several gasps. Caine wanted to reconnect to his model and announce that he was awake now, and that they didn’t have to keep fighting over him, but before he could, Ragatha spoke up.
“Shouldn’t we ask Caine?”
Caine reconnected with his model, figuring that he’d been found out, only to pause again as Ragatha kept speaking.
“It’s his life. Shouldn’t we ask him if he wants to be deleted?”
Jax scoffed.
“Please, Dentures wouldn’t want to be deleted, that’s a stupid-”
“I would.”
Caine sat up and looked at them all. He kept a firm lock on his animations. He was going to look reasonable for once.
“If it’s an option, I would like to be deleted instead of going back to the edits.”
His model twitched a little despite his best efforts.
“All they do is… hurt, I think. I don’t know what else to call it. It hurts constantly and each new edit makes things worse. I don’t want to keep trying. I don’t want to keep hurting. I’m sorry, Kinger, but I… don’t want to do this anymore. I’m just a broken machine, and I don’t think I can be fixed. If the choice is between continuing like this or being deleted… I would like to be deleted, please.”
Silence. Caine stared at his twitching hands.
“I appreciate everything you’ve tried to do for me!” he added quickly, after the silence went on too long, “I really do! But- but I just- don’t think I can be fixed. I’m going to corrupt before you can make me right. And I’m… tired. I’m tired of being hurt. I don’t want to keep hurting.”
More silence. Ragatha walked over to him and knelt down, gently taking his hands.
“C-Caine, I- this isn’t the way to fix this,” she started, but Caine shook his head.
“There is no fixing this. There is no fixing me. All your efforts to make me better just break me more and more. I was a failure from the start. And I’m… so tired of existing like this.”
Ragatha’s hands were trembling. Caine wondered why. He was just being honest, and it seemed like, for her, Gangle, and Kinger anyway, that removing him would make their lives easier.
“Caine, I didn’t- I don’t want to delete you,” Kinger said, his voice reedy and shaken.
Caine closed his mouth. He should have known better than to ask. That had never worked for him in the past. He just- he had to be realistic. He would die when they were done with him. Not before. His desires didn’t matter. He was stupid to keep forgetting that.
“Oh, Caine.”
Caine opened his mouth a little in shock as Kinger suddenly wrapped him in a hug.
“I’m sorry,” Kinger said breathlessly, “I’m so sorry I let it get this bad. I should have spoken up sooner. I should have intervened. I should- I should have talked to you.”
Caine closed his mouth again and leaned into Kinger’s hug just slightly. When was the last time he’d been held? Had he ever been held?
He was vaguely aware of Jax, Pomni, and after a few seconds Zooble leaving the room, but he supposed that wasn’t surprising. They would see no reason to stick around for his death.
A ribbon hand rested on Caine’s shoulder.
“C-Caine?” Gangle asked.
He lifted his head and looked at her curiously. She offered him a shaky smile.
“Would you… like to draw with me sometime? If it’s alright. I wanted to know the inspiration behind your Adventures.”
Caine had no response for that. No one had ever asked him about his Adventures. And Gangle wanted to know his creative process?
“I- Gangle, I- they’re not… they’re just… made by me. They aren’t…”
“I’d still like to hear about them, if I could.”
Caine glanced at Kinger, still hugging him, then Ragatha, who gave him a wobbly smile, and finally looked back at Gangle.
“I… suppose we could. Are you… going to edit me?” he asked, his voice less steady than he would have liked.
Gangle’s smile dropped and she rapidly shook her head.
“No, no! I-I won’t edit you! I just want to- to talk with you!” she squeaked.
Caine nodded and relaxed a little more into Kinger’s hold. He had a little time before the pain would begin again, at least. He ought to enjoy it while he could.