Chapter Text
Abigail Brooks had long considered declaring the hours between 8pm and 7am her dedicated ‘cellphone-free’ period. Oh, how much trouble and how many headaches doing so would have saved her. Sure, not being always available came with its risks, especially for an F-list YouTuber with a G-list sized Discord server, such as herself - If she wasn’t there to moderate the space, stupid bouts of bickering were quick to turn into needless drama that would overwhelm her with a flood of white account names upon logging back in the following day, and bot comments on video premiers could quickly overtake the engagement if she wasn’t there to cull them the moment they happened - But still, sometimes she felt like maybe, just maybe, that all would be a worthy trade-off for getting a good night’s sleep.
Especially because it would also have allowed her to sleep through her boyfriend’s exasperating texting shenanigans.
The groan that left Abigail’s mouth resembled a dying car engine in treble. Why did he do this, why did he ALWAYS do this. Sure, on his good days, Lee was just the best to be around, sweet, fun, surprisingly considerate, too… But then, sometimes, he just had these nights. These incomprehensible, completely senseless nights.
“I need to break up with him, I need to break up with him, I NEED to break up with him…” sleep drunken Abigail mumbled to herself like a mantra, as she attempted to coordinate her fingers well enough to type out a longer message. She didn’t get to send it though, before another incoming text popped up on her screen.
And what it showed her let Abigail’s fingers freeze in place, because her blood had run to ice.
Pomni was doing about as well as she supposed one could do as the digital soul-copy of a 20-something woman, living in a virtual world. Things had really improved a lot for everyone ever since Caine’s change of heart and alterations to the operations of the circus. She wasn’t forced to go onto one terrifying nightmare of a slapstick escapade after another anymore, of course, but even aside from that, things had just become a lot more… ‘fulfilling’ was probably the word? While her and all of the other animated brainscans existing within the programming routines of the circus were barred from every truly accessing the “real” world outside the server rig housing their data, they’d spent this past year building their very own, very unique world within it, just for them and the NPCs. The once wide, empty halls of the circus maps were now full and bustling with life, characters coming and going whenever, with a proper day and night cycle to match their routines. The long dreary hallway leading to everyone’s rooms - including those of the Abstracted - had long been replaced with a small outdoor area filled with huts and tents, unique to each resident, and completely their own to design. Above all else, the circus’ denizens were free to decide their own destinies now, be somebody, even if just within the perimeters of this small, artificial world, surrounded by beings made of bits and bytes just like them, but that very unlike them had no memories of the world outside. In a way, it made it easier to become part of this new, little world inside the computer and somewhat forget about the sting of the other world they would never be part of again. Well, at least not physically, that was.
There was one window they had to the real world now, actually. Just a small, but tangible connection. The café housed in the same building that once held the C&A offices, that very same one who’s owner had been unknowingly paying for the electricity to keep the abandoned IT developer’s server computer running all these years, offered free WiFi. And that same server rig, incidentally, came equipped with a for its age fairly powerful wireless LAN receiver card. It was a conversation they had with Caine right after he had revealed their real world selves’ names and fates to them, in which he’d explained to them that connecting to the internet had, technically, always been an option. He’d just never known because he had not been programmed to seek out network connections, and even if he had known, he probably would not have told them. Out of fear that they would use it as a venue to “escape”, of course.
Nowadays, none of them intended to spend the rest of their digitals days roaming the hostile wastelands of Web 2.0, of course. (“Geez, this sure all seemed a lot more welcoming back in the 90s!” Kinger had said upon first laying eyes upon the minefield formerly known as twitter.) They were more than satisfied with the occasional browse to keep up to speed with the general state of the rest of the world. Pomni would check the real Abigail’s latest urban exploration videos, trying to get into the right headspace to guess for herself what she was about to say next in the voiceover, Kinger would coo and swoon to pictures of Grant’s wife and children on their family Instagram, Zooble would argue with people leaving bad reviews on the Yelp page of Riley’s bar, Gangle would with excitement await each new comic page and art piece posted to Zoey’s social media, flooding the comments with short but (maybe?) meaningful messages… Their internet usage really wasn’t that dissimilar to that of their real world counterparts, Pomni supposed. Probably right down to the part where they sometimes didn’t know the right moment to stop before you got too involved.
The day Abigail Brooks and Leeroy Mateo announced that they were dating on Abby’s Discord server was the day Pomni left that server, one she’d been lurking in for months up to that point. It had just been a bit too much. The ‘what ifs’ and the ‘what could have beens’. Not that she’d ever even thought of asking out Jax back then, but…
…Jax.
The tent within the tent still stood firm and sturdy like the day they’d built it. The pacified Abstraction sleeping within hadn’t caused them trouble once since. It was enough to elicit a bitter laugh from Pomni sometimes, when she thought about it. Jax, who’d given them all so much grief when still in control of their own mind, now seemed so at peace as a mindless piece of corrupted code.
…’Their’. Hah. Even pronouns were somewhat of a puzzle to her when thinking of Jax these days. Pomni had never told the others about what she’d seen that day, within the depths of the abstracted Jax’ code, of course, so they all still said ‘he’ and ‘him’ whenever the subject came up, such as at Jax’ funeral, or whenever somebody approached the tent to check on “Jax”. That Leeroy Mateo’s social media bios remained firmly adorned with the announcement “he/him” to this day didn’t help much. In the end, Pomni herself hadn’t had the opportunity to ask Jax before doing so became impossible…
It felt a bit sad. To keep saying “he” and “him”, when she really had no idea what Jax would have really wanted. If she'd dug deeper. If she'd gotten through. If she'd managed to save Jax.
And that tent within the tent still stood firm and sturdy like the day they’d built it. Jax had yet to join the other Abstractions in the aquarium. None of the circus denizens had even broached the subject of relocating Jax since it first came up, it was like something of an unspoken agreement between them, that, no, Jax stays above ground, even if nobody could really put into words why. Maybe for fear that Jax wouldn’t play well with the other Abstractions. Maybe it just felt good to be able to see Jax and only Jax whenever they wanted? Or maybe, after Pomni was able to make contact the way she did, there was somehow, however distantly, still the faintest bit of hope that maybe, just maybe…
…”Chasing an unattainable goal will drive you crazy”. Pomni had to keep telling herself that, over and over. It was hard to make stick sometimes, in all honesty. Sometimes she felt tempted to just up and leap into that tent and give that Abstraction another tight hug. To make contact again, see Jax one more time, talk about everything, and together, however possible, try and attempt to untangle the mess of unstable code that made it impossible for Jax to be there, with them, as one of them. It was a pipe dream, she knew it was. But what was their whole world made up of, if not dreams? With all the power in their hands, it was difficult to entirely dismiss the idea of a miracle, sometimes.
“Boy, in retrospect, we really didn't keep enough backups around back then,” Kinger mentioned one night at the counter of Zooble’s bar with a half-drank Whisky Sour in one hand. “I ought to find some posting or another I can use as an excuse to poke ‘ol Grant about getting better about that point, I guess.”
Pomni wasn't sure what exactly had prompted this shift in conversation topic - the whole dialogue between Kinger and Caine behind the bar had long gotten far too technical for her to follow - but it piqued her curiosity enough to chime in.
“Would keeping more backups actually have changed anything?” she asked, sipping away on her Margarita.
“Oh, it would've changed a lot,” Kinger raised a finger to explain. “For one thing, I probably wouldn't have selected an empty folder on accident when I tried to restore Caine's default programming last year.”
“Wait, was THAT how that happened?” Zooble piped up. They'd been too busy preventing Caine from breaking glasses with his attempts to ‘add pezzass’ to his ‘bartending’ to activately join the conversation up until now. In fact, 3 of their 4 attached arms were currently holding mostly spilled drinks, with the fourth one occupied with wiping a spill on the counter. “I thought you'd just fat fingered into the ‘Delete’-key or something.”
Kinger laughed, “Pff, good joke, Zooble! But, yeah. It just goes to show how vital healthy data storage practices really are in this field.”
“Oh, I've heard about something like that!” Gangle clapped her ribbons together, delighted to have found an ‘in’ into that conversation. “There was, well, this movie, it's a really famous one - You probably wouldn't know it though, um! Anyway, it got deleted in a freak accident and they almost couldn't find a backup to restore it from-”
“Toy Story 2,” said Zooble. “You can say you mean Toy Story 2, babe. This is the last place anybody is gonna judge you for watching Disney flicks “
“Oh- Right, ahaha… It's Pixar, though!”
The conversation derailed into a small argument about the semantics involved in animated movie studio ownership at that point. Right before Pomni could decide on whether to contribute trivia from Abigail's explorations of abandoned attractions in the Disney Parks, Caine returned them to the previous point of discussion.
“Now, to be fair, the folders Kinger attempted to patch me with did hold valid backups at one point!”
“Oh! They did? What happened to them?” asked Kinger.
“If I had to guess, I'd say Bubble removed them while I was distracted.”
Oh, right. Bubble.
They were told about it when the question came up soon after Caine returned. What Bubble, Caine's ever-present sidekick NPC, had really been. What part of “his” code it had been, for lack of a better term, ‘pupeteered’ by. Caine told them he'd split the assimilated code out of his ‘binary’ (whatever that meant) and ‘set it free’. None of them had seen Bubble - Caine’s brother - since then.
“But you're here now, right?” Ragatha pointed out to Caine. “If all the backups were destroyed, how did you come back?”
“Oh, that… Well, I'd generated a small subroutine to the circus to automatically reindex data in case of damage to the file system. Now, when I made it, I didn't intend for it to be powerful and indiscriminate enough to find and reinstate my entire binary, but, hey! Clearly, neither did Bubble! So it all works out.”
“Come again? -Also, stop putting ice cubes in Ragatha’s Piña Colada, I swear it's mostly water by now,” Zooble grumbled.
“Oh, I don't mind!” Ragatha quickly chirped.
Pomni decided to get back on topic, “No, but, seriously, Caine. What does any of that mean? In, like, less tech-y terms.”
When Caine only gave a confused tilt of the dentures at that, it was Kinger who explained, “Data is rarely just ‘gone’, even if it's corrupted or deleted. When you delete a file, all the computer really does is remove its reference - that's, sort of like a name on a register - from the internal file table. So it can't be viewed anymore, and the physical disk space it occupies is marked as empty, but really, the data is all still there until something else comes and takes its place.”
“So… because we didn't do anything with the circus that would've made new files to put where Caine's was, he was able to restore himself from literal empty space?”
“Exactly! It's similar with corrupted files, really. Even if you can't view the contents anymore with conventional means, most of the data is usually still there and recoverable.”
Pomni thought about that. A file, corrupted to the point the program can't recognize it anymore. But a lot of the contents are still inside, ready to be found.
“...Like the Abstractions.” The words left her mouth before she thought about it.
The entire bar fell silent at once, and Pomni needed a minute to process why that was. The idea of “saving” the abstracted was somewhat of an unspoken taboo in the Circus, akin to digging up someone's grave. What they were now and who they used to be - there was a clear barrier the circus denizens kept between those two realities. But to Pomni, who'd seen the inside of one's mind, maintaining that boundary wasn't always natural. She sometimes wondered if Kinger felt the same.
“Pomni…” Zooble more mouthed than spoke the name. It was clearly meant as a gentle warning to, maybe, change course. But Pomni, taking a breath, decided to voice where her mind had gone after all.
“It's like Kinger says. A lot of the data is still there, we just can't, well, ‘open’ the file. Like, as a person. But… it's still all in there. Their memories, who they used to be. I know that, because… I've seen it.”
It was Ragatha who spoke up, “Pomni, are you sure that's… I-I mean… You must've been in a lot of pain with all the damage to your body. What you saw back then… Are you sure that wasn't just… maybe…”
“I wasn't just imagining it,” Pomni spoke firmly, but matter-of-factly. Not a hint of irritation, let alone anger, in her voice. “Jax… was there. If just for a moment. I'd found him in there…”
The silence around the bar spoke much louder than any yelling could have. Nobody else wanted to be talking about this. Pomni needed to stop, before she’d bring the mood down any further. Especially Gangle was looking away, staring into the distance as if her digital soul had left her ribbon body about five minutes ago.
It was Caine - perhaps feeling suffocated by the awkward, cold atmosphere of complex emotions he still had trouble interpreting fully - who started speaking again, giving Pomni a good, if unsolicited, head pat while doing so, “WELL! Speculating about ‘if’s and ‘maybe’s is all good and fine! But don’t forget to save most of that stellar creative energy of yours for the adventure worlds, where it belongs! Trust me, even with all the phenomenal, godlike power I had at the smallest of my pinky tips, I tried to find a way to uncorrupt the abstracted minds’ files for years and never had even the least bit of success!”
“It’s Scratch’s– I mean, Mike’s code,” Kinger said. “If the problem really was just a broken header or something superficial like that, it would be one thing. Then the missing data could be easily copied from any one of us. But Mike’s code… he just never structured his work like that. In a way that would be readable to the rest of us, I mean. I never could even begin to figure out how the files produced by the brainscanner could encode so much information at such a small file-size, neither as Grant, nor now.”
“But-” Pomni hesitated. Ragatha’s eyes were on her, and she knew the others already weren’t happy with Caine and Kinger continuing the conversation, even diverted from the matter of Jax as it now was. Maybe she shouldn’t bring it up again, but - No. She had to. “But… Let’s just assume I’m right! That their memories, their personalities, all that made those people… themselves is buried in there, and hasn’t just turned into some mess of garbage data. Then… there has to be a way to get that data out, right? I mean, I could see it, it was all there! I-”
-She stopped herself. Too much, too close. She couldn’t take it this far. Not with this subject. When Pomni turned her head to look around a little, Gangle was lifting her empty glass to her mask as if drinking from it. Zooble just shook their head as they sorted through the bottles on the counter, probably to distract themself. Ragatha looked somewhat sad. Kinger, however, replied to her words without missing a beat.
“I mean, if there was any documentation on which sectors of our files are responsible for what, sure, it could be done, in theory. But Mike, he really was never big on documentation and such… I suppose if we had a reference file to compare one of the Abstractions to, that could change things, but…”
“A reference file?” Pomni looked at him. “Like, what?”
“Like, a clean brainscan of the same subject, untouched by whatever data corruption causes abstraction. Comparing an abstracted file to that in a hex editor might help me reverse engineer what exactly is going on there. Of course, an undamaged backup of the same file would help, too.”
“Ahaha… Yeah… backups of you,” Caine laughed uncomfortably. “I… never bothered making any of those.”
“Yeah. We could tell,” Zooble groaned.
“And… C&A didn’t make any, either?” Ragatha asked carefully, but to that, Kinger could only shrug.
“How would I know? I am one of the files made during the first tests with the scanner, after all.”
“Oh… right. That makes sense.”
The conversation changed topics soon after, from the sheer weirdness of having to think of yourself as a ‘file’ on a harddrive, over an Anime Gangle had once watched, to the genre of science fiction literature as a whole. Soon, the group was chatting away about Doctor Who, Star Trek, and what not. Pomni, however, wasn’t paying attention to any of that. Ideas were swirling in her mind. Half-formed, vague, far-fetched ideas, that slowly, ever so gradually were starting to take the shape of something distantly resembling a plan…
”Chasing an unattainable goal will drive you crazy.” But what if she knew that this goal was attainable? Because… she’d seen the proof. All she had to do was prove it to everyone else.