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Caine had a very different concept of sensory input from his humans.
He could perceive and replicate auditory and visual stimuli without difficulty – in designing him, those had been given top priority. And over the years, he’d gradually built out his rudimentary understanding of smell and taste to create more immersive environments and appealing rewards. Touch, while more represented in his baseline programming than smell or taste, was harder to learn, as much of how humans perceived it was subjective. Hardness and elasticity were easy, but all the different coatings and textures were hard to learn, especially when they had to correlate with visual stimuli to not feel uncanny. He could still vividly remember Ribbit recoiling from a perfectly fuzzy pet he created because she wasn’t expecting a bulldog to feel like that.
As to personal sensation, his model was largely insensate. It could detect pressure, proximity, and force so as to respond appropriately to physical contact – letting humans touch it, recoiling from blows, colliding correctly when it encountered floor or walls, etc. Most other sensations were extraneous, so while he was aware of the characteristics of various objects for player interaction purposes, he didn’t really interact with them himself.
Which was why it made absolutely no sense to say that he felt itchy. It wasn’t a physical itchiness. He was certain of that. His avatar wasn’t capable of processing such a sensation, and no other part of him even interfaced with touch sensation. And yet, that was the closest word he could think of to describing this feeling. It reminded him of the way players got before they started to shift restlessly, whether during an explanation of an adventure that went overlong or just in a hot and dry environment. (Sometimes moist environments could trigger it, too, which did baffle him.) They’d twitch and look uncomfortable, then guiltily scratch and stretch. He couldn’t really understand their discomfort with the action – it wasn’t as though they were doing anything unnatural for humans. And it certainly wasn’t inappropriate, or his content filter would’ve blocked it. Occasionally, they’d scratch certain areas that got rapidly covered by a censor bar, but that was it, and even then, he could understand that it wasn’t the action that was the issue – just the location. Regardless, it was clearly a physical reaction to uncomfortable stimuli, or occasionally to boredom. He understood that.
But as someone who didn’t feel uncomfortable physical stimuli and could always find more work to do (or just bother a player) if he got bored, neither of those things applied to him. Besides, he wasn’t even scratching anything. He’d tried a scratching animation – just an experiment, scratching his avatar’s chin – to see if it helped, and it did a little, but it didn’t really get rid of the underlying directionless discomfort.
It’d started after Bubble’s adventure. On Pomni’s recommendation, he’d stopped using the sillier animations on his avatar that sometimes helped him relax and focus. The juggling, the flipping, the twisting, the dancing… even the finger-removing one, just to be safe. He’d initially figured he could just avoid doing them when the players were around and not in the mood to tolerate his behavior, but if the incident during the adventure had shown anything, it’s that that wasn’t enough. He’d activated the animation without fully thinking about it – he’d been too focused on trying to fix the situation to see himself actively making it worse. And that meant that until he could get in the habit of not just using inappropriate animations whenever something cropped up, he had to quit cold turkey. For the players.
Moreover, while Zooble had insisted that they didn’t have an issue with his unforgivably-personal adventures, that wasn’t true of the others. All the players had expressed frustration and exhaustion with the gardening adventure, and Ragatha had later taken him aside to note, rather less politely than usual for her, that she knew Zooble was too kind to say as much, but he could really traumatize somebody if he wasn’t careful. He’d thought Ragatha was too kind to say as much as well, but she was clearly losing patience with him.
Maybe they all were. He wouldn’t blame them.
With that said, he was actually feeling optimistic. He had a deal with Zooble and Gangle that allowed him to ask questions, and since the Bubble adventure, they’d started going back to Shrimp Town again. He remained ambivalent about that particular expression of interest, but surprisingly, Gangle was now the one spending most of her time there, while Zooble was largely alternating between Shrimp Town and regular adventures. He couldn’t have dreamed of such an outcome when they’d started this little experiment, but he was pleased as punch. Pomni had made another few tentative visits to Shrimp Town, after negotiating a contract similar to Zooble’s and Gangle’s. He hadn’t put up an argument about that – there was precedent, after all – and Pomni now talked to more NPCs than Zooble did, and far more than Gangle did, so the interactivity data were helpful. And with the tweaks to his adventures, the NPC programming in Shrimp Town, and his avatar, he was reasonably confident that he was moving in a direction that would further encourage player comfort and prevent abstraction. For once, he was making the right changes.
And none too soon. Aside from Ragatha’s increased coldness, there were other worrying signs. Jax was less engaged in adventures than he’d been since the first shaky week after "Escape the Circus” – he still went, but he didn’t seem to come alive with them anymore. And Pomni… On the one hand, she was participating more enthusiastically in Shrimp Town, and even the adventures, than she had been. And her feedback was helpful! But she still seemed sad and distracted at times, and he couldn’t figure out why. (It didn’t help that she was probably talking about it in Shrimp Town. With Gangle and Zooble. Where he couldn’t see them.)
On balance, though, he was fairly pleased. He’d been in a deep downward spiral of unlikable adventures and players on the verge of abstracting, and they were finally starting to level out. He wouldn’t have traded this stability for anything.
If only he could get rid of the itchiness.