Chapter Text
“Ow.” Pomni grunted as she was pulled from the abstracted Jax. No matter how many times she visited it always hurt, her limbs feeling like they were being pulled apart in every direction all at once. It never lasted long though. Caine was always right there to fix her and offer relief.
“Hey-o, Pomni!” Caine said, his exuberant personality starting to return over the past few months. “How’s he doing?” he said, lowering his tone as he tried to gauge his own emotions.
Pomni stretched her arms over her head as she walked towards the bench in the aquarium. “Not great, but he’s not trying to kill me when I enter anymore.” she said thankfully. They still didn’t know how abstraction worked or what exactly caused it, so Pomni had suggested they try and discover what they could with Jax. She had been the only one to enter an abstraction and come out relatively unscathed, and with Caine now being a watchful eye for them during these little soirees, the chances of severe harm were as minimal as they could be.
“Well that’s a start.” Caine said, snapping his fingers and spawning a bottle of orange juice next to Pomni. It was refreshing and helped ground her after these visits, something Kinger theorized helped settle their minds after dealing with the corrupted code.
She quickly drank the juice and let out a sigh as Caine floated next to her, taking a seat on the bench beside her. “Are you sure there’s nothing to be done to reverse it? It’s technically just code anyways, right?” she asked hopeful.
Caine looked to the floor shamefully and shook his head. “Human minds are...incredibly complicated. There’s more connections in your head than there are connections in the circus.” he explained. It was one of the first things he was asked about after helping rebuild the circus. Kinger seemed to already know it was irreversible, a conclusion he had years to come to terms with, but the others still hoped that something could be done to help them.
The way Caine explained it to them made it seem like the only way to fix it would be to delete them completely and copy the mind files from them and rebuild it from the ground up. However, in doing so there was no guarantee that the person who came out afterwards would even be the same person that first entered. There was also the fear of what it would do to Caine. Trillions of connections being rebuilt by an AI that could only process a few billion at a time would cause him to crash, and the circus to essentially factory reset itself, killing everyone there. Without the Blue AI he had cannibalized during his break from containment, he was much more limited in manipulating his own code.
Pomni let out a sigh, knowing he was right. “Okay. I’ll keep visiting him. Maybe the calmer he gets, the more likely chance he’ll be able to return. That they’ll all be able to return.” she said as the abstractions swam around them in a dance of colors and shapes. I’d call it beautiful if I didn’t know what you really were. She thought to herself.
The hardest part when dealing with the abstractions was knowing who was who. Jax was easy to figure out since he had stayed in the tent they had all made for him for weeks following Caine’s return. He had placed a kind of digital tag on the abstraction that would allow anyone to know who he was when coming across him through a digital interface in front of them, like a HUD from popular first-person shooter games. But finding Queenie, Ribbit, Kaufmo, and all the others was becoming a challenge. Kinger was able to find Queenie almost immediately. She crawled over to him in the dark and stared at him while the others floated around and ignored him.
He only entered once when she came to him, and after he was pulled from the abstraction and confirmed it was Queenie, he never interacted with her again, rarely talked about what he saw in there. If it was anything like when she first visited Jax, she could only imagine how painful it must have been to see his wife like that.
He would still visit the aquarium and watch her swim and dance through the water, taking time to see her knowing that the real her, the one he fell in love with and had a family with, was still alive outside the circus. It kept him going, knowing that she was safe and not trapped in a fractured mind.
Everyone would come by and visit from time to time to see all the other members who got abstracted. It became almost ritualistic the first month the aquarium was built, but soon only Pomni and Kinger ever really showed up. Ragatha made infrequent visits, usually alongside Pomni, but otherwise she kept her distance from them. Whether it was shame or to give Pomni time to process and think about what to do next, not even she knew.
Caine and Pomni sat in silence as they watched the abstractions dance and flow, blissfully unaware of the onlookers inside the glass tube below them. “Has Ribbit come back out since Jax moved in?” Pomni asked as she finished her orange juice, tossing it into the trash can next to them.
“No. I haven’t seen her, but I know she’s still there, somewhere. Her mind files still show as corrupted, not deleted.” Caine said quietly.
Pomni lowered her head. I had hoped that maybe a familiar face would help her, but I should have known better given what happened between them before she abstracted. She thought. “And Kaufmo?”
Caine did a quick scan of the aquarium before pointing above them. The form twisted a curled in a dance that seemed to defy motion, but that was part of the beauty of it. And it made her sick to find the sight beautiful.
“I know it’s painful, or at the very least, uncomfortable. But this is the most free they’ve been since abstracting. They can move safely, without fear. Without losing what’s left of their minds to seeing...people.” he said, pausing at the end to find the right words. “I think Queenie would like this. They have their own space that’s not confined to a cellar.” She didn’t say anything, just sat there staring at the figures as they danced. Half an hour passed before Caine spoke up. “Come on, Pomni. Let’s get you some food.” he said, holding a hand out to her. She reluctantly took it as they walked out of the aquarium.
Pomni was surprised at how quick Caine had started to behave more like a human than a computer after the rebuild. He walked instead of floated when with them, ate alongside them, asked questions and conversed with them regarding adventures they went on, and seemed genuinely interested in each of them.
And they returned the favor in kind. Caine had given them access to some of the creative tools he used to create adventures and would take part in some alongside them. It took awhile for him to figure out how to handle them in a way that a computer normally wouldn’t, especially given how he saw the digital world, but he felt included, and he learned how humans acted more and more each day.
When they arrived at the cafe, Ragatha was already in the process of making lunch for everyone. They had all agreed that instead of conjuring food they would take turns and actually cook and prepare it. It was an attempt to make everything seem more real and give a sense of reality in a digital world. It was an agreement that Pomni had issues sticking with. Most of the time, she was too busy or tired to prepare her food, so she just acted like she was and would conjure what she wanted to happen when the others had their back turned.
“Howdy, Ragatha! How’s the cooking coming along?” Caine said in his upbeat tone.
“It’s coming! A little too much garlic, but I should be able to mask it with some lemon.” she said as she stirred the pot, steam rising from the container. Ragatha was the only one who really tried to make sure the food was prepared properly, even if they could just change the flavor themselves. Most of the time they’d prepare, mix, and cook the food, but would already have the exact amount needed to make it perfect. Ragatha preferred the old school method of trial and error.
“What’s on the menu today?” Pomni asked as she sat at the counter.
Ragatha poured the excess water into a strainer and placed the pot back on the stove and added some sauce. “Just some simple pasta. Figured I should do something a bit easier after last week.” she said causing Pomni to chuckle. Ragatha had decided she wanted to try making a beef wellington for everyone like her dad used to make her before he passed away. The smoke only cleared after Ragatha relented and let Caine intervene. “Besides, I missed making my pasta.”
Zooble and Gangle arrived shortly after, with Kinger arriving later. He had taken it upon himself to dig deeper into the code of the circus and find any bugs that may have appeared after the rebuild. Most of them were simple texture errors and collision glitches, but there was one major bug he found where if someone placed a block out in the fairgrounds and then drove a candy truck passed it, the circus would start to flip and glitch through the ground. Caine had been given his own world where he could simulate any changes to the code to ensure the safety of the actual circus. That glitch crashed the world itself to crash and fall apart, taking the computer that had stored the code he had been working on into the void. Kinger spent the following week painstakingly going through all the code again and rebuilding it back to where it was before the catastrophic crash. He started keeping multiple backups on multiple computers to ensure he wouldn’t have to do that again. He never figured out what exactly caused it, but Caine made sure to lock that particular vehicle behind its original world while Kinger ensured there was a conjuring barrier between the circus and objects.
“Hello my humorous humans!” Caine exclaimed. “How was the comedy show?”
“It was nice.” Gangle said as she took the seat Zooble pulled out for her. “Though, I think the jokes were a bit too...explicit for my taste.”
Zooble sat down next to Gangle, her left leg wrapping around the leg of Gangle’s chair for support as the appendage hooked for stability. “It wasn’t too bad. Punchlines could use some work, but it was enjoyable nonetheless.” they said with what Pomni would assume would be a smile, if Zooble had a mouth.
Gangle and Zooble had grown incredibly close over the past three months. They never claimed anything or said anything regarding it, but nobody, outside of Caine, questioned the dates every week, the late nights in the more romantic settings, and the few times they stayed together in each other’s rooms. Kinger told Ragatha he’d try and explain what romance was to Caine. He knew of love and what it was, but he had a hard time comprehending how it happened and how it flourished.
“I see.” Caine said as he whipped out a notepad and jotted notes down quickly. “Was it the timing of the jokes or more simply the jokes themselves?”
Gangle shrugged. “A little of both I guess.”
“Yeah, comedy changes from person to person. What I find hilarious may bore someone else.” Zooble said. “But it wasn’t awful. I’d have paid money to see them at a comedy club easily.”
Caine listened as Gangle and Zooble gave insight on what they found funny as Ragatha served the food to everyone. Pomni took a bite and couldn’t help but give an approving moan. “This is amazing Ragatha.”
Kinger agreed wholeheartedly as he quickly took more bites. “I’m glad! I used to make this for my siblings whenever my mom left town for work. Seeing them smile made my day every time.” she said her own smile forming as she remembered them. “I’m glad they’re doing okay.”
Caine allowed the humans access to the data center so they could keep tabs on Abigail, Susie, Zoey, Riley, and Grant and see where they’re at in their lives, to see how their dreams have begun to unfold. None of them could have imagined they would know each other outside the circus, let alone be as close out there as they were inside the circus, but it gave them all a sense of destiny. As if they were meant to be friends.
It was always weird whenever they saw Leroy with the group. He seemed so different from the person he was inside the circus. He wasn’t rude or mean to them but kept his sarcastic attitude up. Oddly enough, he seemed closest to Zoey despite his torment of Gangle in the circus. It was odd seeing him be so free and confident in himself in a way that wasn’t harmful, but while odd, it was also what helped keep Pomni going back to try and help him.
“I’m glad everyone got away from her.” Gangle said. “It sounded horrible living there.”
Ragatha waved her hand. “It was, but no point in reliving it.” she said dismissively. “How’s your oldest handling the college search, Kinger?”
“She’s trying to get into MIT for Artificial Intelligence Studies. Don’t know how I feel about that given the state of the world out there, but who knows? Maybe she’ll be able to put some ethics into that field. It’s changed so much since my time there, or at least the old me.” he said with a hint of pride.
After they moved the abstractions into the aquarium, Kinger seemed to be more lucid as time went on. He believed that knowing his wife was still alive and safe kept him from fading away. Zooble believed it may have been a trauma response to keep him from going crazy himself, and the dark making him lucid made him remember that his wife was able to recognize him in the dark and wasn’t completely gone. It wasn’t a completely full proof theory, but it was their best explanation for the change in his mental faculties.
“I’m sure she’ll make you proud.” Pomni said. “She’s a smart kid.”
Kinger gave a small chuckle. “She sure is.”
Pomni poked at her plate as she thought about Abby. She thought back to when she first entered the circus and tried to take the headset off, who she may have been with, what it must have looked like on their end or felt like. It was just a brain scan and the power wasn’t very stable in the building she explored. She tried to remember more about what happened exactly when she placed the headset on, but there wasn’t much there. The only thing she could think of is that since she was just a copy, that the moment the headset scanned Abby’s mind, anything that happened immediately after was nonexistent. She hadn’t experienced anything after that in the real world.
She had come to terms with it, but it still surprised her just how much of it seemed so instant. She remembered putting the headset on, asking the camera if it still worked, and then she was in the circus. Thinking on it, it made sense that it was just a scan. If she had disappeared, or if her brain had been uploaded into the circus and left her body in a sort of coma, she was sure someone would have noticed people going missing. At the very least, the building would have had bodies surrounding the computer desk from when the others put the headset on after closure of that C&A building.
Kinger didn’t have any real knowledge as to what may have caused the closure of the firm. Caine was semi successful, and he could only assume that they would have continued working on a more advanced version of Caine to improve on their past efforts. But with Caine breaking containment and taking over the data center for his creation of the circus, they may have had to shut it down to protect their assets and patents.
It was possible that Scratch’s real life persona was able to convince the C&A corporate figure heads to keep the data center functioning and use it as a way to observe the way Caine operated on his own as a way of study. Maybe C&A knew about the brain scans being opened and what Caine was actually doing, but due to limited understanding of what was happening, they didn’t realize how real it would feel for the scans.
All of this was a hypothetical. There was no real way of knowing what C&A had planned for Caine or what the plan was for him after he broke containment and absorbed Abel. It was possible that the portion of the data center Caine was operating in was just a small segment in a much larger program. It wasn’t Kinger’s job to handle that aspect of the code, so he wasn’t able to answer that.
Pomni shook her head trying to clear her mind. None of it mattered. If the power got pulled, or if C&A decided to pull the plug on the whole thing on their end, there wasn’t anything they could do. It would just go blank, with no real sign of what was happening. It was a peaceful thought, the idea that it would just cease with no warning. Better to just stop than to suffer in fear and anxiety. Like Jax. Like Kaufmo. Like all the abstractions.
Stop. She thought to herself. Just stop focusing on this for now. It’s not good. Not healthy.
She hadn’t told anyone just how fixated on the abstractions she had become. They knew she visited Jax on a near daily basis, but he was the only person she made a connection with who abstracted. And they knew she blamed herself for it. He had come to her before abstracting when everyone was practicing their conjuring skills. She didn’t know what he was going to say, or what he wanted to, but she figured he would be alright. He always returned, always came back.
Until he didn’t.
She wasn’t able to get through much of the abstraction to talk to him while she was visiting him. The abstraction had constantly attacked her when she entered it, the exaggerations of the other circus members and how he viewed them were all antagonistic, except for the Jax who played the piano. There was something innocent about him, like a piece of him that was locked away and not allowed to come up and show himself. The chains she noticed locked around his feet and the piano when she first visited seemed like he was a suppressed emotion, which she thought explained some of his actions in the circus.
She didn’t know much about his past, just what fractured pieces she had seen in his memory of Ribbit. She wanted to know more, to hear more about him and his story, but none of the memories or personalities in the abstraction wanted to answer the questions. And every time she had found the real Jax, he just kept saying he wasn’t deserving or supposed to be loved and cared for.
And she didn’t know how to respond to him when he said that to her. She wanted him to talk to her, but he never did. She wanted him to be comfortable around her, like he was with Ribbit before he began to push away, but he kept breaking down before she could get anywhere.
Why can’t you talk to me, Jax? The first personality she would meet in the abstraction always seemed to want to stop her from going further, choking her or swinging at her, violently pushing her away, but never going so far as to kill her. Or what she thought would be killing her. The fact they couldn’t die from suffocation or normal means in the circus made her think that she’d be fine if he kept going further with the attacks, but inside the abstraction, the corruption, it just felt different.
When she would hold her breath in the circus, she felt the pain of suffocation and the lack of oxygen, but when she was in the abstraction it felt as if her mind itself was constricting from the lack of oxygen, her vision blurring and darkening every time he came at her. She had been able to hold her breath for multiple minutes by now in the circus as she experimented with the limitations and design of the circus and compared it to her experience with the abstracted Jax. Her vision never blurred, darkened, or diminished when she held her breath. It was as if the abstraction was directly interacting with her mind, where the circus was merely simulating the sensation.
It was the same idea with how food worked. The digital food had no real taste, but the circus would simulate what it would taste like and tell the mind what to experience. In the abstraction, it didn’t feel simulated. Could the abstraction actively manipulate the code of the other mind files? If it was just corrupted code of the brain scans, could it corrupt the others in a much more intense way than what the circus could?
“Pomni?” Ragatha said, shaking Pomni from her thoughts.
“Huh?” she said, startled.
“You okay?” Ragatha asked with a hand on Pomni’s shoulder. “You were kinda zoned out there for a second.
“Oh...uh, yeah, I’m okay. Just...thinking.”
Ragatha looked to the others concerned. “Want to talk about it?”
Pomni shook her head, giving a smile she hoped was convincing enough. “Nah, I’m alright. Just wondering how Abby is doing out there.”
“Have you had a chance to look at the data channel recently?” Gangle asked.
Pomni shook her head. “It’s not my life. Not anymore. Besides, it feels a little like spying to me.” she admitted. She still checked in from time to time, but only to see how Leroy was doing. She didn’t notice any of the others really checking to see how he was doing, but compared to the Jax of the circus, he was just a normal guy who lived off sarcasm, but with less assholery mixed in. He seemed to be more genuine in his actions and relationships with the others.
It stayed quiet for a little while, the silence starting to drag into an awkward stage, the only sound echoing throughout the cafe was the clinks of silverware on the plates as the others poked at their plates, unsure how to continue. They all knew the reason she was silent. She didn’t really hide where she went each day after the adventures and worlds they would visit.
Ragatha looked at the others, worry spelled plainly on her face. “Look, Pomni, we know how much you cared about Jax. Even if we don’t completely understand, we know. If you want to talk to us, you can.”
Pomni stopped poking at her plate. She wanted to talk to them about him, about what she saw in the abstraction. But it felt like a betrayal. As if she somehow was responsible for keeping his secrets safe. “I...can’t. What I saw in there, it’s...not something I think he’d appreciate me sharing.”
Ragatha nodded her head. “Okay. Well if you need anything, you know I’m here for you.”
Pomni chuckled. “Thanks. Maybe I’ve been hanging around the abstractions too much lately. Starting to mess with my head a bit.”
“Why don’t you spend some time creating your own adventure? Use some creative freedom to express your thoughts and help unmuddy your brain.” Kinger suggested.
“Yeah, it’d be fun to see what you make. You always tag along with us on ours, but you haven’t made one yourself since the remade that one expedition you went on in the abandoned hospital.” Zooble chimed in.
Pomni shuddered. “Yeah, I don’t know. I didn’t really have a creative instinct out there. I tended to morph what I saw in the world around me into new and interesting perspectives. Kinda got me labeled as the weird kid in school.”
“Nothing wrong with weird. I mean, look at me.” Zooble said, taking one of their arms off and placing it on the counter. It jumped and wiggled around before resting on Gangle’s lap.
Pomni chuckled softly. “Okay, sure, but I just don’t know if my adventures would be anything more than just a recreation of what I experienced out there. Or at least, what I can remember.”
“Don’t worry, Pomni. I’m sure you cook up something amazing.” Caine said reassuringly.
“It’d be nice to see you make something of your own.” Ragatha said. “Even if it’s a recreation. It’s a start.”
Pomni sighed. “Okay. I’ll think of something. It probably would do me good to take a break.” she said as she stepped down from her chair. “I think I’ll head to bed early today. Feel like I got turned inside out today.”
“Okay. Get some rest, Pomni. We’ll see you tomorrow.” Ragatha said as Caine cleared her plate from the counter with a snap. As she walked down the stairs from the cafe, Ragatha let out a soft sigh and put her head in her hands. “I wish she’d leave him be.”
“Yeah. But you know why she does it.” Zooble said as they reattached their arm to their torso. “Remember what she said happened the day before he abstracted?”
Ragatha nodded. “Yeah. I just...wish she would feel comfortable talking about it.”
“I think it’s just hard to describe. Kinger is the only other one to have gone inside one of the abstracted circus members, and it didn’t exactly leave him in good spirits.” Gangle mentioned.
“It’s...a bit crazy inside there.” he admitted. “It’s like seeing everything they view as wrong with them on a macro scale.”
“Sounds terrifying.” Ragatha admitted, especially considering how Jax acted.
“Give her time. I’m sure she’ll come out of it alright. She helped us all find ourselves. We’ll be there for her if and when she needs us.” Zooble assured them.
***
Pomni laid on her bed and stared at the ceiling. Now that Caine had given them access to change parts of the circus that weren’t hardwired in, she had changed her room around to make her more comfortable. Her old bunk bed was now a queen size bed with simple sheets and comforter, the blocks were replaced with some old polaroid cameras with different lenses, and her walls were covered with pictures of different world wonders as well some from the circus. She enjoyed photography and filmmaking; the process of editing and framing shots to force a perspective intrigued her, and it made her happy to capture how free her friends looked in their worlds and capture how their brains worked and expressed themselves.
“How can I use this to get him to open up?” she said to herself. “How can I get him to talk to me?”
She sat up quickly as she remembered one of the doors that was in the abstraction. It was boarded and locked up when she first entered the abstraction, but she remembered that after he last one, it looked less secured, as if a board or two had gone missing.
“What’s behind that door that he doesn’t want anyone to see? Could it be what caused him to push Ribbit away?” she asked herself as she stood up and walked over to her desk, taking a piece of paper as she started to draw what she remembered inside the abstraction.
Gangle had made a world where she could create comic boards on a large and wide scale, her avatar reaching the highest heights as she drew large world sets to help her establish what she wanted for a world in her comic strips. It helped Pomni develop her own storyboards that she would use for her photos around the circus.
She started with what she could remember from her first time in the abstraction. It was fuzzy after the months that have passed, but the one thing she remembered clearly was the fear on who she called ‘Piano Jax.’ It was like he was scared of what may happen by giving her the key, but knowing that it needed to happen. The ‘Looney Jax’ was uncaring about everything, the ‘Choking Jax’ was aggressive to his other personalities, and ‘Maid Jax’ was very effeminate in a very uncaring manner. But they all seemed to lose control when a noise came from the boarded and locked door in the room.
“What are they hiding?”