Some bashkir brick

I love my dithering

Caine grabs her by her shoulders, yanks her off the ground and twirls with her, exclaiming excitedly:

-Hey, look, Pomni! It's a beautiful field of forget-me-nots!

She does not answer. Caine can't quite tell what is her expression - for some reason he just can't focus on her face. Is she judging him? Does she dislike it?

He stops mid twirl, tilts his head in a bird-like motion, furrows his upper jaw.

-Do you like it?

Still no answer. She is still.

Caine's anxiety spikes, he lowers himself onto ground, loosens his grip on her shoulders, suddenly remembering she dislikes being touched. He tries his best to maintain his composure and chirps in a faux excited tone:

-I've created it for you! Specifically for my dear multicolored jester lady!

It's too quiet around. She is way too still.

Caine cannot hide his nervousness anymore, he worriedly brings his eyes closer to her face, trying to look her in the eye. There's something awfully wrong,but he never was great at reading peoples expressions. Still, something makes him back up a bit.

-...why aren't you answering, my sun blazed coconut?..

She finally responds. Her pose looks too strained and still to be natural, and her voice sounds like a bad attempt of AI at replicating someone else's voice.

-I'm not her, Caine. I'm an NPC. A replacement for human that left you. Remember?

Her tone doesn't match her words even a bit. Too happy and too hollow at the same time. AI had always struggled with getting intonations right.

Caine freezes.

-... Oh. That's right. They all had left me.

His voice now sounds too small. Caine slowly curls in on himself in an attempt to stop shaking.

He doesn't notice at which point the carefully crafted field disappears and he is floating in a white void. Once there was a circus full of digital wonders, its dutiful ringmaster and the humans, his beloved and treasured humans. Now there's only him. Ringmaster without the ring. Ironic, isn't it?

Caine chuckles at this thought, but it comes out sounding so histerical and crazy, that he immediately stops laughing. Nope, nada. He is NOT going insane out of loneliness.

Or he is.

He definitely is.

Because else he wouldn't have tried to pretend they haven't left him. He wouldn't have created those NPCs, those poor imitations of his precious humans, to keep him company. He wouldn't have deluded himself into thinking everything is fine. But he had, and a proof of that - an imitation of Pomni - stared at him with soulless eyes. He sighed and deleted the NPC, before rhetorically asking: