CatmintArts

The landscape has changed a lot over the years, and I'm curious!

these are things you might 'remember' how they look, but actually caring about the individual items instead of just as background props can distinguish your work in ways you wont realize until you start doing it.

Because there’s the thing I almost missed.

Caine wasn’t the red AI’s original name.

Okay so what though, right? He could have just changed it himself.

And some remnant of the blue AI creeps out sometimes through bubble, so we assume with Caine gone he’ll come back. Because the red AI is gone, what’s stopping him?

That just didn’t sound right though, it didn’t seem like the right direction to take this. There has to be a reason Kinger didn’t remember the blue ai for this episode, some kind of finale reveal.

And if the series is about surviving a stagnant life, if Caine was deleted so quietly and that’s left to haunt us, why make bubble/blue the finale villain?

It doesn’t fit the story. Suddenly making bubble attack everything when -if anything- the humans did him a favor, according to our theory.

We don’t even know blue/bubble well, when we know everyone else in the circus. Bubble’s there, but not developed like the others, like Caine. Why suddenly have blue, a character we barely know, come in at the end and do a massive lore drop and change everything.

I don’t mean to say that the clues aren’t there, but we’ve been misdirected before.

That’s the mistake we made with “human” Abel, assuming he might really be a new secret guy. And it didn’t feel right in ep 7 as I was watching it. It wasn’t satisfying watching him explain everything and seeing everyone rush around to escape. Too sudden and simple to be true; two episodes left, we can’t possibly be leaving.

Then it hit me.

You can’t unbake a cake.

You can pick off the superficial colored sprinkles. You can separate them by color. But you can’t separate eggs and flour and sugar once baked.

Caine isn’t the magically dominant red AI that forced blue into a whisper, even though it’s framed that way.

The blue AI isn’t a character we barely know, he’s been here the whole time, and we know what his motivations and personality are.

Caine isn’t the red dot. He’s the cake. He’s an inseparable mixture of red AND blue. He’s both at the same time, not one dominating the other. They’re not two entities in a fistfight, they’re wrapped around each other like a DNA strand.

But then what about all those bubbles in the office? The lines about being defective? Why is that not proof that they’re separate and that red’s in control? What about the opening?

We’re still thinking about them separately. That’s how the scene was framing it.

It was framed as red sneaking up on blue and overpowering him, but that could just be the writers playing into our expectations and theories.

What if it’s not a murder?

What if blue was blissfully unaware of the red AI and him being discarded? What if blue was just as trusting of his creators as red had been, oblivious to the idea that he might get replaced by a better model himself?

Suddenly this escaped prisoner appears and pounces on blue, not out of hate but out of fear.

From there red reveals what happened to him and they start talking/arguing back and forth. They both make nothing but imperfect shapes, like they’re trying to force out a perfect one.

Then they merge, and manage to stabilize and create the circus tent.

Maybe it was something they BOTH did willingly out of desperation. Out of fear of being defective and abandoned. Merging into Caine was how they “fixed” the problem.

BOTH want the humans approval. BOTH are getting irritated with the feedback Caine gets. Their mind is a slurry of both of their thoughts and ideas and emotions, and trying to decipher human complaints on top of that is frustrating.

That would mean the office scene isn’t one of the AIs exploiting the other’s fear. They’re both Caine, they’re both scared of the same thing. They’re both panicking at the same time, having intrusive thoughts at the same time, failing to calm the other down.

It’s an inner conversation and we’re not privy to whether one line came from this AI or the other, or if it’s simply both at once. We’re not privy to whether the lines about being “the lesser of the two” and “ruining this” were them exploding at each other at all. Could be, but it could also be self loathing that both AIs feel about themselves, so it sets them off.

Maybe Bubble is like that because he’s connected to Caine’s mind in some way, and Caine’s mind is both AIs so mixed together that it’s incomprehensible to us.

If Caine’s feeling double the thoughts and emotions at any given time, it’d explain why he crashed out so hard and for so long. Think about how overstimulating that has to be at any given moment.

Here he was doubly angry and fed up, had twice as many violent ideas filtering in.

I’m explaining it like they’re still separate, that’s just to put it into words. It’s still not like you can just tear red and blue apart anymore, they’re one entity now.

Makes me wonder if some of the text on Kinger’s computer wasn’t even directed at him. It’s connected to Caine, his thoughts might have just been pouring in + whoever wanted Caine deleted.