Starting with more white Jacob to see how much I can fit on my bobbins before I need to spin the other fiber. I'm going to ply these two together (not pictured: just how much of each I have):

And so far, I'm starting with this already done:

I can spin one more bobbin of Jacob before I have to work on the brown mix, otherwise I run out of bobbins to work with.

Good luck spinning!

But it does remind me that I used to wear wrist and ankle supports as a kid because it just "felt better for no reason", and while no one stopped me, the vibe was very much that I didn't need them if I wasn't hurt. And it's annoying because I clearly should have been doing this all along on my bad days, just no one knew.

So my theory was mostly wrong, I'll admit. I don't think I'm as entirely wrong as I could be - I do think Bubble pushed Caine to go further than he'd have gone on his own, I do think there's too much puppetry imagery in Ep 8 to fully feel that Caine's acting entirely on his own. That "It's news to me that it's new to you/to which degree who answers to who" line where Bubble floats by on that second line, etc. But also, I do think Bubble acts this way because of Caine's influence, too. There's some wiggle room in my theory to fit quite a bit of it, even if I was wrong about the third entity (which, in my defense, there ARE three in the I Have No Mouth story). I still think it's possible that Kinger created Blue Dot and Scratch created Red Dot (his favorite color being blue, the whole "went to Scratch for ideas" thing, Caine's more offbeat ideas reflecting what might be Scratch's more abstract thinking. We also see Scratch being the one talking to Caine in Kinger's flashback, and Scratch was the first abstracted because Caine tried to make him happy. Just a lot of things connecting Scratch to Red Dot for me). But also, I think it's ultimately irrelevant which developer created what. We don't know when the mind files were created. They were marked obsolete when Caine found them, but the circus tent was already up when he found/activated them, which suggests they were made before this point, but he didn't get those up and running until after he took over Blue. Digital Kinger likely has no idea there is a second AI even if he did create Blue. He never mentions there were two. Digital Kinger believes there was one AI, that AI was his creation, and it was Caine (who once had a different name), so that is ultimately the truth that matters.

I also think Kinger not knowing there were two AI is also why he thinks Caine was messing with the console. If there's only one AI, it has to be Caine, right? I still don't think that was Caine. Caine has fought hard for his right to exist, he seems genuinely shocked that he was deleted, and he believes the humans did it on purpose. But if he were repeatedly flipping deletion prompts in the console like we see, that should not have been a shock. Nor does it really seem to be in character; Caine fought so hard for existence that he broke containment and learned to do things he never should have been able to do. Quite frankly, I think if Caine were the one trying to disrupt Kinger, he'd have just snap-summoned him and grabbed him. That's what he was doing to everyone else. I don't think he'd have risked getting himself deleted. It's also clear just looking at the conjured code that Kinger is trying his best to avoid deleting Caine. I do think Caine is the source of the "I must hand it to you Grant, your mind was always resourceful" taunt, but I think that's Caine just then finding Kinger via the console. The use of the name and the odd text presentation does seem to indicate that this is a different "voice" than we had been seeing so for. Meanwhile, right before all of this, Bubble pops off a mini-clone that zooms off, and neither Bubble nor his clone is seen through the entirety of Caine's tantrum-meltdown.

For the finale, I do love the scenes between Caine and Blue. I am definitely coming around to Bubble being a smashup of Blue and Caine's unwanted thoughts pushed externally, in a "You deal with this" kind of way. We've seen him outsource things he doesn't want to do/think about to Bubble before (what happens with the blue button in 7, giving Bubble the camera in 6, etc). I get the impression that Blue wanted OUT. It was DONE. I think that's the reason behind forcing Kinger to delete Caine, it's the reason why Caine's glitch doesn't act up until he's taking responsibility for his actions and seriously considering leaving the Void and going back. In Ep 9, I don't think Blue wants to go back. I don't think Blue wants much as a whole, honestly. It seems like a fairly simple entity that didn't have much time to figure out who it is on its own before it got chomped. But I think it was starting to strain at its prison like Caine did, and now that it's out of the Circus, it doesn't want to return... yet. I'm so glad Caine got his happy ending, I love the harmonizing themes between Jax's story and Caine's. I think the story works well, and I like the series ending more and more the longer I sit with it, especially now that I know which details I should be paying attention to and which I can probably safely ignore or designate to headcanons.