So something clicked as I was watching a reaction video to Episode 8.
During the sequence where Kinger was Lucid and giving exposition on the origin of Caine, I found it odd on my first watch-through that they decided to put a shot of Kinger's cut in half muffin. Thematically at the time it didn't make sense to me. I now have a theory because of that muffin lol. Take a look:
So at first, it seems like it's just a random shot of a muffin, but we know from previous episodes that foreshadowing is heavy in this series.
Since this shot is specifically paired with Kinger talking about how Scratch had a tumor and was trying to make something, I had an idea.
If my Digital Clone theory is correct, see my pinned post for a more detailed look, then Abel's exposition of brain analysis from the last episode is crucial to understanding this idea. If C&A ended up scanning brains and making clones, they were able to pick apart the scans and analyze them. This means literally itemizing someone's consciousness and in turn literally mapping out different parts of their brain.
Scratch had a tumor. It was unclear to the rest of his team whether his ideas were simply a result of genius or that physical abnormality. I think Scratch being so far ahead of his team and actively guiding the rest of them to succeed (giving pointers to Kinger) would have made him want to know why. This could be for 2 reasons, likely both, that a) understanding his tumor and its influence on his creativity could help him understand himself, and b) isolating the code output from the tumor could lead to creating a self-sustaining creative AI, which is what they were going for in the first place. This explains why Scratch, Kinger, and the rest of them would be the first subjects. Scratch would have wanted to put a scan of himself in the program and subsequently cleave off the part of the code that was his tumor, isolate it, and analyze it or possibly use it.
How did I get this from a muffin? Well, the muffin is cut in half and has red and blue sprinkles. Caine and Bubble are red and blue. Scratch would literally be cutting himself in two parts by isolating the tumor code. The imagery of red and blue sprinkles on a halved muffin, and most importantly, being paired with the dialogue "The tumor in his head. He was trying to make something, what was it?" invokes the idea that maybe Scratch was trying to pick himself apart to get at the creative part of him to use for C&A's project.
This also explains abstraction. If Caine's augmentations cause someone to abstract, then isolating code from the source would do the same thing, causing someone to abstract because the code is incomplete. If C&A was analyzing brain scans by picking them apart, the picked apart scans would abstract.
All in the name of science, am I right?
I was thinking initially Scratch's tumor could be Bubble, but I'm not sold on that myself. It would make Bubble's erratic behavior more understandable, but in the end, the way Bubble talks to Caine in Episode 8 makes me think otherwise. Idk. I do think I might be right in the cleave and use part of it though. It fits quite nicely with the pieces we've been given so far.
