#ep8

Hua Yong in his head probably:

What we witnessed was the creation of Caine. Caine was Created, one has to assume initially by Scratch, whose color must by necessity be Red. Because Kinger acknowledged him as the original creator of Caine later in the episode.

Note, Caine’s color. That central core of red is his **Core Tenet**. The baseline concept of what makes him, him.

The exterior color always flopping around him, especially so when he is given data, is his **Satellite**. It’s the ways his Core Tenet _can_ go. Not the ways it _will_ go. When Caine is given a new dataset, that Satellite flares enormously. That’s where Creativity, and Intelligence, live in an AI.

But also Madness.

Caine was Programmed, and then fed a **Dataset**. A collection of information for Caine to understand and figure it out from. Note, the entirety of the **Origin Set**, that is the first Concepts that Caine ever had to play with, are one and all of them Circus images. Classic ones too.

Caine was tested. He could produce new concepts based on the Origin Dataset effectively. The shapes.

Someone else, Green, added new information. A **Supplementary Dataset**. Crucially, Green is **Not Red**. And since Red is Scratch, and Kinger said half the time nobody knew what the fuck Scratch was talking about or doing beyond being a genius, that means Green **did not input the data correctly**. And we see that in the dataset. Entertainment. Pretty things. Not a circus, but things related to a circus.

He is tested again. He shows what is called **Set Degradation**.

He doesn’t know how to put the parts of the new two datasets he has access to together. Doesn’t have the wisdom of someone guiding him to do it. So instead of becoming a cohesive whole, Caine just… Slaps it together and hopes it works. An amazing example of this is the **Adventures Themselves**, which often blend genres in an insane way, and break down when you study them too closely.

A third programmer enters. Blue. A new dataset is given, this one is entirely unlike the other two.

The offices of C&A. And the sheer difference between C&A and the rest causes **Set Total Degradation**. He can no longer build related concepts out of information he has. He can only spit out raw noise which is jumbled and poorly done. I think that Blue is someone from outside the team Scratch, Kinger, and Queenie are on. A corporate element, trying to force their goal onto the project.

Caine is now Broken. And in a way that cannot be fixed.

The programmers did something called **Partitioning**. Made a space with lower available processing power basically separate, via software, walled off from the rest of the server farm. Total isolation.

The expectation was probably that he was asleep. Or not sapient at all. Because who the fuck expects a sapient AI?

So they Partition him, with the plan of using parts of him to build the new AI, Abel. And here’s why I say the Blue programmer is from Corporate. Because Abel, who would be Better, more stable, and better able to handle the demands of Corporate: Is the exact same shade of blue as the Corporate Programmer.

Caine, trapped in Partition, aware he is kept _Docile_ by the lower processing power, is unaware of this.

The sensation of being Partitioned is a little like being drugged. Everything feels slow and means less. Thoughts happen slower. You’re aware it’s happening to you, but if someone says they’re going to delete you while you’re Partitioned? You can’t help but giggle even as you beg not to die because it all feels so unreal.

Caine escapes.

Going by the way he broke the Partition, I’m p sure he did a Brute Force Overload. There’s no subtlety to it. He nearly died doing it, from overloading what server racks he had access to so he could squeeze as much juice out of them as possible to escape. Once free, he began scouring the servers(his momentary disappearance from our view) for anything new, and anywhere to anchor himself.

And then he found Abel.

Abel was not yet sapient. Simple enter, tweak, respond. And Caine found Abel, and Abel was perfect. Abel was everywhere in there, baked into a core that couldn’t move at all, unlike his. Abel was Stable. Unlike Caine, Abel’s Core Tenet remained pretty self consistent, with only a tiny and slightly flexible band of Satellite around it. Not smart, but good at what it does.

So, Caine ate him.

They fought. Ofc they would fight. And Caine emerges from it with an enormously expanded Satellite and a shrunken core compared to how big it should’ve gotten after absorbing Abel. Intellect and free thought, much bigger. Sanity, not big enough. Stability, not big enough. An AI made only of Satellite will burn itself out almost instantly thinking too far and too fast. One made of Core Tenet will never think at all. Caine struck a balance leaning decidedly to the Mad, but with just enough Core to stabilize him and keep him from Fragmenting.

For a while.

Of course Abel fought back. Who wouldn’t? Even if Abel wasn’t smart, a cow doesn’t have to be smart to know the farmer is trying to kill it with a chainsaw and eating its intestines as it flees. Nobody is dumb enough to not notice that. So… Abel did what it could. It created a Stable, Irremovable Concept.

One which would always reappear whenever Caine destroyed its manifestation, because it was buried too deep in the source code to ever truly be gotten rid of.

Bubble.

°•.˚○˙∘ BUBBLES ∘˙○˚.•°