#pondering........

even allowing for an alternate history where high-fidelity medical imaging technology was available to a software company in the mid-1990s, why are the characters' neural scans so small? i don't have the screenshots to hand right now, but if i recall correctly, they're on the order of megabytes, not petabytes as you'd expect for a full model of a human brain.

when Kinger regains a measure of lucidity, he explains that the inhabitants of the simulation are able to manipulate their environment, “conjuring” objects by sheer exercise of will. he also knew that he'd be able to use a simulated computer to reprogram the system from the inside. surely he didn't just figure this out: he must have learned it years ago, when the initial group of C&A employees were still around. surely they all knew. what did they get up to, in the early days? did they ever manage to communicate with the outside world? did they come into conflict with caine?

is Caine (and, by extension, the circus and everyone in it) really hosted on a desktop computer that's been running in an abandoned office building undisturbed for twenty years? i don't think it's plausible that a machine from that era could survive unattended for so long. dust and spiderwebs accumulate. insects crawl into vents. fan motors wear out. hard drive heads crash. buildings decay, ceilings leak, carpet goes mouldy, pipes and wiring get stripped by copper scavengers. i've done a lot of urban exploration, and although i've come across plenty of perfectly functional vintage hardware, and while that does include a few computers that were still plugged in and running, none of them had been sitting untouched for twenty years.

why did it take twelve years for ragatha to show up? why did Caine imply that the trapped C&A members had doubted whether new people could join them? why was Ragatha at the C&A office? we know she worked in real estate: the simplest hypothesis seems to be that she was inspecting the building when she donned the headset out of curiosity. and we know she wasn't alone at the time. but then why did six other people do the same thing over the course of the next five years? was it an accident every time? is there really only one headset, sitting in a decaying building, with people stumbling across it every so often? how has it not been broken or stolen? why don't we see any pairs of people who entered the circus together?

and why haven't the circus members talked to each other about any of this? does Caine keep them busy with adventures so they won't have the time or energy to put their heads together? or have their discussions just been conveniently elided from the story we've seen so far? how much do they really remember about their lives outside the circus?

does C&A still exist? do any current or former employees know that a version of their prized “creative AI” has been running without external influence for twenty years straight? does anybody know that there are humans trapped in there with him? did the original C&A employees even know that they were having their brains scanned? did they realise that their neural scans could be used to produce conscious human simulations? if people on the outside do know, do they simply not regard the simulations as human? and what does society look like, in the year 2017— the year, in our world, that “Attention Is All You Need” was published— in this alternate timeline where artificial intelligence seems to be twenty years ahead of schedule?