#scratch tadc

Scratch’s eyelids opened. For a moment, the office-like environment calmed him- maybe he really had just fallen asleep at work. But then he felt the mattress beneath him and looked up at his own outstretched paws. Right. Right, he’d passed out. Caine must’ve answered Wormo’s call and teleported him back here. Scratch pulled the covers over his head and made a distressingly dog-like whimper. No escape.

After a couple minutes of senseless self-pity, Scratch pulled himself upright. He was better than this. He’d invented a neuroscanner, dammit. He’d responded to a cancer diagnosis by deciding to cheat death itself. He could figure his way out. 

Caine had, for whatever reason, decided that the perfect bedroom for Scratch was one that looked like the old C & A office- four cubicles, each containing a work desk and computer, and this one having the addition of a plain-coloured but otherwise completely out-of-place twin bed. The last thing Scratch remembered from the human world was using the brainscanner he’d invented. It seemed to him that he’d appeared in the circus instantly after that, but whether there had been seconds or years between the scanning and the resumption of his consciousness was impossible to tell. Regardless, the logical assumption from that was that he was the brain scan, not the biological “him.” 

Except that didn’t make any sense. Why would anyone want him in a preschool show-esque circus tent getting dragged off by Caine at all hours to play weird games in worlds he made up?  Yes, he- the brainscan him, that was- was supposed to wake up in a digital environment to continue his life, but this… wasn’t that. It was frustratingly not that. His perfect, post-biological existence was supposed to be in a little cabin in the mountains, where he could work endlessly without interruption and come down to the village in the valley if he needed anything, with an endlessly flexible and creative AI assistant making sure he stayed mentally healthy and had his needs met. How had that turned into this?

Scratch was getting frustrated, and asking the questions that were too big, too quickly. Okay. One problem at a time. What’s the first thing I can verify as true? Checking whether he was a brain scan would be as simple as checking his email to see if the biological him had used it since… Let’s see… February 17th, 1996, the day he’d uploaded his mind. Yeah, easy. More importantly, if he could use his email, he could contact someone about getting him out of this mess. And, on a less practical angle, it would let him see today’s date, and thus how long it had been between the recording of his mind file and his upload to the circus. That would give him an idea of whether his biological self was still alive.

Scratch pivoted from his bed to the desk chair and clicked the computer mouse. The screen lit up, showing an aquarium screensaver with rising bubbles and swimming fish. Scratch clicked again. Nothing. He shook the mouse and then hit every key he could think to hit- esc, f1, ctrl-alt-delete just for the sake of it, the power button on the computer’s side, and got absolutely nothing. He checked the other three computers. Same deal. Frustrated, he smashed his fist into the keyboard of the fourth one, and the fish multiplied. Great. So the computer could do something. Just nothing useful.

“Caine!” Scratch called out testily.

Caine appeared instantly beside him, striking a T-pose. “Eee-yes, my darling doggy developer?” he said with far too much enthusiasm for Scratch’s tastes.

“I need a computer that works, please.”

“Righto!” Caine snapped his fingers, and the computer screen changed to a game of Pong. Scratch hit escape and found a few other Atari game options. He pounded escape a few more times, but nothing happened.

“Ugh, no! One with internet!”

Caine scratched his lower jaw pensively. “Well… I only have limited information about what ‘the internet’ is, but… here!” Caine snapped his fingers, and a video of a cat chasing a laser pointer appeared on the screen- the first live-action thing Scratch had seen since he’d arrived. “I believe this is the primary thing you humans use it for. Now you can use your precious internet on this computer and engage in gamery on the one around the corner!”

By now, Scratch’s voice was a yell. “No! Give me a computer I can work on!”

Caine shrank back a little and snapped his fingers. The screen changed to a colourful ‘match the shapes’ game for toddlers.

Scratch was seeing red, but he clenched his fist and forced himself to think and breathe. Alright, the AI wasn’t going to let him have the internet. What was the next best thing to help him figure out what was going on?

“Make… the screen… show the code of the digital circus,” Scratch said, leaning over the desk and breathing heavily.

“W-why would you want that?” Caine asked, sounding like Scratch had asked Caine to hand him an atom bomb. The AI had a self-preservation incentive. Interesting. For a moment, Scratch just waited for a response. When he forced himself to look at Caine, the ringmaster had shrunk back, folding in on himself and floating downward and away. As soon as Scratch’s eyes were on his, he forced himself to regain composure.  “Haha, you know, I can make these computers do all sorts of interesting things! Like sing! Or tap-dance! Or cook you a filet! Or-”

“Can you at least tell me today’s date?” Scratch asked, a little softer now.

“Today’s what? You mean the adventure? Well! It was none other than-”

“Leave.”

Caine’s booming voice fell silent.

“I need to be alone.”

Caine snapped his fingers and disappeared, leaving Scratch in blessed silence. Scratch made his way back to the bed and fell back on it. Okay. Verifying whether he was a digital copy had failed. Onto the next question: assuming he was a digital copy, how had his planned digital afterlife come to this?

It was like… like someone was playing a cruel prank on him. How? He’d been the one in charge of the project. Had he gone mad from his brain tumour and decided to… what? Torture a brain scan of himself and six other people? God… he hoped not. The doctors had said that his personality probably wouldn’t change until he was too sick to work, but they’d also said brain damage could be unpredictable. Still, Caine’s sense of humour definitely wasn’t his own, and this world didn’t seem like something he’d imagine. He couldn’t rule out the possibility that he’d literally and intentionally done this to himself, but there wasn’t much reason to think he had, either.

There were two other options. One, someone else had done this to him. Unlikely, but possible. He trusted his team. Of course, it could have fallen into other hands, but he couldn’t think of a single motive anyone would have for putting them in the circus. Experimenting with the concept of digital immortality would appeal to a lot of people, sure, but this wasn’t that. Test subjects should be completing standardised trials, not staying in vastly different rooms and avatars and playing what amounted to chaotic children’s games. It wasn’t impossible that they were being experimented on, albeit by extremely incompetent researchers, but it seemed unlikely.

The third option… was that the AI was doing this of its own accord.

That was silly, of course. His team had barely started training their first AI model when he’d uploaded his mind file, so plenty of progress could be made, but that progress was “make a circle”-level, and honestly the AI hadn’t even been very good at that. Yes, he’d fed it some circus images as an early pattern-matching activity, but creating whole worlds and gaining what looked like sentience? That was the stuff of sci-fi movies.

Except that Caine had already shown himself to have self-protective instinct. One that superseded taking orders. There was no way anyone would design a machine to keep its creators from accessing its code, and even if they did, they’d have it say, “access denied.” Caine showed fear. That made no sense from an interface perspective- it would just make people want to probe harder. Unless… it hadn’t been programmed. If it had evolved on its own.

No… no… no. No! That would mean that there wasn't necessarily someone aware and in control of this. That would mean that, potentially, no one was coming to rescue them.

There was a knock at the door, leaving Scratch acutely aware of how he looked- face in his paws, fingers crumpled against jowls. He straightened himself up and wiped the dog slobber from his paws. “Come in,” he said, trying to sound steady.

“Hey,” came Kinger’s gentle voice. “You okay? You had quite the reaction to that fall.”

Scratch chuckled bitterly. “It wasn’t the fall.”

“I know.” Kinger sat next to Scratch on the bed. “Look… remember that conversation the seven of us had on our first night here? Yeah, this sucks, but there’s probably nothing we can do about it. All we can do… is try to tolerate things until the real us comes along and either fixes this or shuts it down. And to try and take some comfort in the fact that the real us are out there living our lives. We’re not being missed.”

Scratch felt tears prick his eyes. “Yeah, that’s just it,” Scratch said, his voice cracking. “Your real you is out there living. Mine is either dead or will be soon. The upload is all I have. It can’t be like this. It just can’t.”

“Yeah… I know. It’s… I’m sorry.” Kinger exhaled and put a hand on Scratch’s shoulder, but he didn’t say anything for a long time. That was a first- Kinger always seemed to know what to say. “You want to come to dinner? We’re having a taco night, and Bubble’s really improved on his cooking.”

“I’ll think about it.”

Kinger got up. “Okay. Just… promise me you’ll talk to one of us if need be, alright?”

“I promise.”

With that, Kinger left.

Scratch stared at the door. He wasn’t hungry. Well, no one was ever hungry in the digital circus. It was more accurate to say that he wasn’t up to talking to anyone. He crawled back into bed. Not that he was ever tired, either, but he was up for some not-thinking.

About an hour after Scratch had woken up, Caine appeared in Scratch’s room, pulled off the blankets Scratch had pulled over his head, ignored Scratch's growling, grabbed him by the shoulder, and teleported him to the main stage, where the others were already waiting for their next adventure.