whowho

caine is a creative artificial intelligence, meaning he can create and come up with his own things within the program. he was the company’s first “somewhat successful” attempt at building this kind of model. kinger says that from the very beginning his name wasn’t scratch, but he doesn’t remember what his original name was. scratch, one of the programmers, played a huge role in caine’s creation. kinger’s monologue implies that scratch probably had his own plans and ambitions for the ai, which kinger unfortunately doesn’t remember.

abel, on the other hand, was created by scratch as a more advanced version of caine, as kinger says:

"caine was pretty rough around the edges though. i wasn’t quite on scratch’s level of thinking outside the box, but it was good groundwork for something the rest of the team could wrap their heads around. i can’t say the same for scratch. his ideas sometimes were so bizarre and abstract that the rest of the team had no idea how to work in his language, either due to pure brilliance or the tumor in his head. he was trying to make something. what was it?"

that’s where the mention of scratch and the first abstraction comes from. it’s likely that caine held resentment and anger toward scratch for creating abel and abandoning him, and eventually, at the first opportunity, abstracted scratch.

(but this doesn’t really explain why the company is called c&a if caine was the first and only one for some time. maybe caine and abel were created simultaneously, and again, the programmers saw that abel worked much better. that way, caine’s line "but i’m better, i’m the original" could be justified by the fact that his name is the first letter in the company’s name)

however, somehow caine managed to bypass the restriction and absorb abel. it’s unknown whether abel disappeared completely, but some part of him is still preserved inside caine (thus the red-blue eyes of caine).

how exactly caine bypassed the system is unknown, but it might have been kinger’s fault. he probably wanted to push caine further as an ai and didn’t want to give up at such an early stage. that’s why kinger rewrote caine’s code and gave him various administrative privileges.

the headset acts as a gateway to the circus by putting it on, a person enters this digital space. most likely, after regular testing, c&a employees would put on the headsets and observe the progress of their models. however, after kinger rewrote caine’s code and the whole team put on the headsets, they ended up in the circus, a place caine created based on photos kinger had stored in the database. the image of a tent, a crocodile in a pool, masks, carousels, gifts - caine analyzed all of it and turned it into the digital circus.

it’s also known that caine created the program that generates a vessel-body to contain a person’s consciousness. the programmers from c&a (and later all the other characters) who ended up in the circus couldn’t remember their names, also because of caine’s intervention.

__________

while kinger was hastily rewriting caine’s code, among the large amount of text you can notice strange phrases urging him to delete caine. maybe that’s abel, trapped within caine’s code, trying to reach out to kinger.