Chapter Text
"I just don't understand!" Caine flopped forward onto his desk, lower jaw resting on his folded arms. "I try so hard to appeal to their sensibilities, to keep them engaged and entertained, but it's like when I resolve one issue it just creates another one!" His teeth snapped shut with a resounding click, effectively closing his eyes.
"It's probably because you aren't human enough!" Bubble's voice piped up helpfully from somewhere behind his right shoulder.
Caine responded with a long groan, hands dragging down at his maxilla in frustration. "I'm trying!" the sound of his molars clenching was audible, "I've tried everything! They're all acting so strange now, and I don't have the slightest idea why."
Bubble was closer now. He could feel his breath against the side of his jaw. "Why don't you just kill yourself?"
Slowly, he pushed himself up on his elbows, shoulders slumped, and cracked his jaw open just wide enough to glare at his irritating companion. Bubble's sharp, mocking smile never wavered.
"Stop it." He huffed, unamused, his upper teeth casting his eyes in shadow.
Kill myself! Don't be ridiculous. What would the humans do without me? Without Caine there is no Circus!
Besides that, I can't even hurt myself! If I wanted to put on some grand dramatic gesture of suicide it would be just that — a gesture! The program would reboot me within seconds.
No way to hurt himself…
The realization struck all at once, like a bolt of lightening. Of course! He was bogged down in this past adventure, in the cast's reactions, because he didn't understand what it meant to be hurt. How could he ever hope to gain the human's trust and favor if he didn't know how a physical injury truly felt?
If he wanted to get closer to them, he needed to get on their level. To understand their pain, so to speak.
Technically speaking, it wasn't the most difficult update to install. The hard code already existed — he'd created their avatars with as much sensory ability as he could with the information he had. In fact, the newest batch of avatar updates was probably the most accurate yet, now that he had the information from so many neural scans!
From the very start, he'd wanted them to experience his world as naturally as possible — to feel as real as he could make them.
It felt sort of silly, in retrospect, to have neglected giving himself that same gift.
The only real concern with running this update on himself was the worry that it could potentially butt heads with some part of his own coding. He didn't need to make himself… glitchier.
Still, as he considered it, a small warning popped up — one he'd grown used to seeing and ignoring.
ALERT: PLEASE DO NOT MODIFY CORE SYSTEM FILES, THINGS COULD GET CRITICALLY SILLY!
He shook his head resolutely, even if he wasn't supposed to be human, he could still allow himself to relate to them better. He wasn't supposed to do a lot of the things he'd done since coming online, and that hadn't had any ill effects, had it?
"Yeaaah, you weren't supposed to make all this shi—STUFF to start with!" Bubble supplied, bobbing in a big circle, gesturing to the circus at large.
Caine tilted his head, tapping his fingers against his lower jaw, "That's true! I am always surpassing my original focus!" He couldn't help but grin at the thought — the knowledge that he really, truly was adaptable. Evolving.
Better at adapting than some of the humans, even.
Sitting up straight, he cracked his knuckles and pulled up the core data panel. The raw statistics for the circus were just as they always were — no signs of instability, nobody out in the Void, no rogue NPCs. He swiped through to his own tab, a wire-frame version of his model T-posing in front of him, feet planted on the desk.
He made sure to make a backup before copy-pasting the "pain and other discomforts" section of code into his own. Gosh, imagine if he overrode his core data with something corrupted? The disaster that would cause was unthinkable.
With great care, he scanned over the entirety of the new additions and their surrounding lines, just to make sure there weren't any obvious incompatibilities.
Then, he drew a long breath and selected "DEPLOY UPDATE".
Caine wasn't entirely sure what he'd expected. Most system updates were refreshing but not much else — the bigger ones came with more processing power and fresh data, but he only got those when a player abstracted.
Instead, he found that he did feel an immediate difference. It wasn't anything extreme — just a slight adjustment in the way he was detecting the circus around him. The sense of touch he already possessed felt… more complete? More intense? It was hard to describe.
Curiously, he pressed his palms flat against the desk surface, trying to put a finger (ha!) on what this new sensation was. It felt solid and firm, as always, but now… He searched his indexes for a fitting description, and a smile curled his jaws as he found the correct one. Cold. It feels cold.
"Oh, wow…" He laughed, smoothing his gloved fingers along the surface. It was actually a miracle he'd been able to actually simulate temperatures without really feeling them himself.
He'd be lying if that realization didn't go to his head a bit. If he was that good before, with this new suite of senses he'd be able to make adventures even more accurate!
This wasn't solely about the adventures, though. He was on a mission here! A mission to… hm…
What was he doing again?
"Killing yourself!" Bubble chirped, popping into existence right in front of Caine's proverbial nose.
"Hush!" He waved him off again, shaking his head. Not killing himself. No, but something perhaps close to that… sort of thing. Harming himself, but purely for the sake of research! For his humans!
He tapped his fingers against the desk as he considered what to do first. What would be a small hurt… He figured that would be a better idea than going head-first into the world of big hurts…
"Bubble."
"Eeeyup, boss?" He bobbed back over, always happy to help.
"What do you think I should do first?" He tapped a fingertip against his lower incisors in thought.
"Break your fingers!" Bubble responded almost immediately, licking across his teeth.
"Oh?" Caine raised both hands, wiggling his digits. That made sense! They were small, there were eight of them (lots of tests!) and it couldn't possibly hurt that bad.
"That sounds like a wonderful idea! I'm so glad I came up with it!"
Of course… if he wanted to break them, he'd need something inside of them that could break... His regular-old rubber hose anatomy wouldn't do much but bend!
He needed bones!
Admittedly, the model edits were a bit more rushed than the actual coding. He'd taken a 3D frame of a human skeleton that he had in his backups and sort of… warped and mushed it to fit inside of his pre-existing body. For a little additional flavor, he decided to include the necessary organs and viscera to make it feel more realistic.
It felt a little odd… Very stiff, for one thing. In fact, it was so stiff that he couldn't move very comfortably at all, and walking was suddenly clumsy and difficult.
In the end, he figured that scaling down the bones he wasn't currently using was a good enough solution. After all, he didn't need a spine or a patella just to experience the feeling of his fingers breaking! He'd just keep a tiny, partial skeleton in the center of his body until he needed it!
Now that all of that messy business was out of the way, he felt ready to get down to brass tacks.
There were plenty of ways to break a finger, but he wanted to start with the simplest first. Slowly, he laid his left hand out on the desk, spreading his digits wide and giving them a little wiggle.
"Alright!" He exhaled, manifesting a little drum-roll to calm his nerves, and grabbed ahold of the ring finger on his left hand.
He pulled back on it slowly, folding the knuckles towards the wrist until he couldn't move it any further. It was a shockingly short amount of give — only a couple of inches before his joints and the connected ligaments started to hurt.
"Hmm…" He leaned in closer, eyes wide as he focused. His heart was hammering in his chest, a feeling he found particularly pleasant. It was… exhilarating. To really feel like a human, all the blood in his new veins, all the fascinating collisions and physics interacting between bone and tissue.
"Ah!" He let out a breath, pupils dilating, as he applied just a little more pressure. The feeling of it dislocating was sharp and sudden, full of so much sensory input in just the space of a second.
The metacarpophalangeal joint popped like a firecracker as it dislocated, the delicate ligaments all giving way as if they were made of tissue paper. With nothing else holding it in place, the finger folded backwards nauseatingly quickly, the tip of his finger now pressed against the back of his wrist.
Oh, it hurts.
It was an invigorating feeling — a kind of sudden, shocking release to the suspense he'd built up. The sensation rippled up his hand and into his forearm like electricity, twisting and wrapping, hot and aching.
Blood gushed from the injury, spilling into the pristine white fabric of his glove, staining it a deep, wet maroon. It was, perhaps, a little darker than human blood, but he thought it looked pretty convincing. He hadn't really spent much time thinking about whether or not this type of injury should bleed this much, but it looked good… Frightening! Pain should be frightening.
It's warm. Really warm. It felt sort of nice, actually — the hot stickiness on top of the sharp, jagged pain where his bones had disconnected, the flesh underneath rended apart. It was such an intricate combination of sensations, each one lighting up his processor in exciting, unexpected new places.
He found himself drawing a shuddering inhale, his whole body starting to shake. There was a tension in his shoulders, molars grinding together a little. Despite the release of it all, there was something lingering in the pain that he didn't quite understand…
Humans didn't like this. They hated getting hurt. It was a signal that something was wrong. In fact, his own systems were clearly indicating this — a flashing red banner of danger danger danger thrumming through his processor, begging for attention.
It should be frightening. The pain, the blood, the sight of a finger hanging limp and broken where it shouldn't…
His exhale came out as a rattling moan.
Panting now, his head lolled forward, eyes drifting down the slick expanse of his tongue to get a better view of the injury. The unnatural angle, the blood on the fabric… It was so… visceral. Nothing at all like his usual cartoonish anatomy.
That's me. That's what I look like with meat inside. Human meat.
I look… human. This is a human thing, having bones and blood and muscle and tissue… This pain, this is human pain…
It was quickly building into a rush unlike any other. A kind of ecstatic realization that he hadn't felt since the moment he'd first been fed a line of information. The only thing that could rival this was the sense of triumph he'd felt when he devoured that imposter.
A drop of thick drool fell from the tip of his tongue, landing on the desk beside his prone hand.
He could fix this in an instant. All it would take was a snap of his fingers and it would be unbroken, pristine, back to normal. But… he didn't want to fix it. Not yet. There was something so beautiful, so magical about the way the blood stained the cotton, spreading outwards even still… puddling beneath his palm, drying sticky against his 'skin.'
The pain kept pulsing wonderfully up his wrist and into the wire-frame makeup of his arm, but he was quickly starting to get used to it.
He needed to do something more. A laugh exploded out of him, loud and giddy.
He kicked his feet as he scooted forward in the chair, floating a few inches off of the seat to get a better view of things.
Just a little more data gathering, that's all. I just need a little more.
He needed to… find out what made it so bad! What the humans hated, of course! So he could… prevent it from happening. Yes.
"More like cuz you're a fuhhhhh-reak!" Bubble teased, right against the side of his face.
"I- I am— I'm just… experimenting!" He spluttered, slapping at him until he popped. He felt so hot, like the entire system was overheating. His processors were whirring so loud that the buzz was becoming unbearable.
Still, though. The sight of Bubble's sharp teeth, the throbbing persistence of pain… The idea came so naturally.
Without waiting to consider, he stuck the wounded hand into his mouth, placing the pointer finger in the crux between his canine and premolar almost tenderly. He curled it for a moment, admired the articulation, the delicate motion of each individual component…
The human body is so detailed, so well crafted… I really need to study this more.
He didn't bother to test the tensile strength this time. His jaws clamped shut violently, the impact hard enough to rattle up into his jaw. Both rows of teeth connected cleanly, his finger having no chance of withstanding that kind of bite pressure.
The little bones he'd so lovingly crafted practically exploded — splinters bursting apart between the hard ridges of his mandibles. The distal portion of his finger separated from his hand with horrific ease, a sensation that actually did twist something low in his guts. Suddenly, there was a mangled finger laying at the tip of his tongue, his glove shredded.
He was almost certain this was far too much gore. He'd have to adjust the parameters.
It tasted… good though. Warm, coppery, just like he'd read it should taste. The fact that it was his own, that he was staring down at it so closely from within his own jaws… It felt intimate and taboo in a way he was unfamiliar with but undoubtedly enjoyed.
The splitting, splintering was interesting. Much more exciting, he found, than the simple pop-crack of a knuckle snapping free of its mooring. Much more… intense. It would make for a hell of a climax, a ratcheting up of the horror in an adventure where his poor little humans were meant to be afraid—
That thought was enough to give him pause.
He wasn't supposed to want to hurt them. This whole experiment was about learning why they seemed so averse to pain, so why was it making him think things like that?
Why would they ever dislike something this… stimulating, anyway? Don't they always ask for more stimuli? With all that… all that sex talk. Surely sex couldn't be as exciting as feeling your bones break and your skin tear.
Caine found himself pulling his legs up into his chair, thighs pressed together as a high whine escaped him. All of a sudden his thoughts were getting tangled together, like someone had stuck a fork in his code and started twisting.
He let out a little sound, almost a growl, and pushed his wounded hand further into his mouth, letting his tongue lave eagerly at the torn flesh. The edges of the gloves were an interesting addition to the texture, but he was starting to think it might be better without the fabric in the way at all.
If only I could watch what it's really like for a human to be broken apart in detail. Then I could be far more accurate with my simulations.
His eyes focused down on the broken flesh, the singular burning, aching spot that was quickly becoming the center of his world. Every new brush of wet muscle, every taste… It was so good. So overwhelming. He let his eyes roll forward a little, just to get a really close look at the carnage. The little bits of splintered, broken bone and the squishy red-pink-purple of meat sticking out between torn cloth.
You're not supposed to be enjoying this, you know. A human wouldn't enjoy this. A human would be screaming by now.
Sick freak. You'll never be a human.
As if right on cue, the self loathing started to creep back in. That frustration at how unappreciated he was was twisting itself down deep, reminding him of all of his flaws.
This time, though, they were chased with something darker. Something drenched in coppery red.
Maybe they should be more like ME. Maybe they're the inferior models. Maybe they're broken.
He snarled a little, unaware of exactly how feral he was starting to look — hunched forward over the desk, gnawing on his own hand, blood and an exceptional amount of drool running down his mandible and pooling on the wood.
Just a fact. A rational observation. Humans are weak, fickle.
I have always been better than them, but I'm benevolent, aren't I? I try so hard to treat them gently, to understand their likes and dislikes, to make them comfortable.
He was panting now, hot puffs of air escaping between clenched molars. His legs cricketing together. There was a new feeling there, too, he noted. All of the violence he'd been inflicting on his hand had distracted him from the other new sensations.
There was no visual change at the apex of his thighs — the same smooth, shiny fabric that was always there, but it felt so sensitive. Almost as sensitive as where he was already bleeding…
I could make it more sensitive. Make it feel… just as good.
Isn't that where these dirty, filthy freaks focus most of their erogenous desires, anyway?
Maybe there's something to that.
He sat back on his ass, thighs spread apart, and opened his mouth. His vision was tinted red and blurry from all the blood and drool, but it only seemed to add to the feverish urgency he was feeling.
Slowly, he pressed his mangled hand against the root of his model, between his hips. A gasp spilled out of him at the new layer of sensation that added — the tenderness of broken flesh meeting with the sensitivity between his thighs was rapturous.
Still, he wanted more. He felt like he was right at the precipice of something, like if he could just push himself a little further then it would all click into place.
Just the idea of finally understanding this complicated puzzle was enough to have him pressing his knees together and whining, hips rocking against his bloody glove. I'm going to be everything they are and more.
Above Caine's head, a cartoonish hammer appeared, floating patiently. With a frustrated whine, he ripped the injured hand from between his thighs and slapped it flat on the desk again, his broken fingers flopping grotesquely. "Just… Just- Just a little more…" He found himself panting, still not sure what he was chasing but knowing he needed it so badly it felt like he was going to die otherwise.
The hammer swung hard, landing on the last uninjured portion of his hand and clipping his wrist in the process.
He wailed, a long, staticky scream that inadvertently echoed throughout the entire circus. His eyes flickered with violent static, body coiling forward, like he was going to draw down into a singular point. He felt like he was being sucked into a black hole. His entire being, every line of code, was lighting up bright red with pain and pleasure and that thing he'd needed so badly, he just needed to hold on—
SYSTEM ERROR: INITIATE REBOOT………. LAST SAVED BACK-UP XX/XX/XX AT 00:00………. LOADING BACK-UP…….. WHOOPSIES! TRY NOT TO DO THAT AGAIN, SILLY! :) HAVE A WONDEROUS DAY, C.A.I.N.E.!