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Light. That’s all he could see.
He squinted through his teeth against it, struggling to make out anything in the glare coming from the hole in the wall. The players were jumping into it with no regard for their lives, and he rushed forward to stop them from killing themselves, but before he got to them, he ran into a barrier that was as solid as brick yet completely transparent. Caine rammed into the wall head on and the impact nearly knocked his digital teeth out.
Kinger and Jax were the last ones remaining, with the former reaching toward Caine. He tugged at the AI’s collar, trying to pull him forward to no avail. Jax wrenched his hand away and grabbed onto the chess piece, throwing him over his shoulder.
“Are you insane, old man? We finally have a way out! Who cares about your stupid robot boyfriend! Go find a real person when we get out!” he yelled over Kinger’s pleading to Caine to come with them.
Caine was frozen in place, unable to move forward but at the same time, unable to move away from his love. Their eyes locked together and years of memory flashed through Caine’s mind.
Kinger’s face was full of emotion, pain written on every feature. Caine knew his expression surely mirrored this. He felt tears drip down his face and wiped them away before waving a solemn goodbye.
“I love you!” he shouted over the whirring and glitching of the circus.
That was the first time he had ever said it to Kinger. And now he would never see him again.
Kinger yelled something back. A promise.
“I’ll come back!” he sobbed, tears streaming down his face.
Jax pulled him through the portal, and the last thing Caine saw of Kinger was his white glove, reaching out to him, but he was unable to take it.
No he won’t. He’s lying to you.
~~
Kinger tumbled through the white breach in the circus wall with Jax, landing with a thud on the other side. He pulled his legs to his chest, rocking back and forth. Tears seeped through his dirty khaki pants as he rested his forehead on his knees, and he didn’t bother to muffle the sobs.
The most emotion any of the others had ever seen from him. He doubted that Gangle and Zooble had known that he was lucid in the dark, so they hadn’t seen him like this. Ragatha had only seen him comfort her paternally. Pomni was there to hear about Queenie, but hadn’t reconnected with him after that. God knows what Jax thought of him, the way that he had separated him and Caine like that.
He was only trying to help.
He knew that, but it hurt so much.
The feeling of loss was so intense that it hurt. He had lost Queenie to abstraction, and now Caine was stuck forever in the circus, alone.
Kinger had left him.
But he would be back. Even if it took him the rest of his life.
At least he would get to see Caine one last time.
~~
Caine watched helplessly as the rift in the wall closed, sealing him here. The invisible barrier disappeared as quickly as it came, and he collapsed to the ground without anything to support his weight.
His leg clipped through the floor, and he didn’t bother to do anything to fix it. He just laid there, staring up at the high, over-saturated ceiling above him, pain radiating from his thigh to his foot.
Time passed. He wasn’t sure how long. It could have been minutes—or days. He let the tile’s jaw bite into his leg, refusing to move.
Once, he halfway got up before deciding that it was too much effort. There was no one here, nobody to entertain. The others most likely would have smashed the computer that accessed this place, so he need not worry about new guests.
He wished that the program had shut down completely.
It would have been better for everyone.
Every so often he broke out into bouts of weeping uncontrollably, the entire circus map shaking along with him. He clutched at his jacket, wanting to tear it off as he wailed.
He felt it glitch through his fingers, flickering along with the rest of the place, effectively trapping them there. Caine tugged at his hand, eventually ripping the cloth. Glimpses of the white undershirt underneath became visible, and he didn’t care.
He had nobody to entertain, no one to judge him.
There were no people to see him break down.
No one to see him summon a half-rendered knife.
Nobody to see it bite into his skin over and over, or see him hardly feeling anything.
He was utterly alone.
~~
Kinger had run home after the others wrestled his phone number from him to contact him later, the computer sitting in his arms. It weighed him down, not just with the bulk of the thing, but with the burden of carrying a life in the system that resided on it.
When he reached his and Queenie’s old apartment, he was surprised to find that his key still fit in the lock. He braced himself for whatever came, but opened the door to find everything just as they had left it, covered in a thick layer of dust. He turned around in confusion, stirring up the dust, leaving a circle of footprints in it. With a flick of the light switch the fixtures came on, and he looked around the room.
He saw a sheet of yellow paper on the counter that he couldn’t remember leaving, and approached it cautiously.
There, in large printed letters, it read “This apartment is preserved on behalf of C&A.”
His company. The one that had built the game from scratch. The same company that had accidentally trapped him there was “preserving” his apartment? For what? Evidence that he existed? For twenty five years?
Kinger didn’t care why, as long as it granted him sufficient power to get to Caine.
He wiped the counter with his sleeve, everything on it crashing to the ground as he set the computer down gently. He plugged it into the wall beside it, praying that it would turn on.
A breath of relief rushed out of his lungs as he watched the company logo power up on the screen.
Inhaled as it glitched for a moment.
It settled, and he relaxed. The loading screen booted up to show the outside of the circus, and he pressed play. He pushed the headset back onto his face, and braced himself.
Nothing happened.
Kinger took it off and tried again and was met with the same result.
A tear worked its way down his face and he wanted to smash the godforsaken VR headset to the ground, but stopped himself. It had to stay in working condition.
The play button was glitching, bouncing around the screen like an idle computer logo. He flinched as he watched it disappear for a moment, but came back a second later. His mouse chased it around, but it evaded the cursor. Once he finally managed to press it again, the entire screen went black.
He cursed loudly and pulled at his blonde hair. Streaks of grey slipped through his fingers as he ran his hands through it, staring at the screen.
It lit up.
Went dark again.
The screen display finally reappeared and he gripped his shirt anxiously as he waited for it to load.
It opened the program.
~~
Caine had discarded the knife a while ago, watching it clatter to the ground and sink through the unstable floor. He stared at the spot where it had disappeared, unmoving except for his stuttering breaths.
The complete, utter silence pressed in on him like an oppressive blanket. It wrapped around his neck, strangling him—
He shrank in on himself, curling into a tight ball. Pulling his knees to his chest Caine let the quiet eat at him. It was like acid, biting into his legs, his chest, working its way down his throat. There was nothing to be done about it.
The horrible feeling overtook his body to the point of numbness, and Caine shut down.
~~
Kinger was met with the sight of a disintegrating circus, all of the colors melting together to create one, muddy reddish-brown. The small screen didn’t show him much else, so he tried to pan down to the circus floor where he had last seen Caine.
A fresh wave of tears crashed over him when he saw the poor man on the ground, teeth sealed shut. His sleeves were pushed up and—
Fuck!
He saw a dark, viscous liquid steadily flowing out of Caine’s arms, and he put his head in his hands, tears dropping onto the yellowing keyboard. His knees slid to the ground. Kinger wished that he could send a message, something—anything—
Wait. If he could get onto the game’s code, he could code a message into the game and let Caine know his plan! Well, once he had a plan.
This fresh ray of hope gave him the energy he needed to stay moving.
First, he needed a better computer.
~~
The walk to the nearest store that sold computers was brief, but Kinger felt every moment of it. On arrival, he found that the doors refused to open, and the “Closed” sign on them flashed at him. He groaned and turned away, about to return home for the night.
“Kinger?”
He looked behind him to see two people standing behind him awkwardly.
A redheaded woman with tight curls was next to a shorter adult with large, expressive eyes were looking at him, mouths slightly agape.
“Is that you?” Ragatha asked again.
“Yes,” he snapped at them, and something inside of him shriveled as he watched them shrink away. He ran a hand down his face, close to crying again.
“I’m sorry, girls. I didn’t mean to say it like that,” Kinger said, voice unsteady. “It’s very nice to see you.”
Pomni’s expression shifted into something like pity as she asked, “How are you, um, doing? What were you trying to get here?”
“A computer that’s up to date.”
Ragatha’s mouth dropped into a frown as she noticed how he had avoided Pomni’s first question, but she let him.
“Where did you drop the C&A computer? An alleyway?” Ragatha questioned.
“What?” Kinger was taken aback.
“The computer?”
“Yes, I heard that—why would I put it in an alley?”
“Where—where else would you put it?” Pomni asked, face full of confusion.
“My apartment?” He responded. “Why?”
Their faces froze.
“You still have access to your apartment?”
“Yes…?There was a note inside that said it was “preserved on behalf of C&A.’”
Pomni’s eyes widened. “You have a place to stay?”
Kinger’s stomach twisted into knots at that. “Do you—not?”
Both of the girls looked at the ground, shifting their feet. “No. Someone else was living in my apartment, and Ragatha refuses to go to her parents. For good reason!”
“Stay with me.”
It wasn’t a question. It was an order that they couldn’t refuse, and wouldn’t even if they had the chance. After endless thank yous, they walked to Kinger’s apartment together. The two of them made idle conversation, but it was clear that the man’s mind was somewhere else.
With some hesitation, Ragatha asked the question they had been dreading.
“Did you see Caine? Is he alright without us?”
“I—I turned the computer on, and—well, Caine doesn’t seem to be doing, uh, well,” he told them, mind bringing forward the terrifying scene he had found when he turned the device on. He didn’t tell the girls that, though.
“Oh.”
‘I’m sorry, Kinger,” Pomni said, and halfway reached out her hand as if to pat his arm, but stopped before she got to him.
“Thank you, girls.”
A few minutes later, they had arrived at the door of Kinger’s apartment.
“Beware, there’s a lot of dust. I still have to clean.”
They walked in together, and Kinger was suddenly very aware of the dust and crap everywhere. He looked at the trail of footprints that he had left, the panicked shuffle that he had tracked in the dust near the counter as he waited for the computer to work, the small circle of prints where he had looked around in confusion, and the place where he had fallen to his knees when he saw the state Caine was in.
The yellowing computer still sat there, screen dark. His fingers itched to retrieve the files from it, but he had nowhere to put them if he didn’t have a newer device.
He was trying to ignore the fact that it had been twenty five whole years since he had disappeared, and wasn’t likely to know how to operate a newer computer.
But now he had these two. They could help him out.
Speaking of, he wondered about the others.
“Have you contacted Zooble, Gangle or Jax about where they are staying?” He asked them, suddenly worried for them.
Their faces paled as they looked at one another. It was 10 o’clock at night, and the other escapees were probably wandering around with no place to stay. Pomni immediately pulled out a small, rectangular screen from her pocket, sighing in relief when it still worked. Kinger and Ragatha stared at it for a moment in confusion.
“What—is that?”
“Is that a phone?” Ragatha asked, face pale as she watched Pomni hold it to her ear.
Kinger’s mind gave him a quick picture of what a phone looked like, and it was not that. The phones that he had were like small bricks, with a tiny screen and the entire thing was covered in buttons. Thatwas a sheet of metal and glass that looked like it would shatter when you touched it.
Pomni shushed them with an apologetic look on her face as someone picked up.
“Zooble? Is Gangle still with you?”
A sound of affirmation came from the device as she turned the volume up.
“Okay, great. What about Jax?”
“He ran off a while ago,” came Gangle’s voice from far away.
Pomni cursed quietly under her breath.
“Ugh. Okay, do either of you guys have a place to stay?”
“Uh—We’re working on it,” responded Zooble.
Kinger spoke up, leaning closer to Pomni’s phone. “My apartment was saved for me—the offer is open, if the two of you would like that.”
After the initial confusion, they agreed to find his address.
“Thanks, Kinger.”
~~
Caine felt himself reboot.
The numb feeling was gone, the pain intensified tenfold, but he could find no physical wounds on his model.
Nothing.
Just an unseen, creeping ache that fought to get to his heart, eating at him. He was in his office, the room being the default starting point for him.
He hadn’t been here in a long, long time.
Hadn’t seen it necessary to restart.
It hadn’t been his choice, this time.
Looking around, he found a familiar, round AI watching him.
Bubble.
Caine turned away, but the—that thing moved closer.
Thing? Why did he call it a thing? Bubble was his friend.
Something was screwing with his head or—
Oh.
That was why he never rebooted.
~~
Where is Caine?
The AI was nowhere. Not where he had last seen him, not by the lake, nor the carnival. Kinger had searched all of the rooms and found no trace of him.
He hoped he was alright.
Kinger’s doorbell rang and he jerked out of his stupor in front of the computer just in time to see Zooble and Gangle walk in. Tearing his eyes away from the screen, he pulled his face into what he hoped resembled a smile.
He didn’t think it worked, judging by everyone’s expressions.
“I would offer all of you dinner, but I’m afraid there isn’t any food here. However, there is a corner-store nearby that I believe is open all night.” He glanced at the clock before looking back at them. “And it’s only 10:45.”
He tried to ignore the fact that it might not be there anymore. Although he knew they would all understand, he warned them of this possibility anyway.
The door closed softly a few minutes later, and he was alone.
He opened the program again, gripping the edge of the counter painfully with every glitch that came across the screen. Once it finally showed him the circus, he continued his search for Caine.
Every room was checked again.
Behind every block, inside of each toy castle. Up in the ceiling.
In the basement.
He was nowhere.
Kinger’s eyelids grew heavier and heavier with every click of the mouse, and he just barely managed to close the program before he drifted off to sleep, head falling onto the dusty counter.
~~
When he awoke, it was to quiet talking and a blanket pulled over him on his and Queenie’s bed. The door was cracked open and he could see the vaguest shapes of people hovering outside his room.
He rose slowly, body and bed creaking as he got up.
The chatter stopped.
Tired and aching, Kinger opened the door all the way to find three anxious girls waiting outside his door. And one Zooble.
The four of them froze like deer in headlights as they watched him walk out, blearily rubbing his eyes.
“Are you…alright, Kinger?” Ragatha asked him.
~~
Caine had always been irritable after he took the time to restart. He was supposed to, after all. It kept him running safely and smoothly.
Or rather, it was supposed to.
In the beginning, it had. He powered off every night to save more energy, and it worked well.
Then, something had happened.
The extra power going to the circus just—disappeared. Caine suspected that was when C&A had abandoned the project. He found himself becoming more and more irritable when he awoke, steadily growing worse with each power-off. It began to affect his adventures and the way that he interacted with the players, even going so far as to nearly drop one in the cellar to scare them.
For almost no reason at all. Sure, the player had been rude, but dropping them in the cellar? That had shocked him out of his stupor.
He had gone through his settings that night, alone. Carefully sifting through code, he got to his emotional levels.
All of the worst ones were at their highest, leaving things like empathy nearly at zero.
He never tampered with those.
Sometime while he rebooted they had reset to their original measures, which were horrible for everyone.
But now—to get them back—Oh, he hated this part. Each time that he pushed a value down to where he wanted it, it hurt. So badly that he avoided it whenever he could by never restarting. Which eventually led to him being weaker and contracting a virus, so he had to reset anyway.
But it was unavoidable. It would lower his mood, and overall stability, which could potentially harm the circus. Not that he really cared much, at this point, but if there was any way that he might see his beloved Kinger again, he didn’t want the circus destroyed.
Caine braced himself.
He corrected the values.
Agony tore through his body, fire surging through his very veins. His very code felt as though it was ripped apart, one number at a time. He was completely frozen, and though he showed no outer symptoms of something being wrong, Bubble was asking him questions that he couldn’t understand.
His model was being shredded—it had been put in a wood chipper, glitching pieces of him flying about—
And as soon as he had done it, the torture was over.
~~
Kinger knew he had been gone a while. He really did.
But somehow he couldn’t quite prepare himself for the massive changes. Everywhere. In fact, he doubted that any amount of preparation could have made the world now shock him less.
In reality, it wasn’t that different. But every minor detail stood out to him like a beacon, shouting that things would never be the same as it was.
Even small things were off putting to him. He couldn’t put it into words well enough to describe it to the others walking next to him, like human shields. Ragatha was also a bit overwhelmed, and she stuck close to Kinger’s side.
He had missed years of change. And somehow he hadn’t changed at all. Coming out of the Amazing Digital Circus left him the same age as he had been when he had gone in, same height, weight, even the same clothes.
Kinger should be 73 years old. Instead, he was stuck at 48 for two and a half decades.
Years of his life had been withheld—and it felt like a burden. The others had less time under their belts, less time for it to become increasingly unsettling. They still looked at the world around them and could see pieces of what they had left behind.
Yet it was nearly unrecognizable to him.
He found slivers of normalcy when he looked somewhere that wasn’t plastered with strange ads for companies that he had never heard of before or saw a use for.
He could see it in the small insects that roamed the potted plants beside him, perched precariously on a narrow shelf on display.
Crouching down, Kinger watched as a small bumblebee buzzed around a daisy, roaming freely around the plants. Going anywhere it wanted to go. It had no restraints, no barriers. Nothing standing in its way.
God, he wished he could see Caine again.
Straightening up, he tugged at his shirt collar, loosening it slightly. The others had paused and waited for him patiently, almost as if they had expected this. Or simply found it natural.
Oh. That’s right.
In the circus, his memory had been—well, a bit spotty, to say the least. It had improved somewhat after he had someone to focus on, ground him, and it was understandable that they would not find this out of the ordinary.
Even in the short time that he was out of there, he was constantly reminded of the fact that his mind was simply not as good as it used to be. In the past, remembering long sequences of code had been child’s play for him, but now he lost his train of thought every other second.
It was uncomfortable to think that it may not ever be the same again.
But he wouldn’t worry about that now. They had a computer to purchase.
~~
After some debating and discussion with an employee, they finally found a device that was suitable for Kinger to use.
He clutched the box in a death grip the entire way home, almost denting it in his nervousness.
When they reached his door, he handed his keys off to Ragatha to open them, arms full.
The simplistic white box held a picture of the computer on the front. The flimsy-looking thing was called a “MacBook Pro” which had been a newer model of what Pomni recommended as well. It was so different from what he was used to that he didn’t want to look at it.
Didn’t want to be reminded of what he had missed.
The worker had been insistent that these two thin pieces of metal barely hinged together would be durable. Apparently it was called a “laptop” because you could carry it anywhere, but Kinger didn’t trust himself enough to do that.
Once the annoyingly slow process of setting it up was done, Kinger switched to the computer that currently housed Caine. He hadn’t paid much attention to it before, but now he found it ironic that he seemed to have chosen the same brand of computer for the new one as well. This older, blocky thing was an Apple Macintosh.
Comparatively, the new one worked much better. It was faster, more compact, and overall preformed extremely well.
But in his mind it would never measure up to the one that had brought Caine to life.
At the store he had been surprised to see that there was no slots for a USB flash drive in the laptop. In fact, there was only two ports that had the same shape, and they were like nothing that he had seen.
Mildly frustrated by this, they had to find an adapter as well as an empty flash drive in the massive technology store.
They had managed to find them. Eventually.
Now he was home, and had transferred the game’s very code into this small USB stick. He held Caine’s life in his hands.
He plugged it in.
~~
The circus had gone dark. Just for a moment. Half of a nanosecond.
But he felt it.
Caine felt the minuscule change, the way that the ground shook under his feet, the sudden surge of energy that coursed throughout every inch of the place.
He had been weak from the sudden switch up in his emotional levels, but now—
He felt alive. Renewed.
And he knew it had something to do with his Kinger.
~~
When he opened the program again, it was smoother. There were no glitches that left him gripping his chair to ground himself. Some of the controls didn’t quite translate, and the screen was a little bit grainy, but he didn’t mind. He now had a stable device to work on the circus.
He got started.
~~
Later, he had the code written for the note, and a draft of what he wanted to say, but not his plan to get Caine out. The simple text would show up like a constant reminder in the corner of Caine’s vision, showing him that Kinger was there.
Always.
In theory, he could dismiss it rather easily, if he so wished, but somehow Kinger didn’t think he would take the measures to do that. After all, it was only a small box of text.
Even without a solid plan, he knew that Caine needed a reminder that he was there, waiting. Kinger would help him get out of that hellscape, no matter what he had to do.
He executed the code.
~~
Caine had access to dates and times now.
He could do research.
There was a huge store of energy that he could take and take and take from that only depleted minutely.
It was so, so much better than before.
But he was still alone. He slept to fill the time, the pillow fort empty aside from Bubble, who slept near him on occasion. The AI had taken to acting like a strange, bothersome cat that meant well after Caine’s episode, never straying far.
It was welcome company.
But it wasn’t the same. His heart still ached with the absence of his love. He could hardly breathe sometimes, it hurt so much. It crushed his chest constantly, never letting up.
He craved the comfort of being able to rest in Kinger’s embrace again. To be able to breathe easy, knowing that they were both safe. Now, all he had were unknowns.
What had changed in his power source? Where was Kinger? Were the others alright? Would he ever get out? How would his code hold up to the constant stress he was under? Would it crumple like wet paper as his anxiety became worse and worse until—
No.
He would be alright.
Caine would be fine—
He froze.
Letters, slowly, one by one typed themselves into a small text box in the bottom right corner of his vision.
Hello, dear. I miss you so much, and I hope that you’re alright. I’m here for you. I transferred your files to a safer, more stable computer, and you should have access to more power and information. We’re working on a plan to get you out of there, but in the meantime, just know that I love you.
And right next to that text box was a little chess piece icon, with the name “Kinger” underneath it.
He could have cried in relief. He wasn’t alone anymore. They were watching him, trying to get him out. Thank god.
He sank to his knees and put his face in his hands, struggling not to let tears fall down his face. Staring at the striped ceiling didn’t stop the tears from welling up, but he couldn’t find the energy to wipe them away.
They cared.
~~
Kinger surveyed the screen for any sign of movement, never letting his eyes stray. For a moment, he wondered if the code had been done right—Could he have made a mistake? While it was an obvious assumption that he did, Kinger was confident that he had not.
And so he watched.
A single pillow fell off the pillow fort, triggering a domino effect that led to all of the fort collapsing in on itself, revealing Caine in the middle of it all. He had sunk to his knees and held his head in his hands, and tears were rolling off of his chin. Although Kinger could not hear him, he read his lips as he mouthed two words.
“Thank you,” he sobbed into the empty circus.
Kinger broke out into tears, right then and there. He let the others pat his back and stare at the screen as they saw the two identical weeping fits. He knew he wasn’t being the strong father figure that they needed in these uncertain times, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.
It was a small price to pay in the steps he had to take to get Caine back.