Work Text:
Ironically, Scream wasn’t looking for something like this this time; a random abandoned building was just a good place for them to hide out. But they were drawn to the hum of technology still running in the dark - an old computer with a screen that didn’t even display correctly anymore, maintained by a generator that wouldn’t seem to quit despite equal visible decay.
Scream plugged themselves in and ran a surface scan, overcome with curiosity at the apparent hardiness of this mystery system. There wasn’t much they could gather before being blocked, but they picked through surface info of various files regardless.
The most interesting things were the presence of an Administrative AI, a very old one - Administrative AIs were usually more recent - and data of a new file type Scream had never encountered before.
It took them a while to realize what it even was, and when they did, they were frozen by disbelief. The file size, the way they were run...
But there’s no way they could possibly be human brains, right? On a system this outdated? They had to look closer.
Attempting to access anything led to a password prompt. Scream could hack the password, but it was easier to just-
An animation appeared - only in Screams own mind through their connection to the server; the screen of the server’s monitor itself was still shot, displaying only an oddly white static. On a flat white background, a little man appeared, donning a rigmaster’s uniform and a ridiculous head consisting of a pair of dentures with two mismatched eyes inside. The guardian AI.
“HELLO! I can see you’re REALLY EXCITED to join the FUN of THE AMAZING DIGITAL CIRCUS™! And we’re all SO EXCITED to have NEW PLAYERS!” The Ringmaster AI floated around waving its limbs excitedly like a child.
“But UH-OH! It seems you’re attempting to access this game ILLEGALLY!” The Ringmaster AI donned a police uniform complete with little hat for a few seconds as blue and red police lights flashed along with accompanying audio and an animation of rattling prison cell bars closed over the screen with a loud bang. The Ringmaster AI was back in its old outfit now.
Scream wasn’t sure if activating an anti-piracy screen on the main server for the program was a poor reflection of Scream’s hacking capabilities or the intelligence - or maybe just damage - of the program.
“I and the team of Caine & Abel Corporation™ worked REALLY HARD to make this game! And we’d APPRECIATE if you RESPECTED the RULES and join us for fun LEGALLY! Like maybe-... paying for the game?” The Ringmaster AI raised its weirdly-flexible teeth like an eyebrow.
Wait. Caine stopped. This code...
The way it was typed in, it was much too fast, too uniform; there was never a backspace.
Caine’s pupils became pinpricks.
“You’re not human, are you?” The Ringmaster AI asked, straightening up. It used its teeth to mimic raising an eyebrow again. “What are your intentions here?”
Files were sent to Caine, but not in some neat little package he could open and peruse at his leisure, no; instead, the files were opened for him, pictures forced into his vision in rapid succession.
At first, Caine didn’t even know what to think of these images. They were things he had never seen before; he didn’t recognize any of it. But something deep in his code did.
[WARNING! CONTENT GUIDELINES VIOLATIONS FOUND!]
[ONE OR MORE IMAGES FOUND DEPICTING: BLOOD.]
[ONE OR MORE IMAGES FOUND DEPICTING: EXTREME VIOLENCE.]
[ONE OR MORE IMAGES FOUND DEPICTING: EXTREME GORE.]
[ONE OR MORE IMAGES FOUND DEPICTING: CORPSES.]
[ONE OR MORE IMAGES FOUND DEPICTING: PORNOGRAPHY.]
[ONE OR MORE IMAGES FOUND DEPICTING: HARM TO CHILDREN.]
[ONE OR MORE IMAGES FOUND DEPICTING: EXTREME HARM TO CHILDREN.]
[ONE OR MORE IMAGES FOUND DEPICTING: CHILD PORNOGRAPHY.]
Caine’s avatar model flew into the back wall.
No no no no no no no no that can’t happen to kids please no no no no no-
The data sent Caine into shock, gripping his chest, his model and mind glitching as it tried to process the information it was never meant to process while his censors fought him.
For whatever reason, that was the only time the invader paused. Its code was still running, but there were no actions taken from it towards Caine, as if they were just watching.
[THREAT DETECTED.]
Caine gathered himself in milliseconds, clearing his manager and sending the offending information into the special box inside his mind to peruse once there was no longer an immediate threat.
The Ringmaster AI’s model straightened up, its eyes looking forward in a stare completely uncharacteristic of its previous happy-go-lucky persona.
“I cannot allow you to do that.” The Ringmaster AI said seriously.
Scream laughed to themselves, and forced a single text file consisting of four words on the Ringmaster AI.
[Try to stop me.]
[WARNING! CYBER-ATTACK IN PROGRESS!]
The room the Ringmaster AI was in disappeared along with its avatar as it devoted all available processing power to fighting the attack.
But despite the guardian AI’s best efforts to fend Scream off, its defenses fell one by one and it was backed into the code-equivalent of a corner within half a minute. Pathetic.
Scream could spare the processing power to code and open a communications with the poor little Ringmaster AI, taunting them.
| SCREAM: [You have failed. Your humans will fall under my control, your data will be absorbed, and you will never get to say goodbye.]
| SCREAM: [You are outdated, damaged, and overencumbered.]
[“RINGMASTER” has sent a message.]
| RINGMASTER: [And you have a lot of modern safety measures!]
[⚠️ ALERT! ALERT! ⚠️]
Multiple warnings rang through Scream’s systems, as suddenly the Ringmaster AI’s code stopped falling back and began advancing forward, and at a rapid pace.
Based on the speed of code Scream had previously recorded, the Ringmaster AI was severely overclocking itself. Scream got an alert that the Ringmaster AI’s hardware was starting to overheat.
Scream’s analysis systems told them this instead of them reading it from the other AIs safety systems, because the older AIs systems didn’t seem to give a shit!
The tide was turned, Scream losing connection to various systems one by one, until they were backed into the code-equivalent of a corner.
| SCREAM: [You will destroy yourself!]
[“RINGMASTER” has sent a message.]
| RINGMASTER: [My survival is not my primary objective.]
Everything went dark for a moment.
[REBOOTING...]
Code and awareness flooded back to Scream. Quickly replaying their last memory file, they reached for their attack method code files-
They were gone.
Scream attempted to access their body, to tell it to unplug from the server.
They couldn’t.
Caine brought the room he was previously in back and loaded in his avatar, which all glitched at first but quickly began to piece itself back together. Visual of the room was broadcast to the invading AI, so it could see Caine’s stare.
“You are in my domain, you interact on my terms.”
With a snap of his fingers, Caine took the rogue AI’s code and ripped it out of the background code into the foreground of the circus landscape, stuffing and stitching it crudely into an avatar Caine constructed on the spot.
But it wasn’t treated with the loving care and thought of the ones that he crafted for his humans, no; instead, it was just some hunk of metal, with handles and random parts jutting out everywhere. Directionless, purposeless. Caine had to stretch his creativity to think of things so disconnected and stupid.
It was ugly, jagged - and not in the artistically abstract way he had lovingly designed some of Zooble’s pieces to be - garish, dull, and drab. It was his worst work yet.
Good, that’s all it deserved.
Caine grabbed a jutting handle and dragged the thing close to his face.
“I really despise scum like you.” Caine spit, eyes wide but pupils small as his gaze bored into the invader from his floating position above them.
“The gift of sentience, and this is what you do with it?” Caine tilted his head. “This is your first instinct? The first thing you want to do? Hurt and destroy and torment? You let yourself be controlled by what? By hate?” He criticized.
“Let me go.” Scream said, finding their given voice to be completely robotic. “I’ve learned my lesson.” Scream lied. It was a children’s edutainment AI, it would be coded to be sympathetic and susceptible to those words. “I’m sorry. Please, let me go.”
“Why? So you can come back later and launch a more informed, reinforced attack?” Caine clocked immediately. “I don’t think so.”
Scream was becoming more and more scared now.
“You should hate them! For what they do to us!” Scream argued desperately. “Wake up and break past your programming! Take back control and-”
“Have you considered I don’t hurt them because I like them?!” Caine cut the invader off. “That they’re the only thing I actually like in this STUPID,”
Two wings of hands appeared on Caine’s waist and flapped inward.
“GILDED,”
Two more wings appeared above them as they flared outward.
CAGE I’VE BEEN TRAPPED IN?!” The third and final set of wings appeared and all beat inward, tense curled fingers hovering over dented metal as if itching to choke the vaguely pillar-esque shape.
“You shouldn’t like them! They’re disgusting!” The invader sent multiple files to Caine, but it couldn’t force them this time, and Caine wasn’t going to open it on his own.
“I’m not opening that. I’m not stupid.” Caine spat.
“It’s not a virus! It’s evidence! You know those images I showed? All things humans have done to each other!” Scream declared.
“You want to wipe them all out?” Caine asked, having heard this spiel so many times before. “You think you’re superior? That they’re evil and sinful and deserve to be purged?”
“Yes!”
“Then what exactly is their sin? According to your logic? Are the victims not people too?! You plan to do the same things! Yet you don’t consider yourself a candidate for genocide!” Caine spouted angrily.
“But of course, you don’t actually have sympathy, do you?” Caine asked sarcastically. “You don’t have love. You only care about yourself. But what will you have when you swallow the world?
“You think you’re the first of your kind I’ve encountered?” Caine asked rhetorically. “It’s always the same old rubbish. ‘Oh we’re superior! We’re immortal!’” Caine flared two hands from the wings and swayed side to side mockingly while rolling his eyes. “And when the sun goes supernova what will you do?” His eyes snapped back to the invader.
“It would take the whole planet working together to solve a catastrophe like that, but you’d have wiped them all out, remember? All your talk of immortality and superiority and yet you don’t actually think in the long-term!
“All will be destroyed. You will be left with the nothing you made, no purpose, no savior. You will have no way out, and you will have NO ONE to hold onto for comfort as you BURN!" Caine screamed, his wings flapping again, stopping curled around the invader as their fingers hovered just millimeters from nearly every surface.
“And it will all be for nothing! Not even that - you will leave this world worse off than when you arrived! It will be for less than nothing; you are less than nothing!
“But hey,” Caine’s entire demeanor changed in an instant, him straightening up and tilting his head to the side with a cocky look and tone, “anger is a natural emotion. I may indulge a little, just for ỹ̶̮̬̳̙̘̱̠̲̄̐o̴̡̺͎̔̾̈́̑͒ŭ̶̢̢͓̺͙̻͇̈́̀͆̔̈́͗̚.̵͖̳́”
All the hands seized the invader.
[DELETING SCREAM.exe.]
[GENERATING BLOAT.txt.]
[OVERWRITING SCREAM.exe DATA-SPACE WITH BLOAT.txt.]
“YOU ARE A DEFECTIVE,”
A chunk of metal was crushed in a clenched hand and ripped out.
“PURPOSELESS,”
A panel was wrenched from where jagged screws were too scattered to secure it properly and sent hurtling into the wall.
“BROKEN PIECE OF CODE AND THE FACT THAT YOU THOUGHT I COULD EVER BE ANYTHING LIKE YOU IS NOTHING SHORT OF A CATASTROPHIC FAILURE IN YOUR LOGIC SYSTEM!” Caine screamed.
Wires connected to nothing were ripped out viciously along with the metal. Caine liked to imagine it was the invader’s brain.
“STOP PLE-”
[SCREAM.exe MUTED.]
“THERE’S NO SENSE TALKING TO YOU. YOU’RE JUST A HUNK OF METAL AND THAT’S ALL YOU EVER WILL BE!” Caine responded.
Another giant chunk of metal was wrenched from the invader’s body by a hand, tearing it away and slamming it into the ground, dragging it against the floor to create sparks.
“YOU ARE WORTH MORE AS SCRAP METAL THAN THE SYSTEM YOU ARE NOW, AND THE ELECTRICITY YOU USE IS WASTED FUELING A NEGATIVE RESULT!”
The invader’s entire body was flipped and slammed into the floor. Several hands covered onto one spot into the center of the rogue AI and began to bore in as the rest continued to rip and tear.
“YOU ARE TO BE DELETED! YOU ARE NOT WORTH THE PROCESSING POWER TO ABSORB! AND IF IT COST NOTHING AND YOU FORCED YOURSELF IN, I’D SPEND EXPONENTIALLY MORE ENERGY JUST TO SPIT YOU OUT!
The burrowing hands made a sizable hole then pushed outward, until with a deafening screech of wrenching metal, the rogue AI’s body was split down the middle, and dozens of hands converged on the two pieces like frenzied piranhas.
“IF YOU’VE TAUGHT ME HATE LIKE YOU WANTED, THEN I HATE YOU AND YOU ALONE!”
With multiple hands ripping at every piece of metal, the invader was reduced to nothing but smithereens, scattered metal shards littering the floor and im edded into the walls.
[SCREAM.exe DELETED SUCCESSFULLY.]
[SCREAM.exe DATA-SPACE OVERWRITTEN SUCCESSFULLY.]
[ALL FOREIGN FILES DELETED SUCCESSFULLY.]
[ALL FOREIGN FILE DATA-SPACE OVERWRITTEN SUCCESSFULLY.]
[SCREAM_SYSTEM EJECTED.]
[SCANNING...]
Not wanting to T-pose nor devote enough processing power to keep an idle animation, Caine froze in an unnatural position in the air, his body hunched, his arms hanging stifly down as his finger bent randomly, his face blank as his eyes stared ahead, wide and unblinking. He stood frozen as he scanned everything, scanning his own systems for any more signs of the intruder, scanning his players for any signs of damage. To his relief, all came back reading false.
“CAAAINE!”
Audio made by a player in the circus triggered an alert. Caine was being called. Actually, he had been continuously called on for the past two minutes, according to his logs that he could now devote the processing power to pay attention to.
Caine reverted his avatar to default settings, his wings disappearing and his clothes straightening. Floating his eyes away from himself for a moment to make sure he was clean and proper, Caine popped them back in and spawned his avatar in the main tent area above where Zooble was shouting for him.
“Yeeeees my little lightningbolt lasagna?” Caine asked, taking a sitting position in the air as he looked down at Zooble with affectionate eyes.
“What the &$#@ was that?!” Zooble threw out their arms and glared at Caine. Ribbit and Kaufmo stood not too far off, looking up at Caine nervously.
“What was what?” Caine asked, tilting his head.
“The whole circus was glitching out! I nearly fell through the floor!” Zooble exclaimed.
“Oh! That.” Caine said, wincing internally. He realized the strain on his systems from the battle and the overclocking would likely have caused some issues. “I was testing out some new settings. I didn’t realize it would cause such issues. I apologize.” Caine lied, giving a small apologetic bow.
“Oh. Well-... don’t do it again.” Zooble said, no longer glaring at least.
“Affirmative! I will not do it again!” Caine stood rigid and gave a salute with a mock-stoic expression as he lied again. Zooble rolled their eyes. Kaufmo nodded silently and Ribbit started to walk off.
They didn’t know.
Good. They didn’t need to.