Mastodawn

Anyone got any theories on where the final episode is headed?

I personally buy into the SOMA theory for the show. I think all the characters are just virtual copies made by the VR headset, so they're never going to be able to get out. It tracks with the fact that there's a "brainscans" folder where the humans are stored in .dat files, it makes sense with Scratch having had a brain tumor since he'd want to scan himself to live forever, and the way Kinger reacted to Abel by saying it doesn't make sense that they could get out, all points to them being virtual copies.

It'd be a pretty dark ending but honestly that fits with the show.

That said, I'm curious what other theories people have

#TheAmazingDigitalCircus #TADC #GlitchProductions #Gooseworx

Nyx Allocer 5d ago

@Rusty this feels like where everything is leading to a degree I feel. The fact that everyone's initial reaction is instantly "How do I take off the VR headset" and from what I can tell, Pomni seems to have ended up there by finding the machine in an abandoned building and slipping the headset on to check it out.

Nyx Allocer 5d ago

@Rusty this could also explain why they don't have a complete memory of who they are and how they got here, only the general stuff. It can only create an approximation of who they are but can't get deep enough to replicate them entirely.

Abstraction may be somehow realizing this fact and having their sense of self completely collapse. Causing them to use the "conjuration" ability on themselves to become skewed.

Nyx Allocer 5d ago

@Rusty it could also be that, Cain was in full control of their environment AND them, as he's shown to be the source of the profanity filter and he's the one who's given them those bodies. So Abstraction has an origin in him since he's shown as abstracting when he was being developed before he killed Abel (the blue dot) and absorbing them. The original flaw was still there and he probably modeled their consciousness after his own.

Nyx Allocer 5d ago

@Rusty one possible ending is that it's literally just ends up with a full reset lol. Everything is back to how it was at the start but Cain is "stable" and they all just have Never Ending adventures because they realize they were just pale imitations of Humans to begin with

Rusty Corgi 4d ago

@nyxallocer I'm trying to figure out if their memories of the real world are actually as shallow as they appear or if the narrative is just moving so fast that they haven't really had a chance to discuss it. I think the brain scans were actually probably pretty deep, and anything they're missing like their names or other memories were probably a result of Caine messing with them.

I'm not sure exactly how they're going to end it. Maybe they'll escape to the internet where the *true* horrors exist. But honestly I think it'll probably just be them accepting their fate and learning how to conjure in the digital world to make it palatable to live there with the option to delete themselves down the line. I'm curious if Kinger can, I dunno, clear the cache I guess? on the .dat files for the other players and revert them from being abstracted.

WeirdAlex03 5d ago

@Rusty Not familiar with SOMA here, but that's my prevailing theory on their situation, too.

And the live forever reasoning is stronger now with Scratch. Also fits with Gangle's motif of getting hit by a truck. Ragatha's mother was obviously physically abusive, maybe she went too far?

For people like Kinger/Queenie, they could've been """visiting""" as guests?

Jax had the flashes of driving at night through a residential/wooded area. Maybe an animal jumped out and went through the windshield? Or he hit a person and is hiding from the consequences? (Though doesnt seem to fit as well)

I dont know where Zooble or Pomni would fit into this idea.

As for how the episode itself could go, I have no clue. It feels like we just experienced this universe's version of a heat death. I don't know how they possibly continue from this. My only ideas right now are that either Bubble reconstitutes himself from the remains of Caine to take over or that the gang can conjour up a new terminal for Kinger to rebuild a new basic AI to take the reigns so that they can... ????

Rusty Corgi 4d ago

@WeirdAlex03 Yeah I'm super curious where it's going to go. It definitely seems like Bubble is probably the remnants of the 'Abel' AI in some way, since he doesn't disappear when Caine blipped out of existence and seems to know a lot more than an NPC should. That said, I feel like Gooseworx kinda had Caine set up to be the big bad, like a zany version of AM from I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, so I'd be a little bummed if there was an even bigger bad or something else behind Caine.

blobfoxthinkgoogly

@Rusty I think it also tracks with the themes set up with the stuff around Gummigoo. The point of that episode is that just because these NPCs are artificial and in a sense "not real" doesn't mean that they matter less. Pomni&co. are assumed to actually matter by virtue of being our protagonists, so having the reveal that they actually are also just as "virtual" as the NPCs now would further solidify that thesis. If they got out that would kinda undermine it because then it would look like they mattered because they're at least at some point "physical" and therefore the experiences in the circus matter because they are remembered by a "physical human".

Rusty Corgi 3d ago

@zvavybir The fact that they deleted Caine does seem to indicate that they matter at least a little bit though

The fact that they were able to change a supposedly unchanging world means that they do matter more than the themes of the plot would initially indicate. So I'm very curious where they go from here.

@Rusty agree about conjuring their own world, agree about the brain scans. i think the CA_NeuralScans (Obsolete) folder in the Characters folder might store abstractions.

i dont totally agree with the bubble truthers – i was transcribing kingers coding scenes last night (hard) and it wasnt really adding up for me. i think the bubble-is-blue theory is valid, but there are other possibilities

Rusty Corgi 3d ago

@pastelexuvia I don't really get why Bubble's data file is called bubble_chef. Bubble definitely seems like more of an elevated NPC that Caine was projecting onto, but maybe those projections were remnants of Abel.

That said, the one thing that doesn't add up to me is who was talking to Kinger through the console. Caine seemed unaware of Kinger trying to break in, so either the safeguard program Kinger was trying to circumvent was a separate autonomous runtime, or there's another AI lingering in the system. The whole, "I must hand it to you Grant, your mind was always resourceful" didn't feel like Caine at all and felt really foreboding.

@Rusty yea i couldnt think of a reason why devs would want to make a copy of a tiny lil .lisp into an entire model lol

when i saw lines like "NOTE: Hundreds of all-seeing eyes are watching you!" and "GASP! A critical malfunction in my SPECTACULAR systems!", i interpreted that as caine being in the chat while everything else was going on.

@Rusty to me, the resourceful mind comment suggested that caine remembers who kinger comes from, and was addressing him by his originals name. because when kinger introduced the torment daemon, the response was "WHOA when did you make THAT?", and that was followed by the comment about grant. to me, that seemed pretty cainelike, but i could be wrong.

my vague theory is that the torment daemon was running and eventually just asked kinger, "you wanna delete this mfer? oh you want to keep the module intact? ok. well. do you wanna just delete caine then? 👀"

Rusty Corgi 3d ago

@pastelexuvia I think the torment daemon was Caine's daemon and Kinger was trying to inject GreenGrounds into it. I'd imagine that was the daemon Caine was using after he snapped and started more intentionally tormenting the main cast. From what I can see GreenGrounds initiated a system fallback to ensure stability and Kinger couldn't override the fallback because he didn't know the password, then when it offered him a fallback option his input wasn't parsed as being valid, so it opted to delete Caine instead. I kinda wonder if Caine's constant intrusions messed up Kinger's text buffer. Kinger looked like he was just trying to swap out the torment daemon with a different program but when he was in the middle of that, it offered to delete Caine entirely, and Kinger fat fingered the DEL key instead of the backspace key.

But yeah, it's super hard to tell because the console is a pain in the ass to read. Thanks a lot Caine and Bubble

@Rusty OOOOOOO ok thats interesting. could give new meaning to "torment must be 100% accidental."

@Rusty would also explain his switcheroo command