Dirk

I didn't sleep well last night because THOUGHTS. Better get them out of my system.

I was trying to get the sequence of events in order last night, and something occurred to me: The order might not be all what it seems to be: In I Have No Mouth, which we know by now this show is heavily inspired by, AM changed his victim's perception of time in the end (as far as I remember - it's been a while). This plays a bit into the other thing I'm thinking:
I don't think any of the humans in the circus are alive as such.

#TheAmazingDigitalCircus #TADC #IHaveNoMouthAndIMustScream

3:42pmWeb
Show threadDirk7h ago
When Ragatha spawns in the circus, she talks to people she had been with, just now. Yet nobody helps her remove the headset. Even months, years (do we really know?) later, no one helps her.
And we know the humans were all exploring a Lost Place, so it's not likely that there's any infrastructure present to keep humans alive, and unconscious, and hooked up to a machine.
I think they're all purely digital copies of humans. The headset was a device to copy a mind into the simulation. Think #GhostInTheShell and #BlackMirror.
Show threadDirk7h ago
So real life Ragatha is around living her life, most likely not aware that there's a digital copy. Just that weird experience when she put a headset on that one time for a minute.
In my opinion, that would explain why Caine can just .. alter the humans. He's just software, and we know he's being kept away from the real world, so why would he have access to physical humans, physical brains?
And abstraction? Files getting corrupted or fragmented (we see the defrag icon in episode 8, after all).
Show threadDirk7h ago

And that would also mean that "people" can be stored and resumed, which makes the timeline we're seeing unreliable.

Now, what about Kinger? He was the last human of the initial "batch" not to abstract. So, maybe Caine was being extra careful with him?

Oh oh, idea! More I Have No Mouth reference: Maybe abstraction is the only deliverance from the circus? Maybe Kinger figured out how to do it to the others? Maybe they even all realized that it's the only way out, but were unable or prevented from doing it to themselves?

Show threadDirk7h ago

Maybe Caine removed that knowledge from Kinger's memory to stop him from doing it again once new humans showed up. Or Kinger himself wanted the memories of his friends gone and did it to himself? He did leave a backdoor, after all, with him becoming sane when in darkness.

The other enigma? Jax. He very conspicuously leaves when the lore drop happens. Pomni is worried about him. And then that nightmare with the shadows of abstracted characters pulling his fur from his body, revealing .. What, exactly? I'm thinking, colour like the NPCs, but body way more defined. NPC 2.0?

Show threadDirk7h ago

I think Jax is desperately trying to keep himself from thinking about what he already knows to be true. And I think he's different from all the others. I think his human mind file has been jumbled up with an AI. Probably not Caine. We know there was another AI (or is?). Anyway, I think he might be a hybrid (hello, again, Ghost In The Shell).

As for Caine. I think it's interesting that we get sort of a representation of his doubts, of his inner monologue, his inner demons (daemons, lol get it?) with Bubble. Why would an AI even have that? What did the developers think here?

Show threadDirk7h ago

The reason I think Bubble isn't a separate entity? The tongue thing, in an earlier episode. Something had sprung a leak, and Caine had told Bubble to fix it. Bubble put his (its?) tongue on it, and when Caine puts out his own tongue a few seconds after, Bubble's tongue retracts.
So .. They're sharing the same tongue? Caine even comments that this was weird.
Come to think of it, Caine might not be aware of who / what Bubble is, either.

Yeah, so. That's it from me, for now.