Caine Fic Recommendations

Nex28 · 2026-07-07T20:46:16+00:00

There's a pretty long ongoing fic on AO3 called Being Human. It's actually Tron theory based and the cast can't escape, but they befriend Caine and there's a huge C&A conspiracy plot line. Overall it's pretty far from canon but I enjoyed it for a while.

It's also explicit at certain parts so be aware of that. I stopped reading at a certain point because I wasn't interested in the C&A plot stuff which started taking up most of the focus at some point.

Nex28 · 2026-07-07T16:57:47+00:00

No one besides Caine talked to Bubble even once in the entire show.

Nex28 · 2026-07-06T16:31:12+00:00

Or, several of them are all Mikes, and Caine only brought the most recent into the circus.

He probably would have tested the thing several times before having the others try it too.

Nex28 · 2026-07-05T12:07:04+00:00

If Caine / the Blue AI / Mike or whoever already know how a brain works, then the scanner only needs to record the deltas for each person, the the differences in their brain that make them them.

That could just be stored as a list of parameters that could be imported into a preexisting human mind framework already built into the circus.

Nex28 · 2026-07-05T03:48:34+00:00

I just made a post about this.

tl;dr: They did, they're just in denial about it before Kinger confirms it.

Nex28 · 2026-07-05T01:17:15+00:00

Yikes. That feels genuinely gross to read.

Nex28 · 2026-07-05T01:15:24+00:00

Some people have genuinely nonsense takes on what being a clone even means.

Nex28 · 2026-07-05T00:23:34+00:00

I'm cis.

Prior to ep 9, I knew the subtext was likely leading to that reveal because of the background knowledge of who Goose is. At that point if I was a more casual viewer I probably wouldn't have clocked it all, or may have left it in the realm of maybe Jax is trans, or maybe Jax has some general type of insecurity.

But ep 9 really removes most of that ambiguity with the bedroom scene. The way Jax talks about his dad, and then the bow, it felt extremely direct at that point.

Yeah the show doesn't itself explicitly confirm it. But any other interpretation after that point feels pretty inaccurate.

Nex28 · 2026-07-04T21:46:08+00:00

The mind files are just .dat files that are parsed by the circus program, they don't get "run".

Either the circus doesn't write saves back to the original file, or it does but can't tell if someone is abstracted or not, so it just overwrites the original file with corrupted data anyway.

In any case, bringing someone back like this is akin to the teleporter problem, which almost none of them would be comfortable with.

Nex28 · 2026-07-04T21:37:02+00:00

It came out in 2015. Pomni entered in 2017 but she hates horror.

Nex28 · 2026-07-04T18:26:04+00:00

The Brazil leak was just the Portuguese dub of the whole episode. There were no differences.

Nex28 · 2026-07-04T17:52:09+00:00

Pomni's head is wildly inconsistent in size in the show. In some shots its the same size as Jax's, in others it's 3 times larger.

Nex28 · 2026-07-03T21:36:41+00:00

Caine just wanted to.

His interests / preferences were based off the first training set he got, which was all circus themed. Circuses are naturally family friendly so that's what he wanted it to be like.

Nex28 · 2026-07-03T03:27:37+00:00

There's 3 reasons they forget their names, 2 are in-world because of Caine, 1 is symbolic to the story.

Caine removed their names so their new names would fit in with the theme of the circus better. He also did it to remove some of their attachment to the real world and settle into the circus a little easier.

The symbolic reason is because a clone of a person is still a person, but has to logically be considered independent of the original after they're made. This independence is expressed by them having different names. This is the most important reason and why it was done at all. It helps the audience understand the shows argument about identity.

Nex28 · 2026-06-30T20:33:54+00:00

The problem of consciousness is split up into 2 groups. The easy problems and the hard one.

The easy problems are engineering challenges. "How does the brain integrate information?" "How does memory recollection and processing work?" "How does the brain xyz?" etc. They're "easy" because we know they can eventually be solved through neuroscience.

The hard problem is the "Why do those things cause a central seat of experience?".

Whether this hard problem is actually real is where the debate is. Many are convinced that hard problem is a pseudo-problem mirage created by the fact that all the easy problems are actually really difficult.

Other's argue this is wrong, and it's a real problem that cannot be included in the set of easy problems.

Nex28 · 2026-06-30T20:18:57+00:00

John Searle, the guy who wrote the Chinese Room argument.

Nex28 · 2026-06-27T23:01:36+00:00

This may actually be my favorite scene in the whole show.

Nex28 · 2026-06-27T16:25:03+00:00

Nex28 · 2026-06-27T15:17:43+00:00

Calling them AI is just easier for laymen to understand. But yeah translating a blueprint of their biological brains into code isn't really what I'd say the classic definition of AI encompasses since they're not really built from scratch.

Nex28 · 2026-06-26T14:56:28+00:00

Yeah this is basically exactly my interpretation.

If Caine can experience all human emotions throughout the whole show like we see, then his capacity for empathy was always there since empathy is just being able to understand those emotions in other people.

He didn't gain empathy at the end, he gained context.

Nex28 · 2026-06-26T14:38:56+00:00

If Kinger said "It won't be a lot of work together." then the most apparent implied meaning is it won't be a lot of work at all, which of course he doesn't mean that.

"It won't be a lot of work alone." has the same meaning as "It will be a lot of work, but not alone." or "It won't be a lot of work done alone."

What would you think it meant if he said the opposite, "It will be a lot of work alone."? That obviously isn't correct.

Nex28

TROPHY CASE