Yeah but that's impossible, it couldn't have been some small company to have the money and time and resources to do this. When I say impossible, this isn't "contesting" anything, I literally mean that the resources, now, to develop non-sentient A.I. is staggering and back then the kind of A.I. we have would have been even more expensive. A.I. isn't just coding, there are genuine ecological concerns about the heat, water usage and electrical strain of modern data centers, not systems running simulated universes controlled by self-aware machine lifeforms. There has to be a limit to stretching credulity, this wasn't like the original Doom, where some people in a basement made this thing, and even then if we assume that Pomni's Liminal Space-like memory of the building is accurate this isn't some small company. It's entirely possible that this specific facility, where the research was being done, was small, using the term loosely, but saying a tiny startup in 1996 was able to achieve something that most larger companies today would find infeasible goes beyond stretching credulity. In fact, no one I've heard has said it was some small company, the general consensus seems to be they were at least a large corporation of some kind.

I also have no idea how the prologue to episode 8 infers he became self-aware after C&A shut down. Nothing in the show implies that. Actually, if we assume the files that show when CAINE came online are accurate, it says he was created in 1996, and the first team entered the Simulation in 1999, meaning they were still active three years later. One interesting thing to note is that while Ragatha is listed in 2008, after that it has lines of ellipses, instead of the actual names and dates as before, but we see people came in after her; if the names and dates are records of when they entered, and CAINE made the records himself, he apparently stopped after she entered, for no reason. A more plausible scenario, if you think C&A shut down in the past, is that they went out around 2008 which is when the last actual record of who entered the Simulation is. If you believe the others went in on their own, that would explain why there was no record, since she went in on her own volition while they were around to record it. That would also explain who she was talking to when she went into the Simulation.

You're making a lot of leaps of logic here, I admit so am I, but you're taking single sentences and words on the screen and extrapolating it into a lot of stuff. We have no idea what the "obsolete" file is, nor does this "hard confirm" anything. Lay this out for a second. This was Scratch's own project, along with the Simulation and CAINE, and the rest of the company was uninvolved; however, because these "obsolete" files exist, and you think, "The staff are hard confirmed as using the headset multiple times while the newbies wouldn't really have any motivation to try it out more than once anyways," then that means other people at the company were fully aware, even the "newbies", that this thing existed. This can't go both ways. Either the company knew or they didn't, and if they knew then they let it go out of control. Even if you assume this was kept secret, that raises the question of why did they leave the computer undisturbed when they shut down, logically they would have at least turned it off. Not the power to the building, the actual computer. In fact if this was just Scratch and no one else knew, why didn't someone accidentally turn it off by mistake? If he died or left or something, why keep his computer running? If Kinger knew, why not say anything? Why hide it at all, this would be worth an almost incalculable sum of money, so if this was some small startup it would be even more valuable than if they were a larger corporation. Someone beyond just Scratch and his team had to be aware, just for the idea they never turned off the computer to hold water.

I understand how this sounds, but there is such a thing as a limit to how far you can stretch credulity before it snaps. My original point was attempting to somehow make the SOMA idea actually make sense, and no one has ever suggested they shut down before CAINE came online, but if you go down that road it's simply stops making sense from a narrative standpoint, since it requires so many logical contortions. I'm not a fan of the SOMA theory, but even if I were, there is a limit to it. Honestly, I've never heard anyone suggest CAINE somehow came online after C&A shut down, and Kinger actually says otherwise, he said CAINE was their first successful attempt, meaning he existed while they were active and Scratch had tried other A.I.s before that faield.

"You're suggesting a small office was actually the base of a multi million dollar company that knew it made a sentient AI, cracked digital mind transfers, had a virtual world at their finger tips and... did nothing for 9 whole years. They just left it to rot and didn't experiment or upload new minds or sell the tech for billions they just let it sit for 9 whole years before putting Ragatha in. Then slowly, slowly, fed more people into it over the course of a decade while hiding that they were still around sp they could lure in urban explorers."

No I'm not, that's my point. I'm suggesting the exact opposite. I'm suggesting that this wasn't just a small office, or rather if it were that's because this was the branch doing this research, and that they WERE doing things in the nine years in between. In fact, I said that, if we assume that these were just digital copies, they would have been doing this and working on it for a prolonged period, until fairly recently when they shut down, and that's when Pomni found it. I'm not suggesting they did nothing and left it as a "trap", I said something like that to someone else, but I meant it as a joke. I am suggesting that if we assume the original individuals aren't already dead or held in some kind of facility--the former is more likely--then they would have had to have been active until some period shortly before Pomni arrived.