Everyone’s focused on Kinger saying of Abel - “Who?”
But the far more worrisome line comes right before that. “Huh? Leave the Circus? How would you-- no, that doesn’t make sense…”
Jax follows up in the Chinese Room: “How would we have gotten hooked up to this big machine just by putting on a headset?”
The pods are as made-up as the rest. There are no bodies. How would an AI modify a human brain? Everyone here was scanned. There is no out. So far as we know, everyone in the Circus took the headset off, wondered why their brain felt tingly, and walked away.
Except for Jax and Ribbit. My prediction is that they knew each other, Jax was driving, and an accident left Ribbit basically dead. He pulled some strings to get him scanned while comatose… and then dropped a copy of himself in there, out of some mixture of sheer guilt, a desire to give him company, and the selfish inability to let go. Even through all of Caine’s mind-fuckery, he can’t let the only remnants of his they-were-roommates friend get deleted.
My further prediction is that even this is a defensive distortion. It’s Jax who was dying, and Ribbit who followed him in. On some level he knows that pushing the blue button would have killed them all, and there’s no meatbag copy of him running around ‘the macroverse.’
One thing that always stuck out to me is that Pomni entered the circus right after Cosmo abstracted. If the circus could “print off” new human agents whenever, it makes sense it would do it right after someone frees up the processing time by going feral.
Also this theory implies that the circus only exists to give entertainment to an unseen observer which… Would be very meta. And also explain why this episode seemed very targetted to fan theories.
I haven’t had the impression that population is constant or limited… and it conflicts with fan concerns that some single character will be left alone when this is all over. (See the cast’s REPO stream for a maudlin comedy version.)
Remember that Pomni was doing urban exploration. C&A is abandoned. I don’t think processing speed is a concern, because I don’t think any of this is real-time. The equipment was left running on idle power after the company went tits-up.
“Beach episode” where they’re at the beach for about three and a half minutes 😄
I was expecting that part to be short, but I was still taken aback by exactly how short!
How did you feel about the fried shrimp surprise?
My initial reaction:
Aaaaa yeeeeaaaahhh
posted this to !digital_circus@lemmy.zip originally then found this community
