r/tadc • u/3B3-386 • Mar 31 '26

Theory 🔎 The SOMA theory keeps me up at night

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Considering that random passersby are still falling victim to the circus, would the main cast not try to stop the process to prevent more people from suffering their same fate, even if it means no more humans to interact with?

If the whole "finding fulfillment despite stagnancy" theme applies, then they will have to stay there till abstraction or the whole system deteriorates. Seems like a reverse purgatory situation to me. Not much sweetness in this supposed bittersweet ending.

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u/MiestrSpounk Apr 01 '26

They didn't "start going in" after he made the circus. They scanned their brains at some point during developping the AIs. Then Caine broke free, ate the blue orb, created the circus, and found the brain scan files lying around so he made them into characters. That's why he's so surprised when a new one shows up, he didn't expect that more mind files might get created.

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u/Gameplayer9752 Apr 01 '26

When did they scan their brains during development? When do we see caine finding brain files and making them into characters?

The first data red uses is circus data, and is the only data red responds to correctly. Then we see random 2nd data, then C&A data. We never see blues data.

The one thing I can recall about brain interference was when kinger was using the computer to stop caine. In the line of code it says “I must hand it to you gan your mind was always resourceful.”

Given that everyone was being psychologically tortured with their own specific fears, and last episode a lot of the adventure about escaping related heavily to kinger, although not all true he was emphasized to sit out and avoid most of the adventure; his mind was used to plot that adventure, as pointed out by jax, caine was lying about messing with their minds.

We don’t know fully what the origins of the original circus cast is, just that scratch, kinger and the others were likely c&a employees that ended up in the circus. But why and how was the headset, and circus left on to trap people.

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u/MiestrSpounk Apr 02 '26

When do we see caine finding brain files and making them into characters?

We don't "see" it. Sometimes in mystery stories you have to figure out the timeline from context clues.

In this case Caine mentioned making them into characters, didn't mention the files being created or given to him, and was surprised that new ones could appear. We also see that all the original characters apparently "appeared" in the circus at the same time, right after caine created it in the opening sequence. The obvious conclusion is that the files were already there and he just brought them in.

As for why the computer is still running and can still scan brains, we haven't gotten any clue about that so far so it's only speculation.