Gummigoo is a one-off NPC that shows up in episode 2. Previously the bad guy in the Canyon Candy Kingdom adventure, he and Pomni get stuck in an out-of-bounds character model room and becomes self-aware from the original premise Caine wrote him to have.
While the friendship between them is short-lived, Gummigoo is the very first friend that Pomni connects with and despite being the new guy herself, she invites Gummigoo to the living quarters with her and the rest of the cast in hopes that he feels less isolated upon his self-awareness, and maybe lives there with her to share solidarity in how little they fit in.
- (08:23) Ep 4: Fast Food Masquerade
"Ragatha, where's Pomni?"
"Huh? Oh, she's flirting with the gummy guy. 'Cause she'd rather be with the NPC than with us, or something. I wish someone would flirt with me."
Most of the series wraps around the human experience and uses "AI" (presented like a race of sentient living entities, not consumer AI irl) to demonstrate that Pomni's humanity completely ignores the body inhibited and extends to how much the other person has in common with other proclaimed humans.
Even though he's an artificial intelligence, Gummigoo feels for a mother he has never met because Caine never planned past what happens at the end of the adventure until the humans complete it. He doesn't have a life outside proximity of the humans just like the humans don't have a life outside of proximity of Caine. Gummigoo and Pomni's interactions show that
- Humans and AI are capable of communication and developing new knowledge in the circus.
- Humans and AI come in all bodies and shapes, all decided by Caine.
- Caine has full access to the humans and AI, managing or allocating their files and having general control over them (can teleport them, etc.).
Even though Gummigoo's mother was never created, it's still something that feels real to Gummigoo, in the same way that the circus may be digital and artificial but still feels real to Pomni.
- (16:42) Ep 2: Candy Carrier Chaos!
"I guess I just don't want you to feel like you're nothing. I don't want anybody to feel like that."
Later in the series, we also learn that humans can conjure concepts and objects into reality just like the artificial intelligences. At this point, there are more in common between the AI and humans than there are differences: being under Caine's thumb and not being given as much thought past Caine's programming and as a consequence are stripped of autonomy.
Eventually by the end of the series the humans could prove they are capable of overcoming the ringmaster and proved that the hierarchy had no grounds in their world. Without the hierarchy between a ringmaster and his clowns there is nothing that actually establishes what makes the AI and human two separate races besides how they got there (which doesn't really matter, they're both never going to see the light of the macrocosm moving forward).
Given that Pomni actively empathizes with the artificial intelligences, I think it goes to show her problem with Caine was never about his status as an AI. She wasn't stunlocked by the AI and human distinction which explains why she recovered the fastest after the reveal that she and everyone else were instead snapshots of their real life human counterparts' brains.
If you ignored the AI element and shortened your scope down to the humans, even the humans are so different from each other; one of the humans has children, a couple of them are in their early 20's finding stability. Some have good families and some don't. Drawing a line bears no weight in whether they are included in the humanity club.
On the other hand, Jax divorces herself from being seen as human because it's the only way she can accept piloting a body that isn't hers from real life. She looks at her cartoon rabbit body and goes "Then I should be that." Most of all, she's afraid of her mind resembling a body that isn't hers to choose.
If I was in a body that wasn't mine I personally wouldn't care what would happen to it. I'd probably do a lot of reckless things or remind myself "It's not really me that's getting hurt." When Pomni accepts her digital body as her self, Jax chose to get worse not caring where she ended up because she probably told herself "it's not really my body at least."
Because Jax feels this way about her own digital body, she relies the most on the distinction between AI and humans of anyone else in the cast. She doesn't see the AI like Pomni does. She will completely dismiss the NPCs and their feelings for "not being real," most likely because them being real would go against how she generally feels that she's only really human if she was in her original body.
She will talk about the NPCs like they're toys or cause mindless destruction and griefing like any gamer does when given the prompt to, and she even does a lot of brutal things to the other humans which indicates she thought they were also "not real" until episode 8. This shows that what she considers real is not limited to the NPCs, but is just an arbitrary rule she declares onto others based on convenience.
Gummigoo's last appearance/impression on Pomni would be in episode 4, where she says her last farewells and rests her memory of him. After Pomni bonds with and mourns that NPC variation of Gummigoo, that's when Jax begins to display a more obvious interest in her.
