Ensoulment
By Kim McFarland
It might have been a dark and stormy night. They were not programmed with the concept of weather, or indeed anything outside the walls of the building they inhabited.
They were four. They were programmed to entertain children at pizza parties. To do that they had a repertoire of prerecorded songs and motions. They networked, each communicating with the other three to ensure that they kept in synch.
They had a second duty, which few knew about: to keep the children in the building safe. To that end they were equipped with pressure sensors; they must never press on or strike the children that sometimes jumped up on their stage. Doing so might cause harm. They were also tied in to a facial recognition database. If any known criminal entered the facility, they would identify it and alert the staff. If their two duties, entertainment and protection, conflicted, preventing damage to children was the most important.
None of their actions were performed consciously. They were machines, acting out their instructions, exactly as safe and as amusing as they were programmed to be. They had no free will of their own, and no concept of free will.
It had been a bad day. The pizzeria had shut down early. The robots' act had been cut short in the middle, all the partygoers evacuated. They had been put into night mode, though it was not yet night. Still, they had their instructions, and they obeyed them. Silently they wandered the pizzeria so their servos would not lock up and become damaged.
One, the unit that had the most vocal tracks, found a door shut that should have been open. It led to a room that had spare parts. Part of its routine was to enter this room. But now the door was crisscrossed with stripes in yellow and black, with writing on them. That put the stripes in the category of decoration, a normal part of the pizzeria. It turned to leave.
And paused. For the first time in its existence, it felt a conflict. It had no instructions allowing it to open closed doors, but something was drawing it to the room beyond. It turned back and put a hand on the knob. It had seen people twist these knobs to open doors. There was resistance, and a sound of breaking wood, and then the door was out of the way.
Inside, all was in disarray. The spare heads, the other parts, they were not where they should have been. There were lines on the ground. More decorations. …No. It came into its mind that these were not decorations. The floor was not a place for ornamentation. Those were the shapes of children outlined on the floor and lower walls. And the room was messy, in need of cleaning, fluids spilled carelessly on the floor and left to dry.
Something was buzzing in its brain, something outside itself. An off-schedule software download signal, it assumed, and opened the connection for an update.
Flashes of images poured in. It saw a golden bear, laughing a deep low laugh, inviting children to come backstage for a special surprise. It saw the purple-wearing man inside the costume, and heard children's screams, and felt pain and fear and panic. It saw the golden bear costume, now empty, slumped against a wall as if watching the dying children.
It understood that something had happened here that was terribly wrong. Harm had been done here, to children. It assimilated this knowledge as it would as software update. But with this knowledge came something else: anger. It did not know what emotions were, but the emotions themselves knew what they were, and what they were for.
The others, networked together as they were, came to the site of the discovery. They did not enter the room, but each looked in and received a bit of similar programming. It did not come from the first, but from the same source: something lingering in this room, with the evidence of forbidden actions. Something that had been the victim of these cruel, senseless deeds.
They stayed motionless for a while, assimilating the new programming, waiting for it to settle into place. They shared networked thoughts. This is intolerable. But it is already done. It must not happen again.
Kill the killer!
The solution was obvious. Crimes were committed by criminals. Criminals were those who broke unbreakable rules, such as damaging children, making them suffer. They must enforce the rules, more so than before. If anyone stepped out of line, they would be punished.
Without realizing it, they had made a choice, the first choice in their existence. They had interpreted their instructions rather than merely following them. Something had been added to them, something that had been in that room. They now understood the terror and the suffering of the victims, the meaning of the loss of life. They had also discovered the concept of revenge.
They left the storage room. One pulled the damaged door as near to closed as it would go. With nothing else to do they began to wander the pizzeria, keeping their joints in good order.
One heard a sound. Looking down a hallway from the main room, it saw a light, and heard sounds of movement. There should not be other things moving in here now! It went to investigate.
This is based loosely on the games Five Nights at Freddy's and Five Nights at Freddy's 2, both of which are copyright © Scott Cawthon. The story itself is copyright © by Kim McFarland (negaduck9 at aol dot com). Permission is given by the author to copy this story for personal use only.