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It started in a room deep in the Mega-Pizzaplex—or, at least, what would in a month be the Mega-Pizzaplex, a gargantuan mall and theater and children's entertainment center to end all of the above with its crushing brand might and a heavy dose of ponderous Late Capitalism. As such, beyond and below the flashy veneers the more utilitarian parts of the complex were wildly more stark, cramped, and bald of the trappings gussying up the parts seen by paying customers. The Parts and Service section was as grand as the Lobby and Main Stage, but all in grim metal and plexiglass. No color.
Now, in the small cubby by the testing chambers, some color. Jobe was a short, broad, hairy man resembling a tired-faced, blackbeard Santa Claus. For days he'd been fine-tuning the biggest project in his section—putting the robotic mind he'd been painstakingly honing into the limber, metallic form he had machined to high-wear and high-impact specs. Perhaps too-high of a standard; Fazbear execs were not too hot on how much labor and cost was going into one caretaker robot, and so the standardization of these high-end protocols and super-human constructions in their other robot entertainers was riding on the success of this one. Or so it seemed to Jobe.
The man grunted and carefully lifted up the deceptively large entity's slim torso to bring the soon-to-be Daycare Attendant into a sitting position on the work table. From a wide margin back watched a man named Fritz. Fritz was soft-voiced, stubble-faced, weedy, and not taking his eyes away from the deactivated mechanical monstrosity.
Afraid, of course, and mostly suspicious. He wasn't young and knew the stories. Of course, Jobe wasn't young either. He also knew the stories; for this reason, his thick, oil-smeared hands worked without tire to put together this strange robot, in the hope history wouldn't repeat itself once more. At least not in the same way—the same unstoppable way.
As Jobe stepped back and slapped grimy palms against the stained apron, Fritz squinted to the thing, giving it a once-over. Perhaps some designer over at corporate thought the idea was cute, but something about the execution was simply wrong, and made the head of daycare feel nothing but chilled revulsion. The robot was lanky—skeletally-thin arms and legs. And these were cores of pure tempered, high-impact steel and titanium protecting the wiring, surrounded by a rubbery shell to give it the impression of warm yellowish and beige skin. He supposed the costume it was currently lacking might remove the impression of "long-legged, jaundice-pale cave creature", but given how little robots which pretended to be lively, emotional beings appealed to him he doubted the impression would ever un-sear itself from his memory.
Its face was perhaps worse. At present, it was set to resemble a round, smiling sun complete with radial triangular sun rays, though a half-portion of the flat disc was already carven into a bizarre crescent for the moon setting. Perhaps if the dimples had been less pronounced such that the wide, permanent grin couldn't be taken sometimes for a forced, gun-to-head grimace, it would have been as cute a character as in the company's runs of cartoons and candy adverts. But no—that, and the bulging frog eyes, pale lamps lacking in pupils whatsoever—made the thing more of a horror movie clown than a friendly jester.
"So," Fritz broke the ice as Jobe shot him a slight smile, "This thing's going to be around the four-year-olds, huh?"
"Oh, kid," the tech chuckled, shaking his head as he tugged a cleaning cloth from his apron pocket, "You've got nothing to fear from this fella. It's got the most extensive security, firewalling, and protective protocols, and child-care-oriented subroutines of a Fazbear robotic project to date. Sun and Moon here absolutely sweep even those Security Puppets of yesteryear. A couple of times over, I'd estimate."
"…And kids won't freak out or be scared of this thing?"
Jobe chortled, shaking his head.
"I imagine some will! But then again, some kids get scared of dogs, or balloons…" He put away the cloth and turned over to the costume rack, on which hung a bizarrely-proportioned and unusually heavy-seeming pair of puffy pants halfway between jester's get-up and pajamas, as well as a few ruffles and ribbons festooned with bells, "But it'll do the job with no complaint. Personality's a winner here."
"Personality..?" Fritz's squint somehow grew more strained and skeptical.
"Sun and Moon here is advanced, to say the least. Cognitively, I mean. The personality chip helps, but that's nothing without a good CPU brain to use it," the tech explained, a hand laying against a pile of blueprints on the table's corner, "I do believe I've managed my goal of making the default form of 'feeling machine'. It's a good basis for the failsafe programming for all future Fazbear Entertainment work. Think of it—it's programming of course but not just programming. This fella will be especially motivated to keep any and all children it meets safe and well. It has a creative learning AI, and with that it will be able to adjust to adversity and go through with that goal on the fly. Thinking freely. It's expensive, sure, and requires a lot of testing to get it just right, but it's going to be better."
"Better," Fritz mused, "Well, I hope so. Don't see it yet myself, but…"
"Well, it's about ready to boot back up. Maybe it can change your mind." As he said it there was a hasty shuffle back on the part of the thin man, and Jobe chuckled once again, "Stay behind the glass if you prefer, but do stay and watch. I need to get the costume on it. Easier to let it do that itself."
A heavy hand tipped the odd swivel and jointed neck forward so that the face plate of the thing tapped against its narrow chest piece and revealed a plate of metal on the back laced with circuitry trenches, small bolts, and a few recessed buttons like the factory reset on a phone or music player. With a tiny probe, the bearded man pressed and held down the blue one for a few moments. A faint hum of life rose up from its torso and with a dull plink the light behind its huge, glassy-white eye covers cut back on. Easing his hand back, Jobe's eyes creased with proud delight as the robot waited a few seconds for all squishy, fleshy bits to be clear of its mechanical joints before bobbing its head back upright.
Fritz already shuddered; it appraised its surroundings right away—twitches and light swivels, half rat, half owl, all uncanny—with an immobile face scanning over the two men, the walls of Parts and Service, the tools and plans laid all around, and catching on the glints and glares off glass shielding and metal girders before re-centering on the face of its creator.
"Go—od morning!~" Its voice was upper register, sweet and chirpy but with a definite metal echo to it. The long, articulate hands and fingers gave a sharp flicker of movement, almost nervously, before it leveled its sunny head downwards and realized with a start its bare framework, "Oh—oh! I-I-I should get dressed!"
"How does it know that," Fritz grumbled to himself. The Sun's face jerked back up as if startled—providing its own answer with an insistent, automatic fidget:
"I-I can't be naked! I have to set an example," Its legs quite suddenly flexed and launched it from the table to the floor in an effortless hop, "I'm programmed not to let the kids take their pants off in public—so they cannot see me like this!"
"Shh, settle down, Sun," Jobe outright guffawed, and passed the costume hanger towards the robot to assist that, "No kids here yet. Besides, I only woke you so you could get yourself nice and presentable. Here—if you need some help getting the ribbons right let me know."
The Daycare Attendant's head swiveled, locking onto the festooned pants and snatching them swiftly up. Fritz's mind was boggled not only by the speed, but the nature of the exchange:
"…Taking their pants off in… you have programming for that?"
"My data leads me to believe that 3-year-olds may do that! Some of them very insistently! Sometimes if they're too hot, or if they've gotten tired and cranky, or if there's too much background noise and they can't focus—"
"Ya-hunh." Fritz gave a dry nod. Really accounted for everything, did it? Surely though there was going to be some obnoxious limitation; some one more terrible thing he—the real person in charge of the daycare center—would have to add to his list of troubles and risks as a result of this robot's presence. The gangly form now jingled with every shift in weight or flick of its hands from the wrist-wraps and the goofy-looking jester slippers. It studied itself, head twisting around backwards and swiveling in a complete 360 to check each cinch of fabric and secured button, before it shot back up into its full height from the tech tapping it on the shoulder.
"Here, one last thing," Jobe held out another piece of fabric. A comically-small nightcap—clearly not designed to fit over an actual human head or any approximation but more or less a flag to be pinned to the top of this garish automaton. For a moment Fritz was puzzled by the cheerful Sun needing such a costume piece, but the robot itself was unbothered and plucked the cap up between two fingers. Bending its head down, it opened a narrow slot in the metal just behind its mask façade and fed the base of the hat into it. Something clicked and whirred like a soft, muted noise of a dot matrix printer, and with a cranking sound the hat was sucked up into the little slot as if it hadn't existed.
"Okay—I'm ready!" The robot turned back to Jobe with a fidgety gesture; the thing's left leg was making an automatic sort of jitter against the floor, Fritz noted with a feeling of impending doom. Was it bugged already? It hunched down a touch, head tilting the appropriate, puppy-like 30 degrees, and continued, "So—what's next? What's next? This doesn't look much like a daycare. Is the daycare over that way, or up those elevators? Or—"
"Hush, hush, Sunny. You're getting ahead of yourself!" Jobe patted the thing on the tops of its outstretched hands. Fritz noted another disconcerting fact: Despite the weight of the meaty hand and the chummy gesture, the Sun/Moon's limbs didn't dip down from force or even shudder. The daycare head's eyes widened as he thought the inevitable thought: Too strong! They've done it again! And this is the one tasked with looking after the toddlers!
"The higher-ups simply aren't ready to open the Daycare yet," the robot's creator began to explain as he took hold of two of the padded, metal fingers—leading the thing as if it were a young child itself towards one of the lower-level's big red double doors, "The Glamrock Band are still being put together, you know, so while those guys are being finished up, they'd like to see you go through a test-run on a smaller scale."
"Test run?" The Sun took care not to overtake the much shorter, stockier being, and only jiggled on its spry ankles a tiny bit during the pauses in its enormous strides, "Like a mini-daycare? It's not down here… right?" Bafflingly, the thing's static expression flinched and twitched to each side, giving the impression it was sizing up shadowy areas along the hall with uncertainty. Afraid of the dark?—no, Fritz convinced himself. That was ridiculous. It was probably just part of the programming to be able to relate to younger children.
"This way, you'll see." Jobe brought the Sun/Moon to a new set of security doors. Waving them open with his keycard, he revealed one of the back offices between testing chambers. The robot perked up—so much the tips of its topmost sunray dinked lightly against the door frame: Inside, the foam padding tiles of a typical daycare floor had been wedged into a corner and all of the filing cabinets and computers had been pushed out of the area. Replacing those furniture bits were playpen barriers in many primary colors—shaped like castles, fences, glitter-daubed shapes—and bright red, green, and blue plastic crates filled with a number of soft-bodied plushes and toys. "For now, you'll do a couple trial runs for a few of the staff's kids in this spot. Just look after them and try some activities for a few hours at a time. Sound good?"
"Oh! Oho!" Its hands lifted up and fanned around its face. Jobe could see what was coming from his creation and sidestepped before it bounded into the room. Now the reason for the Daycare Attendant's strength became apparent: Its energy was so much that it didn't settle for just leaping in but flipped itself forward into a handspring—catching against the corrugated metal of the floor and swinging its long legs over the playpen fences to land exactly on a bright yellow square of foam.
It whipped back about, arms out to its sides as it bounced lightly from foot to foot—"Hoohoo—l-look at all these! So many toys, so many toys!" He came to a sudden halt, the spindly fingers touching together in front of it, "Where are the little ones, then?"
"Not here just yet. Later."
"Oh—!" The Sun popped up high onto its tip-toes where it held its balance perfectly, "Then—then—may I play with these until they get here? You know—test them out?" Fritz did not quite like the sly note that crept into its peppy speakers. A child—bending the rules and bending some guardian's words back on them for some giddy purpose. Jobe chortled and scratched his thick, black beard as he rolled out an office desk chair to sit nearby.
"I see no harm in it. If there's any defective ones be sure to get them out of the pen there."
Fritz flinched as the thing effectively shrieked with simulated, excited laughs and squatted down to child's eye level, rustling in the nearest toy crate through a pile of extra-large Glamrock Band plushies. He kept his back facing away from the robotic being as it made an affectionate coo and turned a particularly wide-molded Glamrock Chica over in its hands. Too tense to sit; he stood near the opposite security door and just watched as the entity flew through a series of pantomimes—and a flurry of questions:
"Are these the band? Will I meet them?"
"Yep, hmm, let's see… Chica there, then there's Bonnie, Foxy, and Freddy of course. There's a few side-characters mixed in there too. We'll be making robots of them fairly soon too."
"Oh, good! Will I meet them?"
"Likely. The Daycare's in the same service section as a few of the zones they'll be the mascots for. There's one—big green fella's Montgomery Gator. I don't know if we could get any of the Roxannes for this set-up. Oh well."
"I want to meet them all!" The robot's fingers wriggled, delighted, before scooping up a sorted line of six different characters into its arms and hugging them to its chest. It cocked its head completely onto one side, "Do you think we will all be friends?"
"Maybe!" Jobe remained glib and perhaps pacifying, ignoring Fritz's light scoff. The robots being "friends"… might as well just point a couple of old Furbies at each other. There would be little difference to him between the two interactions. "We'll probably all be mighty busy once we hit the Grand Opening. Just focus on keeping that Superstar Daycare in the best shape you can. You'll have plenty of little friends once it opens, I'm sure."
"And I'll have plenty of little lawsuits, huh?" Fritz grumbled and crossed his arms. He jumped as the Sun's legs uncrossed and straightened in an instant, fixing him with a curious stare while still softly turning a Freddy doll over in its hands.
"No, no, no, no—I won't let anyone get hurt!" It half-cradled the toy as if holding an especially tiny, fabric baby, leaning out towards the daycare head (who was likewise trying to press himself as far from the flat perma-grin as he could, pressing right into the wall), "Everything will be fine!"
Poor naïve hunk of metal. Fritz kept his gaze on the floor, on his own feet, on his own fiddling hands. He heard the clinking of metal and rubberized casing as the attendant bent further over and its neck swiveled about, hunched low to either maintain eye contact, or maybe to evaluate his grim, pensive countenance.
"I'm sorry—I'm sorry—I upset you," its voice was wincing, and from the rapid clicking it was still fidgeting its metal fingertips together.
"Ugh, well, it's hardly your fault. Forgive me for not being enthused that old Fazbucks Corporate is putting walking robots back in direct contact with toddlers again, after all that…"
The Sun's head tilted, so bamboozled it nearly flipped its face completely upside down. "I… beg your pardon?"
"You can't compare Sunny here to those old models, Fritz," Jobe chided. "The tragedy was of human hands, remember? There was tampering going on back then. Sun and Moon has a mind of its own specifically to work against that sort of thing, and I doubt there's a hacker out there able to bypass all of the security subroutines and code quarantining by-mode, and not to mention get close enough to mess with it even for all that—"
"Are you sure those old animatronics didn't have 'minds of their own'?"
"Fritz, that's silly. We only just now have true learning AI like Sunny here's."
"Don't look at me like that. I'm not being paranoid—I'm being realistic. If it happened before it can happen again."
"You'll see when the security protocols kick on."
"I'd rather not," Fritz shot a quick glance to the mechanical jester, making certain it was occupied still with sifting through the contents of a crate of branded coloring books. Jobe made a half-amused, half-worried noise like a fife through his nose:
"Uh. Well." He snickered, "You will, I'm afraid. You're on the evening shifts for the opening, so…"
The head of daycare flinched at the realization, "Please say you're kidding me."
The Sun had straightened up its posture, though still seated cross-legged with a page across its lap of an older-style Freddy and Chica ripping apart a pizza, stretching the cheese to preposterous levels. Its head rotated almost in a complete revolution, stopped itself, and corrected back into a head-tilt.
"Oh!" It squeaked, "Are we gonna be working together? Can we be friends? I would love to be friends!"
"We are not friends," The thin man's tone sharpened; the robot seemed to rock back and compress down on its joints at it, "We're co-workers, you got it? Damn it, what am I saying? We're not even that. You're a tool, understand? One I'm being given to use against my will. I do not like you, you understand? We're only going to get along if you stay out of my way. Clear?"
The Sun continued to grin, though the way it had cringed back announced that if it could have changed its face to give a frown, or a whimper, it would have; the coloring books slid free as its hands twitched and shook and raised up halfway between its facepiece and the harsh words aimed at it. Its bells gave a discordant, faint jingle.
"Th-that's—that's not a very good thing to say," it finally seemed to find its voicebox again, though the tone was faltering and almost a whine, "Wh-why are you being so mean to me?"
"Shh, Sunny—hey, Sunny—" Jobe rose and made a hasty stumble over to the miniature playpen, stepping over and grabbing the metallic hands. "It's okay, you're doin' good. That's it—don't cry. Don't take Fritz personal. He's just a grumpy guy, y'know? You know what to do with grumps."
"Fuck off, Jobe," the "grumpy guy" tensed, "Don't go and sicc it on me."
"No… no no no—" The Sun relaxed a bit, taking its hands back from the tech assuring it in order to pick up and straighten the bundle of coloring books before setting them down in a careful stack to the side. Faint whirrs and clicks and a flicker of movement under the glossy, pale eye covers seemed to hint the thing did have proper eyes—and eyelids—though due to some questionable design choices were set in place beneath the bulbous, bright outer parts. It seemed to be using them now only to shoot Fritz a wary, prolonged side-eye. "Don't you use language like that in front of the kids."
"Are you kidding—I don't."
"Good!" It turned and nodded slowly at him, "S-so—when the Daycare opens, you will be my… boss?"
"I guess…"
"Okay then!" Its tone returned to its friendly, cheerful norm. It clapped once and surged back up to its feet, "So long as we can get along. But hey—the little ones come first, every minute of every day! I'll try not to bother ya, but don't you bother me back." It sunk down a touch and gave a shake of its head, "Because I don't want children to watch us fight—if the kids get upset it would be terrible!"
Fritz was stunned for a few seconds, unsure what about this had knocked him out of his unpleasant mood more: The hint of very adult, human reason the goofy-looking nightmare-bot displayed, or the sheer dedication to shielding children from negativity that had leaked out in all aspects of its compromise. Or maybe it was the sudden revelation that this thing could compromise on anything. Was there a way this exchange could be what he knew the older bots to be: A disgustingly-complex Escher stairway of "if; then" lines? He wasn't sure, at last.
To avoid dwelling on that, he waved a hand in a lazy gesture of acceptance and sighed. "If that's the deal, fine. Just do what you're programmed to, and don't get in any of the staff's way."