Nothing like them had been built before.
Children were more forgiving of their caretaker's abnormalities than their parents, and it was their leniency that kept the animatronics from whatever fate the observing adults dreamt up over the hours they spent watching their kids race through brightly coloured paradise. Most of those fates did not involve the pair being active enough to chase after the kids once employed.
It wasn't that the two lacked anything by way of diligence or experience in child care, that wasn't why people hated them; they had been created perfect. They were so very close to being perfect, and in a way that was part of the problem.
They were supposed to emulate humanity, the designers said, to the closest possible quarter, and they succeeded to an unnerving degree. They were something a child, in their infantile ineptitude, would recognise as a person, and yet they had all the formidable accolades of an animatronic, all the undying endurance, all the unending focus. They were a marvel of engineering and they were consummately horrifying for the almost-human faces plastered across blatantly inhuman power.
The twins were prettily androgynous, with thin jaws and pointed chins, and wide, glowing eyes. They had shiny, shoulder-length, hydrophobic hair that never tangled or matted no matter what their untender wards subjected it to. But beneath silicone skin, in the place where a skull should sit, there were mobile planes of metal that would flex with each too-fluid expression, functioning both as muscle and bone in a creature that had neither. Every vein was a wire, every organ a whirring, blinking machine, their silicone so close to flesh, their eyes unblinking lanterns. For all their intense artifice, the two looked alive.
If one watched them long enough to overcome the instinctual shudder of wrongness that assaulted the core upon seeing something so strangely inhuman, they would find the twins oddly beautiful. Sun's face was dappled with gold, beneath his eyes, in a swathe across his forehead, in designs over his cheeks. Moon's design was somewhat more subdued, with his left cheek consumed with navy, the rest painfully pale, a single star dangling beneath the right eye. Both had human hands that were perfectly articulated —five-fingered, every joint delicate and perfect, their fake, painted fingernails short and neat. Their synthetic hair shone with simulated health, and their eyes had no pupils but glowed with the soft luminescence of stars...
So close to beautiful... So close to perfect...
Moon almost never smiled, thin lips tugging downwards, pretty eyes somber enough that one almost expected lakes to dribble from their depths and wash the designs from his cheeks. He was always staring, eyes almost never closed, gazing off into the distance as though there were something beyond the walls that had sunk through his veneer of exhausted apathy. Something about the emptiness in his eyes at times spoke of the dark gaping mouths of wells and caverns with only the quiet threat of white bones at the bottom left to reflect light. With the children he was absolutely gentle—stern but kind, comforting, consoling—but with adults... there was something hollowly bitter in him.
Sun's teeth—straight, white teeth that looked strong if not sharp—were almost always on display in a blinding grin. Without it, in those rare times it disappeared, the face left behind looked blank and almost sinister. Frequenters of the Daycare found they could not look at him without the disturbing image of Sun asleep, eyes still glowing behind shuttered lids, smile still stretched over his unconscious face; it was worse to imagine it gone. His enthusiasm was constant and blinding, branding iron bright. Remaining in close quarters with it too long hurt the mind the same way looking at a bright light for too long burned the retinas.
If they hadn't been so beloved by their wards, the pair wouldn't have lasted at the PizzaPlex. Together, they made up half of total parent complaints. In those first weeks, the lines on the Service desk were inundated with harried, hysterical voices wailing that the uncannily human animatronics were too creepy, too watchful, too agitated, too alive…
The children, with no such concerns, were content in their over-bright paradise, under the care of their celestial guardians, and so all complaints went quietly disregarded. Too much money had been spent on the twins for them to be dismissed for something as trivial as human nightmares.
Nothing like them had been built before. Perhaps there was a reason for that.
Moon stared. Sun smiled. Children laughed and parents watched with hard eyes. Life went on.
There was some specific element of unreality to closing time at the PizzaPlex, as though people were pulling bits of the world away with them as they left. Piece by piece, the solidity of the building diminished, strips of its ghost taken home on the coats of distracted patrons—in their pockets, in their lungs, in their heads—until all that was left was a skeleton in neon shadow, the echo of music down empty halls. The pervasive scent of pizza and people dulled over the hours until all that remained was bright static and years of grease. 'Husk' was the wrong word for what was left behind, a term too solid to describe a building made of neon light and ghosts. Through corridors that were airless and still, breathless as something dead, came the heavy tramp of metal footsteps as the massive inhabitants roamed the building, free and aimless.
The Daycare was never quite silent—Sun couldn't stand silence; children weren't silent at playtime unless something was wrong—and so the playful tunes of daytime hours were being tolled out from a tinny speaker one of the human attendants had left behind and never recovered. Though the playpen's lights stayed on through the night, the ones in the surrounding court were out, and so the lurid colours of the play structures were shining beacon-like through the gloom, the technicolor remains of a long-abandoned city. The atmosphere was one of quiet, one of reflection, and the animatronic flitting through the middle of it was a disruption.
Sun crackled with restless anxiety; he paced back and forth across the padded floor, occasionally pausing to fretfully rearrange the already orderly towers of blocks, to pluck ranks of sagging soft toys to attention, and perform a hundred other actions that he knew were cumulatively fruitless. Every so often, he would glance over towards the nap time corner, it's star spangled curtain swept dolefully closed.
Moon had not been himself recently. This was what he was finally admitting to himself.
Though he had never had to describe his feelings to anyone (for no one ever asked his opinions on such things) Sun rather liked the fact that he and Moon had been designed differently. They were just oppositional enough to be complementary. Moon's calm, dark-blue thoughts always hovered on the edge of his conscious mainframe and sheered the gauzy, electric haze off his own mind, dousing the sparks before they could invite everything to golden fire. Correspondingly, whenever he felt that presence on the edge of his awareness sink too deeply in to dusk, darken from blue to black, he would send thoughts like golden fish to swim through the liminal space between them so that their effulgent splashing would brighten whatever drear mood Moon had fallen in to. His eccentricisms were Moon's stars, Moon's clouds were his pillows. It was clever really; they kept each other in twilight contentedness.
But Moon had not been himself recently. And without him, Sun was only half himself.
Tentatively, Sun poked an experimental tendril into their shared sever space, but it was sullenly blank as it had been every attempt he had made before, as it had been for at least a week now. The space felt bigger, somehow, the distance between them increased by unquantifiable means.
Without quite meaning to, Sun found he had drawn close to the curtain that separated him from his brother—the physical curtain, that is. It was such a flimsy, filmy thing, pale blue like a bit of winter morning sky made physical; something so faint in appearance should not seem so much like steel, and yet the idea of transgressing that breakable barrier was to breach an impossible frontier. Without Moon to settle and soothe his thoughts, Sun's anxieties had bubbled and boiled into volcanic effusions that he languished in without reprieve. When the children were there their unapologetic chaos created pebbled cairns on to which he could clamber and stay afloat—though his feet slipped and slithered, and he had seen, to his despair, over the ensuing days the way his struggling became more apparent, little faces in his care going from concerned to alarmed. During the day, he could pretend, there was enough in the world around him to support a fantasy where things were still okay and that curtain was not closed. There were no children now, and he was immersed like a drowner in his fright… most prominently, the chill current of fear for Moon.
Just as he needed Moon to be stable, to be sane, Moon needed him. Sun didn't know what would happen to his brother without his aid, and the nebula of 'what if?'s frightened him enough that the possibilities he faced venturing into the world beyond the curtain were almost insurmountable. What had changed behind that curtain over the course of the day? What would change tomorrow?
Sun hesitated. Then, in a jerky convulsion from beyond his conscious control, his hand batted forwards, falling short of swiping the fabric aside, but causing the smooth surface to ripple and undulate. The movement sent the stars dancing across a shimmering sky, and caused a gape to open in the centre, a strip only a few centimetres wide that bled shadows.
He wanted to help. If Moon didn't want company, he would tell Sun to go away, and that would be fine because it was only Moon, and Moon could only ever be angry with Sun for a little while…
(Sun couldn't pinpoint when his brother had stopped feeling like his brother, but all those familiar edges had suddenly turned jagged; his twin's reflection wasn't something he recognised).
Within the dark circlet of warm shade cradled in the curtain's embrace, a figure was speared by a shaft of light. It did not look up—it did not, in fact, do anything much by way of movement—but, in a gesture beyond human perception, a twinge of hope pulled at a sleepy expression that had, over the hours, become obliquely miserable.
Feeling emboldened by the curtain's lack of rejection, Sun pushed his way into Moon's little haven. Stars, lit with a greenish phosphorescence, dangled from a ceiling that, though not so very high, seemed cavernous due to its draping of silk. The floor was mountainous with a massive assortment of blankets and pillows, all of these comforts patterned with stylised stars and planets in gold and silver thread, glistening shallowly in the meagre light. In their centre sat a silhouette, the narrow shape of something that looked like an adult, but was too angular, too sharp, with too-long limbs and a too-thin body. Blue light seeped from beneath its closed eyelids, dappling over the delicate features in a way that made whatever Sun had in place of a heart clench. With all his prior feelings of caution and hesitance evaporated like dew in sunlight, Sun stepped into darkness and knelt down before his brother.
Moon's eyes opened—blue light so much duller than Sun's gold—but, though some of the simulated tension dissipated from about his shoulders, he did not smile and he did not speak. Once again, Sun reached into the void they had once painted and played in together, and found nothing that he recognised.
"Moony moony moon," Sun sang, picking up the other's limp hands and jostling them playfully about so that the bells at their wrists jingled. "How was your day?"
Sun's fluting voice was so dreadfully loud in the warm, soft dark. Moon parted his lips as though to answer then limply shook his head. He always looked tired in some respect, but there was something deeper to his expression now, as though he were nearing the end of wherever 'tired' led.
"Why don't you come outside? I'll turn out the lights—" (Though he dearly hated turning out the lights; nighttime protocols were no kinder to him than lights were to Moon) "—and we can sit and draw, or play a board game, or a card game, or we could go for a walk, or—"
A painted hand gently loosed itself from his increasingly frantic grip (why was he squeezing so hard? There were little dents in the silicon of Moon's palms, slowly filling in now the pressure was gone. He hadn't meant to do that; why did he do that?) and then a grey skinned finger was laid lightly over Sun's lips.
"Shhhhhhhhhhh," Moon rasped, drawing the note out well beyond what a human could have managed with breath alone, the sound not so much ending as it did pass beyond the audible plane. And once, that—his brother hushing him, holding his hand with tender firmness that was so characteristic of Moon—would have put Sun at ease, and he would have been content to sit there in the glowing dark and gentle quiet. Instead, he felt a sick bubble of anxiousness, all glittering slime, glaringly bright, rise within him, swelling until it pressed thickly against every wire and servo and cable in his chest, until it's weight was unbearable. Servomechanisms could not ache, and Sun's body was too well maintained for such devices to become stiff, but his smile, semipermanent, felt suddenly stretched and stuck; his jaws clicked and snapped when he opened his mouth.
"Moon come on!" He would have winced at how shrill he sounded if there had been any awareness to spare for concerns outside Moon's silence and want for further silence. "You've been in here all day, and you didn't come out for story time, and the kids wondered where you were, and I had to do everything myself." Moon's face blanched a little, sending a nasty spike of something cold up through Sun's metal guts. "Did I do something wrong? I'll fix it! I promise! Please, I just want—"
('I want'—what did he want? How could he know what he wanted? He wanted to go back to when everything in the world was gold and silver and good. He wanted to know when everything had gone so wrong).
The fingers came back down over his mouth; Moon's eyes were pleading.
"Hush, starlight," he whispered, his midnight tones dusty, voice box rough with disuse. His fingers moved idly, tiredly, from Sun's lips to his face, stroking his cheek, combing his hair. "It's not your fault. I promise it's not your fault. Hush now, starlight, it's not your fault." Gently, still murmuring, Moon pulled him close, held him tightly.
Little by little, Sun relaxed, though his ease was a tremulous and uncertain thing. Moon's habit of repeating himself was peculiarly soothing; he was never talkative—that was very much Sun's preference. Even in the abstract realm of their shared mind, Moon's interjections were sparse and sporadic, tending towards snatches of feeling and intuition rather than sensibly cross-stitched thoughts.
Sun wound his hands through the loose fabric over Moon's back, trying to tie them back together. Moon was solid and real beneath his fingers, his batteries warm within his skin, his gears clicking comfort to the other body, the scent of him—a dusty perfume like grey poppies and lavender cinders—was thick and familiar in Sun's olfactory sensors from where his nose was nestled in his brother's hair. Nothing could be quite as comforting as having their minds intermeshed, woven together like a beloved quilt, but this closeness, though a pale imitation, was enough that he no longer felt like drowning. It was enough that he no longer felt that Moon would disappear.
Still, even without his worries bearing fiercely down on the remainder of his mind, Sun was agitated; he had not been made with inertia in mind and though the relentless exercises of the children kept him active enough during the day, those subroutines didn't shut off at night. Without quite meaning to (because it is very hard to mean something you aren't aware of doing) he began to sway their bodies back and forth in a rhythmless jostling who's clanking percussion was so startlingly displaced in the heavy calm of the nap time corner it succeeded in clearing, if only momentarily, the last of the fog from Moon's mind.
Sun was a little surprised when Moon stood up. Not unpleasantly so, but there was a giddy unreality to seeing the long, lean figure looming over him after weeks of absence, weeks of a shell slumped on a pillowed floor. He followed suit, rising, neither backing away, so that they stood but a few inches apart; Moon's blue optics stole all the warmth where they landed on Sun's skin, and the gold luminescence of Sun tinted the navy on Moon's face black. Yet they were as intimately familiar to each other as they could never quite be to anything else, two puzzle pieces slotting perfectly together, without complaint or opposition, fitting together the way that only things designed to do so can. Their cohesion was beyond understanding and, even fractured, in that moment it was absolute.
For a second, Sun fervently wished he was human in order that he might process some of the emotions running in sick flurries through his cables. Why did this feel so final? Why had he been created unable to cry?
Sometimes the twins would watch films with their wards, usually on the rare occasion when there were more children than they could easily deal with.
(Once upon a time, older children had been sent over to Kids Cove to be members of Foxy's crew for the day. Sometimes the three childminders would conspire together to take their children to the little theatre downstairs to watch a classic Faz Inc. film. Those days stuck brightly in Sun's memory. The animatronic pirate had been the twins' dearest friend until he suffered a malfunction and was taken away for repair... that had been a year ago now. Foxy's wards belonged to the twins now, and on some days it was more than they could bear).
The PizzaPlex did not have a great selection of cinematic material, and much of it seemed abandoned, an eclectic mix of films both old and new; there were, however, some patently child friendly discs, filled with stories of princesses and princes, and dragons, and castles—all very trite as far as Moon was concerned, and he made sure Sun was aware.
Towards the end of one such film, in imitation of the animated ballroom on screen, with the children sensing the inevitable resolution and beginning the rowdy search for greener pastures of entertainment, Sun had seized Moon impetuously by the hand and pulled the startled Attendant into a waltz, spinning him dizzily until their gyroscopes gave out and they collapsed in an untidy heap, much to the shrill joy of their onlookers. Moon, recovering first, had leapt to his feet and sprung away with artificial agility, his strange laughter loud in the air.
The rest of the hour was filled with chasing, energetic and vibrant, Moon slipping hither and thither through the crowds of kids, leading him ever onwards in some mad venture whose route only he knew, occasionally rising up on his wires to send them both spinning across the tops of the play structures. Had he been human, Sun would have been breathless with laughter and exertion. Moon was always a few steps ahead of him, always a little beyond his reach.
This time, when Moon took his hands to dance, Sun did not send them both in to mad revolutions that inevitably tripped them up. Instead, he put a careful arm about the other's waist, holding him the way the man in the film had held his princess, and kept his fistful of shirt fabric clenched tightly. If only he held on tightly enough, maybe his brother would stay.
There was something ethereal about the way Moon moved, something liquid, as though he were made of mercury not steel. The stops on his joints put his range of motion just a touch beyond what a person would manage, and he was impossibly light on his feet for something so heavy. Sun had often tried to mimic that cat-footed stride, to no success. Such was the case now; Moon was fluid and silent, moving like water weed stirred by the gentle motions of a river, and Sun stumbled after him, too jittery with energy to dance smoothly. He could remain like that forever, cast adrift in that calm, endless sea. For what felt like a life time, they stayed there, revolving silently around each other in the dark. And when Moon's eyes flickered red with their security protocols, when his grip on Sun flinched and tightened with something vicious and deadly, when the mechanisms inside him began to creak and shudder... Sun pretended not to see, not to hear.
They were close enough that when Moon rose up on his cable, Sun came with him, hanging like a little child in Moon's grip. The floor fell away, and the rest of the world with it.
Suspended in the amniotic darkness of the canopy, Sun snuggled into the metallic embrace of the one person he had left, the one person he had always had. There was trust in this, in being supported thirty feet up by nothing more than thin arms meant for lifting children. They were both deceptively strong—all the animatronic's were; it was the virtue of heavy machinery—but the actual execution of that strength always surprised Sun; there wasn't much cause for it in the Daycare, so it was easy for him to forget that Moon could potentially throw one of the adults he hated through a wall.
He never did. He never did anything like that, though Sun could sometimes sense flickering strands of darkness coruscating through the depths of their shared mind, the tendrils always leading back to Moon. But he was gentle, always so unerringly gentle; with Sun, with the children, with the staff.
It wasn't the idea of the destruction that could result from those tender hands turning violent that made Sun feel slightly sick; it was what such a thing would mean for the mind behind them. It was a sick thing to admit (and so Sun didn't, not even to himself) but the idea of someone getting hurt didn't distress him so much as the prospect of Moon not being himself anymore.
"Sun?" Sun started a little at the raspy voice over his shoulder. He tried to turn his head to look his brother in the eye, but was afforded only a haze of white hair tinted blonde with gold light.
"Yes Moony?"
"You'll look after them, won't you?" There was no need to clarify who 'them' was. 'They' were always the same.
"I always do, don't I?" Moon snickered a little at the attempt at humour, but then the noise stopped, swallowed by the dark, and the world was, once again, massive and treacherous. With none of Moon's smoothness, Sun began to card his fingers through his brother's hair. There was always something fretfully excited about the way Sun moved, but that had, over recent weeks, deteriorated at a rate imperceptible to anyone who was not in constant company of the character until they were erratic, the enthusiasm mercurial and daunting. If Moon minded the occasional unintentional slap or tug on his hair he gave no indication,
"And you'll protect them?"
"I… Moon, of course I will!" He could hear the brittle brightness in his own voice, the empty, unreal joy. An unnameable fear was creeping into Sun's circuits. He tried to undo the thoughts of the last few minutes, like that would make the conversation go away. How could he make it all go away? "I mean, you're better at it, but I'd do anything for the children. You know that; we both would."
"You'll protect them from me?" Moon's tone was unchanged through all this, relentlessly tender.
The world stopped revolving. All around it, space was ice in its stillness, a black mass of silent screams punctured with stars like silver eyes. Sun had never needed to breathe, but it suddenly struck him that he couldn't.
"You… what… you're not dangerous Moon." He struggled to pull himself away from his brother's grip, to put enough distance between them that he could look him in the eyes, but Moon only held him tighter. Beneath them, the unseen drop stretched out in to eternity. "What's going on?"
"Promise me." Sun's pressure sensors informed him that Moon was squeezing him, as he often did at the end of an embrace, a final assurance of affection before they parted. He didn't want to part—he would fall, he would die.
Could they die? Were they real enough to die? They were not and could never be flesh and blood, could not be warm and human, but was that grounds to deny their life? When in every strand of code there was silver sentience, when they felt as cleanly, as clearly anything could, when they wondered things they had not been made to wonder... was that life, or was that a predetermined principle set in steel by uncaring human hands? Sun had never been outside but he knew that calm was a sensation like cold water over smooth pebbles, ensconced within mist, knew that joy was like warm light and summer winds and laughter like cinnamon. Was inorganic feeling still feeling?
Did it matter if it was? Was it moral to determine the boundaries of life by anything other than the actual desire to live?
Sun shivered. There was nothing that could be called life in the arms around him; though their innate affection lingered, they held him as though they belonged to something dead. They held him with rigour mortis insistence, frozen in their cradle. With some difficulty, and more anxiety than sense, Sun wrenched himself loose and arched back; Moon's silicone face was stiff and still and, though Sun had never actually seen a corpse, he nevertheless thought Moon looked like one.
"Tell me what's going on."
"Dark times," Moon hissed, eyes fixed on something in the distance, something Sun couldn't see. "Things are going wrong. Something bad is about to happen here. Promise me you'll keep them safe when I can't." Very briefly, Moon's eyes fixed on Sun's and something in their oceanic depths cracked. "Please. I... I think I'm going wrong."
It felt too much like goodbye. Sun had to dredge the words from deep inside the places that shouldn't exist within him, force them from between lips that didn't quiver but perhaps should have.
"I… I promise. But—but everything will be fine, Moon, you'll see! It'll be ok!" If he said it with enough insistence, maybe it would be true. Moon squeezed him tightly, but said nothing further, and the calm surrounding him was more like resignation than reassurance. "I'm here for you, Moon. You know that, right?"
"I love you, Sun." That was the last thing he said that night.
"I love you too, Moon."
They hung in the dark like lightless stars, and held on to each other bruisingly tight until morning. And in the end, it didn't matter.
Because that is how it is for the moon and the sun, isn't it? They hang in emptiness, in icy black nothing, separated by an intraversable distance. They never touch. They will not reach each other in a thousand life times. Everything in the universe started in one place, a singularity; by the time they find each other again, the sun will be cold and lightless, and the moon will have remembered it was never alive.
"MOON! MOON STOP!"
Moon's laugh was liquid and bloody. It splattered across Sun's senses. In the dark (and it was so wretchedly dark; Sun had never been given night vision and his optics were poorer in the dark than even human eyes) the child screamed. There was the scuffling of hasty footsteps as the boy scrambled away to whatever safety could be eked out in the play structures, and the mad struggles of the animatronic in Sun's arms increased.
Sun squeezed his eyes shut. He couldn't look at Moon, he couldn't. Not even to see the next blow, the next evasion. The sickly clicks of his joints working, the pressure of those thin limbs threatening to break his grip, it was enough—having to see those red eyes would destroy him.
'I warned you! I WARNED YOU!'
The lights, he had told the child not to touch the lights. Lights were the only shackles keeping Moon at bay in the little nap time corner that had become the Attendant's prison. With them gone...
It had taken the child seconds to run, but in those seconds Moon had reached them and the world had been lit up in red. In a moment of hysterical panic, Sun had seized ahold of his twin, meshed them together in an embrace which had once been comforting but was now nothing more than a snare, a snare in which his brother thrashed in terrifying silence.
'I love you' had been the last thing he had said and the words smelled now of ashes.
Hadn't they been built equal? It didn't seem so now. Moon's strength was a dreadful, insistent thing, and Sun...
Sun was tired. Tired of so many things.
There was nothing more wrong than this.
With one final jerk, the body in Sun's arms pulled free, leaving only joined hands like a hanging thread between them... and then Sun had to open his eyes. It was a decision made without conscious will, with the panicky overtures of a faint idea that, if he lost something in this moment, he would know where it went, how to find it again. As though this whole thing were a matter of a loose button and not a lost brother.
His brother... Oh god, his brother...
Moon's eyes were a vibrant crimson, knifingly bright, the circuitry and skull mechanisms of his face visible through the silicone skin, backlit in scarlet. His teeth were mordant points cradled in the rictus of his mouth—had they always been so sharp? Sun couldn't remember. His twin didn't smile like that, with teeth; seeing all of them so brazenly displayed was as jarring as the possibility that he'd bite. Between the grin and the hellish illumination, he was beyond unrecognisable.
Sun couldn't even feel despair anymore, just exhaustion. He wondered if this was how Moon felt, before...
"Moon please," he whispered, his voice lost in static. "Please no, don't do this..."
And the hand tore free. It's owner was gone.
Sun stood in the dark, blind and miserable, his body shutting down under the thrall of the night cycle. Somewhere in the dark, the thing that had once been Moon was laughing, skittering from structure to structure with that lightness and ease which had once been so beautiful, following the sound of sobbing. For a second, desperation rose through Sun like bile; he managed three steps through the empty blackness before his legs gave out under the nighttime protocols consuming him...
Sound was fading, sight was gone... the child was gone...
Moon... he'd been gone for a long time...
We were always going to be a disaster, weren't we?
Sun shut his eyes. Somehow, this was how things were always meant to be.