Standing in front of the machines feels like an affront to God.
When the showtime button gets pressed, the tentative giddiness at seeing William's genius in action seeps into Ricky's bones the more he observes. Stiff joints of articulation rotate on the spot, torsos swinging back and forth as The Romantics play through the crackling speaker system.
The experience is so unexpected that throughout the entire number he's braced for the scenario to devolve, for the animatronics to enter their free-roaming mode with some hint of hostility towards him.
They're just robots, he tells himself, hands deep in his pockets. Just buckets of fancy bolts I can take apart in twenty seconds flat with nothing but a flathead screwdriver.
The song ends and the animatronics bow, with the exception of Chica who stands staring at Ricky with the aura of someone with serious beef. No she doesn't. She's just an AI. Why would an AI have beef with me?
"Weren't they great!" William says, giving his creations a round of applause. Bonnie excitedly waggles his ears. "Nothing but sheer, unbridled talent."
"How did you do it?" Ricky edges closer to the stage, only half of his attention on William. "The programming alone must be—"
"Ah-ah-ah," he interrupts. "Not, uh, not in front of them. Let's head on back and I'll fill you in. Show you where the magic happens."
Ricky follows with a fraction of William's enthusiasm, keeping an eye on the machines who turn their heads to watch them leave with something akin to curiosity. He quickens his step down the hallway.
He's dealt with machines of a higher caliber before, had his hands and brains tested against a newer iteration of DeepBlue before the dean deemed him unable to continue being on campus, but it seems like the definition of intelligence is wholly subjective when it comes to what kinds of machine learning are possible. Predicting chess moves is one thing. This? Whatever shines behind those plastic eyes? It's a kind of intelligence that unnerves him.
William is out of his line of sight within an instant, taking a turn up ahead with the determination of someone who knows the place better than most. Ricky is too distracted taking in his surroundings, poking at the recesses of his memory in hopes that something might spark.
He pauses in front of a sealed off bathroom. The grody door was once red, indistinguishable from every other bathroom door in a public establishment. Half of the triangle stick figure is missing.
Ricky's breath hitches when the ghost of a thought nags at the back of his head.
He grabs the door handle and gives it a push, the door coming unstuck from the frame with a loud kiss from years of disuse. The KEEP OUT tape does its job as the door swings open, the room beyond dark but otherwise devoid of occupancy. Enough light creeps in from the hallway to illuminate shattered mirrors, uneven tiles, and a lack of stall dividers and trash cans.
Part of him wants to call out and ask who's hiding in the corner, but he doesn't. There is no one in there and he knows it, even if it feels like eyes other than William's are on him as he navigates his way through the defunct pizzeria.
He lets the door swing back shut, its seam uneven with the door frame. He can feel his pulse in the pit of his throat, a rapid fluttering that becomes difficult to swallow around.
This is ridiculous, he thinks, lifting a hand to rap his knuckles against the door and stepping away to find his host.
Something knocks back, and a child giggles on the other side.
Ricky jumps away from the door, backpedaling until his back collides with a soft surface, hands closing around his biceps. Fight or flight kicks in, and he would have elbowed whoever grabbed him if it weren't for William's quiet cooing.
"Hey, now. Everything alright, jitterbug?"
He's too spooked to even snap at the pet name. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm good."
"The electricity in here is a bit buggy. Really makes shadows creep around. Come on, I'll restart the breaker in the office."
This time, Ricky sticks close to him for what remains of their trek.
William's said office is a workshop of horrors.
As a mechanic, working the bays near closing in the middle of winter feels wrong in the way that everything looks like a slasher flick torture chamber. The tools, the belts, the gutted cars and their withered parts hanging against the dying light. Logically, the same is happening here, but it's all made worse by the near humanoid nature of the scraps.
While William hits the breaker, Ricky keeps his hands under his armpits as he weaves through the tables covered in unrecognizable pieces of metal. He's grateful that his job requires him to keep his tetanus shots up to date.
"Well, whattaya think? Welcome to parts and service. Or what used to be parts and service. Now it's just where I hang out whenever I need to clear my head and get some serious work done."
"Looks dangerous."
"Naw. Actually, don't touch that," he says as Ricky leans over to get a better look at what appears to be a mascot suit that's been cracked open like a metal lobster. "It's—It's been here a while, gathering the elements. It might go off on you and we wouldn't want that now, would we? Would be a really bad time."
Ricky squats down next to it, mindful of his hands and feet. "What is it?"
"That is a springlock suit." William shadows him, pointing at the razor sharp rib-like appendages. "I designed them to have two-fold functionality. With a proper endoskeleton and a lithium-ion battery, it would function as an automaton when connected to the server. But with the spring locks keeping all of the robotic doohickeys at bay, it could also be worn by a performer. When properly maintained."
Ricky looks at him, horrified. "Why the hell would anyone get into that?"
"There's a layer of protective padding," he says defensively. "State of the art, at the time." William unbuttons the cuff of his sleeve and begins to roll them up, revealing the tapestry of pale lines all along his forearms. Like circuitry grafted onto human skin. "I designed them so that Henry and I could wear the suits, providing structural support and the ability to bear more weight. Plus, it was a two-for-one deal. In any situation that would require one of us to be out, Fredbear or Bonnie wouldn't have to perform by himself."
It makes about as much sense as William being crazy enough to walk around in a death trap. "The one's on the stage?"
"Also springlocks."
"With endoskeletons?"
"Mhmm."
"What about programming? This place doesn't look big enough to host a server room capable of handling three machines. Let alone the free-roaming kind."
William purses his lips, then looks at him over the rim of his glasses. "If I tell you a secret, can you keep it?" Ricky doesn't answer. "What if I told you that what animates an animatronic is far smaller than a server room?"
Ricky wouldn't believe him. Processors have shrunk over the last two decades and will continue to do so, but at this magnitude it would be impossible for exponential pathways to develop on surfaces small enough to shove inside a restaurant mascot.
William holds up a finger between the two of them. "Oh ye of little faith," he says. "You're not thinking outside the motherboard."
Leaping up to his feet, he shuffles towards a corner of the room and emerges with an armful of blueprints he spills onto the cluttered table. Waving him over, Ricky moves to look down over his shoulder.
He pours over the white lines on the blue papers, the outlines of mascots similar to the ones on stage but far sleeker, better suited for the new millennium rather than the heyday of the past decade. They're borderline human, their uncanniness leaving traces of sourness on Ricky's tongue. He'd write it off as a crock of shit, but— "Human trials?" There, in his handwriting. "You're training AI on human behavior?"
William sniffs, swiping a thumb underneath his nose. "You're almost there."
"That's not possible."
"Are we not also composed of wires and data?"
Ricky laughs. "God, you sound like my ethics professor." He gestures at the schematics with a skepticism that borders on disappointment. "Technically, yes, of a different material we're unable to replicate outside of a lab. But it's just numbers. There's no real way to emulate human emotion when we hardly know where in the human body those are stored."
William pivots to rest against the edge of the table, taking Ricky's hands and pressing them together between his own calloused palms. "It hasn't been tried."
He's right. There are some lines science is not ready to cross. Or, more aptly, there are some lines that have been erected in the form of impenetrable walls courtesy of poorly-conducted government agencies dating back to the 60s. "Dude."
"But!" William continues, gesturing his head towards the springlock suit on the floor. "With your brilliant ability to fine-tune machine learning, and my ability to build just about anything…"
Ricky blinks, taken aback. "That's not how this works, William. That's not how any of this works. If it was that easy I'd be a Nobel Prize winner rather than a mechanic."
"I know how to give them souls."
The statement shocks him into silence. Ricky shakes his head, bewildered and confused and—
It clicks. Loud and growing louder. The realization of what this is, the glowing source of William's poorly contained madness. The thread that binds William to Ricky, and Ricky to William. A connection born from loss, grief, regret, and the pointless pursuit to undo what cannot be undone.
I want to rebuild him.
I can bring your brother back.
"Will."
"They were onto something. They always were; the concept of hauntings—both residual and intelligent. What if I told you. Listen to me. What if I told you, that if you time it right, if the passing is…traumatic enough, that the soul lingers?"
"Hauntings. Ghosts?"
"The ghost in the machine, little rabbit."
"Is a philosophical concept. It's not literal. You're a smart man, I know you…"
The sentence dies off on his tongue as meaning continues to bloom, anchored by silver stakes into each alcove of Ricky's insides.
William has not let him go. He squeezes his hands tighter, pinning him to the spot, but the physicality of the gesture is nothing compared to the hold his gray eyes have over him. Eyes that narrow behind thick lenses, imploring Ricky to understand, to see what he sees.
Reality unfurls like a flower. One damaged, blood-soaked flower that eclipses what little light is emitted by the sun above, throwing the world into darkness.
Ricky's lips part but words do not come. William's nod is slow and deliberate, as if he can read Ricky's thoughts and is telling him that yes, his assumptions are correct. Yes, he finally understands.
"The kids..." The newscasters blare in his head and Roger's voice overlaps them. "The kids." He doesn't so much suck in a breath, but hiccup air into his lungs. "The kids are…" It's nothing but a whisper.
William looks grim.
There are layers to this. It's an all out war of equally fucked up factoids Ricky wants to bring up, decipher, and throw back at his face.
One: This is insane.
Two: He is implying that the animatronics are haunted.
Three: He is implying that the animatronics are haunted because kids died inside of them, traumatically. Dead kids. Kids he killed himself. Violent enough for them to hold a grudge.
Four: There's no such thing as fucking ghosts which means William is far more gone than Ricky could have possibly thought.
"I understand the claim is a bit…far-fetched."
Ricky laughs. He laughs because he doesn't know how else to react. "How do you attach the soul of something that's already passed?"
William's eyes light up, his shoulders sagging with relief. "That's where you come in. We're data, and who knows a loved one better than ourselves?"
"I can't boil Jeremy down to zeros and ones."
"You won't have to. Not him. But if we start, imagine what all can be achieved."
Ricky pries free of William's hands to pace the cramped space, hyper cautious of the suit and its proximity to his legs.
Whichever way he folds it, Afton is off his rocker. This is the type of scenario that helps populate the Missing Persons walls at shopping centers, before said photographs become the static background of an episode of Unsolved Mysteries. If he so chose, he could shove Ricky into that suit right now and there's little to nothing he would be able to do about it.
He is very well aware that William's former business partner's bones are in a box on his kitchen counter.
Henry's warning is all that lingers in the back of his head: don't follow him, don't try to outsmart him.
Ricky takes too long to respond, and by the time he turns back to William the earnestness in his face has been replaced by an unreadable mask.
"Now, I'm gonna be honest and say that I know how all this sounds, but it's the God-honest truth." William looks down at his watch, and nods his head. "I can't force you to work with me, like I said, not my style. But I did say I'd show you."
Keep him talking, is all Ricky can think of doing. "Can you?" He hopes his tone conveys engagement rather than a challenge.
"What's a business venture without proof of concept to get things started?" William pushes away from the table and wraps an arm around Ricky's middle, pulling him out the door. "The kids? They're performers. They love this place, always have. And I? I love them as if they were my own, I take care of them. So, I gotta ask to keep this between us. Don't want to upset them."
Ricky's aunt had gone senile near the end of her life and he had gotten great at dealing with it, surviving her tempers and her lapses in logic. He can do it again. He can buy himself time before booking it out of there and never looking back, job and social life be damned. Just gotta play along a little longer. "I'll keep my mouth shut."
"Good, good. I do, however, gotta run a quick errand. Mind keeping an eye on the place while I'm gone? That pesky cop keeps shoving her nose where it doesn't belong."
"Yeah, that's cool." It's not at all cool. It's suspicious as all fuck and William has proven time and again how far ahead of Ricky he is in the game, with an uncanny ability to accurately predict his next move. He would very much like to see if William would be capable of beating DeepBlue.
The dining area is fully operational, arcade cabinets and stage lights having come on when William flipped the breaker.
A fourth animatronic has unexpectedly appeared to flail along with the band. Foxy and Chica stand in the audience, dancing to whatever song Freddy and Bonnie are performing on stage. It would have felt normal if they hadn't stopped what they were doing to turn and look at him the moment he and William crossed the threshold.
"Alrighty then." William gives him a hard pat on the back before grabbing the jacket he's hung by the front doors. "I'll be back in about thirty. You kids behave yourselves."
Ricky shakes his head, suspicion and confusion blending into an aggravating mess of nerves. "You said–"
"I know what I said. Go on. Have a chat, have yourselves a little fun. We'll see what your thoughts are when I get back."
The animatronics are facing William, most of them wearing expressions that echo Ricky's own.
"I mean it," William continues with a fake-stern voice that is mostly fatherly. "You four treat our guest how you would like to be treated." Bonnie lifts an arm, his hand forming a thumbs up. "And just in case. Ricky? The kitchen is fully furnished."
"Alright," he says, unsure about what he's insinuating.
"Ta-ta!" With that, William offers them a salute and dips out the door.
The sound of chains on the outside makes his stomach sink. He can feel their eyes on him, his palms sweating for a whole new variety of reasons.
Shit.
• 
