Chapter Text
The trouble began in March- if you asked Anna Kwento, at least.
Truth be told, Anna didn’t care for her job too much. Not little enough to neglect making sure it was done right, but little enough to be deathly bored whenever she didn’t have a (generally uninteresting, as a rule of thumb) operation to supervise.
The glorified Roombas they called S.T.A.F.F bots weren’t working as optimally as the company had hoped, though, which meant that Anna was scheduled and called in regularly to supervise… everything. In general.
It was not the most entertaining use of her time.
So, as she did during most of her shifts, she sat and absently scrolled through her Twitter feed, absently taking in the garbage on her page and her surroundings both at once. She half paid attention as a little girl, about six to nine, approached her, but paid her no mind, assuming she’d get along on her way soon enough.
She didn’t.
Anna put her phone away.
“Hey, kiddo! Welcome to Freddy Fazbear’s Mega Pizzaplex.” Anna smiled as much as she could as she crouched down to the level of the little girl- who, now that Anna had a better look, appeared just about 7 or 8 years old. “What’s your name?”
A simple script- a confused or lost child approaches her. She smiles, welcomes them, and asks their name. Not overbearing, but not intimidatingly cold.
When they say their name, she parrots it back to them, says something nice, and asks if they need help to make them feel welcome and able to trust her to help them.
“M-Molly,” The girl managed, twisting and intertwining her fingers anxiously.
“It’s great to meet you, Molly!” Anna replied, taking in the kid’s appearance. She was dressed in a blue dress with a red tulle outer skirt and black shoes, and her blonde hair was pulled into pigtails, sporting orange streaks at each side of her bangs. “You look lovely today. Do you need something?”
“Not me.”
Anna’s smile fell. “Pardon?”
“I don’t need anything. It’s Freddy. There’s a problem with him.”
“A… a problem?” Anna echoed, frowning.
Molly nodded. “A problem,” She repeated. “He’s being scary.”
Anna felt the blood drain from her face.
“…Scary how?”
Molly swallowed, balling her fists around her fancy skirt, and squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. “He’s not moving right. He’s just standing and making weird noises and breathing kinda scary.”
Her breath hitched.
“Freddy doesn’t breathe, Molly,” Anna said in an attempt to be reassuring. “He’s just a robot. There’s no reason to be afraid.”
“But he’s being scary,” Molly whimpered, looking ready to burst into tears. “He’s not supposed to be moving and talking like that!”
“H-hey, it’s okay!” Anna said quickly. “These things happen sometimes. Here, I can go take a look- I’m supposed to check up on everything in a minute anyway. Why don’t you come with me?”
Molly sniffled, then nodded, trailing behind Anna as they walked.
“Have you been here before, Molly?” Anna asked, trying to keep Molly happy so she didn’t make a scene.
Molly shook her head. “I’m on spring break at school now. Mama took Jack, Laney and I as a special day.”
“That’s great. Have you guys been having fun?”
“Jack and Laney think this place is silly. But I like it.”
“Well, I’m glad you do. I’m sure your friends will warm up to it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, of course! I mean, you think this place is cool, don’t you? What’s your favorite part?”
“Freddy.”
Anna grimaced. “…What about a second favorite? Any other characters, parts of the restaurant? The arcade? Maybe the play area or the raceway?”
“I don’t like any of the other characters as much as Freddy,” Molly complained.
“Not even a second favorite?”
Molly hummed, seeming to consider the idea. “Roxy! She’s all super cool with her raceway and everything! Is her keyboard real?”
“Of course,” Anna lied, knowing her boss would have her head for breaking the illusion to a child. “How else would she play it?”
“Mhm! Jack says it’s a fake, but I think he’s just lying to make it seem dumb.”
Molly smiled proudly, and Anna let herself relax a bit, feeling that she’d managed to handle the situation well enough.
At least, until they approached Rockstar Row, and Anna became aware of the chatter of a crowd of children who seemed to be crowding around Freddy.
So much for not making a scene.
“Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Go ahead and play with your friends now, okay?”
Molly nodded and hurried away, clearly still disconcerted by what she’d seen.
The crowd of children all crammed together, faces pressed against the glass opening to Freddy’s green room, barely parted for Anna to pass through, leaving her to struggle and worm her way to the front.
Just like Molly had said, Freddy was still, just twitching, his shoulders sort of rising and falling like something trying to breathe, and Anna could hear strange noises, muffled by the glass wall.
She felt sick.
“Okay, everyone!” She called once she’d finally forced her way up. “Freddy’s having a bit of a bad day. Everything’s fine, but we’re going to need some space to handle it. If anyone knows what happened, let me know, and then hurry along so I can call one of our technicians to take a look, okay?”
She heard a sudden clank from inside, and glanced out of the corner of her eye-
Was Freddy… looking at her?
“Come on now, kids, we’ve gotta check up on Freddy, okay?”
Finally, the children began to disperse, leaving behind only three- two younger, and one who appeared about fourteen, dressed in all black with black and blonde hair.
“Do you three know if anything happened?” Anna prompted. “Did anyone do something? Was anything weird happening?”
“I saw it from the outside, if that helps at all,” The girl chimed in.
“Honey?”
She looked down at the little boy who’d called for her attention.
“If you’re gonna be talking to her, can we go?”
“No,” Honey said simply. “This place is too big. You can stay in this hall, but if I catch you leaving your mom’ll have my head.”
“But no other kids our age have to be followed around like this!”
“No other kids your age have a track record of getting lost half as long as yours,” Honey scolded. “You’re staying here until I finish.”
The boys grumbled and trudged off disappointedly.
“Don’t go trying to leave because you think I won’t see,” She called after them, then redirected to Anna. “I’m so sorry about that. You know how kids can be.”
Anna nodded in understanding.
“My name’s Honey Fitzgerald. I saw when he malfunctioned, so I’ll do my best to help. Let’s see…
I guess I didn’t really see what happened before it, but I heard this really nasty sound, like microphone feedback. When I looked over to check, the lights inside were flickering, and the ones in his eyes were, too. On top of that, he was moving weirdly, and making weird sounds beyond the feedback noise- like he was trying to breathe.”
“But you don’t know why?”
“Um… no. I mean… the light flickered over the Bonnie sign and went out after it started. Maybe the lights are going wrong and it triggered an audio glitch? I’m not too big on computers, sorry.”
Anna hesitated, mulling over the thought.
Finally, she nodded. “I’ll pass that along. Thanks.”
Honey nodded and headed off to find the boys she seemed to be accompanying.
Now that the area was empty, Anna turned around and looked at Freddy once again.
He was staring at her, no doubt about it.
And…
Even though the animatronics were bolted down in their green rooms to prevent any accidents, one of his legs was off the bolts, and he was standing differently.
With shaky hands, Anna reached for her walkie-talkie.
“Can I get Raha Salib to Rockstar Row? I’ve got a problem.”
“Okay, okay. Run the story by me one last time?”
“Freddy was bolted down in his green room, and there were kids in there. But then he just stated glitching. The girl I talked to didn’t know why. She said he just started moving weirdly, making sounds like microphone feedback and breathing, and the lights started flickering. It freaked a bunch of kids out, and I had to tell them it was totally normal.”
“Which is why we shut the curtain and locked the door for his room instead of putting up the out of order sign,” Raha finished, relatching Freddy’s face. She wiped her forehead of the small sweat droplets forming and readjusted her purple hijab.
“I guess I was hoping it is just something small.”
“It is,” She said finally. “Something is taking up too much RAM. That explains the movement and audio malfunction- it was trying to clear up space by shutting down programs, and it looked like it freaked out.”
“Should I call in someone else?”
Raha nodded. “I’m more of a physical technology person than a computer programs one.”
Anna nodded, slipping her walkie-talkie from her belt loop again.
“Can we get Nora down in Parts and Service?”
Static crackled on the other end for a moment, then Nora’s voice came through the staticky speaker.
“What do you need?”
“We’ve got a RAM issue with Freddy, causing audio, movement and eyelight glitches. We need you to work through it if you’re free.”
“Don’t you have Raha down there?”
“She isn’t authorized.”
An audible sigh coughed its way through the speaker.
“On my way right now.”
Almost as soon as Nora turned off the receiver, Anna heard the elevator rumbling, then it dinged as the doors open and Nora stepped out.
Anna smiled. Nora may have been constantly annoyed with the entire job, but she did her best to get things done, even if it was just to stay on top of the stress, making her among the more reliable of Anna’s coworkers.
She sighed again, clearly annoyed, as she grabbed an extension cable to connect Freddy to the computer outside the protective area for maintenance.
“An, do me a favor and open up his stomach hatch.”
Anna nodded, slipping her fingers into the crack and prying it open.
“You can head out, Raha. I’ll handle it.”
“Thanks.”
The door opened as Nora entered, and Raha and Anna stepped out.
Nora emerged a moment later and scanned the computer.
“Okay. We’ve got a glitch that caused him to copy an mp3 file and turn it into an mp4, which started running and took up too much space, I think…”
She frowned. “But the ‘happy birthday’ mp3 is only 20 seconds.”
“And how long is the video?”
Nora hesitated, running the mouse over the video file.
“Oh, damn. No wonder he’s having storage issues. It’s almost twenty minutes! Something is definitely screwed up with the computer.”
Nora clicked to delete the file, then entered the protective area.
“If my suspicions are correct,” Nora explained, “It’ll convert another mp3 into a video when I turn it on. It’ll probably cause another crash, but at least I’ll know the source of the…”
“Nora?”
“What?” Nora sighed.
“The video file just reuploaded.”
“…What??”
Anna pointed to the computer, and Nora hurried out.
“It’s the same ‘happy birthday’ mp4 again,” Anna continued. “We might just have to delete both files and reset the system.”
Nora groaned. “I swear to God, these stupid ‘personality’ chips are the worst fucking thing. Couldn’t they just perform the way they do onstage and have that be enough? An, do me a favor and delete the mp4. I don’t want to screw with the mp3 yet.”
“I’m not authorized either.”
“Do it anyway,” Nora retorted, clearly growing increasingly frustrated. “I’ll have your back if you get in trouble for it.”
“Fine.”
As Anna clicked to delete the video, Nora pressed and held Freddy’s power button, forcing him to shut down.
The computer went black, and in the silence, Anna suddenly became aware of the buzzing of the dim lights, and just how much of the large, dark and musty room she had her back turned to.
A chill ran down her spine, and she tried to will herself not to listen to the quiet rustling and skittering behind her.
She gritted her teeth.
Stop it, Anna.
Nora sighed, brushed her fingers through her side-shaved black hair, and pressed the power button.
And Anna couldn’t help the scream that escaped her as both Freddy and the computer sprang to life, letting out an awful noise. Freddy lurched forward, hitting the floor with an ear-splitting crash, and Nora jumped back, barely avoiding getting crushed.
“Holy shit!” Nora cried. “Holy shit!”
Nora was trembling when she exited the area, and for a moment, Anna saw what had happened.
Freddy was on his hands and knees on the ground, his shoulders heaving intensely like he was trying to breathe, complete with those weird wheezing sounds that had been reported. The echoing sound of Freddy hitting the ground with all his might escaped as the door opened.
Freddy was trembling. He looked horrified, his face twisted into the most unexplainable expression, one that should have not been even possible- eyes too wide, eyebrows too twisted, mouth pulled into a grimace too real. He stared blankly in what seemed to be horror, and it was only as Anna tried to take in his expression more that she realized his eyes were completely white.
But a dark fluid was building up in them, dripping down onto the floor below.
“I don’t know what’s wrong,” She admitted. “I don’t know what could possibly be causing this!!”
“Can we at least try to get him back to a functional state?”
“I don’t fucking know!!” Nora barked. “Look at that! What do you expect me to do?!”
“Shit, I- I don’t know…!”
“I need to have him out for now. If he reacts to an emergency restart like this-”
“Isn’t there anything else we can do?”
“Look, I’ll work overtime tonight and everything-”
“Nono, I’m just worried you’ll have the manager down your throat-”
“Y’know what, Kwento?! FUCK that asshole!!” Nora shouted suddenly. “FUCK him, I can’t stand this! Impossible tasks on even worse time limits to keep the ‘children’ happy, I can’t deal with it! If that dumb son of a bitch wants to haul his own sorry ass down here and fix it himself in the next ten minutes before the kids start getting impatient instead of putting it all on me, I’ll fucking welcome it.”
Anna hesitated, and the two stood in tense silence.
“I can have him presentable before the day’s end, and that’s it. He won’t be even close to functional until I can have some more time to look at it.”
“Is Freddy okay?”
Anna heard the question before she processed what she was seeing- almost fifteen kids were crowded around the door to Freddy’s room, and Anna had to push a few away from the door so they couldn’t try to sneak in.
“Freddy is…”
She hesitated.
“Freddy is fine. He’s just not feeling too well. We’ll have him back before the end of the day, but it might be a while before you guys can play with him again.”
“Aw, what?”
The kids groaned and complained, as though expecting her to relent.
One of the kids, however, said nothing, until everyone had stopped whining.
Once they did, he spoke up.
He spoke so quickly, as though he was trying to avoid attention, that it took Anna a moment to process his question.
“Yeah, what IS wrong with him?” Another kid chimed in.
“We…”
Well, she couldn’t say they didn’t know, not if she didn’t want to make this a bigger problem than it needed to be to the kids.
“We think he’s caught a bug that’s overloading his system a little bit,” She said finally.
A few more voices piped up from the crowd.
“A bug? Is he sick?”
“No, it’s a computer term, idiot.”
“Hey,” Anna scolded. “Don’t talk to each other that way. You could think of it as getting sick. There’s something in him that’s making his body do things it shouldn’t. That’s like getting sick, right?”
“See? I was right!”
“No you weren’t, dumbass! She said that to make you feel better!”
“Hey!” Anna repeated. “That is enough. You do not speak to others that way!”
The kid blushed, clearly embarrassed at being called out.
“Sorry.”
“I’m not the one to be apologizing to,” She responded. “Does anyone have any more questions?”
There was a moment of silence.
“Is Freddy turning evil?”
“What? No!”
“My brother said that the animatronics used to be evil!” The little Molly girl added in. “He said they were haunted and they killed people!”
“Well, he was lying. They’re not evil, and they’re not…”
Freddy had been breathing. Really breathing. He wasn’t just moving erratically, it was with a purpose. And those sounds were coming straight from him, not a speaker or a computer, but him.
And those eyes…
“And they’re not haunted,” She finished firmly. “I promise you, everything is okay.”
Damn it.
The one thing Nora Pacheco hated more than her job itself was the stress it put on her. She was overworked with ridiculous expectations, and always had so much on her shoulders. Her manager was useless, her bosses were painfully demanding, and the job itself was so intense, she rarely had a second to breathe.
…Really, she didn’t hate anything more than her job.
And yet, here she was, working overtime at almost midnight to fix this stupid bot.
What kind of glitch even was this? It converted an mp3 to a video file, multiplied the size by nearly sixty, and then started running the file unprompted, leading to an overload and partially shutting down the system.
…Leading to him managing to step off his bolts, and breathe, and overflow and spill that weird black fluid…
Was he being hacked?
Scanning through the files for any other signs of any issues with the mp3 and audio play commands.
But the longer she looked and the less she found, the more it began to look like the ‘happy birthday’ mp4 was completely unrelated to the audio file.
And the preview image in the computer wasn’t the simple black or white background Nora would have expected.
It appeared to be… a person. A child, at that.
An image of a child hue-shifted to red.
Stomach twisting, Nora clicked on the video.
It was blood. Not a color shift, it was blood. Blood and brain matter.
The child was dead.
Unable to tear her eyes away from the kid, she barely processed the shaking hands of an older boy at the corners of the screen. The rest of the older boy was off-camera, but she saw his hands. They trembled and rattled like Nora had never seen, and she could hear a voice that must have been his breathing heavily and sniffling, trying not to sob aloud.
A small cry slipped from him, and Nora’s face fell in horror as he took his hands around the child’s face, first gently holding his freckled cheeks, then digging through his curly hair like he was going to try to fix the breakage.
And then he did.
As the boy let out a sob, Nora heard a split second of the nauseating noise that sounded when his hands were pushed into the child’s injured head, and then-
An error tone rang.
Access to this file was not authorized by your administrator.
Clasping her hands around her mouth, Nora leaned forward, trying desperately not to puke.
She didn’t know what she’d just seen; she didn’t even know how to comprehend it.
Was it a threat? A stupid hoax? Maybe just a scene from some horror movie?
She needed to make sense of this. She needed to understand it. She needed to fix it. She needed help.
She needed to go home.
Freddy blinked, turning to her with an almost saddened expression.
“Alright, Freddy,” She managed, trying to hold back her fear. “What is that? What’s going on?”
She didn’t expect him to answer, of course. She was just trying to keep herself from giving in to her terror. Maybe talking would help her through it, for some reason.
Freddy wasn’t even supposed to be able to answer. She was just running test commands on him. He wasn’t able to hear, process or respond to anything.
But he did.
He cocked his head, and twisted his plastic facial plate. His eyebrows turned upward, his mouth shut tight, and his eyelids turned in, making him look almost hurt.
And he spoke with a voice deeper and raspier than normal.
“I… am not… me.”
“Alright, we got a creepy idle mode malfunction from a RAM overload, responding like he’s in idle mode in test mode, fluid leakage, audio glitches, and a video hacked into his system?”
“Not hacked,” Nora corrected. “It was from our network.”
Mark Cho, the tall man who had now taken Nora’s place at the computer, shrugged. “It could’ve been a hack anyway. If they got onto the network first, the video would have been sourced from the same place as all his other files.”
“Fine. Then yes, you’ve got all of it. He said ‘I am not me’ when I asked aloud what was going on. I guess he was trying to cycle through his responses and ended up with that. I think the problem is that video, but…” Nora shuddered.
Mark glanced over at her.
“But every time we try to delete it… it just… uploads again,” She finished. “My… my hypothesis was that it was some sort of glitch converting the mp3 file to a video, but… that video was not his birthday protocol. I don’t know what it was, but…”
“From what you told me, it sounds like it came from a horror movie,” Mark suggested.
“Mark, it was twenty minutes! What movie would have a quarter of its runtime dedicated to that?!”
“Final Destination?”
“You’re not funny, Mark.”
“What about Saw?”
“Cut it out.”
Mark snickered. “Sorry.”
“Right,” Nora sighed. “For the record, I’m not saying I think it was a real kid dying. I just… it’s seriously horrific. And I didn’t see nearly the whole thing. I’m telling you, if it was a hacker, that’s the smallest problem. I can’t for the life of me figure out where they found that footage.”
“Do you think it’s a ghost?”
Nora hesitated. That was about the last thing she’d been expecting to hear, but-
No.
“Cut the crap, Mark.”
“I’m being serious.”
“No, you’re not, you dick.”
“I’m dead serious. It could’ve been a message. It reminds me of that old story of the bite of 1983? They could be trying to stir up crap from the past.”
“Mark, you asshole, that’s not a ghost.”
“Sure it is.”
Nora groaned. As kind as Mark could be, he was also a smartass, and he refused to just speak straight most of the time. He always insisted on joking instead of telling it like it was, and Nora could barely stand it.
“Okay, say it is this ‘ghost’ of yours. How do we get it to stop? Whoever wants to remind everyone of this weird ‘null’ past, how do we get them to cut it out?”
Finally seeming to take it seriously, Mark frowned. “Not sure.”
“I guess we could isolate the file and clear the commands making it take up so much space,” Nora suggested. “Will that keep the ‘ghost’ at bay?”
“I mean…” Mark shrugged. “It’s worth a try. If we can clear that extra data, we can probably get him back in working order.”
“Didn’t answer my question.”
Mark grinned, and Nora rolled her eyes.
But his smile faded.
“Nora, the video deleted just fine once it was in a different folder. Did you not try that?”
“Look, I tried to delete it and it just fucking reuploaded,” Nora shot back. “I don’t know what was going on, but it wasn’t deleting, okay?”
Mark frowned. “It’s fine now.”
“Okay, well it wasn’t last night! None of it makes sense… I’m not making this up, Mark. I’m not crazy.”
“Didn’t say you were.”
“I’m serious, I’m not!!”
“I know!” Mark raised his hands in surrender. “Look, I can handle the rest of this. I don’t think you’re crazy, you just need a break.”
Nora sighed.
She knew Mark was right, but admitting that would feel like, ironically, admitting she was losing her mind.
But she knew she wasn’t.
She knew what she’d seen.
“I am not me.”
She knew this was real.
“Fine, I’ll take a damn break,” She said finally. “But if you come out of this thinking I’m insane, I’m quitting.”
Mark rolled his eyes.
Nora glanced at Freddy again.
Even though she hadn’t moved, he turned and stared back.
…His face didn’t look quite right.