(Set some time post-Boskone War, featuring the same characters from HARD FEN Making HARD DECISIONS. Also happens to be my first attempt at a female 1st person narrator.)
"You know, theoretically we're supposed to be on annual leave," Tom grumbled, dumping two ballistic vests and a duffel bag containing the pick of our extensive weapon collection in the trunk of a rental Ford Taurus. "And I'm not wild about you going in there on your own either."
"Me neither," I admitted, shifting uncomfortably in the too-tight uniform shirt. "But if Schmidt's right, those 'bots are sentient and pretty smart. If they see another person in the box they'll know something's up. Now, is my gun showing?" I gave Tom a short twirl, giving him ample opportunity to appreciate the way these dress pants hugged my ass and letting my tail wrap round his knee.
"Well, I was suitably distracted," he replied with that cute lopsided smile of his.
We've only been officially dating for about six months now, after a long period of practically sitcom-esque tension and build-up and outside circumstances getting in the way. I needed to ease into living as my actual gender, he needed to get over some hangups about dating a catgirl, there was the fact he was technically my boss... Hell, we even did the cliched thing and finally hooked up after nearly dying in a desperate battle.
People ask me if living a romcom plot is as much fun in real life. I say it's actually better.
But now, instead of taking our first vacation as a couple, I'm playing rentacop in a (purportedly) haunted Chuck E. Cheese ripoff.
Being an Operation Great Justice troubleshooter isn't particularly glamorous or exciting for the most part, especially not when you're on a semi-permanent posting to good old Mundane Earth, but the workload is one of never-ending variety. Two weeks ago we airlifted a failed bioroid clone of Adolf Hitler to protective custody, the month before that we helped track down the wiseguy who broke into Hunstanton Sea Life Centre and created tsundere sharks, and now we're investigating reports of possessed animatronics at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza.
We don't know much about them other than the fact they're definitely wavetech, likely a homebrew effort by the owners, whose identity is hidden behind several layers of shell companies. The only contact the current manager has with higher authority is a phone number for a Mr Kepler, exact job title unspecified, who suddenly stopped taking calls after learning the IRS wanted to talk to him...
Anyway. During the daytime they alternated between standing on stage miming to bad covers of Top 40 songs and wandering around the floor area spouting canned phrases and giving kids hugs... until one of them bit some sleazebag's arm almost in half when he decided to play grab-ass with a twelve year-old girl. That was what you might call an undocumented feature.
This didn't play too well at City Hall, even when the 'victim' turned out to have outstanding warrants for possession of child porn, and the OSHA weren't too impressed either. That was the end of free-roam mode, but custom dropped severely, and it only got worse when someone remembered there'd been five minors vanish into thin air several years earlier after being lured backstage by a still-unidentified individual wearing a Freddy Fazbear costume. A few weeks ago, the place went up for sale.
That was some two days before the mysterious Mr Kepler dropped out of contact, and when the IRS did some digging they found out that his number belonged to a pre-pay SIM card bundled with the cheapest handset the store had, bought for cash in a batch of twenty in Chicago. Draw your own conclusions.
But where we come into all this is the bizarre and downright frightening reports about the behaviour of the animatronics.
The owners left instructions to put them in free-roam mode overnight so "their servos don't freeze up" (which sounds like pure horse-puckey to me, but let's just roll with it), and hired an overnight security guard to monitor the CCTV setup to stop kids breaking in to meet the "killer puppets". Those guards started reporting some seriously freaky shit going down with those puppets. They'd wander into places they weren't supposed to be able to get into like the kitchens, or even try and get into the security office. They'd been seen moving way faster than they should be capable of, lights and cameras started getting mysteriously disabled, and a couple of the rentacops swore up and down they'd heard them talking to each other.
The last straw came when one of them bust into the office, got right up in the guard's face and screamed like something out of the deepest pit of hell, at which point he jumped up and initiated Evasive Pattern Run The Fuck Away. When he called the next morning and threatened to quit if he wasn't allowed to bring his shotgun to work with him, the manager decided enough was enough and called the Convention embassy.
After some back-and-forth with the state governor's office, Tom and I were called in as 'civilian consultants', a legal fiction we perpetuated thanks to my 100% valid and legitimate Private Investigator's license. (The only thing more unnerving than how easy it is to get one of these in a lot of states is the number of states where you don't need one, but I digress.)
The local police were suspiciously pleased to see us, falling over themselves to extend us every possible courtesy in the name of making this clusterfuck someone else's problem... except actually providing a couple of officers as backup in case something went wrong in there, although Tom was sufficiently vocal in his displeasure with this (bless his old-fashioned protective heart) that they signed off on all the necessary paperwork enabling him to bring some Title II hardware into the US as well as a temporary CCW for me.
And why am I the one going in undercover instead of him, you might well ask? Well, one of the longer-serving night guards theorised that something's screwy with their self-repair and maintenance code, and they've mistaken anyone less fuzzy than they are for an animatronic missing its outer covering, so a catgirl might throw them off. It's a long-shot, but it's the only card we have to play short of calling in a squad of Starfleet Marines.
* * *
Freddy Fazbear's Pizza was at one end of a strip mall in a bad neighbourhood. At ten minutes to midnight it was pretty much deserted; the only other car in the lot belonged to the manager, who gave me a brief wave as she attempted to break the record for the 100-yard Nonchalant Walk.
Figures.
If the animatronics were still acting according to the pattern, we had 'til the stroke of midnight to get ready. I headed into the office to get settled in while Tom busied himself girding his loins.
"Radio check," he said tinnily through the conductive speaker secured to my left temple.
"Loud and clear. Camera test underway." I flipped through each one on the battered first-gen iPad provided for the purpose. "No visual feed in the kitchens, just like the last guy said. Think I should check it out?"
"Nah, leave it for now. The only place they can go from there is back into the dining area or out the fire exit."
"Okay. Coming up on five minutes." I opened the gym bag I brought with me and laid out my own weapons.
I was already wearing my pistol in a holster in the small of my back, an old Browning High-Power I'd been carrying since Tom took me on as copilot. It was loaded with steel-cored FMJ rounds that can punch through the faceplate of a pressure-suit; not ideal for fighting killer robots but hopefully good enough for something not built for combat. Four spare magazines went into the pockets of my uniform jacket.
For hand-to-hand, I had an old tonfa-style police baton that I stuck in a belt-loop. Probably useless as an offensive weapon, but it could parry blows and potentially buy me time to get my sidearm out, or use my claws. Unlike some catgirls, mine are fully retractable, so I get to keep 'em sharp.
And just for extra insurance, not to mention the intimidation factor, I placed a double-barrelled coach gun on the desk in front of me.
Now, as a serious combat weapon against well-armed and organised resistance it's got its drawbacks, but this thing is an amazing gun for de-escalating a conflict. It just looks plain scary; on a subconscious level you feel like two-barrels = twice as much buckshot = twice as big a hole in you. I've only tried actually firing both barrels simultaneously the once and missed the target spectacularly while damn near dislocating my shoulder, but your average low-rent thug doesn't know that and even people who ought to know better don't often remember when the barrels are looking them in the eye. I had twenty rounds of modern armour-piercing slug ammunition for it, which went into the pockets not occupied by the pistol magazines.
"Are you ready for Freddy?" I said to myself, quoting a half-remembered tagline for one of the Nightmare On Elm Street movies. "You're damn right I am."
Midnight rolled around, and nothing hapened for the first few minutes. I slowly cycled through the cameras, getting used to the awkward controls. Half of them were nearly useless thanks to the poor lighting, and there were two major blind-spots right outside the doors to my office. That could be a problem...
Then, when I switched to the camera overlooking the stage, all three animatronics had turned their heads to face it and were looking directly at the camera. I suppressed a stab of nervousness. "I think they're aware of the cameras," I murmured into my throat-mic. "The three on stage are staring right at me."
"They're trying to rattle you," Tom replied. "Play it cool, let 'em think you didn't notice."
"Alright." I resumed flipping through each camera feed in succession. If they could tell which camera I had up in the main window, it should hopefully look like I'd decided I couldn't possibly have really seen that.
When I next looked back at the camera in the dining area, everything was normal. Freddy the bear, Bonnie the rabbit and Chica the... bird of some kind (either a chicken or a duck; the design made it hard to tell) were soon strolling around the dining area in their 'idle' mode, whistling the odd snatch of song and generally behaving like they were waiting for the first guest to arrive. It was at once mildly creepy and at the same time kind of sad, because they'd never get to greet those customers ever again.
Was it possible, I thought whimsically, that they were acting out because they were lonely?
The fourth animatronic, a fox imaginatively named Cap'n Foxy, was behind a curtain in an area called the Pirate Cove with an out-of-order sign in front of it. He was the one who did the biting, if memory served, and the mysterious owners never got around to putting him back into service.
"I used to think pirates were awesome 'til the first time I had to fight some off," I remarked idly.
"Yeah. They didn't sanitise 'em so much when I was a kid. I've got a Valiant Comics Book of Pirates somewhere from the end of the Sixties that went into quite a bit of detail about the armed robbery and the murder and so on. Glossed over the sodomy though."
"That was the Sixties for you... Hello, what's Freddy headed backstage for?"
The backstage area was little more than a closet, with spare animatronic parts and a whole but apparently non-functioning endoskeleton on a bench. Freddy stood in the doorway, and looked right into the camera again. Somehow, despite the puppets not having much control of their facial expressions, I got the feeling he was annoyed at the intrusion. I hastily flipped back to the main stage.
"Well, that was interesting."
Back in the dining area, Bonnie and Chica were now mysteriously absent, and the camera in the men's bathroom was non-functional. "Well, they're not having a quickie," Tom quipped. "I saw in there when we recce'd the place on Friday, I think it gets cleaned once a year."
"Nice. Well, least I know where they are- Whoa! Foxy, the busted one, he just poked his head out the curtain." I zoomed the camera in for a closer look... and he drew backwards like he was startled, then yanked his head back. "He noticed. He saw me, Tom! There's definitely an AI in there!"
"Good to know. Now we just have to find out what kind of AI." I heard the muffled but still-recognisable click of a bolt being worked. "I'm coming in- Shit!"
There was a loud bang behind me and to the left, then another to the right. I flipped over to the entranceway camera to see the heavy steel shutters inside the doors had been slammed closed and bolted. "Damn it!"
"Stay at your post!" Tom barked. "They're probably trying to lure you out of the office. I'll go round the long way." That was a pre-arranged codeword; we didn't expect that they'd be able to monitor our comms, but if they did then they'd hopefully expect Tom to go around and jimmy the fire exit instead of taking a plasma cutter to the shutters.
"Understood," I replied, sounding more confident than I felt-
And then the fox was standing in the doorway. I stumbled out of my chair and fell backwards, landing on top of my gun, but I grabbed for the baton and snapped it open. If I could parry the first strike-
The fox just stared at me. Then it spoke.
"Oh, no..."
It didn't sound like the voice clips. It didn't sound like a robot. It sounded like a very frightened little boy.
And before I could even form the rest of the thought, it turned around and ran like hell.
"You know, theoretically we're supposed to be on annual leave," Tom grumbled, dumping two ballistic vests and a duffel bag containing the pick of our extensive weapon collection in the trunk of a rental Ford Taurus. "And I'm not wild about you going in there on your own either."
"Me neither," I admitted, shifting uncomfortably in the too-tight uniform shirt. "But if Schmidt's right, those 'bots are sentient and pretty smart. If they see another person in the box they'll know something's up. Now, is my gun showing?" I gave Tom a short twirl, giving him ample opportunity to appreciate the way these dress pants hugged my ass and letting my tail wrap round his knee.
"Well, I was suitably distracted," he replied with that cute lopsided smile of his.
We've only been officially dating for about six months now, after a long period of practically sitcom-esque tension and build-up and outside circumstances getting in the way. I needed to ease into living as my actual gender, he needed to get over some hangups about dating a catgirl, there was the fact he was technically my boss... Hell, we even did the cliched thing and finally hooked up after nearly dying in a desperate battle.
People ask me if living a romcom plot is as much fun in real life. I say it's actually better.
But now, instead of taking our first vacation as a couple, I'm playing rentacop in a (purportedly) haunted Chuck E. Cheese ripoff.
Being an Operation Great Justice troubleshooter isn't particularly glamorous or exciting for the most part, especially not when you're on a semi-permanent posting to good old Mundane Earth, but the workload is one of never-ending variety. Two weeks ago we airlifted a failed bioroid clone of Adolf Hitler to protective custody, the month before that we helped track down the wiseguy who broke into Hunstanton Sea Life Centre and created tsundere sharks, and now we're investigating reports of possessed animatronics at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza.
We don't know much about them other than the fact they're definitely wavetech, likely a homebrew effort by the owners, whose identity is hidden behind several layers of shell companies. The only contact the current manager has with higher authority is a phone number for a Mr Kepler, exact job title unspecified, who suddenly stopped taking calls after learning the IRS wanted to talk to him...
Anyway. During the daytime they alternated between standing on stage miming to bad covers of Top 40 songs and wandering around the floor area spouting canned phrases and giving kids hugs... until one of them bit some sleazebag's arm almost in half when he decided to play grab-ass with a twelve year-old girl. That was what you might call an undocumented feature.
This didn't play too well at City Hall, even when the 'victim' turned out to have outstanding warrants for possession of child porn, and the OSHA weren't too impressed either. That was the end of free-roam mode, but custom dropped severely, and it only got worse when someone remembered there'd been five minors vanish into thin air several years earlier after being lured backstage by a still-unidentified individual wearing a Freddy Fazbear costume. A few weeks ago, the place went up for sale.
That was some two days before the mysterious Mr Kepler dropped out of contact, and when the IRS did some digging they found out that his number belonged to a pre-pay SIM card bundled with the cheapest handset the store had, bought for cash in a batch of twenty in Chicago. Draw your own conclusions.
But where we come into all this is the bizarre and downright frightening reports about the behaviour of the animatronics.
The owners left instructions to put them in free-roam mode overnight so "their servos don't freeze up" (which sounds like pure horse-puckey to me, but let's just roll with it), and hired an overnight security guard to monitor the CCTV setup to stop kids breaking in to meet the "killer puppets". Those guards started reporting some seriously freaky shit going down with those puppets. They'd wander into places they weren't supposed to be able to get into like the kitchens, or even try and get into the security office. They'd been seen moving way faster than they should be capable of, lights and cameras started getting mysteriously disabled, and a couple of the rentacops swore up and down they'd heard them talking to each other.
The last straw came when one of them bust into the office, got right up in the guard's face and screamed like something out of the deepest pit of hell, at which point he jumped up and initiated Evasive Pattern Run The Fuck Away. When he called the next morning and threatened to quit if he wasn't allowed to bring his shotgun to work with him, the manager decided enough was enough and called the Convention embassy.
After some back-and-forth with the state governor's office, Tom and I were called in as 'civilian consultants', a legal fiction we perpetuated thanks to my 100% valid and legitimate Private Investigator's license. (The only thing more unnerving than how easy it is to get one of these in a lot of states is the number of states where you don't need one, but I digress.)
The local police were suspiciously pleased to see us, falling over themselves to extend us every possible courtesy in the name of making this clusterfuck someone else's problem... except actually providing a couple of officers as backup in case something went wrong in there, although Tom was sufficiently vocal in his displeasure with this (bless his old-fashioned protective heart) that they signed off on all the necessary paperwork enabling him to bring some Title II hardware into the US as well as a temporary CCW for me.
And why am I the one going in undercover instead of him, you might well ask? Well, one of the longer-serving night guards theorised that something's screwy with their self-repair and maintenance code, and they've mistaken anyone less fuzzy than they are for an animatronic missing its outer covering, so a catgirl might throw them off. It's a long-shot, but it's the only card we have to play short of calling in a squad of Starfleet Marines.
* * *
Freddy Fazbear's Pizza was at one end of a strip mall in a bad neighbourhood. At ten minutes to midnight it was pretty much deserted; the only other car in the lot belonged to the manager, who gave me a brief wave as she attempted to break the record for the 100-yard Nonchalant Walk.
Figures.
If the animatronics were still acting according to the pattern, we had 'til the stroke of midnight to get ready. I headed into the office to get settled in while Tom busied himself girding his loins.
"Radio check," he said tinnily through the conductive speaker secured to my left temple.
"Loud and clear. Camera test underway." I flipped through each one on the battered first-gen iPad provided for the purpose. "No visual feed in the kitchens, just like the last guy said. Think I should check it out?"
"Nah, leave it for now. The only place they can go from there is back into the dining area or out the fire exit."
"Okay. Coming up on five minutes." I opened the gym bag I brought with me and laid out my own weapons.
I was already wearing my pistol in a holster in the small of my back, an old Browning High-Power I'd been carrying since Tom took me on as copilot. It was loaded with steel-cored FMJ rounds that can punch through the faceplate of a pressure-suit; not ideal for fighting killer robots but hopefully good enough for something not built for combat. Four spare magazines went into the pockets of my uniform jacket.
For hand-to-hand, I had an old tonfa-style police baton that I stuck in a belt-loop. Probably useless as an offensive weapon, but it could parry blows and potentially buy me time to get my sidearm out, or use my claws. Unlike some catgirls, mine are fully retractable, so I get to keep 'em sharp.
And just for extra insurance, not to mention the intimidation factor, I placed a double-barrelled coach gun on the desk in front of me.
Now, as a serious combat weapon against well-armed and organised resistance it's got its drawbacks, but this thing is an amazing gun for de-escalating a conflict. It just looks plain scary; on a subconscious level you feel like two-barrels = twice as much buckshot = twice as big a hole in you. I've only tried actually firing both barrels simultaneously the once and missed the target spectacularly while damn near dislocating my shoulder, but your average low-rent thug doesn't know that and even people who ought to know better don't often remember when the barrels are looking them in the eye. I had twenty rounds of modern armour-piercing slug ammunition for it, which went into the pockets not occupied by the pistol magazines.
"Are you ready for Freddy?" I said to myself, quoting a half-remembered tagline for one of the Nightmare On Elm Street movies. "You're damn right I am."
Midnight rolled around, and nothing hapened for the first few minutes. I slowly cycled through the cameras, getting used to the awkward controls. Half of them were nearly useless thanks to the poor lighting, and there were two major blind-spots right outside the doors to my office. That could be a problem...
Then, when I switched to the camera overlooking the stage, all three animatronics had turned their heads to face it and were looking directly at the camera. I suppressed a stab of nervousness. "I think they're aware of the cameras," I murmured into my throat-mic. "The three on stage are staring right at me."
"They're trying to rattle you," Tom replied. "Play it cool, let 'em think you didn't notice."
"Alright." I resumed flipping through each camera feed in succession. If they could tell which camera I had up in the main window, it should hopefully look like I'd decided I couldn't possibly have really seen that.
When I next looked back at the camera in the dining area, everything was normal. Freddy the bear, Bonnie the rabbit and Chica the... bird of some kind (either a chicken or a duck; the design made it hard to tell) were soon strolling around the dining area in their 'idle' mode, whistling the odd snatch of song and generally behaving like they were waiting for the first guest to arrive. It was at once mildly creepy and at the same time kind of sad, because they'd never get to greet those customers ever again.
Was it possible, I thought whimsically, that they were acting out because they were lonely?
The fourth animatronic, a fox imaginatively named Cap'n Foxy, was behind a curtain in an area called the Pirate Cove with an out-of-order sign in front of it. He was the one who did the biting, if memory served, and the mysterious owners never got around to putting him back into service.
"I used to think pirates were awesome 'til the first time I had to fight some off," I remarked idly.
"Yeah. They didn't sanitise 'em so much when I was a kid. I've got a Valiant Comics Book of Pirates somewhere from the end of the Sixties that went into quite a bit of detail about the armed robbery and the murder and so on. Glossed over the sodomy though."
"That was the Sixties for you... Hello, what's Freddy headed backstage for?"
The backstage area was little more than a closet, with spare animatronic parts and a whole but apparently non-functioning endoskeleton on a bench. Freddy stood in the doorway, and looked right into the camera again. Somehow, despite the puppets not having much control of their facial expressions, I got the feeling he was annoyed at the intrusion. I hastily flipped back to the main stage.
"Well, that was interesting."
Back in the dining area, Bonnie and Chica were now mysteriously absent, and the camera in the men's bathroom was non-functional. "Well, they're not having a quickie," Tom quipped. "I saw in there when we recce'd the place on Friday, I think it gets cleaned once a year."
"Nice. Well, least I know where they are- Whoa! Foxy, the busted one, he just poked his head out the curtain." I zoomed the camera in for a closer look... and he drew backwards like he was startled, then yanked his head back. "He noticed. He saw me, Tom! There's definitely an AI in there!"
"Good to know. Now we just have to find out what kind of AI." I heard the muffled but still-recognisable click of a bolt being worked. "I'm coming in- Shit!"
There was a loud bang behind me and to the left, then another to the right. I flipped over to the entranceway camera to see the heavy steel shutters inside the doors had been slammed closed and bolted. "Damn it!"
"Stay at your post!" Tom barked. "They're probably trying to lure you out of the office. I'll go round the long way." That was a pre-arranged codeword; we didn't expect that they'd be able to monitor our comms, but if they did then they'd hopefully expect Tom to go around and jimmy the fire exit instead of taking a plasma cutter to the shutters.
"Understood," I replied, sounding more confident than I felt-
And then the fox was standing in the doorway. I stumbled out of my chair and fell backwards, landing on top of my gun, but I grabbed for the baton and snapped it open. If I could parry the first strike-
The fox just stared at me. Then it spoke.
"Oh, no..."
It didn't sound like the voice clips. It didn't sound like a robot. It sounded like a very frightened little boy.
And before I could even form the rest of the thought, it turned around and ran like hell.