The Mind of an Animatronic

Haven’t written one of these in a while…

So last week I promised to write a little analysis about the animatronics’ processors. Reusing the surviving processors is a big deal here at the FFP rebuild. You’d be surprised how many we’ve gotten a hold of. I admit, I’m a little… wary about this topic. It’s heavy stuff, what we’ve found. But what the hell. Nobody knows about this blog. Let’s just hope none of this bites me in the ass later on.

In case you’re just tuning in (and how did you find this if you are), my name’s TLB. I’m an engineer at the new run of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. Head engineer, actually. I’m in charge of rebuilding the Bonnie animatronics. So far, it's… Well, the actual ‘rebuilding’ thing is going smoothly enough! But we’ve found a lot of information that…

Look, let’s just get right to it. I don’t wanna waste any time.

We’ve found a lot more processors than you might expect. Considering the old run, how can you expect to find even one half intact processor? But once the bots left the chop shop they didn’t get rid of anything. Right now, we’ve got more than enough to combine, refine, and reupload into the current 'bots. We’ve got a good range of time periods too, with brain bits from all eras of the pizzerias. Heck, we’ve even got Fredbear and Spring Bonnie’s processors! That’s a miracle, considering how long they were around!



At least, I would’ve said it was a miracle had the latter not given me so much trouble when I went to buy him.

(Seriously, fuck you 'Springtrap’. I hope Spring Bonnie doesn’t remember what you’ve done.)

Of the generations we have, the springlocks are the least advanced. (Obviously, considering they’re the oldest.) They have no interactivity features. They follow voices to find people, then run through one of several pre-programmed scripts. These scripts run through a sorting program to make decisions based on several factors:

a. When the script was last performed

b. Where in the pizzeria they are

c. How far away their partner is

These factors ensure maximum satisfaction and immersion for the audience. The animatronics do not ignore them, do not ignore each other, and do not perform the same skit to the same crowd. They also have a feature that activates only when the crank is used. When placed in suit mode, the processor went dormant, allowing the person inside the suit to become the character without the character programming getting in the way.

Of course, if an accident happened… There’s a thought to haunt your nightmares, huh?

The Toy era processors are the most advanced of the bunch. Also the most fragmented and incomplete. Old Management did a number on them. From what we’ve gathered (pun not intended), they had the most interactivity. They recognized 100 words and phrases, and said almost 500 names. And they could perform skits with human employees. They had a separate data bank for various games children could ask to play, and how to do them. They could tell parents where and when they had last seen their child if they had to. Their memory banks could keep up to one month of faces, but one of the 'banks we have is set to erase after one week.

ALSO! We found something interesting when we checked out the criminal database. The database wasn’t stored in the robots, but in on-site servers. The robots accessed this information whenever they encountered a new person. This info came straight from the cops, 'to ensure the safety of both customer and employee’. Unfortunately while they owned the building, they did not own the server. When we checked out the data from the server, we got a big ol’ error screen. Turns out management hadn’t payed the server bill. It was shut down for a least a week before the kids disappeared.

Maybe the bite was a good thing for the old run. Had the cops found out about that, they’d shut the whole place down for criminal negligence… and it would not be opening back up for a long, long time.

Along with all this, they had the most advanced map of all the generations. They had set paths to every room in the facility. Every room had it’s own name. If you said, “Toy Bonnie, you’re needed in Party Room 2,” he’d walk over to Party Room 2. Their dynamic maps let them navigate those rooms easier than the springlock animatronics did. If there was a table in the way, they walked around it. Meanwhile, as I personally saw, if you put a table into Fredbear’s way, he’d walk right into it.

I miss that old lug…

We haven’t found any processors for the Prototypes. At this point, we never will. They’d probably run off modified Old Classic hardware anyway. Only the personality data would be interesting to us.

The Classic animatronics… Mm. We don’t have Old Classic data, just the New (90s) era processors. But those processors have some disturbing things in there.

They’re different from the others. They’re like a combination between the Springlocks'and the Toys’. They weren’t supposed to move, yeah, but they kept the free roam programming of the Old Classics. The same map, same paths… and that all wouldn’t be so bad if they were bolted to the floor, but they weren’t.

Let me back up and address their other capabilities. No interaction with the audience. They did not recognize speech. They didn’t recognize each other’s speech. If one of them broke down during a show, the others continued like it didn’t happen. They didn’t recognize faces. Didn’t recognize people. Didn’t recognize each other.

These things were machines. They had no sentience, no personalities, no life. The characters we love are completely separate from those things. They – none of the animatronics that ever walked through those old halls – could feel. Could care. Could love or hate or think. They could not think. And yet…

The Classics have two kinds of memory. Both are exactly what they sound like.

Taped memory: Visual memory, recorded by small cameras, without sound. We haven’t found any of these, just signs they could do it. I’m assuming they got erased after a set period time. Either that or management did it. Or maybe it was an Old Classic feature they didn’t bother to reinstall. No way to know now.

The other is logged memory: written out logs with a lot of info in them. These were all things the animatronics needed. Things like the time, the skits of the day, their 'health’. The power and temperature of the building. Where the employees were. Where they and the other animatronics were.



Now none of this sounds bad on the surface. After all, what’s the worst they could log? The animatronics couldn’t walk, and no children vanished at the final pizzeria. Health code violations aside, everything was hunky-dory right?

Well… There was that missing security guard.

Yeah, I’m going where you think I am.

The taped logs we have go back to mid 1990. Parts of them are too corrupted to read, but I doubt we need to. The animatronics – the pizzeria itself – had a predictable pattern. Like clockwork, the employees followed the same routines. They did the same tasks, visited the same tables, the same trash cans. The employees were designated by numbers, not names, because FFP went through so many.

There were two exceptions to this, and neither were the managers.

The first of these exceptions was the security guard. Employee number 359248 came in every weekday, and sometimes Saturdays, at approximately 11:45am. They went to the security office, and stayed there until 6am. Sometimes until almost 7.

At midnight, the animatronics switched into free-roaming mode. One by one, they headed towards the security office. You could say their intentions were innocent. That they were following pre-set paths that had no relation to anyone or anything that had a brain. But like I said, Employee 359248 only came in on weekdays. On weekends, when there was no security guard, the animatronics didn’t move.

And when they did move, it was predictable. They visited the same rooms and stood in the same spots. They went through the same motions, the same processes, again and again and again. Of the lot, only Foxy’s movements were erratic. He sprinted from Pirate’s Cove without warning. Even within the logs, there’s no sign of what triggered it. And he still did the same thing. He ran down the same hallway to that same closed door, and then went back to Pirate’s Cove. Again, and again.



Night after night.

Two things about these days, before '93, make me uncomfortable. The first actually involves Foxy. Management closed Pirate’s Cove at the end of '91. They didn’t have the money to repair him, and he wasn’t bringing people in anyway. Despite this, Foxy chased the night guard after hours right up until November of '93.

The other thing is something I wouldn’t expect a lot of people to notice, but I did. See, I’ve been to this pizzeria. Been to the 87 pizzeria, too. Many times, both off them. I’d say I have a good mental map of that place. And when I looked at these logs, laid them over with the map in my head, I saw…

The animatronics… tended to linger around the security cameras. I’m not talking 'there were a lot of cameras and they were near them by coincidence’. I mean, they stood in front of the cameras in more than one occasion, in more than one room. Again, night after night. Like it was on purpose.

Like they wanted to scare him.

It’s hard for me to talk about this next part. Hard for me to put what I know into words what I know. But if I don’t talk about it, I’m gonna explode, so… No matter what happens I’m gonna try.

On a Thursday in November '93, they changed their pattern.

Things always escalated as the week went on. Freddy himself didn’t leave the stage until Wednesday. But that night. It was like they knew he was retiring. They never crowded the room like they did that night, and they never did it again.

At around 2 or 3, Chica got into the office. Freddy followed.

The left door opened. Chica and Freddy went into the hall. Foxy and Bonnie followed. Employee 359248 was with them, between them.

They went down the hall.

They passed Pirate’s Cove.

They went through the Dining Room.

They entered Parts and Service.

For the rest of the night, they remained in there. For hours, the logs don’t change. Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, Foxy, and the night guard, all locked up in that tiny room.

The animatronics moved around in there, y'know. Walking around the tables, bumping against the shelves, that kind of thing. The employee, I think they sat him on the table. These logs, they don’t show human gestures, just where they are in the room. At first none of them tried to hold him down. I think he fell unconscious just before the long walk. But then Foxy goes over and stays by him, so I guess he woke up.

For a little while.

After maybe 30 minutes, the animatronics stopped moving. They surrounded the security guard, and stared at him. For the rest of the night, they remained in those positions, as if admiring their handiwork. Around 5:55, they returned to the stage, and there they stayed for the rest of the day.

Employee 359248 stayed in Parts and Service.

At 6:25am, the first employees filtered in. They entered Parts and Service, left Parts and Service, and got the manager. They locked the room. They washed the floor. They cleaned the animatronics.

Employee 842953 entered the building. This was the other long-term employee. Employee 842953 entered Parts and Service and stood in front of Employee 359248. This employee moved around Parts and Service until close to closing. Around 3pm, Employee 842953 left with 359248. They left the building. Except Employee 359248 was still in Parts and Service. Employee 842953 returned, and removed Employee 359248 again. And again. And again. Until he called it a day at around 11:45pm.

At 6:05am, Employee 842953 returned went back to work in Parts and Service. This went on for the entire weekend. On Monday morning, Employee 359248 disappeared from the logs forever.

The animatronics never moved once.

I’d tell you there’s a happy ending, but there isn’t one. Not to me. Not after reading all these logs. But the story doesn’t end there. It doesn’t remove the bitter taste in my mouth, but you deserve to know.

Fact is, the replacement for the night shift broke the animatronics. Employee 051093 worked from Monday to Sunday. The animatronics gave him all the kindness and hospitality they gave Employee 359248. On Sunday night, Employee 051093 arrived an hour early. He climbed onto the stage, and one by one began to work on the animatronics. I can’t even begin to explain this, not in language laymen can understand. To try and sum it up, he destroyed their ability to walk by damaging both their hard- and software. Once he finished with the stage trio, Employee 051093 went to Pirate’s Cove, and did all this to Foxy too.

It was the first quiet night Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza had in a long time. According to the logs, the first of many.

Employee 051093 got fired for this, of course. But in the long run, this was for the best. The animatronics never moved off stage again.

The idea causes me no pain. I have no sympathy, no sorrow, for those machines anymore. Not after what I know. They’re not the characters I fell in love with. They were just metal under fabric, nothing more, nothing less.

As for Employee 359248, you’re probably wondering what happened to him. Truth is, I don’t know what Employee 842853 did with him. The logs don’t extend to outside the pizzeria. But what happened to him after this?

Well, I’d tell you he’s reading this over my shoulder, but who’d ever believe that?