Five Nights at Freddy's Fazbear Frights Collection, page 163
The robotics classroom was a large warehouse-like room with tall ceilings guarded by exposed metal beams. The floors were covered with rubberized interlocking squares, and the metal worktables were bright red. Gray pegboards lined the walls of the room, and every robotics part you could think of hung on hooks from those boards. The room was far too industrial to suit Jessica’s tastes, but she tolerated it like everyone else.
Even though robotics was a required class for sophomores, and many of Jessica’s classmates groused about it, she secretly didn’t mind it. Most of the time she didn’t really understand what she was doing, but she did think it was fun. And it played into her other strength: control. Of course, she liked control best when she was controlling people, but controlling machines seemed to be a natural extension of that.
Even with all her beauty and social skills, Jessica never got everything and everyone around her to act just as she wanted them to. There was always someone who was saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing. Take the two redheaded morons, for instance. With her class popularity and physical presence, she should have been able to wrap Mindy and Cindy around her manicured finger. That they didn’t afford her the appropriate amount of reverence was like having a splinter stuck just under the skin. She hated when that happened. She hated Mindy and Cindy even more.
The room’s red tables sat in rows, three tables in each of the five rows. Jessica and Brittany took their seats at the middle table in the third row—not too close to the front so they wouldn’t appear to be geeks, not too close to the back where they’d be surrounded by outcasts. They always sat where their vaulted status could be recognized.
The robotics teacher, Mr. Thornton, a short twentysomething man with birdlike features—beady eyes, a pointed nose, and fine brown hair—strode into the class and set a stack of books and schematics on his desk. Jessica shook her head at the red-and-gold diamond-patterned sweater vest that hung loosely over Mr. Thornton’s narrow chest. Between the vests he always wore and his thick, black-rimmed glasses, Mr. Thornton was the poster boy for geeks everywhere.
Mr. Thornton looked askance at the class, as he always did. He had a little trouble with eye contact. He never faced straight at the class, and when you talked to him directly, he focused his gaze about a foot above your head. Jessica thought that was sort of endearing, in a lovable-nerd kind of way.
“Talk among yourselves for a few minutes. The shipment just came in, and I need to supervise the …” He trailed off and disappeared into the workroom adjacent to the robotics classroom.
That was something else Mr. Thornton did. He frequently left his sentences unfinished. It was weird. Once, Brittany suggested that Mr. Thornton might be an animatronic, one with advanced programming and a minor glitch that prevented him from completing his communications. Jessica thought that was hysterically funny.
“What do you want to do about them?” Brittany asked.
Jessica blinked and looked at her friend. “What? About who?”
Brittany nodded toward Mindy and Cindy, who were sitting in the front row. Jessica looked at the backs of the two redheads.
Mindy and Cindy had only joined the class a couple weeks before. Apparently, they were part of some gifted class that did robotics competitions. They even worked out of the robotics lab—meeting early each morning before the school day began. And now they were auditing the sophomore class. Little freaks.
Jessica opened her mouth to answer her friend, but before she could, a loud clattering and thumping accompanied Mr. Thornton back into the room. The racket came from the wheels of a cart he was pushing in front of him. The cart was piled with things that looked like they should have been either in old sci-fi movies, amusement parks, or circuses.
Momentarily forgetting Mindy and Cindy, Jessica sat up straight and leaned forward to see what was on the cart. She spotted a couple of silver robot skeletons, vaguely man-shaped gray robots that looked like aliens, and several mechanical animals. Many were dog- and cat-shaped, and a few looked like miniature barn animals and exotic animals. She spotted a cow, a horse, an orangutan, a black panther, a flamingo, and a huge pink pig. The pig was the only life-sized thing on the cart. The cow, horse, and panther were about the same size as the dogs and cats.
All the mechanical animals looked like they were designed to stand on their back two feet, and most wore some piece of clothing or accessory, reminding her more of sports team mascots than real animals. Jessica saw a couple bow ties and vests, two feather boas, short pants with suspenders (on the flamingo), a bowler hat, striped socks, and a pair of red gloves. The pig was the closest to being fully dressed; it wore what looked like a frilly waitress uniform in a shade of pink just a little darker than its fuzzy piggy skin. Atop its broad head sat a pillbox-shaped pink cap with a ruffled edge. Other than the outfit, and the fact that it had fuzzy pink hands instead of hooves, it looked a lot like a real pig.
“Okay, class, let’s get started on today’s …” Mr. Thornton said. He gestured at the cartload of robotic characters he’d just dragged in and grinned sideways at the class. “What we have here is a vintage animatronic bonanza!” He uttered one of his rare laughs.
Jessica winced. She was glad his laughs were rare; he sounded like a tortured mouse when he laughed.
Mr. Thornton sobered. “None of these animatronics function at the moment, but every one of them is capable of … You’ll partner up, and each partnership will get one of these to work on, so it will be … You’ll have two jobs to do. First, do whatever is needed so your animatronic will function as it’s supposed to, and second, program it so it performs some specific task. You will then either have it perform for the class or videotape it if the function is done outside of class where we can’t … Each one of these has something to teach us, so let’s …”
He moved over to the cart and pulled out one of the small dog robots. It wore a yellow dog sweater.
“This dog is an example of an animatronic that uses servos, and we all know that servos are controlled by …” Mr. Thornton looked out over the top of the class and pushed his glasses up onto his nose. “Anyone?”
Mindy raised her hand. “Servos are controlled by sending an electrical pulse through the control wire.”
“Good,” Mr. Thornton said.
Jessica rolled her eyes.
“When a servo goes bad,” Mr. Thornton continued, “it’s usually because of one of seven problems we discussed yesterday. Does anyone want to give us a review of …”
He pointed at Cindy when her hand shot up. “Contamination, like from oil or coolant; bad bearings; electrical degradation; poor installation, like the belts are too tight or couplings are worn out; a bad power supply or drive; damaged cables; or overload.”
“Good,” Mr. Thornton said. “So, this dog”—he set the animatronic dog on his desk—“has a bad servo. Cindy, you and Mindy can take this.”
Cindy and Mindy clapped their hands like five-year-olds. Mr. Thornton grinned at a spot above their heads and set the dog on the table in front of them.
Mr. Thornton turned to the cart and grabbed the orangutan, a goat, and a cat. “More servo issues with these. Let’s see who …”
Mr. Thornton parceled out the robotic animals.
Brittany leaned close to Jessica and whispered, “Do we want to work on a servo problem?”
Jessica shrugged. “Whatever.”
Mr. Thornton returned to the front of the class after handing out several of the mechanical animals. “Although servos have a lot of pros in terms of their functionality,” Mr. Thornton said, stopping by the cart, “there can be noise issues with …” He reached out and grabbed the animatronic flamingo. He activated it, and when it moved its legs, the mechanism screeched. Mr. Thornton turned it off. “Pneumatic setups, by comparison, are fairly quiet and …” He got up and approached the cart.
Wrestling with the exoskeletons and human-shaped animatronics, Mr. Thornton unburied the pig at the bottom of what was left of the pile. Now that it was lying on its back on the cart, alone, Jessica could clearly see the pig’s pink potbelly, stubby legs, and sweetly smiling face. The mechanical pig was old; Jessica could see glinting silver showing through the pig’s pink felt layer here and there.
Mr. Thornton gestured at the prone pig. “Meet Rosie Porkchop. Rosie has a pneumatic system, which means she can lift a lot more weight than her fellow … She has a lot of pressure pumping through her lines, so she has quite a bit of potential, but her programming is … Obviously, she’s too heavy to move, except on this cart. Whoever gets her will have to come back in the evenings to work on her, so …”
Jessica nudged Brittany and hissed, “Don’t look at him.”
They’d already had to do one after-hours project this year, and she didn’t want to—
“Jessica and Brittany, you two get Rosie.”
Jessica and Brittany groaned in unison.
“Now let’s get the rest of these passed … ,” Mr. Thornton said.
Brittany whispered to Jessica. “Seriously? We have to come back here this evening and work on a pig?”
Jessica rolled her eyes. Maybe she didn’t like robotics class after all.
* * *
When Jessica and Brittany returned to the robotics classroom after cheerleading practice, freshly showered and once again wearing their school outfits, they found Mr. Thornton at his desk and Rosie, on the cart by herself, at the back of the room.
Mr. Thornton looked up and gazed just past Jessica’s shoulder. “There you are. I put Rosie at the back for you to work … Sorry she’s too big to remove from the school, but … I had to assign her to a team I could trust to stay after-hours so I could get administrative approval for you to be in here for …” He waved a hand toward Rosie. “She’s all yours.”
Jessica and Brittany exchanged a glance, sighed in unison, and went to the back of the class. Together, they set down their leather backpacks. Jessica reached into hers, grabbed her lip gloss, and touched up her lips. Brittany did the same.
They stood together and looked at the pig.
“Uh, girls?” Mr. Thornton called out.
They turned. He waved a thin stack of papers at them. “Here are some specs that came with Rosie when she … You’ll want to take a look at them. She’s not your typical animatronic, and she has a characteristic that it’s important for you …”
Jessica strode over and took the papers. “We’ll read everything, like, super carefully,” she said.
Mr. Thornton nodded. “I’ll be here for a little while longer if you have any questions for …”
“Thanks, Mr. Thornton.”
Jessica returned to Brittany and dropped the papers on the table next to Rosie. Neither girl looked at them. They returned to looking at the pig.
“It’s so, like, big,” Brittany said. She sighed.
Jessica nodded. She glared at the huge pig.
The sound of dual giggles suddenly burst into the room behind Jessica and Brittany. They turned and watched Cindy and Mindy skip over to Mr. Thornton. Mindy carried the dog animatronic they were working on.
“Why did they get, like, a small one?” Brittany asked.
Jessica shook her head. She watched the little brats chatter with Mr. Thornton. Then she turned and looked at Rosie. She looked back at the brats and then back to Rosie.
She grinned and nudged Brittany.
“Picture this,” Jessica whispered. She held her hands out in front of her like she was framing a screen. “Little Mindy and Cindy”—she jerked her head to indicate the two girls who were still talking with the teacher—“are walking into the homecoming dance, like they’re all that. They’re like, ‘We don’t care if anyone likes us. We like ourselves.’ ” In a continued whisper, she mimicked Mindy’s chipmunk voice.
Brittany made a face and nodded.
“And along comes our new BFF Rosie Porkchop, large and in charge.” Jessica held out her arms to indicate the animatronic pig’s size. “She’s been programmed, by us, of course, to walk right up to those two little twerps, knock them down, and … “—she grinned—” sit on them.”
Brittany laughed loudly, and Jessica shushed her. Brittany covered her mouth, then hugged Jessica. “That’s brilliant!” she whispered. “Is that the task we’ll give her, like, for our project?”
Jessica rolled her eyes. “We should probably have her do something that won’t get us in trouble, don’t you think?”
Brittany blushed and nodded.
“But this might be more fun than I thought it was going to be,” Jessica said.
“For sure,” Brittany agreed.
Jessica opened her backpack and pulled out her laptop. “I don’t think this should take very long. We just need to download her command software and go over it until we find her glitch, and then we can tweak it to do what we want her to do.”
Brittany nodded but frowned. “Um, you do know, like, we suck at programming, right?”
Jessica shrugged. “Yeah, but that’ll give us a nice alibi later. We can say we have no idea what went wrong with the programming, what made Rosie go crazy and knock them over or spill punch on them or whatever. And besides, it’s the complicated programming stuff we always get wrong. This is just basic programming of voice commands, right?”
She pulled up a seat and placed it next to Rosie’s front end. Sitting with her legs perfectly crossed, Jessica lifted the flap that hid Rosie’s controls. “First, we just need to create the uplink, and then …” She pressed a button.
A soft puff, followed by a series of metallic clicks and snaps that preceded a louder whoosh, and both girls jumped when Rosie’s lower belly popped open.
“What did you do?” Brittany asked. “Is she going to, like, have babies?”
Jessica laughed, but then she shrugged. What if there were animatronic piglets inside Rosie? Even with the mechanisms that she must have had inside her exoskeleton, Rosie certainly was big enough to store at least a dozen of them, if not more.
After exchanging a glance, Jessica and Brittany both bent over to peer into Rosie’s belly.
Expecting to see a full system of hydraulics—and possibly a few baby pigs, Jessica raised her eyebrow when she saw that Rosie’s belly was, for the most part, empty. A network of metal gears, prongs, and sharp-looking rods—presumably powered by hydraulics—lined the interior wall of the pig’s belly, but the vast majority of the cavernous space was totally open … and big enough to hold a person, maybe two at most.
Jessica stared into Rosie Porkchop’s depths. She grinned and leaned back.
Glancing up at Mr. Thornton, who was still focused on his laptop, Jessica tugged on Brittany’s hand. Brittany turned to look at Jessica.
“I have an even better idea than my original one,” Jessica whispered.
“What?” Brittany whispered back.
Jessica hummed as she picked up the papers Mr. Thornton had handed her and began to skim through them. Brittany looked over her shoulder.
Flipping pages, Jessica reached a section titled “General Operation.” Under that was a paragraph in bold:
ROSIE PORKCHOP IS A DUAL-PURPOSE ANIMATRONIC. THE SYSTEM CAN BE ENGAGED IN TRADITIONAL ANIMATRONIC MODE AND ALSO IN HUMAN INTERFACE OR “SUIT” MODE, I.E., ROSIE CAN BE “WORN” LIKE A SUIT.
There was more, but Jessica’s gaze flicked down the page to the word WARNING, which was followed by a paragraph of bold red writing. Jessica quickly read through it:
ROSIE PORKCHOP CONTAINS SPRINGLOCKS. SPRINGLOCKS ENGAGE TO ALLOW ROSIE PORKCHOP TO FUNCTION AUTONOMOUSLY, IN ANIMATRONIC MODE. WHEN ENGAGED, METAL COMPONENTS FILL THE ENTIRE INTERIOR OF THE ANIMATRONIC. ROSIE PORKCHOP CAN ALSO BE WORN AS A SUIT; THIS IS CALLED HUMAN INTERFACE MODE. WHEN ROSIE PORKCHOP IS IN HUMAN INTERFACE MODE, THE SPRINGLOCKS DISENGAGE AND RETRACT INTO ROSIE’S ENDOSKELETON. DO NOT SWITCH MODES WHILE ROSIE PORKCHOP IS OCCUPIED. SHARP COMPONENTS OF THE SPRINGLOCK SYSTEM CAN CAUSE SERIOUS BODILY HARM.
She grinned and looked at Brittany. “Guess what?”
“What?”
“Rosie can be occupied.”
“So?”
Jessica didn’t answer. She quickly glanced through Rosie’s upload instructions.
While she did that, Cindy and Mindy called out, “Bye, Mr. Thornton.”
Jessica and Brittany turned to watch the little redheads skip out of the classroom. Jessica glanced at Mr. Thornton; his gaze was on his laptop.
Jessica dropped the papers, grabbed Brittany’s hand, and pulled her close. She whispered, “So forget what I said before. I have a better idea.”
“What?”
Jessica glanced again at Mr. Thornton. He was still concentrating on his computer. Even so, she turned her back and kept her voice low. “Rosie’s pneumatic system powers that trapdoor, and it’s designed to be a hermetic seal.”
Brittany frowned a question.
“You know, those seals that keep in anything.”
“Oh, right.”
“The instructions said something about using Rosie as a container for something.” She waved a hand. “I don’t know. I didn’t read it closely. But here’s what I’m thinking.” She scooted her chair closer to Brittany’s. “Those two little snots think they can come to the homecoming dance. Well, they’re coming all right, but not in their ruffled little dresses. They’re coming in her.” She pointed at Rosie Porkchop, specifically at Rosie’s gaping belly.
Brittany looked at Rosie’s empty stomach and slowly started to grin. “We’re going to stick them in there?”
Jessica shook her head. “We aren’t. We’ll have Rosie do it. It will serve them right. They’ll be all like, ‘We do everything together,’ from inside Rosie Porkchop!”
“Oh, that’s, like, inspired!” Brittany said.
“I know, right?”
Brittany nodded, her eyes bright. “This is going to be so savage!”
Jessica grinned. “All we have to do is program Rosie to grab the little snots and put them into her belly. Once they’re in, this door will close.” She pointed to the pink door that hung open under Rosie’s belly. She tapped it. “See? It has the soft sealed fabric stuff on the outside, but it’s hard metal on the inside. Once it’s locked and sealed, they won’t be able to get out.” She grinned. “They’ll be trapped together.”
