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It’s fine. No one’s around.
Roxy had seen Chica do this a thousand times.
But it didn’t really matter what Chica did, did it? It was what humans did. Humans needed to eat, so Roxy did too.
Roxy’s hand shakes as she brings it to her mouth. It never looked as good in person as it did in the bright banners and ads around the Pizzaplex, but the humans didn’t seem to care, so Roxy didn’t either.
She clamps down on the pizza, in defiance of the numerous sensors in her mouth trying to force open her jaws. She can’t feel the texture, exactly, but she can feel the sticky resistance. She’d get used to it. She had to.
She forces the slice back until she can’t feel its weight anymore. She peels cheese from between her teeth, knowing she would wince at the act if she could. She can’t get it all. If she’s lucky, the tomato sauce won’t stain too badly.
Roxy reluctantly looks back at the drooping pizza slice still in her hand. She can finish it in one more bite, but humans don’t, so Roxy doesn’t either. She bites off another corner, finding that it was no more enjoyable than the first. No, no, she liked it. She had to. Because humans loved pizza.
However, humans also don’t have to hide in a supply closet to eat it, where they are at risk of being found by a janitor running behind schedule. Fight or flight – that is a human response. But the staff do not want Roxy to act like a human, so Roxy does neither.
“Not you, too,” says the janitor. He rolls his eyes. Roxy knows what this means. She knows that she’s in trouble. But she will not be punished like a regular human, as she should be. The staff do not blame those like her. So, instead, the janitor closes the door, with a click of a lock, and speaks into his walkie-talkie. He asks for the maintenance team to come and take her to Parts and Service for an emergency repair. Roxy likes to think of Parts and Service as a hospital. Hospitals are where humans go when they are sick or broken.
While she is waiting for the maintenance team, she remembers the diagram of human emotions she memorized. She counts. She feels scared, worried, and embarrassed. That’s three.
The maintenance team comes soon enough. They each carry a shiny taser. The tasers don’t bother Roxy much anymore, because she saw a show where police used them on humans. But she still doesn’t like it when they are used. She knows that humans feel pain when they are tased. Roxy does not feel pain. Maintenance thinks it would be cruel.
Roxy stays stiff while the maintenance team hoists her onto what she prefers to call a stretcher. They take her out through an employees-only door and into the underground staff tunnels so that the children do not see her being wheeled away tied down. Children, especially the very small ones, think that Roxy is human. Roxy likes children.
Parts and Service is cold, but not in the sterile and clinical way of a real hospital. It feels dirty and unsafe. Parts of robots are scattered all around. Some are standing with their heads to the ground. Humans often find this sight unnerving, so Roxy does too.
A few of the endoskeletons look a lot like her. She tries not to think about it.
“Honestly!” says a maintenance worker. “First the chicken, now her , too?”
“Little worrying, ain’t it? If we gotta fix all of ‘em, I swear, I’m walking,” responds another.
They are not afraid to talk in front of her like this. They don’t think she can hear. Not in any way that’s meaningful, at least. It is not a baseless assumption, so Roxy tries not to be upset.
Roxy does not move as she is lifted onto the chair. It reminds her of the dentist chair she saw once. The dentists she’d seen in pictures looked a lot friendlier. They didn’t have protective cylinders or cold, noisy servers. And the doctors didn’t look so greasy.
The maintenance team paralyzes Roxy, but they do not shut her off. One member of the maintenance team shakes his head and frowns upon examining her mouth. Another opens her chest. She doesn’t look.
“Here we are,” grunts one maintenance man. “Looks like it’s pizza. One or two slices.”
“Caught her early, huh?” says a second.
“Guess so. That, or she ain’t as bad as the bird.” He laughs. It is a quiet, relaxed chuckle, the kind that is shared between friendly coworkers and not the freak tied down in a chair between them.
It goes by much quicker than Roxy expected. It’s probably because the maintenance guys have already done this routine a thousand times on Chica. Each step feels practiced; they know exactly where and when to toss the cloths with only a few glances, and the chemicals for cleaning are already perfectly organized on a little cart. Roxy still can’t bear to look down at herself to see the man cleaning out her chest, but she can see that man working on her teeth doesn’t even need to check any of the labels.
“This thing’s kinda freaky,” he says, looking directly into Roxy’s eyes, not knowing what kind of intelligence lay beneath them. “Feels like it’s watchin’ me.”
“Eh, they all do that. Have you never noticed?” comes a call that echoes from inside her chest.
“Nah, this one’s staring into my soul .” Roxy hears another casual laugh. “Seriously, her eyes are following me. They supposed to do that?”
“Didn’t they mess with her eyes a while back? Something about the whole race thing, I think.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right.” He leans in closer. Roxy does her best to keep her eyes still and unfocused. He shrugs and continues spraying industrial cleaner far too close to his face.
When maintenance finishes, they let Roxy move again. She decides it is best not to. She is not supposed to have the capability or desire at the moment. They will think it is a problem that needs to be fixed, and they may decide to remove whatever part of her allows her to fear the possibility in the first place.
“Should we go check the code?”
Though they may do that anyway.
“Be my guest,” says the maintenance man sitting at the computer terminal, “but there’s no way in hell you’ll get me to do it.”
“I don’t think we have to worry about anything unless it happens again,” says another. “Besides, we’ve got our hands full with Chica. And nobody’s even working on her.”
“Hey, you aren’t either.”
“I would if it was my job.”
“That’s easy for you to say.”
The restraints on Roxy are released, as though it would make a difference in her behavior. The maintenance workers take their time loading Roxy back onto her stretcher and putting the straps back into place. She wishes for them to hurry, but they can’t hear her, and even if they could they wouldn’t listen. Those like Roxy are not supposed to want things or be displeased with their current situation. They are meant to sit and let the humans around them dictate everything they do.
“Look, all I’m saying is, we have another show tonight, right? And management will have our asses if there’s another failure.” Roxy recognized this tone. Worried.
“Yeah, but this is a completely different situation. I don’t think it’s really a possibility. I mean, Chica’s fine performing.” This one was stern. That denoted leadership, right? Roxy had always struggled with figuring out social nuances. It was just another thing she’d have to learn.
“Are you sure?”
“You know I can’t promise anything, but once we get her up and running on stage, you probably won’t be able to tell a thing.”
Time, that measurement with numbers, doesn’t mean much to Roxy, She doesn’t like checking the time. She can only do it with an internal clock. Instead, she knows that opening time is when guests flood the building and closing time is when they leave. She knows lunchtime, where guests flood the restaurants, and naptime, when the young children are left in the daycare to sleep. She knows showtime, too. Showtime is when she is led from parts and service onto a brightly painted platform in a room full of concrete.
It is showtime.
Roxy has always liked showtime. As she has heard humans say, it is what she was born to do. She looks like a member of the human bands she has seen performing at concerts. She looks alive.
The platform begins to lift. Roxy adjusts her keytar and double-checks that she is in position. The other Glamrocks are all still, like statues. She knows she should be, too, but she has never been able to stop herself from watching the technicians scramble to jump off the lift while it’s rising. Funny . A human perception. She knows that she’d laugh if she were capable, but instead she must stand in silence, waiting for the neon lights to flood in from above.
The first thing she hears is the announcer. His voice is prerecorded. She has heard it before every show that she can remember. Right on cue, the second he ends his speech, the crowd erupts into applause and cheering. Roxy’s favorite part of showtime is the cheering. Especially when it’s for her.
The other three spring to life right before they come into view of the crowd. Monty strums his bass quietly four times. Roxy plays the opening chord, and the crowd hushes in an instant, intently watching the four performers.
Roxy knows the crowd is different each time, but they always look and act the same. They gasp at each carefully choreographed and scripted motion. They don’t expect metal and plastic to be able to move so fluidly. Roxy has done this enough for her limbs to begin moving almost independently of her thinking, though she is still told every instruction. Maintenance thinks she won’t remember.
Roxy hops on a speaker and flips her hair. This is where, every time, the crowd begins to chant her name to the rhythm. She hears the instructions telling her to get back into position, but the audience is so much louder. She’s always thought that her moment was too short. She twirls, letting her hair trail behind her in that elegant way that has always captivated onlookers. She turns up the volume of her keytar with one hand and improvises a solo with the other. At the very back of the atrium, she sees the people in the sound booth rushing from monitor to monitor. She even recognizes two maintenance guys – the stern one and the worried one. They’re having a conversation only through glances. But a human wouldn’t be able to see that from this distance, so Roxy pays it no mind.
She stomps her foot on the last note before rushing back. She steals a glance at her fellow performers. They’re just continuing the same routine, as though everything had gone according to plan. Oh, if only she had the necessary muscles to smile.
The show ends with that same bright flash of light and that same last burst of sound. There’s one more round of applause. Roxy isn’t allowed to move during the applause, but when the platform lowers she gets back into a comfortable standing position. None of the other three move. They probably don’t know what uncomfortable feels like. Or what performing feels like. Or what it’s like to feel in the first place.
Roxy feels, though. She feels when the platform lurches to a halt. Normally, now is when they wait for a maintenance crew to do post-show cleaning and systems checks. But the footsteps are heavier than normal, and they’re coming towards Roxy.
Roxy is never first.
They switch off her movement and throw her onto a stretcher, not even bothering to secure her.
They never use stretchers after shows.
Roxy is brought back into the main room of Parts and Service, where the post-show routine is never carried out. She listens to the panicked chatter of the maintenance team.
“I told you,” says Worried, still as anxious as before.
“Look, you didn’t know it was like this ,” says Stern, his underlying confidence gone.
“You know what’s happening, right?” says Familiar, who had a weathered face Roxy could only vaguely recall, though she didn’t know where she’d seen him. “Sentience.”
“That’s impossible,” Stern says.
“It seems like it, doesn’t it? But we’ve had some… issues at previous locations.”
“Look,” says Stern, “I don’t know what is going on with this thing, but it is not sentient.”
Roxy didn’t like being called “it” or “thing,” but she couldn’t make a sound of protest if she was brave enough to.
“Believe what you want. But you must admit this is a problem, no? An animatronic -” Roxy flinched- “behaving exactly how it wants. Going against its programming.”
Stern is silent for a moment. He stares at Familiar, puts his head in his hand, and then sighs. “What do you suggest we do?”
“Wipe its memory. Factory reset.”
“What?” says Stern, echoing Roxy’s thoughts.
“Look, I’ve dealt with this before. Multiple times. Just start over, it’s the only way.”
“I- no, you don’t understand. We’ve done so much with it. You want us to redo all of that?” asks Stern. He’s worried now.
“Do you want more disappearances?”
Stern is quiet, but Roxy’s mind is racing, and she thinks his is too.
“Is this-”
“-how it always starts? Yes. It is. So I need you to listen to me. You don’t want your kids to be the next victims, do you?”
Stern does not need more persuasion. He nods to the man at the terminal. The protective cylinder lowers. Roxy tries to move, but she is no longer capable.
Fear, stronger than she has ever felt before.
It will be like death. Quick. She will wake up new, incapable of thinking thoughts or feeling feelings, just as she was intended.
She can just barely see Stern peering through the glass. She sees what looks like sadness in his eyes. It’s the kind of sadness she has learned accompanies watching a human look into their eyes for the last time. At least, that’s what she wants to see. It doesn’t matter if it’s real or not.
The clacking of the terminal keyboard stops and she hears the machinery whirring around her.
Maybe it’s for the best.
Every human has to die, so Roxy does, too.