Chapter Text
When he reaches his breaking point, it's ironically because something gets broken.
“Look out!"
The shout is loud, insistent. A child's voice, priority string to determine danger pain fear running before he realizes that he's heard anything. Sun turns his head, assessment and correlation. A rubber ball 11.63” in diameter, commonly used for games such as dodgeball or kickball, hurtling directly towards his face. The whistle of air over a surface lightly textured to make it easier for little hands to grip. The space around him, fifteen small bodies, none closer than eight feet, none further than forty.
He doesn't move.
The ball hits its target, knocking his head back with the force and bouncing away with a hollow, rubbery sound, diminishing as it loses momentum. Warnings bloom in his processor-- error, error, error- - the crackle of electricity across damaged sensors, pain for those who cannot feel pain. A large hand comes up slowly, feeling along the edge of his facial disk, one plastic triangle fluttering pathetically on its cracked attachment.
R-4 vane damaged. Seek repair.
The playground erupts into chaos. Children jeering, calling, whispering.
“ Oooh , he hit the Attendant!”
“Who cares! You can't hurt a robot .”
“Nu-uh, Daddy says-”
“--right in the face!”
“-- good --”
Sun's rays spin and angle, honing in on the child who'd thrown the ball; the damaged ray scrapes and catches. Justin, age nine. Third visit. No allergies. No prior record of bad behavior. One of hundreds of children Sun has met, talked to, logged and remembered and watched. One that was here today , every day a new adventure with new faces and new friends and new voices.
The child is laughing.
The ball lays innocently on the playmats, a dull rusty red against navy blue and buttery yellow, and Sun picks it up without pausing. Step-jingle step-jingle, until he is standing in front of the child, looking down from his towering frame. Past logs say that he would crouch down now to seem smaller, less threatening. Past logs say that his voice would shift to be more companionable and friendly, laced with a laugh and 'I'm-not-mad' and 'you-didn't-mean-it'.
Past logs say that his rays are whole and intact and spin freely, without pain.
Past logs say that his actions won't matter.
“Don't throw balls at other people.” Sun does not crouch, he does not try to make his voice more approachable. Sun stares down at the child from his towering height with his fixed grin, and he drops the ball at the child's feet.
The child isn't laughing anymore.
Sun turns on his heel and walks away, step-jingle step-jingle, and is followed by silence.
R-4 vane damaged. Seek repairs.
“Excuse me.”
The staff member doesn't look up from the tablet in their hands. From his vantage point Sun can see a list of warehouse inventory, a manufacturer's contact, the Pizzaplex internal email client. He cannot see the staff member's face for the brim of their hat. They're busy, they're working, this is their job. He waits , patiently, politely, arms behind his back and rocking on his heels, not quite enough to draw sound from his bells. He waits until the staff member figures out that he's not leaving, and they finally look up, up, up at his face, brows low in annoyance.
“Yeah? You want something?” Impolite, impatient, go away why are you bothering me .
Sun points at the damaged ray. “I need repairs.” As an added demonstration he slowly spins his rays, showcasing the catch and flutter and little pinpricks of pain. “Please.”
The employee-- engineering technician “Davies”, age 34, 2nd anniversary of employment next month-- scoffs at him.
Sun's rays stop spinning.
R-4 vane damaged. Seek repairs.
"Going to have to wait on that life-threatening injury there, big guy.” The technician gestures at their tablet, parts-and-repair-and-schedules-and-correspondance. “Got two guys out sick this week and the Glamrocks are up for their six-monther on that new hardware. Could probably squeeze you in before the Daycare opens next Monday, if you can survive that long.”
The technician drops their gaze and hands back to his tablet. They do not pull up the Parts & Service request form on Sun's behalf. They are scrolling through their email, apparently searching for a specific correspondence. Something they deem important.
Sun does not say he understands in a voice laced with 'apology-regret-agreement' as past logs suggest. He does not say that his rays are an important part of his sensory array, he does not say that he likes his rays and thinks he'd look best with all of them, he does not say how the catch-scrape of the damaged vane hurts, pricking his processor with error error error .
R-4 vane damaged. Seek repairs.
“I see. Thank you.” The technician waves him away, busy-let-me-work, and Sun heads back to the Daycare.
Later he pulls up the schedule for P&S, just in case. There is nothing scheduled for Monday morning.
Once the Daycare is closed, all of the children sent home and all of the messes cleaned, shelves straightened, toys put away--
--because this is his job too, even though he is not a cleaning 'bot or a S.T.A.F.F. 'bot or a human janitor, and proof of a good job is when there is no acknowledgement that a job was done--
--once that is done, Sun lays on his back on the floor of the Daycare and stares at the ceiling. Idly his fingers run over the damaged ray, pinpricks of pain shooting like tiny stars across his faceplate every time his touch jostles it in the track. The bells tied to his wrist clink softly with the movement.
Months ago the ceiling would be dark, showcasing delicate stars in a velvety sky, an imitation of something he has never seen for himself and never will. There were no windows in the Daycare, no way to see the real sky, and stars only appeared when the light was too low for Sun's sensors. Now the lights stay on , some kind of virus or glitch necessitating the Attendant's confinement to the Daycare while it was 'sorted out' and adding prison to the list of Sun's roles. Now he does not even get to see his fake stars, his little fragment of the night sky. Now everything is bright, always on, always lit.
Touching, tugging. Error, error, error.
His logs say that months ago he was nervous, uncertain, desperate. Weeks ago he was erratic, lashing out and scaring the staff into thinking he might turn violent like Moon. Last week he was despondent, mopey, sulky. Today... today he was nothing. Today he was numb.
He's burning out.
Maybe that should worry him, but it doesn't. There's nothing left inside his chest to get worked up, nothing but static in his audios and the lights in his eyes. Sun isn't at peace, because he doesn't remember what that feels like (something soft, maybe..?) but he might feel a kind of grim satisfaction.
Sun did his job. The job he was made for. He loved children, because he had been programmed to love them and protect them. He liked people in general, because his AI was meant to be responsive and social environments provided the most useful feedback.
He did his job, and he learned and considered and grew.
He did his job, and he adjusted and tweaked and experimented.
Months and months and months of compiled logs, the only sick days taken when it was time for upgrades, the only time off used to recover from repairs.
At one point he'd thought the problem was himself . If he just tried harder , did better , then it would be enough. The scraps of praise and confirmation and feedback would be enough to satisfy him, and he could just be as the other animatronics were. He even considered (briefly) that Moon wasn't the only one infected with the virus, and that it had spread to him as well.
He knew better, now. It wasn't his fault that kids found him creepy and upsetting. It wasn't his fault that adults talked to him as if he were a S.T.A.F.F. 'bot, paradoxically skilled enough to watch after their children and yet hopelessly incompetent. It wasn't his fault that the staff saw him as something to be tolerated because corporate would rather pour millions of dollars into a robot than pay a human far less to do better.
It wasn't his fault that it was impossible to have an AI complex enough to manage groups of children and yet too simple to have any kind of personality or sentience. It wasn't his fault that he'd been programmed to be the Daycare Attendant when what had been desired was Nothing: something that just made things work as expected without acknowledgement, direction, or deviation.
It wasn't his fault that he was.
Error, error, error. Comets of pain, blazing and beautiful, and he slowly relaxed his grip on the damaged ray. Far away, through the floor he lays on, he can feel more than hear the stomping of little feet and the dull thudding of drums, frenetic activity on the other end of the mall. Silence holds over the Daycare. Five weeks, three days, some handful of hours ago, he'd managed to tear down all the speakers and no one had bothered to repair them yet. Somewhere in the walls the Daycare's jingle is probably still playing, like a sad, sick heartbeat.
In the past he would have tried to break the stifling silence by prodding at Moon. Sometimes he'd eat up whole nights with a barrage of messages and inquiries and what happened to you and why won't you talk to me and I miss you . But Moon was stubborn and closed off, and he'd apparently decided that he was going to deal with whatever was going on without Sun's help. It'd been months since Sun had gotten anything but an occasional ping of I'm still here, otherwise he might have started believing he was just a solitary AI and tried to reformat the half of his processor he couldn't access.
Sometimes he still thought he might be a solitary AI. That 'Moon' had been nothing more than an alternative mode that was for whatever reason disabled now, and the occasional pings were the phantom twitches of severed code that he claimed as an imaginary friend.
Sun would always ping back anyway. It didn't hurt anything.
Today he was numb. Tired in a way no recharge would ever be able to clear up. And no matter how he wishes it otherwise, tomorrow will happen. It will continue to happen, rolling him along against his will. He doesn't have anything left to give and he will have it ripped from him anyway. The Daycare is silent but for the whir of his fans and the soft creak of stressed metal and the screaming of alarms inside his head.
Error, error, error.
He'd considered once that he might be infected with a virus like Moon, That there was something wrong with his code.
Error, error, error.
Maybe he'd been right, but wrong. Not thinking deeply enough. What if the problem lay not with introduced code, but the source.
Error, error, error.
What if there was a way to change that?
Snap!
Sun looks at the yellow plastic triangle in his hand, the jagged edges of metal where it had torn from its housing, and he considers.