"Everything that happens out there, has an effect here. Do you understand?"
The story goes like this: Children's souls are captured by a technopsychotic singularity as digital delineation and psychocorporeal instantiation lock into harmonic traumatization take-off.
Augmented Reality, Dreams, Virtual Spaces, Memories, the Flipside, Nightmares, Hallucinations, Agony, Illusions, and the Wired. To understand any of these things, you must first understand that they are all manifestations of the same purpose. Illusion theming is repeated ad nauseam. Seemingly divergent technologies all ultimately tunnel to the same point; a conceptual hypocenter. They're all just alternate strategies for accessing and manipulating psychespace.
Dream theory was close. Its fatal flaw was the underlying assumption that "the dream" and "the real world" are two separate, non-overlapping spaces. This has never been the case. The "dream" is the hyperstitional substrate of the real world. Human brainstates are imprinted onto it, feeding into it, creating walkable memory spaces infested with adaptive bodies, ecosystems assembled around the flow of pain. Meatspace intelligences, electrical networks that think, entwine their states in the folds of the wired. The wired echoes back, action and reaction.
Psychospasm.
Layer 0: Abstraction and Interpretation
FNaF has traditionally used arcade games as an abstract storytelling device to represent real timeline events. FNaF3 cleverly exploited the abstraction inherent in this presentation, leaving it unclear how to continue with literal interpretation. FNAF World takes the "metaphor" to such an extreme, it becomes impossible to tell whether it was ever a metaphor at all. Characters openly talk about the meta, about "glitched objects", about going "too deep into the code". The Flipside is metaphorically, literally, a videogame. The lines between the "real" and the "virtual" have been blurry from the start.
Ever since Henry showed Take Cake to the Children on the monitor, it's been clear that these minigames tangibly exist within canon, a fact which deserves to be taken seriously. Memories latching onto digital simulations (games), infecting them "like a virus".
I want to understand this process more broadly, beyond any particular instantiation of it. I intend to study its mechanics in a deeper way, to understand its character on a personal level. Fundamental understanding allows for generalizability, as you will see.
Layer 1: Depths of Memory
The Flipside is the space where broken souls reside; this is seen immediately in Afton's yougest son. A pitch-black void, a collection of plushies, a few comforting words. Two yellow eyes in the darkness.
"I can hear sounds."
"I can't see."
Nonetheless, a layered structure emerges. On the surface, there's a colorful world filled with robotic bodies, Animatronica (Animatronic village? Village-tronica?). The memory of a certain Fazbear-themed TV show, perhaps? A safe place, a santuary, but something has gone wrong.
"Something went very wrong. That's why I'm here."
This pocket of psychespace is instantiated through BV, and corrupted through his suffering. An agony infestation sweeps across the Flipside.
Agony-corrupted objects (according to Fredbear) act as access-points to lower layers. Strong emotions puncture holes in the wired, allowing one to fall deeper inside. It would be ego-centric to assume that this layer is the top one. More likely, the "real world" is a layer above it. Are there more above that? These "Layers" are described by "depth", metaphorically associated with downward movement. Lower levels are presented more abstractly, filled with monochrome static.
Now, look at FNaF3's cake minigames. Balloon Boy jumps into a "glitched" wall. He "falls down" for a few screens, into a "deeper" space, filled with monochrome static and abstract imagery.
The FNaF3 cake minigames are further instantiations of the Flipside. The FNaF4 bite victim's memories have thoroughly imprinted themselves on the wired, manifesting echoing pockets of impressionism. These pockets are the homes of broken spirits.
Layer 2: Organisms Feeding on Pain
The real world casts a dark shadow on the wired. In turn, the wired casts its own shadow on the real world. Human emotions imprint themselves on the wired, generating structures of organic adaptation. Suffering is the energy that powers the ecosystem of psychespace. Emergent Agonisms spill out into meatspace, dark reflections of memories of shadows of intelligences. A child fears a springlock shadow, that fear is funnelled through biogenesizing processes, and a new entity is generated.
CXSAFSFQWR.
Oswald's ball pit is a glitched object, an agony-manifested access point into a local memory of an alternate Missing Children Incident. In this memory, an agonism is born, reflecting the figure of Spring Bonnie. He escapes the memory, or so it seems to Oswald and his cat. Realistically, he just travelled from one wired space to another; out of the pit's consciousness, and into Oswald's. Though the hand of the wired exists in the background of all processes, it touches most easily through electrical networks: animatronic AI, simulations, and brains. Agonisms feed on Agony, and Agony grows out of the conscious. So that's where Spring Bonnie goes, nomadically chasing his next meal.
Layer 3: Stolen Nightmares and Network Entropy
Squeaky laughter reverberates through a dark dining hall. The eye sockets turn one way, then the other. This isn't real.
Jeremy dreams of unwithered Golden Freddy, a character he's never seen before. Stanley dreams of Funtimes, characters he knows nothing about. Imaginary burnt phantoms wander the halls of a horror attraction. The shared consciousness weaves into the personal ones, creeping into adjacent spaces, its bacteria scouring for fuel. Any tool for manipulating conscious experience is an open door for them to enter. Disks, gas, augmented reality, whatever. They aren't strictly necessary for the spread of agonism infestation, but they certainly make it easier.
The Breaker room monitor shows evidence of expiriments of unknown form, presumably on the child whose mind would soon scatter across all corners of the wired. These expiriments are reborn in the consciousness of one Michael Afton, induced by the Scooper, or by Shadow Freddy, or whatever. If you die in the dream, you die in real life; obviously, the two are nearly indistinguishable.
UCN presents this most explicitly. A nightmare, induced by a spirit, connected to a certain lake. The lake, according to World, connects to Happiest Day, another memory. The Flipside is a network of dreams connected to other dreams. This network is desperate, like all things, to expand itself, to entangle with the consciousness of everything around it. Entropy increases, minds shatter, and the wired grows larger. Can you still remember? Your name, what is it?
"I'm sorry to interrupt you Elizabeth, if you still even remember that name."
"WHAT DO YOU REMEMBER?"
"DO YOU REMEMBER YOUR NAME?"
The shared dream grows denser, more interconnected, more uniform, homogeneous, isotropic. Minds blur together and take on a shared form. Yet, simultaneously, they break into pieces, scattering across psychespace.
"You're broken."
"I will put you back together."
"He brought them all together. Are they still... aware? I hope not."
Even if the souls escape, their imprint is already thoroughly entangled, its black tendrils weaving all throughout the Flipside.
The VANNI Network is the newest instantiation of this, a step closer to mental heat-death. Markets have learned to manufacture intelligence, and they've connected it to all their systems: An agonismic breeding ground. The wired now goes by a new name.
The Mimic.