“Ever hear Wee Sing Sillyville?” her voice shook.
Stryker checked his database but found nothing of the like in his mind. “No. Is it silly?”
He wished his voice didn’t sound so hollow behind his mask.
Norah twitched. “Yeah, very much so. Nursery rhymes mostly, old, historic nursery songs.” He glanced her way as her eyes lifted to look at him. “My parents used to sing ‘em to me and my brother when we were kids. I love them and hate them. They get stuck in your head, for hours, days, your entire life.”
Stryker didn’t know what she meant, having never experienced a childhood nor the songs that went with having one. He knew little about the youth of humans.
He had been engineered as an adult and was treated as such after his creation. Once tested and approved by his mothers and fathers, he was sent straight into the battlefields of space.
What would it feel like to have something stuck in your head? Norah’s distress call replayed over and over. Was it the same?
He peered through the rain and scanned the area, trying to find the ship Norah said existed. “Will you sing me one?”
“No.”
“I’ve never heard a kid’s song before. The songs I know, personally, aren’t silly.”
The roar of distant thunder stifled the silence. His eyes kept looking away from the jungle and toward her wide, numb ones that watched the rain slip across the windshield.
She whispered minutes later, tonelessly, “Down by the bay…”
“Down by the bay?”
What?
She’s singing.
“Down by the bay, down by the bay, where the watermelons grow, where the watermelons grow, back to my home, I dare not go, for if I do, my mother will say: have you ever seen a–a fish spinning a dish?”
Stryker smirked. “Spinning a dish?”
“Down by the bay.”
“You live by a bay growing up?” He reached back over his shoulder and readjusted his pack.
“No, I lived in a high-rise on Earth. There was no water near us. At least nothing natural, not like here where you’re surrounded by water.” The rainfall picked up. “You?”
Me? You don’t want to hear about me, beautiful.“No natural water near where I was created,” he answered honestly. “The only water we had came from faucets.”
“I loved water growing up but the oceans of Earth were gone, replaced by sewage. Giant puddles of sewage but I had seen so many videos and pictures of what it used to look like. It’s why I went into chemistry.”
“Oh? Why not oceanography or marine biology?”
“I didn’t care about the land structure nor the creatures that lived within water. I only cared about water itself.” Norah shrugged at the edge of his vision. “Earth didn’t have anyrealbodies of water anymore unless you went to the national parks but even then, humans couldn’t swim in them. You couldn’t get close enough to experience them and water parks are so fake. The stink of chlorine ruins those places for me.” She sighed. “I studied chemistry so I could be a boring water chemist. I wanted to bring it back to Earth. It’s funny how the smell of chlorine followed me.”
Stryker found a canister of water and handed it to her. She clutched it between her hands and sucked on the spout. Norah continued to shiver and twitch, seize and wrack with every breath.
He needed to treat her, he needed to heal her, and he needed to do it soon. But he also needed to get them off the surface of the planet. His priorities warred inside of him.
“That’s very noble of you.” The hardness of the downpour picked up until it sounded like pebbles hitting metal.
“What about you?”
“Whataboutme?” he asked.
“What did you want to do when you grew up?” Her voice cracked and he stopped the vehicle. “What’re you doing?” she asked as he fished out his medkit.
