“What’s your favorite color?”
“Orange. Yours?”
The bauble zooms in on the girl who is still laying in a ball, down in the seat, her back to the console.
“Because it’s the color of your hair?” asks the man. “Blue.” He adds on, answering.
The mountain has become gradually less steep here and they walk down the length of a very gradual incline, through a particularly thick pine forest that shields them from the cold winds.
“What? No, that’s dumb,” says the girl. “It’s the color of a good crystal.”
“Oh,” says the man, apparently not too surprised.
Pen fidgets. “Blue is nice though. I heard once that the ocean is blue.”
“It is,” says Tango. “Well… some of them are. Some are darker and close to black.”
Pen shifts her gaze, looking up to him confused. “Some of them? But isn’t there only one?”
The bot stops. “What? No. There are four oceans.”
“Huh? That’s stupid.” Pen rolls her eyes and lays her head back down. “If there’s more than one ocean, than why is it called ‘the ocean’ instead of ‘an ocean.’”
“I mean… it depends on what you’re saying?”
Pen sighs. The man is clearly spouting nonsense again. She isn’t sure if she wants to play this stupid ‘game’ of his anymore, if he keeps just making things up. Tango keeps on walking.
“How old are you?” she asks the man, now that it’s her turn.
“Technically speaking… I’m not sure,” he answers. Pen’s ears twitch as she hears the pistons moving his arms up. “The internal clock died a long time ago and I don’t seem to be getting a fresh signal from anywhere.” Pen has no idea what he’s talking about, but she bets that he’s looking at his hands again. “How old are you?”
“I don’t know either,” answers the girl, yawning.
“Oh… Fair enough.”
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The man is silent for a time and Pen’s vision slowly drifts as she feels herself falling back asleep.
A new question interrupts the silence. “What’s your favorite thing to eat?”
Pen is quiet for a moment but then reaches to the side to tap on the green box with her fingers. The blood on her nails has crusted and hardened shut on top of their broken edges.
“Really…? Food must be terrible these days,” laughs the man.
“Yours?” asks the girl, huddling into her jacket. It’s already warm in here, but it’s just more comfortable.
“Oranges.”
“Huh?” asks the girl confused. “What does my color have to do with food?” She closes her eyes, ready to go back to sleep. The man really was just spouting gibberish. Probably just to annoy her. He was a bot, it’s not like he could even eat food to begin with.
“What? No. Oranges are a fruit. Or, uh… they were. Maybe they still are? Hmm…”
Pen relents. “Why would they call a fruit a color? That’s dumb.”
“Because they were orange,” says the man plainly.
“So? Lots of things are orange.”
This time, the man relents. “What’s your question?”
“I don’t want to play anymore. This is dumb.”
“Come on, one more,” asks the man. “Then I’ll let you sleep.”
The girl thinks for a moment, trying to come up with a final question, so that Tango would leave her alone and let her rest. Her ears twitch.
“Have you ever been to the city?” she asks, listening intently.
“Oh… uh… that’s an odd one, but sure. I’ve been to lots of cities. You?”
“No,” answers the girl plainly, ignoring his newest nonsense of there being more than one city, she still doesn’t buy it. “What’s it like?”
“Huh?” asks the man.
“The city, what’s it like?”
“Well… I only know what they used to be like, I don’t know what they’re like now.”
“What was it like?”
“Hmm. Well, big. Really big. Really active.” Pen listens intently, her ears lifted up high and her head turned to the side. “Hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes millions even. So no matter where you went there were people, no matter what time of day it was.”
“Are there stores?” asks the girl.
“Stores?” asks the man curiously.
“Yeah. In the city. Are there stores?” she repeats.
“Uh… yeah, tons? Whatever you wanted to get, you could.”
“Did they make a lot of money?”
“What? I mean, sure, but why is that interesting?”
Pen sighs, too tired to argue with Tango. But accepts his nonsense as the price she has to pay for this smile on her face. “What about food? Is there a lot of food?”
“As long as you have the money, more than you could ever hope to eat.”
Her stomach growls loudly and she pulls herself tighter together.
“If you’re hungry, we can stop and you can make another one of the ready-meals. You should eat, honestly. I bet you have deficiencies that medical researchers have never heard of.”
Pen’s ears perk up at the word meal, but more importantly at the other one. “Do you know about medicine?” she asks him even though it isn’t her turn.
“Medicine? I mean… not really. I’m not a doctor. But I know a thing or two. Part of the job, you know?”
Pen doesn’t know and purses her lips. Maybe there is something that she can squeeze out of him after all. She pulls herself up and tilts the metal box towards herself, reaching in to take out a silver sachet. Her fingers hover above them, they all look entirely identical so she opts to take the one that ‘feels right’.
“But we don’t have water,” says the girl.
“Sure we do,” responds Tango. The window pops up again and Pen looks at it. They’re in the middle of a dense, flat pine-forest that is covered in snow. Before them is a frozen body of water. Tango pulls his arm back and smashes a fist through the surface of the ice. “See? Water.”
Pen looks at the bag in her hands and then at the window again. Getting out would mean stepping onto the cold again. Her legs are hurt and would need a few weeks at least to heal properly, yet she keeps using them. But what else is there to do? She grimaces, but a deep resolution grows in her eyes. Food is more important than some pain. The pain would go away. But hunger wouldn’t if she doesn’t eat. Even if it is cold, it’s food. Besides, cold food is what she’s used to anyways. “Okay. Turn around… please,” she says, wincing a little.
The man turns around. “Just be careful, okay? Don’t spill anything inside.”
Pen rolls her eyes. As if she would waste any of her food. Why was the man being such a buffoon ever since he had woken back up? Grabbing the hatch, she opens it up and climbs down. Her feet touch the snow and she tears the top of the bag off in one motion. Separating the little box that was orange this time, with a wary gaze, she opens that too and fills both of them with cold water, hopping from one foot to the other so that the snow can't bite her as fast.
Clenching both of her treasures in her teeth, she turns back around and jumps up to the hatch, scurrying to climb back inside like an animal returning to its burrow.