Ning Yongxue followed the sound and realized that the little actress was standing to his right. She was still dirty, but she was giving him a serious tone of voice as she commented on the operation. Theoretically, they had all showered and received clean clothes on the Spindle Humanitarian Rescue's medical ship, but Ikas was still the same muddy little thing. She looked like she'd found a muddy puddle to roll in on purpose, and wondered if one of the piglets had come to life.
Compared to last time, she had only slightly straightened her hair, but Ning Yongxue was finally able to look into the girl's eyes. Those eyes were beautiful and deep, with an unforgettable ghostly blue color, as if they were the starry sky of his dreams, full of fantastical beauty. However, upon closer inspection, there was always a sense of unspeakable terror that even he, who had seen so much, could not explain.
Ikarus always seemed a little off. The matter of her dancing around in front of the hospital bed to trick him into giving him nutrients was strange;finding him in the crowd after his disappearance was even more bizarre. However, in the face of this situation, Ning Yongxue didn't have much to worry about. If she wanted to follow him, then let her.
For this completely unfamiliar girl, he could only compare her to a baby packed in a peach. It was as if she had drifted upstream from a river he had never seen before, and drifted downstream to him again after he had moved away. That being the case, their two encounters meant one thing - he could pick her up on the bank and care for her like Momotaro in the story.
Momotaro is a fable, a folktale from an ancient island nation, fictional, not real. Just as it is impossible for a baby to come down the river in a giant peach, it is also impossible for a lonely girl to appear for no reason, bent on being near him. There had to be some other reason behind this incident, perhaps hiding many horrors lurking in the darkness. These related to Ikas's identity, where she came from and where she would go in the future, and even the great trouble he might encounter in the future.
However, none of this mattered. Even though taking care of her meant a huge responsibility, none of that mattered. For Ning Yongxue, there were only two questions to consider when deciding whether or not to do something: what did it mean to do it, and what did it mean not to do it? Picking her up meant taking responsibility, but not picking her up meant one less witness in this absurdly cold world. He would not be able to see the Toller space station again, and those horrific and magnificent dreams would fade away, never to be seen again.
Now he stood beside Ikas, savoring the mystery of her body, probing the veil of her mind. At the moment he was driven by visions, conjectures and dreams. Yes, hallucinations, conjectures, and nightmares. Where she came from didn't matter, and where he himself came from didn't really matter either. Why couldn't she have been born in his marvelous and horrible nightmare? Why couldn't he have been born surrounded by ruins, iron pots, torn clothes, and mud? For Ning Yongxue, the world is inherently a series of absurd and uninteresting combinations of events, and only by actively grasping the fleeting clues can he reach the other side of the world.
When Ikarus is compared to a phantom, she seems to become even more illusory, but illusory metaphors may not necessarily fail to serve as justifications, and they may even be the ones that hit home the most. After all, one can never foresee all the consequences, advantages, disadvantages, and gains and losses of an event. As a human being, he can only live once, and he can neither take the future as a reference nor learn from the past. All he can rely on are illusory metaphors and symbols.
Standing on the stage of reality, he is like a lame actor who treats the first rehearsal as the final performance; all decisions are made on the spot, and no decision is foolproof. For these reasons, he doesn't hesitate in making decisions and has no need to regret anything.
"Since you want to follow me, what will you do? Any life skills?" After some illusory thinking, Ning Yongxue asked a very practical question. "I don't know anything." Ikarus replied. It was both childish and level-headed, and not sure how many words were true.
He nodded, trying to find a hint of shyness on her face, but failing. Her expression was like she was wearing a mask. "I see that you're not very old, but you're very good at performing arts, don't you think that's a life skill?" Ning Yongxue then asked, and although there was a hint of sarcasm in his words, he didn't mean any harm.
"If everyone can tell lies with a stern face, what's so strange about me telling lies?" Ikas said calmly, "I see you're a much better actor than I. If I'm an apprentice, you're more or less a master of deception."
"You'd better be nicer to strangers you just met." Ning Yongxue said with a stern face. "Did I just have a bad attitude?" Ikarus asked seriously, "Are you angry?"
"I'm not so angry over this kind of thing, but you should pay more attention to the way you express yourself, lest you get a grudge one day and don't realize it." "Should I act as kind and relatable as you?" Ikarus asked, "But what's the point? Just so I don't get a grudge?"
"It can also help you harvest unexpected friends." Ikas looked down at her small hands, then glanced at the bottles of nutrients and medicines in Ning Yongxue's hands, "If acting kind and relatable can reap unexpected friends, then if I take a bunch of nutrients and hand them out to other people, I'll be able to reap a lot of good friends?"
Ning Yongxue scrutinized Ikarus for a while, making sure that there was no loneliness or loss in her eyes - her face was expressionless, as if she was discussing whether or not to put on an extra shirt or pair of socks. "Why do you want to gain many friends?" He pressed.
"Don't they say in the books that people are willing to do anything for their friends? --without regard for their own safety, just to accomplish a common purpose." Ikarus's tone was unusually flat, "If I have a lot of friends, I can get them to sacrifice and do a lot of things for me, as well as accomplish a lot of purposes."
Ning Yongxue felt that this little girl was even more out of place. While this was indeed the childish thoughts of a young child, some of her perceptions and ideas were clearly twisted. "I can understand your logic, but ..." he turned to ask, "What purpose is there that you need a friend to sacrifice for you in order to accomplish?"
"I haven't thought it through, and I ... don't want to talk about it." Ikarus hesitated, as if there was some reason he didn't want to mention.
"Well then, what are you trying to do now?"
"I don't know." Ikas replied.
"You don't know this, you don't know that, what exactly do you know?"
"I don't know even if you keep asking." She looked straight into Ning Yongxue's eyes, "I was stranded here. I don't know where I'm going or what I'm supposed to do."
Ning Yongxue could only shrug, this little girl was really weird. "It's really thanks to you that you can fly over here like a bird that can't find its way north to stand behind my ass, it's not like I'm the hen that hatched you."
"Are you insulting me? Just because you're a little taller than me?" She asked, still serious.
"I'm not." Ning Yongxue replied seriously as well, assuring that he wasn't teasing a child.
"Then there is." Ikarus nodded, reaching up and tugging at the blonde hair on her forehead, and holding her chin fervently as if she were pretending to be an adult in contemplation, "I'll think about why you're insulting me, and maybe I can learn something from it."
She liked to speak with a straight face.
Ning Yongxue made his way down the avenue, babbling to this little actress of unknown origin for more than ten minutes, possibly more. Considering her English pronunciation with an odd accent, coupled with a number of latter-day made-up words that spewed out of her mouth, the conversation almost seemed like a listening comprehension exercise.
However, Ning Yongxue heard one key point: Ikarus knew a lot of specialized terms that were beyond her knowledge base. From sociology to cutting-edge biotechnology, there were all sorts of fields, and there were some terms that even Ning Yongxue couldn't tell.
The marvelous thing was that she was able to perfectly retell these words and phrases without understanding their meanings. Ning Yongxue felt that she had probably grown up in an extremely twisted environment. To her, words and phrases that were beyond comprehension were like myths, the expressionless adults were like wandering evil spirits, and the soldiers in power armor were demons on patrol. Every word she spoke was more like an incantation used to hoodwink evil spirits and demons.
She speaks like a spell, playing the role of a well-behaved child, but is not good at "communication" and "expression", which are the original purposes of words. Once she tries to express her true thoughts, she makes jokes. In her eyes, Ning Yongxue was probably a magician who was better at deceiving demons and knew more profound spells.
The two of them followed the map markings on the street to find their destination, their pace getting heavier and heavier, but they never found it. On the one hand, they had no terminals at hand to look up the information, and the two were like lost sheep in this place. On the other hand, the streets were empty, completely at odds with the scale of the high-rise buildings, almost like a perfectly decorated ghost town. Vehicles were scarce here, pedestrians were even rarer, and the one or two pedestrians that occasionally passed by walked in an unusual hurry, with cold and wooden expressions, completely ignoring the greetings and requests of strangers.
In a place like this, asking for directions seems impossible. There could be many reasons for this: perhaps it was the special environment around the space orbits that allowed people to travel only in well-equipped high-altitude and underground transportation; perhaps it was the extremely strict requirements of the local companies for hiring workers and their overly tight schedules, which made it almost impossible to see real city dwellers walking on the streets, except for legal holidays; or perhaps the modern streets no longer assumed the functions of the past, but were just the remnants of the old times, like monuments like municipal decorations, and no one would walk or loiter in such areas.
Just as refugees and homeless people always move around the power piles at the bottom of bridges, the area of activity of hired laborers may be the enclosed commercial area within a large building complex, while the upper class elite has a more enclosed, higher class living area. People of different classes socialized in their own areas, not interacting at all with the rest of the population and blocking the channels of circulation between them.
The streets they are on are, in theory, public places accessible to everyone, places where people used to go to and from, but in the world of the future, they are forgotten municipal decorations. If people can only socialize comfortably among people of similar family and class backgrounds, what exactly are the streets of the future world? Is it the "middle of nowhere" where outlaws and hobos linger?
Because Ikarus had broken her ankle and the journey was long, Ning Yongxue sat down with her at the edge of the canal and watched the blue river flow downstream. This mysterious little girl was still covered in mud, but the silt on her body had dried up under the light breeze, clumping up in her blonde hair and sprinkling bits of mud powder from her pale neck and fingertips.
Willow branches fluttered like flags above their heads, and white flowers bloomed in the greenery, giving off wisps of fragrance, those half-closed flower bones resembling the white bones of a human being. The environment is flawless, the sky is as clear as a wash, the streets are as clean as new, just can't see a few pedestrians traveling to and fro.
As Ning Yongxue saw, environmental problems were no longer a problem in the future world, and there was no pollution or garbage piled up in the city, and the big city was even better than the nature reserve back then. Order and technology have solved the problems of survival that humans worried about in the past, but they also seem to have solved a lot of "problems" other than survival. Thinking of the world's unemployment rate and the forgotten underclass, those worries are no longer worries, because people can only worry about the uncertain future, not the past, which has already been determined.
Ning Yongxue didn't know if people in today's world were lonely, but he did experience great loneliness here, lonelier than he had felt when he was trapped in the ruins. This feeling came from the distant past, from every emotion of the passed years that had been forgotten.
For a while, the two were silent. Ikarus reached out to touch a small bunch of flowers, and it opened up, showing light blue petals, telling Ning Yongxue that it was a crested blue. Although there were many artificially grown flowers along the riverbank, this one was after all the only one open in the vicinity, and Ning Yongxue looked around but saw no other light blue flowers.
"Did this kind of thing turn out to be solid?" Ikarus suddenly asked a very strange question.
What did she mean by that? It occurred to Ning Yongxue that the flowers she'd come into contact with before were perhaps phantoms without entities?
However, looking on the bright side, at least Ikarus hadn't asked, "What kind of bird is this?"