Twinkle Twinkle Little Star: The Lullaby of the Outbreaks

"Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" was an old Earth nursery rhyme, a lullaby composed to sing children to sleep, that recurred through the history of the Necromorph outbreaks with a persistence that no survivor who heard it ever managed to explain. Wherever a Marker signal took hold of human minds, the song surfaced. It was sung in an ominous tone above the bodies of Unitologist suicides aboard the USG Ishimura, transmitted over the radio to a fleeing detective who could find no singer, hummed by the apparition of a dead child aboard the USG O'Bannon, and whispered by the false Nicole Brennan into the ear of Isaac Clarke on Titan Station. A song written as a comfort became, in the shadow of the Markers, a sound that meant madness had already arrived.

The singer on the Crew Deck#

During the Second Aegis VII Incident in 2508, as Isaac Clarke fought his way through the dying Planet Cracker, the lullaby reached him more than once. It first drifted to him in the elevator that carried him up to the West Grow Chamber on the Hydroponics Deck, a thin voice threading through the noise of the infested ship.

The song was strongest on the Crew Deck. The common area there had been remade by the ship's believers in their final days. The walls were hung with Unitology decorations and scrawled with Marker graffiti, and the floor was littered with the bodies of Unitologists who had killed themselves in ritual suicide. Above the carnage a woman's voice sang "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" in a slow, ominous tone, the verse looping over and over through the lounge. The singing came from the third floor, sealed behind an elevator that answered only to a Crew Deck keycard. By the time Isaac recovered the card from the Zero-G Gym and returned, the singing had ceased. The third floor held nothing but more dead Unitologists and an Infector bursting from a vent. The singer was never found, and no record settled whether the voice had belonged to a living cultist in her last minutes or to something the Marker placed in the minds of those who heard it.

The transmission in the vents#

The rhyme found other ears aboard the Ishimura in those same hours. Nathan McNeill, the P-Sec detective who had escaped the Aegis VII colony only to be trapped aboard the infested vessel, was crawling through the ship's ventilation shafts in the final stretch of his escape when a radio transmission reached him: a woman singing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star". McNeill at first believed that Lexine Murdoch was calling him, but the voice was not hers. He tried repeatedly to raise the singer and got no response. The woman only kept singing. Nothing on the channel ever answered him, and those who later weighed the account concluded that McNeill, whose long exposure to the Marker's influence was well documented, was in all likelihood hallucinating the broadcast.

Vivian Kuttner's lullaby#

The melody also attended deaths. When the Ishimura's chief of security, Alissa Vincent, was lost to space during the ship's fall, the lullaby accompanied her lifeless body as it drifted into the darkness.

Aboard the USG O'Bannon, the vessel dispatched to the shattered Aegis system after the disaster, the song attached itself to the most harrowing haunting of the mission. Security officer Nickolas Kuttner, who had lost his young daughter Vivian years before, began to see the dead girl after handling a shard of the Marker on the broken planet below. The melody played about her apparition wherever she appeared, and Vivian could be heard singing along with it. The hallucination consumed Kuttner entirely. In his final moments he believed he was with his daughter again and sang the lullaby with her, even as the apparition tricked him into venting himself into space and taking several Marines with him. Like Vincent before him, he died suffocating in the dark with the rhyme as his accompaniment.

The voice of Nicole Brennan#

Three years after the Ishimura's fall, the song followed Isaac Clarke to Titan Station. During his confinement in the Psych Ward of Titan Memorial Medical Center, his medical examination recorded that he repeated the phrase "Twinkle twinkle little star", one symptom among many of the dementia the Site 12 Marker worked upon him. When the outbreak broke open the Sprawl, the hallucination of Nicole Brennan, the dead woman whose image the Marker wore to manipulate Isaac, sang the lullaby quietly beside him in an elevator before her voice tore into a scream of "MAKE US WHOLE!".

The song was waiting for him aboard the Ishimura as well. The gutted Planet Cracker had been towed to the Sprawl and moored for decontamination, its corridors stripped and sheeted in plastic, its crew three years dead. On the ship's Bridge, in the escape pod bay outside the Captain's Nest, two faint voices could still be heard singing the rhyme together in the dark.

A pattern in the madness#

Across every account the song kept the same shape. It was heard only where a Marker's signal had already taken hold: among the ritual dead of the Crew Deck, on a phantom radio channel, around the apparition of a dead child, in the mouth of the Marker's puppet of Nicole Brennan, and in the recorded ramblings of Isaac Clarke himself. Its singers were the dying, the deranged, and the dead, and its listeners rarely remained whole for long. No surviving record explained why the Markers, or the broken minds they made, reached so often for a children's lullaby. The pattern itself was never in doubt. When the old rhyme began somewhere in the dark, the Necromorph plague and the madness that fed it were already close at hand.