For some reason I kept thinking about the SCV from StarCraft. It mines minerals, puts up buildings, repairs whatever is broken. Yes sir, orders — it says its few lines and then it is gone.
So I made it a song. Every lyric is something the SCV actually says. Almost nothing is invented. I just changed the order of the lines it was already saying, and it turned into a song on its own.
The chorus came out like this. I can fix anything that breaks. There is nobody to fix me.
I was pleased with it. It felt like it had landed. Then I was digging through the original voice files and found this line. “I can fix anything, if this dang thing holds together.”
It says the same thing as my chorus. It had been sitting in the game since 1998.
At first it deflated me a little. I thought I had found something, and I had not. But the longer I sat with it the more it turned around. It means somebody already knew this feeling twenty years ago. They probably worked late too. They left that line inside a game and walked off. It reached me twenty years later.
I made mistakes along the way. The voice I used first was not the SCV. The files said SCV, so I assumed they were, but the tone kept sounding wrong. They were from StarCraft II. I had trusted a filename.
The robot on screen had an ankle bent the wrong way. I could not see it small. I only caught it when I looked at it large. It showed that I had skimmed.
By the time I had fixed all of it I understood what the song was about. It is about repairing everyone else and having nothing left over for yourself. The whole time I was making it, I was also fixing something.
The song is on the channel. If you know the SCV, you will know where the chorus came from.