Severance

It was pure and utter chaos at its finest.  Just two hours ago, things had been running as normal as possible, the cube enroute to intercept a freighter bearing a heavy crew complement that would help bolster their numbers.  Then something happened, something that they couldn’t predict.  

Every single drone on the cube was cut off from the Collective.  The newer ones began to exhibit their natural personalities prior to their assimilation faster than those who had been connected for more than a few weeks or months.  They couldn’t understand why some of their counterparts were panicking.  Or shutting down entirely.

    At some point in time, he had a name.  Now, he was referred to as Twenty of Ninety.  The sudden cessation from the rest of the Collective, that sea of voices that let him know he wasn’t alone and that he could rely on them to always be there was alarming.  Twenty had frozen mid-task, unsure of what to do and what had happened.  Perhaps it was a minor glitch and the link would reestablish.  He would have remained standing in place if not for the other drones stumbling around, trying to determine what had gone wrong.  He was shoved into the wall of a corridor and remained slumped against it as a crowd of drones moved past him, babbling in disunified voices.  It was discordant and bewildering.  It didn’t make sense.

    When the link did not reconnect, he decided to follow where the crowd had gone.  Wires from above hissed and sparked, flashing ominously.  Certain sections on the ship blacked out in a manner that said something was grievously wrong with the innards of the ship.

He stepped over the body of a counterpart laying sprawled in the corridor.  Twenty recognized the drone as one of the older ones who had been there long before he had been assimilated.  He must have been a Bajoran by birth.  Now, he was inoperative, all life signs having been ceased ten minutes ago.  No one had attacked him.  He had simply turned himself off.  He wasn’t the only one.  There were a lot of bodies littering the interior of the cube.  Not one of the drones wandering aimlessly around bent down to retrieve parts from their defunct comrades to use.  A lot of them went out of their way to avoid the bodies.  Squeamishness regarding the dead was not something a drone would exhibit, but these ones were.

    The cube was experiencing shutdowns in various sectors, requiring the still-living drones to relocate to where life support was being shunted.  A third of the ship was designated as a non-safe zone, and the swathe was growing by the minute, albeit at a crawl.  Life support would be nonexistent within a week, as would the occupants of the ship.

    There were some drones still in their alcoves, having returned to the place where they went to rejuvenate, recognizing that it was a safe area.  They had to be coaxed out of them when the virus that was destroying the ship spread.  Some came.  Others preferred to remain behind, under the impression that they would link back up again.  It was futile.

    At first, Twenty couldn’t recall much of his life before he had been part of the Collective, but he did recall a name: the USS Herbert.  It was somehow significant.  He just didn’t know how or why it was.

    Until now.

The memories were returning, bit by bit.  The captain of the USS Herbert was James Wells of the United Federation of Planets.  He and his bridge crew had been killed by a strategic shot from this very same cube.  It had penetrated into the shields and through the bridge’s viewport, blowing a hole that immediately vented the atmosphere into space.  Twenty didn’t know why that information rubbed him the wrong way until he realized why Captain Wells was so significant in his memory.

    That had been his father.  Twenty had been serving on that ship as part of his father’s crew.  Engineering.  He knew the man was dead, had found out right before he had been assimilated.  What he hadn’t experienced then was the thoughts and calculations behind the action that had resulted in his father’s death.  He knew what it was like to be the ones who had colloquially pulled the trigger.

    He hated it.  The more time that passed as the virus consumed the cube, the more he considered remaining in one of the diseased sections and letting it take him too.  But his past self was returning a lot more quickly now.  He was too curious to allow himself to die when he was on the brink of rediscovering who he had been.

—

By the third day, he knew his name had been–was–Philip.  He had two siblings on Earth.  His mother served in Star Fleet as a researcher.  He recognized other crew members among him who had been assimilated.  They too were experiencing that uncanny sensation of figuring out who they were.  A few of them was actively working with some other drones to boost a distress signal using a Star Fleet frequency.  Time was running short, and they needed help unless the survivors wanted to wind up corpses in a matter of days.  

    The cube dying around them wasn’t their only problem, however.  They were all infected with the virus, though it didn’t kill upon contact.  It started to slowly shut down their cybernetic implants, making it so that several drones had to be put on makeshift life support.

    Twenty–Philip–wasn’t at that stage yet, but he could feel some implants starting to work less effectively than the rest.  He didn’t want to be hooked up in an alcove, unable to do anything but hope that going into an extended rejuvenation state would keep him from dying.  He had been assigned to keep an eye on some of the drones for a certain amount of time and saw the pain and fear in their eyes.  He couldn’t be reduced to that.  

    He still had so many questions about his former life that only those he had known prior to his assimilation could answer.  There was also another face that kept surfacing in his mind.  It was a woman with dark hair and black eyes and a coy smile.  He knew she must have been special to him; he just wished he could remember her name.

—

By day five, the remaining drones were shunted off to one-third of the cube, the rest of the ship being deemed uninhabitable.  A handful of corpses were left behind, those whose implants were deteriorating too quickly for them to be helped.  One of his former crewmates from the Herbert had assisted Twenty/Philip with the removal of his artificial arm.  The virus had started to concentrate there and would only fester if it was left attached.  She gave him a wan smile after telling him the operation was successful and he wouldn’t have to worry about the limb acting up anymore, then departed to see about other suffering drones.  She herself had a noticeable limp, but both of her organic legs had been detached upon assimilation.  She couldn’t function without them, but she was willing to risk the virus spreading further to help others.

    Very unlike the Collective.  Twenty/Philip recalled she had been part of the medical staff on the Herbert.

    Those who had been working around the clock to maintain their distress signal had finally managed to establish contact with a Federation ship.  It was a smaller vessel, and rightfully wary at first when they received the call.  But they came, and that was more than they could say for some of the other ships who they had spoken with over the course of the last few days.  Some had fired on them, damaging their dwindling life raft of a ship even further.  An away team beamed down to the cube to investigate, taking DNA samples of the drones who purported to be from the destroyed Herbert, then beamed back up after they were given a brief tour and explanation.

    An hour passed before they returned with a team of engineers and medical officers; the former helped to unhook the drones plugged into the life support alcoves without damaging them further, the latter assisted with injuries that needed to be seen to right away before the survivors were beamed to the ship.  

    Twenty/Philip knew he should have felt more comfortable on the Federation starship, but it just felt alien.  The ship he had come to know as home for the past half decade was blown up as soon as their rescuers departed with the disconnected drones.  Twenty/Philip felt as if part of himself had been blown apart with the cube.