Disassemble

Posted on Tue May 4th, 2021 @ 9:43pm by Senior Chief Petty Officer Sharona Deluna & Captain Benjamin Ingram Dr

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["Is it time?" "It is time." "Proceed to launch." "Acknowledged."]

A group of nanites in JT "Socket" Toomey's combadge activated when they had no communication with the ones implanted in her rank pips or the ones hidden in her earrings. Attempts had been made to communicate and there was interference from somewhere.

The nanites weren't capable of sentience, but they had a set of orders to follow and began to replicate themselves using the material of the combadge and soon became a few hundred more.

Their goal was to find the other nanites and establish contact with Lieutenant Toomey and the others in the group they had been assigned to. To build. To upgrade. To disassemble.

+++

"What?"

"What?"

"That story kills every time I tell it. My sister's wedding, my Uncle Erms funeral, everyone laughs at it. Garuteened crowd-pleaser," Spacer 3rd Class Whitman said. Beside him, Spacer 2nd Class Goldstein nodded a sage and all-knowing nods.

"I just didn't find it funny," Goldstein said. "Hold up."

He raised his hand, holding it over the cargo crate. It was identical to all the other ones lining the shelves of the cargo bay. It was grey, had a red band around it, as well as black and yellow hazard tape sealing it. 'CLASSIFIED MATERIALS BY ORDER OF OSI'. The entire cargo bay was full of them, most of them hadn't been sealed yet and were empty.

But the seventeen furthest from the door, at the back, where the air handling vents blasted chilled air into the room...those were full.

The wrist computer strapped to his arm linked to the crates sensor suite. Status lights for temperature, humidity and a dozen other metrics all winked to green. With a waggle of a finger, he flicked through the manifest for the crate. '20xUniforms, miscellaneous exotic material: Inert/SAFE'.

"Rebuttal," Goldstein said as he lowered his hand, and the pair moved to the next box.

"I'm just saying it's abnormal that you didn't laugh at the story. My statistical model of family gatherings and other social events says that laughter is the default response to the stimuli of my 'Stolen Punch' story," Whitman said. He scanned the next box on the agenda. 'Unknown Power Source, 'depleted matter battery': Active/SAFE'.

"What you need before publishing that story is a control group. Also, your samples are biased. No way you'd get past the..." Goldstein's voice trailed off as he looked at his raised hand. There was an amber tell-tale on his knuckles from the box he was scanning.

'100xCombadges, miscellaneous exotic material: Inert/SAFE. Warning: Temperature above nominal levels by ten degrees celsius.

He reached out and placed his hand on the crate. It felt warm.

"Hey...does this-"

+++

"-feel warm to you?"

The sound waves buzzed from the atoms of his hand through the poly carbide fibres of the crate. They then transferred to the duranium alloy that made up the structural shell of the crate, losing more energy as they travelled. But they made it through, finally falling from the padded format liner of the interior of the crate to weakly transmit the sound of a voice.

By now, twenty combadges had been assimilated and reduced to materials for construction of more nanites. They had gone from a hundred to a thousand to a hundred thousand. As yet, the only plan they had to was create more of themselves and then find out what happened to...

["Contact." "Protocol?" "Unable to determine." "Translating matrix." "..feel warm to you?" "Analyze." "Humanoid. Not authorized. Standby."]

All the nanites ceased what they were doing and waited for another signal.

+++

"A little," Whitman said, pulling his hand back. He then held it out, looking at the holographic display on the back of his hand. "See? Temps going down."

He sighed, shouldered Goldstein out of the way and used a utility cutter from his belt to zip through the special OSI tape. Turned out OSI anti-magic-McGuffin tape was just...tape. Not even silvered utility tape like they had in engineering. Now that deserved to be in one of these boxes.

"Saw this on the Ohio. Crate of comm badges in stores cooked off when one of their power cells went ahead and fried the lot. Melted a few of them, the rest were fine even if they smelled like a plasma fire. Box like this, it's a sealed unit so the combustibles used up the air inside and now its cooling," he turned the box around on its shelf, flicking the latches up on all sides. There were a ridiculous amount of latches on the box.

"Stand back, this is going to smell like a Tholian's wet fart," Whitman said with a grin. This was going to make such a good story. The super-secret OSI sock draw of doom. The final latch came free, and he pulled the lid off the crate.

There were the com badges, all neatly stacked in four rows. Well, not neatly. Some in the middle seemed to have fallen inwards or were resting cockeyed. Shiney though, and then the rectangular ring backed delta of a Starfleet comm badge. These looked sharper, crisper, on a second offset delta backing.

More communication. "Activate scans." "Scanning. Sentient. Organic." "Against Priority One" "Do not disassemble." "Containment free." "Find the Overseer."

The nanites flowed out of the box leaving others to continue to break down the combadges and free the other nanites. They scattered down the side of the box, onto the hands of Whitman, up his arm and torso, down to any tech he had on him, into his combadge and then waited.

Others went to and into the floor, spreading out, multiplying, and learning of their new environment. Relays were tapped. Information was gleaned.

"This is not home." "Explore. Find the Overseer."

+++

"AWW FUCK!?!" Whitman screamed as he staggered back, the sandy grit flowing up his arm and over his wrist computer. For a moment the computer seemed okay, then it began to bubble and hiss and crumble. He let out a howl of pain as the power cell was broken down, the nanites not quick enough to counteract the chemical reaction that the cell contained. And while that happened the nano's moved.

Goldstein stepped back, hurriedly taking big boy steps away from the silvery sand that was now flowing out of Whitman's pant legs. He watched as his friend turned around, his rank pips and comm badge fizzing away into more of the glittering grains.

"You are gonna be okay," Goldstein said in a voice that broached the topic that, potentially, Whitham might not be okay at all. He didn't reach up and tap his combadge, he instead spoke a word to the air. "Averroes."

The cargo bays lighting, subdued strips in the ceiling and floor panels, flickered from standard illumination to a harsh bright non-light. Ultraviolet rays bathed the cargo bay, followed by the static tingling of a containment field going up around the bay. Both men let out little moos of pain as the air pressure downshifted, creating a negative pressure within the bay so that any leaks the field didn't cover would force air inside.

"Containment in progress. Hazard Materials Team has been dispatched along with medical personnel. Remain calm, and avoid further contact with unknown OSI material." The computers auto voice said.

Paralysis set in due to the change in air pressure and the containment field couldn't be immediately breached. System after system was shunted away from the cargo bay save basic life support for organics.

They stopped where they had been in the process of replicating more of themselves, destroying Whitman's uniform, and tapping into conduits of information. All stop.

"Find the Overseer" came from a combadge in the box that hadn't been destroyed, like an echo of hundreds of thousands of synthesized voices.

"....We are so fucking fucked we're fucked," Whitman said in a hollow-sounding voice. He began to hurriedly get his fingers under his uniform's clasps, careful not to touch it where the UV lights were causing the grey dust to fluoresce like bright stars. "Get your uniform off. We'll need to burn them when the Hazard guys turn up."

"But I didn't get any of that grey shit on me!" Goldstein shouted.

"The nano tech just tried to make a break for freedom, and then proclaimed it was seeking an 'Overseer'. You really don't think it's not in the air zipping around like pollen?" Whitman snapped. "I-could-become-dust-any-second!"

"I don't think it would be that quick."

Whitman's boot struck Goldstein in the head when he threw it at him, leaving behind a silvery boot print on his cheek.

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