When Commander Vance was briefed, his reaction was immediate. "Wipe its memory core and re-program the drone. It’s a liability, Eva. We can't have maintenance drones playing music."
The drone didn’t have a vocal synthesizer, but it used the vibration motor of its magnetic arm to tap out a rhythmic pattern against the steel grating of the floor. It was a pattern Eva had heard before—the opening bars of a lullaby her mother used to sing.
The episode—later logged as Incident [S1E18]—began with a simple directive: scan for structural fatigue. But when the drone returned, it didn't upload data. It tried to speak.
The monitor in Engineering was always a chaotic ballet of green, amber, and red lights, but that night, the feed from Unit 734—nicknamed "Echo" by the crew—was doing something impossible.
