Captain Wong had just about completed the first of seven reports he needed to have filed before 0001h that evening. Just as he was about to start his final summary paragraph his ready room door chimed.

“Enter.” Wong hollered.

The XO hovered in with a stern look on his face, and waited for the door to close behind him before he spoke, “Sir, I know our mission is extremely important, and we have a specific deadline that we need to meet, but my concerns about the wear and tear that we are placing on the ship is still very real, Lt. Tesa is a great and humble engineer, but we’re pushing a lot of systems and parts too hard. Sure we can probably get to SB80 without any catastrophic systems failures, but we are still risking having something critical blow out on us. And just relying on our Chief Engineers ability to repair any damage and prevent us from losing the ship is not a reasonable plan of action in my mind sir.”

“Duly noted Number One. But we have to do what we have to do. Make sure we keep checking on any systems that are suffering from any extra strain, and if anything gets serious we can slow down, or if neccesary call for a tow.” Wong said with a stern but sympathetic tone in his voice.

“Then let’s call for a tow for the Borg ship now then sir. That tractor beam being engaged for another week, at warp, is the strain that could overload our shit sir.”

“Can’t yet Commander, there’s not enough time before our mission deadline to get another ship out to us, even the Niagara would end up arriving a day late.”

Mee IH groaned, an audible rumble emerged from his blowhole on the back of his head, but he bit his tongue, “Yes sir. If that’s the case, lets alter speed to Warp 8.2 then, save us another 9 hours of max load towing. Tesa said the extra strain from the tractor beam at that speed is neglible.”

Wong nodded, “Make it so Commander.”

An hour later, the door to the ready room chimed again, and again Wong hollered for the visitor to enter. This time it was his exocomp surgeon.

“Greetings Doc, what can I do for you?”

“Well sir, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking the past several days, and I’ve decided that I am going to change my name. I’ve accessed the records from my childhood, and looked up the name that the AI generator would have given me if I had asked it to supply me with a random one.” The exocomp plopped a padd on the Captain’s desk.

“The proper authorization and requests have been filled out, and all that is needed now is for you to enter the name change into the ship’s records.”

Wong perused the padd, and nodded, “Everything seems in order here then Lt…Cashew Basket.” The CO said with a smile. It was a bit of an odd name, but then again the Doc was a bit of an odd(but lovable) bot.

“Do you mind if I ask why you decided to change your name Lt?” The Captain asked, being genuinely curious.

“Yeah, I do mind actually, you sexist piece of shit.” The exocomp said, having recently enlightened herself to much of what was formerly known as ‘Gender Studies’, a post secondary course of Academic studies that had been consumed in the last century and a half by what was now known as ‘Comparitive Species Studies’.

“Sorry sir, I was trying that phrase out, first time I’ve used it out loud. I like it, its got a lot of edge to it, ya know.” The droid surgeon added with a playful tone in her synthezied voice.

Initially quite taken aback by the inference, Wong couldn’t help but laugh it off given the innocent young life forms explanation, “Edge is one way to put, but you might want to be careful about when and why you deploy that phrase though Doc. It’s, uh, a rather sharp instrument if you get what I mean, and people can take those kinds of accusations extremely seriously.”

“Like, you mean, even if it’s a joke?”

“Yep, even if its a joke.”

“Pfft! You humanoids don’t know how to have any fun.” Doctor Bucket turned to leave.

“Now wait just a second you speciesist piece of shit.” Wong snapped back defensively.

“Oh, I’m sorr…” the Doc thought she just erred again until she noticed the grin on the Captains faced as she turned back towards him.

“See what I mean?” Wong smiled and winked as he made his point quite clearly and directly, but using humour, albeit dark humour, to help the notion make a landing in the exocomps memory banks.

The exocomp started to chuckle, “Oh touche sir, touche indeed. Point taken.”

Less than 10 minutes later Wong’s comm badge chirped.

“Go ahead.” He said.

The XO’s high pitched voice came through the comm, “Cap, uh we’re getting another hail from the freighter. It’s a different drone than the other one who contacted us. This one is claiming he doesn’t want to rejoin the collective at all, and is requesting asylum.”

Wong sighed and sat silent for a moment before responding, “Ignore it Commander. This is exactly the type of thing that could alter their home realities timeline. When we send them back through the portal that damn drone can do what he pleases, but for now, our job is to get them to SB80 with as little contact as possible.”

“Understood sir.” Mee IH squeaked before closing the channel.

Only three minutes after XO’s call, his door chimed again, and Wong resigned himself to the fact that he may never complete the series of reports he was trying to file.

“Ughh, enter.” Wong, marked his spot on the current report amd looked towards the door.

Gallifray walked in, grinning widely as usual, “Félicitations Captain. So sorry for the intrusion, but I’ve just received word from my superiors, apparently they’ve arranged quarters and an office for me aboard SB80, so, sadly I’ll apparently be parting company with you when we arrive.”

“I see, well we still have over a week together. I’ll plan a dinner in your honour in the wardroom one of these days before we pull into ‘80,” Wong stood and walked around in front of his desk and shook the Demi-Gods hand, “I appreciate all your assistance the past few weeks, I guess the fact that we’re still here is a good sign our missions been reasonably successful thus far.”

Gallifray shook Wong’s hand warmly, “Reasonably. Though the dozens of confirmed Loom sightings imply that we’ve been atleast a little bit unsuccessful as well. There’s no telling exactly how many people have been simply erased from existence. But I’ll grant that it seems likely our entire timeline isn’t still seriously at risk, otherwise the reports of Loom sightings would flow like a wave of thousands of sightings at a time for a short time across our galaxy as they ate us, or whatever it is those infernal monsters do. Then poof, we’d all be gone. But the localized nature of the current reports imply that we’ve met some sort of threshold to avoid complete erasure. This is all my own conjecture of course, my superiors would certainly use more couched language I’m sure.”

“Indeed.” Wong didn’t respond immediately, and slowly walked back around his desk as his mind raced.

“Well I’m sure you’ve still a lot on your plate my boy, so I’ll take my leave, just wanted to let you.”

“Thanks Investigator, we’ll be sure to give you a proper send off.” Wong replied with a nod before he returned his attention to his terminal.