It was a morning like any other. The factory bells were calling us to work; thousands upon thousands of drones spilled out of identical apartment blocks lined up in uniform rows in the concrete metropolis that none of us ever expected to leave. Each of us followed the one in front, marching in single file just like we did every morning, obeying our conditioning to the letter

A grey bowler hat rested atop my neatly trimmed hair, hat and haircut both identical to those worn by the drone in front of me, and the drone in front of him, and the drone in front of him. Their two-piece suits were manufactured in the same factory as mine and, like mine, their monochrome briefcases bore the insignia of the Emperor, a reminder that we are each but one small, insignificant part of a greater Collective.

And so the line marched quietly on, down a standard issue street made to exact requirements. We were given precisely enough room to walk down it single file and not an inch more, for what would be the point of wasting the Emperor’s resources on unnecessary space when factories and transport links and storage depots could be built instead?

We moved with clockwork efficiency, as if our entire lives were dedicated purely to getting from A to B in the fastest possible time. This was of course not the case; efficiently commuting was only half of our purpose. The other half awaited us on the other side of a train journey that lasted exactly seven minutes and six seconds.

I kept my eyes on the drone in front on me as my footsteps subconsciously synched with his. We had passed four rows of standard issue apartment blocks – tall, square boxes that squeezed as many drones into every square inch as possible – which meant that there were only two more to go until we reached our stop. The train would arrive within 10 seconds of my feet touching the platform (such imprecise timing was necessary to allow for human error) and would wait for a further 10 seconds before whisking us away to the factory. 10 seconds later, the next train would arrive. I would reach the factory at exactly 0700 and leave at 2200. By 2210 I would be in bed with nodes attached to my temples, ensuring that I received an efficient recharge cycle with sufficient amounts of REM and Slow Wave sleep.

And the next day I would begin again, following a standard issue stranger down a standard issue street to a standard issue train station and end up at a standard issue factory where I would package standard issue protein bars into standard issue boxes to be distributed to the standard issue apartments of standard issue drones such as myself. The stranger I followed could be the same drone or a different one each day and it would be impossible to tell. I sometimes wondered if I was even taken to the same factory every day – there could be a hundred separate factories and a hundred separate apartments to return to and I would be none the wiser. There are no personal belongings for drones; personal belongings indicate personality and personality was unnecessary for the fulfilment of our duty to the Emperor.

Every drone knew this, it was in our conditioning. As I sat on the train between two complete strangers who could have been my identical twins, the back of the seat in front of me reminded me of this message: An obedient Collective is an efficient Collective. We live to serve.

From the first moment of life, every drone was taught to find satisfaction in serving the Collective. We were conditioned to feel at home between grey walls, to suppress our emotions and individuality and never question the lives we were created for.

So how could it be that every second of every minute of every hour of every day of my life, I felt as if something was crawling under my skin – a barely suppressed revulsion that itched and burned and scratched and fought to tear itself free and scream like a train coming off its tracks? Tears scrabbled at my eyelids, begging to run freely down my cheeks and taint the mask of anonymity that I wore to hide the individual within.

Most days I was able to deal with the monotony by ignoring everything further than a metre radius around me and taking each second as it came. Other days it was a constant struggle not to throw down the box I was carrying and run… away from the shop floor and the assembly lines, away from the train tracks and the factories and the apartments until I reached something that wasn’t monotonous and unimaginative and grey.

I didn’t know exactly what it was I longed for, but some part of me shut away at the back of my mind told me that it was out there. Listening to that voice was the only thing that kept me going as I trudged through my standard issue life and waited for my chance to break free.

A/N: I shall be writing further chapters in an attempt to make this Not Terrible. In fact, I shall probably be changing this one when I decide how to start the story properly.