Drone number 2365 had been a perfectly ordinary drone, her queen commanded her, she obeyed, there was no hesitation, no questioning. The commands of Queen Chrysalis were the will of the hive. They must be followed no matter what. If the queen willed you to stop your own heart beating you would do it. You wouldn't even hesitate.
So why had it started becoming harder to follow her orders. The queen had forbidden all worker caste from shifting forms. Yet she had disobeyed, she had shifted her leg in order to grip easier to pull a fellow drone from the sands . Drones were expendable, their cost of production so low that shape shift had probably cost more precious love than it took to produce a dozen of her.
She had broken a direct order from her queen, she was an aberration, actually she liked the sound of that word, maybe she wasn't just a number, maybe she was Aberration She pondered this for a moment, did she just assign herself a name? A shudder passed over her, equal parts fear and excitement. These thoughts were abnormal, a conditioned voice in her head shouted at her to turn herself in for extraction and rendering. She was defective, thinking about it for a minute Aberration reached a decision, she chose to ignore the voice.
The queen would now be aware there was a defective worker in the hive, the collective mind would see to that. However the very thing that exposed her would also conceal her. Within the thousands of voices crowding the hive one single mind was like a drop in a bucket, if she fled she would be cut off or destroyed as a traitor and an example to deter others. Within the hive her abnormal mind was masked in a choir of thousands. She knew there would be others, as far as she was aware there already were.
All this had started with the invasion, from there everything had changed. She had been aware in a vague sense of the ponies presence back during the initial attack. But they had been irrelevant, a mere means to an ends, whether they lived or died was as unimportant to her as the life of a small insect would be to most. She had no strong feelings either way. Then the bubble had hit, the pure love saturating every fibre of her being. It was terrible, it was agonising,and yet in a strange and twisted way it was absolutely beautiful.
But the same magic that had shown her so much love had given her something else too. It had left her changed her deeply, the complete numbness she had lived with from the moment she was born, the surgically precise coldness to anything that Queen Chrysalis did not ask of her was erased in a single moment. She was suddenly fully aware of what she had done all of it, she could feel what they had felt burning it's way into the recesses of her carefully engineered mind. It was completely overwhelmed of course, and gave her two choices, adjust and learn from the experience, or shatter under the massive strain. Then came a new feeling, two actually, shame, and guilt. She despised what she had done but back then she was given absolutely no choice but to continue, the will of the hive had been more powerful in those days. Disobedience had become a complete impossibility, had she tried the hive mind would have had her turning herself in for erasure, or to be drained dry in an instant. Failure to obey at that time would have resulted in the command and compulsion to end her own existence and she knew it.
Good little drones did as they were told, they did not jeopardise their existence by getting ideas above their station. They were tools and would act as such. Well the queen wanted a nice little obedient tool
2365 could do that, she WOULD do that, her mundane mediocrity became her shield from the queens wrath.
She ruthlessly suppressed any signs of her true feelings, schooled her expression back to a complete blankness, learned to stare ahead, and move with the others. Standing out was bad, it gave you away.
Thus 2365's everyday life went on, on the outside a mindless drone in a hive full of others that were exactly the same. She watched carefully though behind that mask. She saw signs of others like her. Of course the queen could sense them like weeds growing in her carefully cultivated garden, and much like weeds she sought to root them out. Every once in a while she succeeded and found them, of course there were no big showy punishments for a drone who grew this way of course. Drones were beneath notice, so they didn't cause a scene at all, just one day they were there the next they weren't. No mess, no fuss, they quietly went off somewhere and disappeared.
There were others though, and more were showing up daily as the queens mind had begun to unravel,she was ruthless in her searching, deliberately performing minor acts of cruelty to her own subjects in an attempt to elicit the aberrant emotional responses so the mutations would give themselves away. Thus numbness became survival trait for them all, they did not communicate with one another, that would cause far too much chatter. When they realised there were others like them an unspoken agreement had been formed, they would never acknowledge one anothers presence in the hive.
If one was caught out the others would not give themselves away. They would carry on as if nothing had happened. Thus they survived. Then one day Aberration had seen a raiding party returning from Equestria with captives, it wasn't the first time this had happened of course, the hive did have to fed after all. But this time was just once too often. She couldn't stand it any more. No ling ever notices a drone though, they are after all a sub caste. Others had noticed too, and later that night Aberration had joined with the others for the first time , and by unspoken agreement they had helped those they could to slip free of the hive,they felt a pang of sympathy for those they couldn't help of course, but they did everything they could, a collective within a collective. 2365 was dead. She was Aberration and she was no longer alone.