Two rival peoples of living light, one spherical and one cubic, whose long hostility the USS Cerritos is asked to help resolve in the episode Of Gods and Angles.
The Orbs and the Cubes are a pair of photonic species, each a floating geometric shape of glowing energy, and each convinced of the inferiority of the other. Their quarrel over shape is ancient and thoroughly entrenched.
They appear in the fifth-season Lower Decks episode Of Gods and Angles. The Cerritos hosts delegations of both for peace talks, and the negotiations are thrown into danger when a member of one party goes missing aboard and the other is at once suspected.
The inquiry falls to Beckett Mariner, who is at the same time trying to keep the accident-prone Ensign Olly, a descendant of the Greek gods, from being drummed out of Starfleet. Olly's unusual nature proves to be exactly what the situation requires.