by David Mack
Once, she had been a Caeliar scientist and poet. All that remained of her now was a tormented fragment of consciousness, a suffering with no name and no connection to its own greatness. Inyx imagined that Sedín, in a moment of weakness, had been unable to let herself disincorporate. She had clung too fiercely to life, lingering even after her faculties of reason had faded, rendering her little more than a sophisticated machine bent on feeding its own ravenous energy needs and perpetuating its own existence.
Taking the initiative, Inyx projected comforting impulses to Sedín, quieting her rage. Then he counseled her, It’s time to let go, Sedín. Let yourself rest. Let the light fade.
She fought. Rage and fury pulsed through the Collective. Driven by fear and habit, Sedín lashed out, to no effect.
Inyx calmed Sedín’s psychic rampage with a dulcet tone, a harmonizing thoughtwave of love. The Collective fell silent.
He reached out across space and found Erika, teetering on the edge between resistance and surrender, and bolstered her with the will of the gestalt. Balance has been achieved, he told her. The next step is yours.
* * *
Hernandez’s mind was clear as she got up from the deck inside the vinculum. The pack of drones that surrounded her retreated in confusion as she looked past them and met the panicked gaze of the Borg Queen, and they parted before her as she walked forward to speak to Sedín through the deposed monarch.
“Can’t you see what you’ve done here, Sedín?” she said. The drones all were watching her, and through her bond with the gestalt—and the gestalt’s new link to the Collective—Hernandez realized that everything she did and said here would be known by every Borg drone throughout the Milky Way.
Ascending the steps of the Queen’s dais, she continued, “Did you forget everything you stood for? Nonviolence, pacifism, the Great Work … did they all lose their meaning for you?” As she reached the top of the dais, the Borg Queen stumbled backward and collapsed before her. Hernandez felt the Queen’s dismay and discerned its cause: She was unable to make sense of what was happening. The nature of the Caeliar had caught the Collective by surprise; despite having believed they could assimilate nigh-omnipotent beings, the Borg had met their betters.
Standing over the fallen Queen, Hernandez understood that the Borg’s figurehead was powerless now; she had become little more than another, glorified drone.
Hernandez turned away from her, shut her eyes, and extended her senses within the Borg vessel, throughout its armada, and then, with the power of the Caeliar gestalt, across the entirety of the Collective—all of which was one mind, one damaged sentience craving peace but not knowing how to find it. She lifted her hand, fingers parted wide, as a somatic cue to focus and direct the power of the Caeliar.
“Sedín, have mercy on all these souls you’ve stolen. You’ve held them all long enough, and you’ve done enough damage—to them, to the galaxy, and to yourself. This has to end.” She quelled Sedín’s fear and let the gestalt begin to place the wounded Caeliar sentience fully under control. “We have to lift this cruel veil from your victims’ eyes,” she continued. As the gestalt wrested the last vestiges of control from Sedín, the Collective dissolved, leaving behind trillions of minds still bound to one another by a shred of shared awareness.
She spoke now to the drones. “Awaken … and know yourselves.”
* * *
Across the galaxy, a trillion drones reeled at the sudden absence of the Collective, as if an invisible hand had released its throttling grip on their throats and let them all breathe for the first time in six thousand years.
In unison, they inhaled and tasted freedom. Their numerical designations were stripped away, leaving some with nothing—and giving others back their names.
Clarity brought awareness … and then came bitter memories. Staggering multitudes of liberated psyches remained inextricably linked, their thoughts exposed and crowded in on one another, and the result was pandemonium.
A billion minds panicked without the Collective’s guidance, and a billion more laughed in triumph at the fall of their oppressor. Tens of billions emotionally imploded and filled the shared mindspace with their plangent wails of grief. Searing tides of rage swelled and swept like a force of nature through the emancipated drones. What one felt, all felt, all at once.
The entire Borg civilization was in chaos. In the span of a single breath, it had descended into madness.
* * *
Hernandez couldn’t breathe. She was only one woman, one mind, one spark of consciousness trying to stand against a tsunami of sorrow and terror.
She could hear the psychic voice of every drone calling out for succor, the doleful cries of those who had awakened to find their lives shattered beyond recognition, the misdirected fury of those who had tasted revenge and hungered for more.
A flood-crush of feelings and memories pummeled the gates of her mind. Souls masculine, feminine, neuter, and wholly alien to her all turned toward the light, the radiance of the Caeliar and their Omega Molecule generator, and they all saw Hernandez as the conduit to those long-sought perfections.
I can’t finish this without your help, she told the gestalt. We’ve come this far. Take the final step.
The gestalt struggled to cope with the onslaught of negative emotions from the freed Borg drones. Such cacophony offended their precious harmony of mind, and all that Hernandez could do was hope that they would rise to the challenge it presented. Then came Inyx’s reply. We’re ready, Erika.
Strength surged in her chest like a river breaking through a dam. She felt Axion’s generator increase its output by orders of magnitude, and suddenly the overmatched gestalt had assumed control. Its energy flowed within her and empowered her, and through her it found the Borg.
Hernandez gave the power a purpose. She shaped it, molded it, directed it. She spread it across the galaxy, to every last drone, on every cube, in every complex, on every assimilated world. In every corner of the galaxy that had been darkened by the scourge of the Borg, Hernandez opened the way.
Her body rose from the deck and ascended quickly toward the high ceiling above the vinculum. Freedom, she thought, and the core of the Borg cube obeyed her. The massive supports and exterior structures of the vinculum peeled away and opened like a steel flower in bloom, revealing the great hollow core of the Borg Queen’s domain. Her catoms burning brightly with the light of the Caeliar, Hernandez soared into the great emptiness above.
Open your eyes, she told her new brothers and sisters in the gestalt. See the future. It’s here. Its time has come.
* * *
Jean-Luc Picard had never broken down like this. Not when Robert and René had died, not when he’d gone home after being liberated from the Borg for the first time, not when Gul Madred had nearly shattered him beyond recovery.
He collapsed onto his knees, unable to stand against the storm of emotions that raged against him. All thoughts of pride were forgotten now. He had no sense of the other people on the bridge of the Enterprise. In the final moments before he had been felled by the psionic barrage, Riker and Worf had moved to his sides to shield him from the crew’s sight.
It doesn’t matter, he realized, submerging into the ocean of his hopelessness. The center didn’t hold. It’s all falling apart. There’s nothing we can do.
Doubts and fears dragged him deeper into his own bottomless despair. How could he ever have hoped to fight the Borg? He was only one man, mortal and weak, and the Borg were a force of nature. He’d failed to challenge them in System J-25, when he first encountered them. He’d underestimated them a second time and had ended up facilitating the slaughter of his own people at Wolf 359. If not for Data, he’d have been beaten by the Borg Queen. Arrogant enough to think he could fool them long enough to infiltrate one of their ships, he had tried to impersonate Locutus, only to succumb to assimilation again.
I’m a failure, he berated himself. I might have lived out my life in peace, but I had to tempt fate by starting a fami
ly. I’ve doomed us all.
Heavy sobs wracked his chest. He cried into his palms until his ribs hurt and his eyes burned and mucus filled his sinuses.
And across the galaxy, a trillion drones wept with Locutus.
* * *
A quarter-billion voices were screaming at Deanna Troi.
She pitched forward to the deck of Titan’s bridge, and Christine Vale was at her side in an instant. “What’s wrong, Deanna?” Vale asked. Troi wanted to reply, but she could barely breathe through the avalanche of wild emotion smothering her.
Vale snapped out orders. “Tuvok, she needs you! Rager, we need a medic. Keru, tell Ree to check on all psi-sensitive personnel immediately.”
The world around Troi seemed to fade behind a wall of anguished keening and wordless, angry roars of noise. It was all coming from the Borg, but they had none of the focused malice or icy detachment that had marked their previous encounters with the Federation. There was only tragic lamentation and sullen fury, emotional aftershocks of a shattered culture of slavery.
Then a comforting thought broke through the bedlam, and Troi became aware of warm fingertips against her temple and cheek. My mind to your mind, Tuvok projected, easily surmounting her crumbled psychic barriers. My strength becomes your strength. My calm becomes your calm. Our thoughts are fusing. Our memories are merging. We are united. We are one.
She opened her eyes and saw Titan’s bridge clearly. Everyone, it seemed, was watching her and Tuvok, who hovered on the edge of her vision, though he was foremost in her thoughts. Troi still sensed the mental turbulence of the millions of distressed souls in the Borg armada who were crying out for help, but the mind-meld with Tuvok had given her the strength to restore her telepathic barriers and recover her composure. She saw in Tuvok’s mind that the meld had proved fortuitous for him as well; his own control also had faltered from the shock.
Inside the meld, he asked, Are you all right, Counselor?
Yes, Tuvok. Thank you.
The crew’s attention was pulled away from Troi and Tuvok as Keru pointed at the main viewer and shouted, “Look!”
On the center screen, the Caeliar metropolis of Axion began to shine with an unearthly glow. It grew brighter in a rapid flash, like a star building up to a supernova, yet Troi found something about its penetrating white radiance comforting.
What she saw next was more than just a turning point in history. It was the end of an era and the dawn of another.
It was a moment too incredible to be coincidence.
It was a moment of destiny.
* * *
A trillion pairs of eyes bore witness.
It was a vision, a phantasm sprung fully formed from the void, a revelation of what had been and what was to come. The former Queen was no more, laid low, made common, deposed. In her place had risen a hue and cry of inconsolable sorrow.
A billion mothers awoke from the Collective’s iron bondage to find their children riven from them. Billions of children opened their eyes to find their parents gone forever, along with worlds they could barely remember. Spouses, lovers, friends, and comrades sought one another through the gestalt and found few of their numbers still living. Billions of souls were alone.
There were no rich or poor. No one was famous, powerful, or privileged. There were simply those who had awakened. Liberated from the cold grip of the machine, they searched for the keys to their lost identities. Then they found them, and the gestalt sang with a trillion names reclaimed from the fog, revealed by the blaze of light piercing the gloom.
Every mind touched by the gestalt looked to the source.
Where once a dark tyrant had reigned, a bright and dazzling queen now rose like the dawn, bringing illumination and comfort. Unfettered by the bonds of gravity, she soared freely, bursting with light, a splendor among shadows, exorcising six thousand years of night in a single moment of ineffable beauty.
The harsh chord of the Collective yielded to the harmony of the gestalt. Then there was no more pain, no more rancor, and no more sorrow, for those things had passed away, leaving only the possibilities of the present and the promises of the future.
A living death was conquered, and for a trillion souls who had dwelled in night, it would never again hold dominion.
We are the Caeliar.
* * *
Riker kneeled beside Captain Picard and kept one hand on his friend’s back and the other in a firm but gentle grip on his arm. Captain Dax was on the other side of the Enterprise’s captain, in a pose that mirrored Riker’s. It was Riker’s suspicion that Dax was just as uncertain as he was about how to react to Captain Picard’s inconsolable emotional collapse.
Picard was on all fours, doubled over, face almost touching the carpeting of the bridge, hyperventilating and sobbing. Then he stopped with a sharp intake of air, and he clawed at the deck for several seconds before bunching his hands into fists under his chin. His body quaked as if he’d just come in from the cold.
As desperately as Riker wanted to defend Picard’s pride by concealing this display from the rest of the bridge crew, he knew that it would be even more damaging for them to see their captain carried off the bridge. In any event, this wasn’t Riker’s ship, and it wasn’t his call to make, it was Worf’s. Until the XO said otherwise, Picard would remain where he was.
Choudhury looked up from the tactical console and pointed at the main viewer as she shouted, “Something’s happening!”
Axion had flared like a supernova, flooding the screen with light and all but bleaching the solid spherical formation of Borg hulls of their details. Then the armada of Borg ships—every cube, probe, and sphere—cracked open and bled light. Intense white radiance poured from every fractured vessel. In a flash, the Enterprise went from being huddled in a pit of starless metal darkness to dwelling in a heart of pure light.
As Riker, Dax, and the bridge crew watched, the multitude of imposing black ships imploded. Vast sections of every ship were sucked inward, and delicate spines of brilliant, gleaming metal jutted out from their cores, reaching in every direction. Within seconds, the Borg vessels had all become incandescent spheres surrounded by dense formations of long spikes. Squinting against the ships’ blinding glare, Riker mused that they looked like massive sea urchins cast from flawless silver.
Picard’s breathing steadied, and he looked up through tearstained eyes, first at Dax and then at Riker. In a knowing whisper, he said, “Everything’s changed.”
Then he turned his gaze to the image on the main screen. He stared in wonder, taking it all in … and then, ever so slowly and by infinitely cautious degrees, Picard cracked a smile.
“Everything’s changed,” he repeated.
And then he laughed. Not like someone amused by a joke or given over to the mirth of madness; he let out the triumphant, joyous gales of a man tasting freedom after living in chains.
Riker threw an amused, wary look at Dax.
She shrugged. “As long as he’s happy,” she said.
* * *
Of the fifty million Caeliar bonded through the gestalt, only Inyx was willing to do the unthinkable. He dissolved the last of Sedín’s corrupted essence, condemning the last of her residual charge into the gestalt at large and returning her, in a poetic and somewhat entropic fashion, to the home she had unknowingly sought for six millennia, with trillions of innocent beings yoked to her unconscious purpose.
It is finished, Inyx declared, overcome with shame for his deed, sorrow for his friend, and relief for the end of her pain.
The gestalt empathically echoed his agonies, and from Or-demo Nordal, he felt the blessing of absolution. There was no other way, Ordemo said. It was too late to save her.
Then it was time to open themselves to the sentient minds they had set free, which they welcomed into the gestalt. It was a decision motivated partly by mercy; after all that Sedín’s victims had endured, in light of all they had lost, the Quorum concurred that the gestalt had an obligation to alleviate their suffering and
offer them a safe haven, a new beginning.
A more honest accounting of the situation demanded that the Caeliar admit the truth, however: They needed the emancipated drones as much as the drones needed them.
Hernandez had persuaded the gestalt to aid her by appealing to its own sense of self-interest. Standing before them only a short time earlier, she had argued her point with passion.
“Your obsession with privacy is killing you,” she’d said. “You made these catom bodies of yours, and you figured you’d live forever in your invulnerable cities, on your invisible planet. You never thought about what would happen if you had to procreate. It never occurred to you that your whole world could get shot out from under you and take ninety-eight percent of your people with it. Well, it did. And the law of averages says this won’t be the last time something bad happens to you.
“How many more losses can you take and still be a civilization? What if another accident happens? Or a new, stronger enemy finds you? The Cataclysm nearly exterminated you. Haven’t you ever stopped to consider that all your efforts on the Great Work will be lost if you die out?
“If you want to explore the universe, you’ll need strength, and the best place to find that is in numbers. I don’t know if there’s any way for you to get back the ability to reproduce, but it’s not too late for you to learn how to share. You need to bring non-Caeliar into the gestalt. You need to teach others about the Great Work—before it’s too late.”
Her proclamation had provoked a schism in the Quorum and sent shockwaves of indignation through the gestalt. The debate had been swift and bitter, but in the end, it had fallen to Ordemo Nordal to persuade the majority that Hernandez was right. It was time to expand the gestalt or accept that it was doomed only to diminish from this moment forward. The Quorum and the gestalt had to choose between evolution and extinction.