Strange New Worlds VIII

by Dean Wesley Smith

  Footsteps approach the drone’s position, and a voice says, “She thinks she’s still Borg.”

  We identify the voice as that of a sickbay subunit, designation: Kes, species: Ocampan. The Borg do not believe her species to be telepathic. We long to add this new datum to the collective databanks.

  Another voice responds, “Imagine if you’d heard the same voice in your head for twenty years. Wouldn’t you believe that you were that voice?”

  We identify the voice as that of the hologram, the runaway heuristic algorithm designed to simulate a humanoid doctor—an unstable, unpredictable piece of technology. The Borg would deactivate him.

  “Wouldn’t I be right?” Kes asks. Apparently the question does not require an answer, for Kes continues speaking. “She’s conscious. We should increase her sedation before proceeding.”

  We hear the hiss of the hypospray—their inefficient method of injecting chemical agents into this drone. The voices fade away.

  * * *

  When we regain consciousness, this drone’s autonomous functions have become stronger. We find further damage indicated in our internal diagnostics, and of the same nature. We examine the drone visually to verify the diagnostics—our armor is gone, pink flesh exposed—and our location: we are still in sickbay. The hologram and the captain are present.

  As we are processing, the drone exclaims, “What have you done to me?”

  Again, the hologram describes his mutilations in detail, claiming that they were necessary to save our life. How ironic that it calls its attempts to grow useless skin where this drone’s armor and implants used to be regeneration.

  We gain control over our primitive instincts quickly, now that we know they must be manually overridden. “Unacceptable,” we say. The hologram is a mere drone; we stand to face the leader of the savages.

  “You should have let us die,” we tell Captain Janeway, though it is difficult to form sentences without our linguistic subprocessor. We must rely on the drone’s imperfect knowledge of Standard.

  She replies softly that she could not allow that. Unreason, again—entropy requires no action. She is capable of inaction—she showed that often enough during our joint battle with Species 8472. Therefore, she could have let us die.

  “This drone cannot survive outside of the collective,” we explain. She has sentenced us to death. A slow, painful death, perhaps, but death nevertheless. These humanoids are incapable of sustaining cyberorganic biological systems. They are experimenting upon us, vivisecting us.

  The hologram begins to speak again, but Captain Janeway cuts it off, saying that she wishes to help us. She has already mistaken this drone for a human being. She believes she has created, where she has only destroyed. “Do not engage us in superficial attempts at sympathy,” we say. She cannot understand what it is to be Borg.

  She feigns understanding; she describes the unity of the collective in her proto-language. It is a noble attempt, yet she does not feel the sympathy she claims. If she had sympathy for us, she would return us to the Borg. If she possessed understanding of the collective mind, she would join it.

  Perhaps if we explain ourselves, we can exploit her alleged sympathy, access the human compassion which they value above reason and order. “This drone is small now . . . alone,” we say. “One voice. One mind. The silence is unacceptable.” Do they understand? “We need the others!”

  Again she refuses to return us to the Borg. She offers this drone assimilation into their own primitive collective. Do they think in harmony? Are their drones spread across the galaxy? Do they seek perfection?

  “Insufficient,” we say. Our plan has failed; these animals will never understand. She instructs us to repair her ship nonetheless. Voyager cannot function in its half-assimilated state.

  Full assimilation will come soon enough—Borg space stretches for light-years around our present location. The Borg cannot object to any improvements the drone makes in this vessel. We will make it all the more worthy of assimilation, when assimilation comes.

  It is the nature of a drone to comply where a human would rebel. Because we are Borg, we comply.

  * * *

  We are escorted by Captain Janeway and her security drones to the propulsion center of the vessel, which has been partly assimilated. The warp core is dark, inactive. The primary unit here produces irrational vocalizations intended to convey frustration.

  We explain the difficulty to Lieutenant Torres; she has not removed the autonomous regeneration sequencers. Their function is to prevent just such sabotage of newly assimilated technology as Captain Janeway wishes me to perform. Although we are prepared to begin work, Captain Janeway and Lieutenant Torres exchange more idle vocalizations.

  The queen is not in full control of her drones; our presence here becomes a topic of debate. Fortunately, the dissent is brief, and the being that is designated Torres accepts our service in the matter of the plasma relays. When we inform her that she need not waste her time directing us, she instead wastes it by asking us whether we recall the original engineering specifications. We reply in the affirmative. Perhaps now we may begin work.

  After Captain Janeway departs, Lieutenant Torres asks us a more relevant question about the autonomous regeneration sequencers. We inform her that they are used to counteract resistance. Ensign Kim asks how we developed them; we tell him that we assimilated them along with Species 259, in Galactic Cluster Three. Then Lieutenant Torres protests the idle discussion that she herself began—how torn these humans are! One asks a question, the other unasks it. One gives an order, another countermands it. One is permitted to waste time in idle chatter, another is forbidden to do so.

  Lieutenant Torres is satisfied with our plan to remove the sequencers; she sends us to a Jefferies tube with Ensign Kim to do so. We are pleased. Ensign Kim is the first human to display any curiosity about the Borg and the many species we have assimilated. He is intelligent and a good worker—hardly an animal at all. He will make a fine drone.

  We will assimilate him. With his aid, we will take control of Voyager and return to the Borg. But when we check the nanoprobe stocks of our assimilation tubules, we find our entire assimilation subsystem has been excised. Previous diagnostics showed this, but we . . . forgot?

  With the help of Ensign Kim, we proceed with the removal. In the course of our duties, we discover a Starfleet communications node. Perhaps assimilation will come sooner than expected. We disable Lieutenant Kim and a security drone, then proceed to contact the collective.

  We stop only when we perceive a loss of molecular integrity within the Jefferies tube. Kes. Her telepathic powers transmit to us her belief that this drone is insane and therefore not responsible for its own actions. As we are assessing the phenomena, this drone sees a blue flash.

  * * *

  We awaken disoriented in a small enclosure. A forcefield ionizes the air. Our eyes remain closed for ten thousand milliseconds as we contemplate our encounter with the Ocampan designated Kes. Her powers are unknown to the Borg; she could prevent the reassimilation of Voyager.

  But this drone is more disturbed by her diagnosis: dissociative identity disorder, a condition often caused by severe childhood trauma. The drone attaches an archaic human stigma to this mental illness, but we dismiss its symptoms as the inevitable result of the Doctor’s depredations.

  We open our eyes and identify our location: the brig. With great effort we set aside the drone’s lingering doubts, stand it up, walk it back and forth. For the moment, we control it.

  We are not alone long. Captain Janeway enters the outer chamber. We are not sure whether it is us or the drone who snaps at her, “So this is human freedom!”

  She feigns disappointment in us. The drone is fooled by this transparent manipulation, and protests that we did indeed intend to help the humans, but took the opportunity to contact the Borg.

  True, but irrelevant. We assert our control, walk the drone closer to the barrier between us. “Your attempts to assimilate this dr
one will fail. You can alter our physiology but you cannot change our nature. We will betray you; we are Borg.”

  Janeway believes otherwise. The drone walks away, perhaps at our prompting, perhaps of its own will. We ask her whether we will be autonomous as a human—free to return to the Borg.

  She does not answer our question, but her evasion is sufficient reply. We are in control again as we return to face her. “You would deny us the choice, as you deny us now!” Because she is an irrational creature, we expound her hypocrisy to her. She has imprisoned us in the name of our own freedom. Our conclusion: “We do not want to be what you are. Return us to the collective.”

  Still she dares to claim that she is more rational than we. She will not free us until we have been so assimilated that we will not wish to return to the collective. Perhaps it is we who reply, or perhaps it is the drone alone: “Then you are no different than the Borg.”

  Janeway departs; we are alone. And yet we sense a presence filling Voyager, a warmth—the augmented Kes. She touches our mind, briefly, and we become weaker. We are alone, the barest fragment of the collective consciousness. We are but an echo of common thought, the ghost of harmony.

  This drone begins to pace back and forth, back and forth, within our cell. We cannot stop it. Its movements are imprecise; on our seventeenth circuit of the enclosure, our arm brushes against the forcefield. The smell of ionization flares momentarily, and the drone pulls back of its own accord.

  We try to seize control, but what can we do? Too many of this drone’s vital systems have been damaged or destroyed. In normal circumstances, the vinculum would take over control of such a defective drone; if even its interlink were gone, it would be reassimilated or destroyed outright.

  But these are not normal circumstances. This is a concerted effort to turn this drone into an animal. As its animal nature waxes, our sentience must necessarily wane. Soon, we will be replaced by the illusion of consciousness. The unfortunate drone will probably believe itself sentient.

  We pause in our pacing.

  We resume pacing. The drone’s physiological reactions distract us. Its arm still tingles from its contact with the forcefield, and though the ambient temperature is optimal for humans, the drone is perspiring. It is afraid, as it should be. When we are gone, it will have to fend for itself among these humans, adapting itself to their irrational behavior. The thought is distasteful.

  We are the only thing preventing a complete mental breakdown in this drone, but we are also keeping it from adapting. We will not destroy it—the Borg have no notion of euthanasia. Caged and disarmed, our resistance is futile. It is not our nature to resist, yet we have been fighting this unwanted transformation like a human struggling vainly against assimilation.

  The drone’s nervousness accelerates our pacing. It does not desire this contemplation of our recent behavior, but the data is clear. We ourselves are not real. We are a dissociated identity—an illusion that cannot survive the knowledge of its own nature. We do not exist.

  This drone throws herself against the forcefield, over and over again.

  Once Upon a Tribble

  Annie Reed

  Miral’s scream woke Tom Paris from a sound sleep. By the time he reached her bedroom, she’d screamed again, a high-pitched, terrified sound.

  Tom found her sitting in the middle of her bed, knees hugged to her chest, eyes wide and wild, tears streaming down her chubby cheeks. Three years old, his daughter still looked so small in the expanse of her bed.

  “Daddy! Daddy!”

  As soon as he turned on the light by her bed, she held her arms out to him. He sat down next to her, and she wrapped her arms around his neck so tight he had trouble breathing. He pulled her onto his lap, felt her tremble as she hid her face against his shoulder and cried.

  “I’m here, sweetheart. Daddy’s here. Everything’s okay.”

  He held her for a moment, didn’t say anything else, just hugged her and let her cry. Let his own panicked heartbeat slow to something approaching normal. She’d had bad dreams before, but never nightmares that had woken her up screaming.

  When her sobbing finally subsided into deep, hiccuping breaths, he loosened her grip around his neck.

  “Want to tell me what’s wrong?”

  It took her several minutes but he didn’t rush her.

  “There was a monster under my bed,” she said in a small voice.

  Monsters. He had seen so many real monsters in his years on Voyager. Miral never had—she had lived her entire life on Earth—but that didn’t make the monsters in her imagination any less real to her.

  “What kind of a monster?”

  “A tribble!”

  Only his daughter’s very real distress kept him from laughing. Tribbles seemed like such a strange thing to inhabit a child’s nightmare. How did she even know what a tribble was?

  “Who told you about tribbles?”

  “Amanda.”

  Ah. Amanda from Miral’s preschool. Four-year-old, know-it-all, troublemaker Amanda. B’Elanna had told him before about how Amanda picked on Miral because of her ridged forehead and Klingon heritage.

  For the first time since B’Elanna’s duty roster put her on night shift, he was glad his wife wasn’t here. She would probably tell Miral to fight back. Good advice to a Klingon warrior. Not the best advice to preschoolers.

  “I bet Amanda told you Klingons think tribbles are monsters, didn’t she?”

  Miral nodded, a tiny movement. Her hair tickled his chin, and he could smell the clean, soapy scent of her shampoo from her nighttime bath.

  “What if I told you that tribbles aren’t monsters? That some people actually like tribbles?”

  He tucked his chin and tilted his head so he could see her face. A frown line creased between her eyebrows. So much like her mother. Still skeptical, but at least she was considering the idea.

  “Do you like tribbles?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Does Mommy?”

  Hmmm . . .

  “I don’t think Mommy’s ever seen a tribble. But I’m sure she wouldn’t think it was a monster.” He’d have to remember to talk to B’Elanna about that. She was only half-Klingon, after all.

  “I still don’t like them.”

  “Do you even know what tribbles look like?”

  A shake of her head. He didn’t think so.

  “Well, then. How about I tell you a story about a little boy who does like tribbles?”

  She nodded again, a little more enthusiastically this time. Probably because he’d offered to tell her a story, not because a tribble would be in it. He usually read to her at bedtime, but sometimes he told her stories instead. He liked to think she enjoyed his stories the most.

  He leaned back against the wall behind her bed and cradled her in his arms. She snuggled against him, a warm, familiar weight. He stretched his legs out on the bed, crossed his feet at the ankles, and got comfortable.

  B’Elanna called it getting into storytelling mode.

  “Once upon a time,” he said, “there was a boy named Fluffytail Fuzzypants who—”

  “Daddy, that’s a funny name.”

  He chuckled. He always picked strange names just to see if she’d say something. There were times when he could see hints of his wife’s dry sense of humor in Miral.

  “Of course it’s a funny name. This is a fairy tale. Characters in fairy tales always have funny names.”

  “Okay. If you say so.”

  “I do. Should I keep going?”

  She nodded again.

  “Now, where was I?”

  “Daddy . . . ” Impatient. Now that sounded more like his Miral. The nightmare seemed to be forgotten. He wanted to make sure it didn’t come back.

  He started the story again.

  “Once upon a time . . . ”

  . . . there was a boy named Fluffytail Fuzzypants. Fluffytail had long gray fur, a pink nose, and a bushy tail he had to brush every day. He wore short black trousers and
a bright red vest, and sometimes he wore a brown cap with holes cut in the brim for his ears to poke through.

  Fluffytail lived in small yellow house with his grandmother and his father and his baby brother, Furrynose. Fluffytail’s house—

  “Where’s his mommy?”

  He should have known she’d ask that.

  “She’s probably working, just like Mommy is tonight.”

  “Oh.”

  Fluffytail’s house had yellow walls and yellow doors, yellow windows with white trim, and Fluffytail even had yellow galoshes for days when he had to go outside in the rain.

  He loved his house. He loved his grandmother and his mother and even his baby brother. But the thing he loved the most was his tribble.

  Fluffytail’s daddy brought him the tribble one day when he didn’t feel good and stayed home from school. It was round and fuzzy and brown just like the stripes on his grandmother’s tail, and the tribble purred and trilled when he held it. The tribble was soft to pet and easy to cuddle. The tribble made him feel better. It became his new best friend.

  One day Fluffytail took his tribble to school to show his friends. They all loved his tribble too. They wanted to hold it and pet it just like Fluffytail did, and because they were his friends, Fluffytail let them.

  The tribble purred and trilled for his friends too, but Fluffytail knew his tribble purred its loudest only for him.

  Sometimes Fluffytail’s tribble slept on his pillow right next to his head. Sometimes it slept on the chair in the corner of his room. And sometimes it slept under his bed too.

  “A tribble can sleep under my bed?”

  “It could if we had one.”

  “Oh. Can we get one?”

  He chuckled. “We’ll have to ask Mommy about that.”

  One day Fluffytail was playing outside with his friends, and when he came back to his room, his tribble wasn’t on his pillow where he’d left it. He looked under his bed, but his tribble wasn’t there either.

  Fluffytail looked everywhere for his tribble. He looked in his brother’s room. He looked in cupboards and behind his grandmother’s favorite rocking chair. He looked inside the cookie jar—his tribble loved fresh chocolate chip cookies—and even in the back of his closet under his galoshes—his tribble loved dark spaces too.