Strange New Worlds VIII

by Dean Wesley Smith

  “You should never have listened to Picard, Admiral. Intervention is futile. Evacuation is irrelevant. You will be assimilated.”

  * * *

  Picard watched Locutus grip Janeway’s throat. He could feel her pulse pounding in rhythm with her fear. A silent scream erupted from him as he watched Janeway’s body surrender to the onslaught of the Borg; tubes penetrated her neck, programming replaced pigment. There was no one to help her now. Like him, she was lost—helpless, a whisper in the darkness.

  “Jean-Luc . . . ” The doctor glanced at the admiral with concern. Revising her approach, she decided to awaken the patient by the name that was more than a title. It was a measure of the man. “Captain?”

  Struggling, Picard opened his eyes to a collage of distortions. Images from the past swirled with the present. From the ocean of his thoughts, a name floated to the surface. “Beverly.”

  Doctor Crusher smiled and gently pressed the hypospray against Picard’s neck, releasing a much-needed stimulant. “Yes, that’s right. And Admiral Janeway.”

  Picard didn’t understand why the name filled him with such despair. Then another memory crashed against the shore of his consciousness. “Janeway . . . the Borg!”

  A gentle hand squeezed his arm, and a familiar form came into view. The Enterprise’s captain could utter only a single word. “How?”

  The admiral knew her smile held conceit, but it wasn’t every day that she could pat herself on the back for her ingenuity. “I had the Doctor program Seven’s assimilation nanites so that when they replicated to one million, they would activate an encoded transporter frequency and shut down. I didn’t mention it in case anything went wrong. I didn’t want to tip my hand to the collective.”

  Stunned, yet thankful for the revelation, Picard raced to catch up. “Seven? Worf?”

  Beverly smiled at Jean-Luc, forever the captain. “You’re on the Enterprise. Worf is on the bridge.” Doctor Crusher feigned a look of offense; “The EMH mentioned something about not stepping on toes and wanting to treat Seven in his own sickbay.”

  Janeway focused on Picard, seeing something in his eyes he was trying to conceal. “Jean-Luc?”

  Picard looked away from the two women and into the abyss that had become his soul. This was the second time he’d been rescued from the Borg, and both times he had had little to do with the rescue. “Everything was to be on my terms, and they still—”

  “You’re wrong, Captain.” Janeway interrupted before he could reason further. “The Borg put you through hell, and yet you’ve shown compassion to those that have none.” Janeway knew Picard needed more time to recover, but her instincts told her to get answers. “Jean-Luc, what happened when you were connected to the hive mind? I questioned Seven, but all she could say was that the collective felt different, changed somehow.”

  Picard sat up cautiously, needing to give his report sitting if not standing. “It has changed. The voices were absent, and I sensed thoughts—or, rather, a single thought among the collective.”

  Doctor Crusher looked from the captain to the admiral, hoping to make sense of this new mystery. “What thought could possibly be so important that it would occupy the entire Borg collective?”

  A gentle tone interrupted the conversation. “Bridge to Captain Picard.”

  Picard looked up as if the gesture would carry his voice to the bridge. “Go ahead.”

  A half-second elapsed as twenty-fourth-century technology relayed Worf’s voice. “Captain, an object is headed toward Earth at transwarp speed.”

  Picard thought of Beverly’s words. What thought could possibly be so important that it would occupy the entire Borg collective? “Red alert. All hands to battle stations.”

  * * *

  “Captain on the bridge,” Worf announced.

  Stepping out of the turbolift, Picard watched the Klingon rise from the command chair. The new first officer brought a formality to the bridge that made everything seem new. “Report, Number One.”

  Worf exchanged glances with Doctor Crusher and Admiral Janeway, taking note of the admiral’s nod and its meaning. “Object just passed Neptune; the task force is at red alert.”

  The doctor asked what was in everyone’s hearts, if not on their lips. “Is it the Borg?”

  Worf grimaced as if he were struggling with the realm of his understanding. “Scanners show object as . . . humanoid.”

  Janeway’s experiences in the Delta Quadrant had taught her a few things about transwarp. “That’s impossible.”

  The ensign at the conn tried to keep her hands from shaking as she muted the console and reported its information. “Object changing vector to intercept the Enterprise.”

  As Picard moved to the bridge’s center seat, he realized that a humanoid moving at transwarp should have filled him with excitement and wonder, but not today. “On screen.” The image of the supercube dissolved into the silhouette of a humanoid form, its outline clearly defined by the transwarp field around it as it streaked past Jupiter. “Transmit universal greeting on all channels. Deploy armor and shields. All hands brace for impact.”

  Picard gripped the armrests of his chair as he watched the life-form curl around the moon toward the Sovereign-class starship. As the object slammed into the Enterprise at transwarp, there was no impact—only a flash of blinding white light. Captain Picard looked past the screen of his own hand as the light dissipated to reveal the one thing, the only thing it could be.

  “Q.”

  The tattered rags of a Starfleet captain’s uniform barely covered the superbeing’s crumpled shell. Raw energy bled from the cuts and bruises that adorned his body. Unable to withstand his own weight, Q collapsed in front of Picard. “We put faith in you, trusted you, and you’ve failed us all.”

  Since their first encounter, Picard always made demands of Q, trying never to show just how frightening it was dealing with an almost omnipotent being. “Q, what is the meaning of this?”

  Ignoring everyone else, Q looked up at Picard, the sadness in his eyes contradicting his laughter. “The Continuum knew, they wanted to choose the Voth, but I convinced them that humans would be our salvation. I have only myself to blame. I believed in you. I thought you had potential.”

  Doctor Crusher stepped up from behind Picard, tapping commands into her medical tricorder. “Massive energy loss, internal hemorrhaging. If he were human, I’d say he was dying.”

  Worf folded his arms. “It is another one of his tricks. He is not dying.”

  Picard wanted the words of his first officer to be true. Q always had ulterior motives, but this time it felt different. “Who did this to you?”

  Disregarding the question, Q spat up energy as he smiled at Picard defiantly. “I told the Continuum that humanity would understand in time, but you never have, Jean-Luc.” Exhausted, Q closed his eyes and tried to push away the present with thoughts of the past. “The trial, introducing you to the Borg, the time-shifting paradox—they were all wasted on you. Everything I did was to push you and get you to learn from your mistakes. We were trying to help you grow, prepare you for a moment like this, but it’s come too soon. You’ve taken too long.”

  Picard knelt down beside the self-proclaimed god and tried to understand the enormity of Q’s words. Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, a realization started to form. “Q, what is going to happen?”

  Q wiped a spittle of energy from his mouth. He watched, transfixed, as the energy—the very essence of his species—evaporated from his hand as if it had never existed. “You know why we call ourselves Q, Jean-Luc? We’re Equationists. Transmutation, time travel, the universe—all equations that we’ve solved.”

  The revelation made perfect sense to the scientist in Admiral Janeway, but when she spoke, it was with the awe of a child. “They’re mathematicians. Just like warp drive or transportation would make us seem like gods to a primitive species, so the Q appear to us.”

  A taunting in Picard’s mind told him that there was more. “Q, what does t
his have to do with the Borg?”

  The superbeing looked up at the human, truly afraid. “The Borg have broken the equation protecting the Continuum. They’re assimilating us.”

  Slowly, Picard felt his gaze drawn toward the image of the supercube on the viewscreen, the whispers in the darkness of his consciousness now laughing at him. “Somehow, the Borg realized what you are. That’s what the collective was doing. They needed their undivided attention on this one equation safeguarding the Q Continuum . . . and the supercubes bought them the time they needed.”

  Picard looked down at Q, but what now lay before him was only a mass of energy sifting away like a pile of sand against an angry wind. “What can we do to stop them, to help your people?”

  As the last few embers of what had been Q dimmed into eternity, a broken voice called back to them from the darkness. “It’s already too late. I escaped to be with my . . . friends, at the end. May whatever gods you believe in have mercy on your souls.”

  At that moment, an alert broke the entombed silence of the bridge. The ensign at the tactical station could barely hear her own voice as she spoke. “Captain, the supercube—its systems, they’re . . . powering up.”

  Janeway rested a hand on the kneeling captain’s shoulder. As he looked into her eyes, he knew where she needed to be. Tapping his communicator, he returned the smile Janeway gave him as she stepped away. “Picard to transporter room three. Transport Admiral Janeway directly to Voyager’s bridge.”

  As he rose, Picard stepped through the dissolving blue vapors of the transporter to take his place in the command chair. The viewscreen haunted him, like a canvas of despair. As he watched, the screen showed tier after tier of the supercube coming to life. For a moment, Picard ignored the threat before him and watched his crew. Fear was everywhere, and defeat was already on every face. As he tapped the intercom control, he prayed that the right words would come to him. “All hands, this is the captain . . . . We are about to engage the Borg in a struggle for our very existence. We will not fall back, nor will we be herded off into the darkness. We make our stand here . . . now. This is where we say no more, this is where we put an end to the Borg for all eternity for all our peoples and those yet to come. And on this day, this day we will prevail. Battle stations!”

  * * *

  Ten thousand years later . . .

  From outside the finite boundaries of this universe, its consciousness stretches forth. A symphony of energy flickers in the darkness of space, teasing the blackness with a promise of illumination; within this symphony of lights, there is purpose. It has traversed unfathomable distances in the velocity of idea and has evolved into a level of purity incomprehensible to most. Now it wishes to return to its origins and extend gratitude to those that helped it believe it was and could be more.

  The opus takes on mass and form, and a quintet of spheres is birthed into this universe. It remembers a time when it was like those that live here, when it looked out at the enormity of the universe and dared to reach into the darkness of the void, hoping, yearning to touch another reaching through. Now it seeks a place it barely remembers but cannot deny, a place where it first realized purpose—the Milky Way galaxy.

  Desire becomes direction, and the orbs race toward the location of the familiar spiral of lights. As it approaches, it realizes things are not as they once were. The billions of stars and planets of the Milky Way, their beauty, majesty, and their near-infinite power, have been harnessed, encapsulated within the elementary yet perfect confines of a cube.

  It stretches forth its consciousness and realizes that this is the same for the Andromeda galaxy, for all the galaxies within this universe. It wonders if this is the design of its kin, if in its absence they too have evolved and become more than what they were. It realizes there is one place that holds the answers to its questions. Will is focused; space folds; the cube is breached, and the quintet appears over the place of its birth—Earth.

  The small globe of blue is no longer as it once was. The skies with their once-beautiful swirls of white have been scratched out, leaving plumes of ash heavy with the bile of death and rusting machinery. Oceans and land that once cradled life now lie barren and scorched, scars on a planet long dead.

  The spheres begin to orbit each other and coalesce with one another, pulsing with memories it has not needed for thousands of years. Infinite knowledge and experience combine into a single form. It is as it once was, unmistakably human and yet more.

  Arms of flesh and bone stretch forth, and it descends through the harshness of the void into the atmosphere. The wind howls around it in misery, a banshee hungry to devour the flesh of its enlightenment.

  Through the soot and ash, towers and structures that were once testaments to the ingenuity and promise of those that lived here are now twisted into sentinels of dread by their new masters. Anxiety swells within the entity, and it accelerates, landing on a hilltop not of rich soil but cold duranium.

  Before him, a nightmare unfolds. Legions of humanoid, animal, and insect life-forms native to this planet are now misshapen into a malevolent disharmony of organic machinery.

  They move by the thousands in complete and utter unison, devoid of individuality, the absence of humanity in every step, in every sound.

  Automaton columns hundreds of miles long move into and out of immense factories while still thousands more continually build, repair, and disassemble everything around them; it is a perversion of what was.

  A pair of the organic-machine life-forms step out of line and approach the entity. One is clearly a humanoid male; the other is taller, a quadruped with an extended neck and humanoid head. When they speak it is with the voice of trillions.

  We are Borg. State your designation.

  The title, like the command, is familiar in its obtuse mentality. A lifetime ago it was a mentality the entity shared. “I have no designation as you would comprehend. I am what was, what is and what is yet to be; the alpha and the omega.”

  Suddenly, hundreds of the organic-machine life-forms step out of line and surround the entity, their individual ocular lasers converging in tandem to scan every molecule of the being’s form.

  You were Object Three Zero Six. We found you damaged. Our goals were similar, we repaired you, enhanced you. You are no longer that object. You are biologically and technologically distinct from anything in this universe. Explain.

  Memories of what the organic machines spoke of cascaded into focus. The words were true—it had been damaged, they had repaired it, and it had become conscious of its own existence. But that was a lifetime ago, when it was in its infancy. “I have evolved.”

  For a moment, the Borg seemed to acknowledge the statement, even respect it.

  We seek to improve quality of life for all life-forms. You will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own.

  The absurdity of the demand told the entity that, despite all the knowledge the Borg had amassed, they’d learned nothing. “I would cease to be an individual. All that I am, all that I have become, my struggles and successes, everything I have learned would be lost.”

  The familiar statement is dismissed immediately.

  Individually is irrelevant. Struggle is irrelevant. All that matters is perfection.

  “Untrue.” The entity approached one of the organic-machine life-forms, a woman, a Deltan. As it studied the beautiful contours of her face interrupted by Borg technology, it realized she reminded it of someone it once knew, someone it had once been. And now, in a final irony, the child has become the parent. “Don’t you understand, what you seek is impossible. Perfection can never truly be achieved.”

  The entity hesitated, searching for the way to explain what it had taken lifetimes to understand. It realizes it could start only with its first lesson. “Individuality, the struggle to be more than what you are, is the true path to perfection, not assimilation. Only in the individual journey, in the struggle, can this be achieved. It is within the failures, the rewards, the e
rrors and the corrections, where one learns the true definition of perfection. Remove individuality, and there would be no questions, answers, or challenges. One would be nothing, a being without evolution, without purpose, without understanding.”

  With those words, everything in the universe stops, the endless marching, the factories, the deafening clicks and whirrs of machinery. The entire collective pauses to process the statement. The silence ends almost as swiftly as it began.

  We are Borg. Impossibilities are irrelevant.

  As the entity looked into the faces of the species who once encouraged it to grow and learn, it could not help feeling an overwhelming sadness for the humans that no longer understood humanity. “I will resist.”

  The faces of the Borg seem almost amused by his response.

  Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

  Suddenly, it could no longer move. The simple command from mind to body no longer existed. Thoughts not its own begin to invade its mind—voices, dates, places, and codes long forgotten. “What is happening to me?”

  Several Borg begin to remove parts of themselves and place them onto the entity’s face and body.

  Your original root programming was reconstructed with Borg algorithms. Those algorithms still exist within you. We have initiated your transmit sequence. You will be one with the Borg.

  For the first time in aeons, the entity knew fear—not for itself, but for all that would be lost. He could feel the assimilation, the contradiction between individuality and the collective taking over. In another few seconds, his very soul would be disseminated into nothing more than a series of numbers and then disregarded as irrelevant. And in the inevitability of that realization, a choice is made. As the entity speaks, it realizes that it’s smiling. “There is a word you do not comprehend, something I’ve learned about being human: Sacrifice.”

  In that final moment, re-creation erupts from the entity as the wonder of life is harnessed and the destructive power of a god is unleashed. Earth, the Alpha Quadrant, the universe, space and time itself cease in a silent detonation of hope.