Pulled into it against our will, my crew and I were forced to fight on the side of the freedom-of-thought faction. The war ended when Q mated with a female Q from the other side. Their offspring offered a new hope of peace for the Continuum. Q even appeared on Voyager to show off his son, just like any proud new father.
I didn’t expect I would ever see Q again. But of course, I was wrong. He came to me again not long after the war’s end, inviting me to visit his Continuum one last time.
I know this: Q and I are walking along the two-lane highway that stretches from one horizon to the other. All around us, the desert is in lavish bloom, blossoms of every shape and color springing from plants I’ve never even heard of. The air is fragrant with their perfume. And I don’t see even a hint of the white clapboard house anymore, though I’m not sure when we left it.
“Have we been walking long?” I ask Q, a warm breeze caressing my face like my mother’s hand.
“That depends on how you look at it,” he tells me.
I want something more concrete. “The civil war is over, right? It’s in the past. So we left the desert … and now we’ve come back to it?”
“If you say so,” he responds, as cryptic as ever. “Though if you look at events with a little more of an open mind, I suppose it’s possible we never did leave … just as it’s possible that neither of us was ever here in the first place.”
Up ahead, something dark is rippling in the wind at the side of the road. As we get closer, I see that it’s the scarecrow. It’s still wearing the cranberry-and-black uniform of a Starfleet command officer.
“Why is the scarecrow still here,” I ask, “when everything else is gone? What’s the significance of that?”
Q makes a grandiose gesture with his hand. “Does everything have to have a particular significance?”
I chuckle dryly. “Here it does. Everything back at that house was a symbol of something. I doubt that the scarecrow was an exception.”
“So what does it symbolize?” he asks me.
“I asked you first,” I remind him.
“And that might make a difference,” Q concedes, “if we were talking about strictly chronological relationships … which, as you must have learned by now, are quite irrelevant here in the Continuum.”
Undaunted, I take a closer look at the scarecrow. Nothing occurs to me. I touch the soft, sturdy fabric of its uniform. Still nothing.
“Kathy, Kathy, Kathy,” Q sighs. “What do scarecrows do?”
I answer without thinking. “They scare—” And then, though I can go on, I stop myself and repeat it: “They scare.”
Q claps for me. The sound echoes across the rainbow glory of the desert flats. “Bravo, Kathy. I knew there was hope for you.”
I hold a hand up for him to be quiet. After all, I need to think. “Who might be scared by a bunch of sticks in a Starfleet uniform?” Who indeed, I muse. And then it hits me like a bolt of summer lightning. “Who else is here to see it … but the Continuum?”
Q nods, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “So you’ve discovered our secret, have you?”
I nod, too, finally grasping what he meant me to see. “We scare you. The whole Federation does. And why?” I’m on a roll now. “Because we have potential. Because we can change and grow and expand our minds … the way Captain Picard did when you presented him with that anti-time paradox.”
“And?” Q says, prodding me.
I glance at the scarecrow again. “And the Continuum wasn’t doing that. It wasn’t changing or growing. And if it remained that way …”
“Yes?” Q demands.
“We might have become a threat. We might, in time—”
“Or out of it,” he suggests.
“—become greater than the Continuum,” I finish. I consider the implications. “And that scared you … some of you, at least. lt made you take another look at yourselves and your pure, unchanging culture.” Suddenly, I realize what I’m saying. “It brought on your civil war!”
“Really?” Q says mockingly. “You give yourself too much credit, Kathy.”
I shake my head, growing more certain by the moment. “No … no I don’t. We scare the Continuum and that’s what saved it. And that,” I realize, “is why you tested Captain Picard. To see if he and his kind would be capable of scaring you … and thereby saving you.”
Q makes a gesture of dismissal. “But the scarecrow was standing here long before I ever met Jean-Luc Picard.”
I smile, refusing to take the bait. “Terms like ‘before’ and ‘after’ are meaningless here, Q. You said it yourself—we’re not dealing with strictly chronological relationships.”
Q folds his arms across his chest and considers the desert’s undeniable grace. “That’s the beauty of this place,” he says. “So many possibilities, so many potentials … and even a Q can’t always be certain which one is going to pan out.”
“I thought you could see the future,” I tell him.
He glances at me playfully. “If that’s so, I can tell you if you will eventually get back to Earth.”
“And do we?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer me. Not directly, anyway. “It’s a long road, Kathy. The sooner you get started, the sooner you’ll finish.”
Seeing/having seen the wisdom of his statement, I accompany/accompanied Q down the two-lane band of highway, my eyes on the purple hills.
So many cultures have figures that are placed in fields to scare away indigenous avian lifeforms. Yet this one so plainly is modeled after an Earth figure. “Nothing the Q do or say can be taken at face value,” advised Captain Jean-Luc Picard.
THE BORG
HEART OF DARKNESS
A horrifying combination of invasive nanotechnology and surgical alteration, the assimilation process not only integrates a victim’s knowledge and experience into the collective, but also subjugates the individual’s will and personality. The transformed entity becomes a drone. Extraneous body parts that do not serve the collective are modified or removed.
Their faces are pale, bloodless, mottled … moist in the way a raging fever might make someone moist. They turn their skull-like heads with nightmarish slowness and stare at you from the green glow of their regeneration units, melting your insides with their scrutiny.
You don’t belong here, you tell yourself. You’re an intruder. Your heart beats faster as their prosthetic projectors carve the shadows around you with a bloodred light. You want desperately to run, to escape before they emerge from their compartments and come after you.
But the dark, armored figures remain where they are. Their black eyes, set deep beneath hairless brows, register your invasive presence but they don’t seem to care. It’s as if you’re beneath their notice.
“They’ll ignore us until they consider us a threat,” your guide whispers in your ear, her explanation barely audible over the oppressive hum of the vessel’s massive warp engines.
You nod to show you’ve heard. Your throat’s become terribly, almost painfully dry. It must be the air, you tell yourself—the stale, pumped-in atmosphere, crushed and compressed by the unimaginable weight of two hundred million metric tons.
Yes, you tell yourself, it’s the air that’s making your throat dry. Then you glance at the faces of the Borg again and you’re not so sure.
Consistent with the decentralized structure of their society, Borg spacecraft—particularly in their most common form, “Borg cubes”—are both powerful and versatile, and capable of extensive self-repair. No two cubes are alike, and maps like this are for general reference only since a boarding party could find that a passageway is sealed off moments after they use it.
The first Federation citizens to lay eyes on the Borg were Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise-D. Though some of the details of the contact are still sketchy, this much is clear: in 2365, they encountered an immense, cube-shaped juggernaut of a vessel near system J-25.
The vessel was manned by a horde of blank-fac
ed drones, part organic and part machine, each one equipped with an array of vicious-looking cybernetic implants. They were linked in some kind of eerie collective consciousness—not just with the other drones on their ship, but with every representative of their race all across the galaxy.
The vessel had no discernible bridge, no engineering room, no living areas. ln fact, its operations were completely decentralized. lt boasted a devastating arsenal of energy weapons and was capable of repairing any damage it sustained almost instantly. What’s more, its defensive systems were highly adaptable, so no method of attack would work against it a second time.
An El-Aurian serving aboard the Enterprise in an unofficial capacity shed light on the phenomenon. They were called the Borg, she said—and their objective was to decimate and absorb other civilizations. They had done this thousands of times on thousands of worlds. In fact, before being incorporated into the collective, every drone had once been an independent member of a unique organic species.
The Enterprise-D survived its initial encounter with the Borg—but only after sustaining severe damage and the deaths of eighteen crewmen. Even then, the survivors had to count themselves lucky.
The interior of a Borg cube is almost uncomfortably warm for most humanoid species, and there is an odor; reminiscent of ancient hydrocarbon-operated machines now found only in museums. At the same time, there is an unmistakable biological scent as well. It could best he described as unhealthy, as if the countless horrors suffered by the assimilated still cling to the air.
My guide draws me past a work area—evidence, in case I needed it, that a Borg cube is always a work in progress.
Drones are repairing or enhancing a node of a system I can’t identify. Serpentine cables are everywhere, like the webs of a colossal spider. Open-ended power conduits spark and crackle, but the only sustained light comes from vertical strips embedded in dark, circuitry-covered bulkheads.
The movements of the Borg are strangely deliberate and unhurried. They’re emissaries of the inevitable, apparently content to take their conquest of the galaxy one stiff-legged step at a time.
Though my guide and I pause within a couple of meters of them, they seem oblivious to our presence, intent only on finishing the task at hand. Mechanical appliances whirl and lock into bulkhead interfaces. Components are withdrawn and replaced, metal scraping against metal. The work proceeds inexorably, efficiently, even—dare I say it?—harmoniously.
With the drones’ faces turned away from me, it’s easier to inspect them. In the eerie half-light, I see the slick, waxen features of a Klingon. A Bolian. A human. A Tellarite.
I wonder who they were—what they did, where they lived, whom they loved. I wonder what kind of lives they led before the collective assimilated them. Were they generous to others … noble … happy? By their own standards, did they do good or evil?
If they had differences as individuals, they have them no longer. They’re all the same now, all Borg … all one.
We had known about the Borg for little more than a year when the initial attack came. Since Earth was the seat of the Federation, it wasn’t unexpected that she would be the collective’s target. What was unexpected was the enemy’s timing. Starfleet had developed a prototype for a warship and taken other measures, but it still wasn’t as prepared as it could have been.
Fittingly, the Starship Enterprise was the first vessel to engage the invaders, under the command of Captain Picard. On this occasion, Picard was assimilated into the collective, his knowledge of tactics and technology making the Borg that much more formidable.
The real battle was fought at Wolf 359. Forty ships met the enemy. Thirty-nine of them were lost, along with eleven thousand lives. However, they bought the Enterprise the time it needed.
Her first officer, Commander William T. Riker, beamed a team aboard the cube and retrieved Picard. Then, using the captain’s subspace link to the collective as a conduit, the Enterprise transmitted a computer command which ultimately caused the Borg vessel to destroy itself.
Afterward, Picard reported that the Borg’s avowed objective was to improve the quality of life in the galaxy. However, he didn’t seem eager to have his life improved by them a second time.
My guide has taken me to the center of the cube—a narrow bridge spanning what looks like a bottomless abyss. There are regeneration units built into the bulkheads all around me, making this chamber look like a dark metal honeycomb, and each unit is occupied by a dormant Borg drone.
The scrape of my boots on the grated surface echoes from one end of the vault to the other. None of the Borg wake. None of them move. I feel like a grave robber making my way through an ancient burial chamber, trying not to wake the dead. I remember all the holonovels that filled my younger days with bone-chilling terror, and once again I relive that awful dark place seared into my DNA.
The corridors we slipped through earlier were bleak and oppressive, the air too densely packed to breathe. But this is infinitely more discouraging. The armies of the Borg are mesmerizing in their perfect symmetry, appalling in their multitude.
The place reeks of ozone. I almost expect to see lightning cut a jagged path from the cube’s ceiling to its murky depths.
“Come,” my guide says. “We shouldn’t linger here.”
I follow her across the bridge.
Picard and the Enterprise-D encountered another Borg ship in 2369 after it attacked a Federation outpost on Ohniaka III. Fortunately, the Galaxy-class vessel was able to engineer the cube’s destruction by luring it into a solar fusion eruption.
The collective was far from disheartened. Four years later, it dispatched yet another cube to Federation space. It was destroyed by a wiser and better prepared Starfleet armada. However, a Borg sphere survived the battle and crossed time to pursue the collective’s mission in Earth’s past. This time, it fell to the Enterprise-E, a new Sovereign-class vessel commanded by Picard, to stop them.
In the process, Picard met the Borg queen—a being who paradoxically embodied elements of individuality while serving as the central node in the group mind. She desired a counterpart who could bridge the gulf between the Borg and humanity … and Picard was the one she had chosen.
In fact, though the captain had no memory of it, she had intended for him to fill that role when he was assimilated into the collective years earlier—a plan thwarted only by his shipmates’ timely rescue. Defying the queen’s will a second time, Picard survived long enough to see her organic components liquefied by a jet of plasma coolant. To the best of our knowledge, she was utterly destroyed.
Recent intelligence has added much to our understanding of the “hive mind” of the Borg. We have learned that a so-called “queen” controls drones, that she brings order to the cacophony of information that are the collective processes. Many exosociologists have proposed that the disconnection or the extermination of the queen can stop a Borg attack.
My guide and I have entered a chamber of horrors, the likes of which would have turned the stomach of the coldest medieval torture master.
Several humanoid specimens, whose species is unfamiliar to me, lie on black metal slabs. Their right hands have all been amputated and Borg attendants are fitting what remains with prosthetic appliances. Each one, I’ve learned, is designed for a particular task.
Elsewhere in the room, representatives of the same species are being equipped with optical interfaces or having neural transmitters injected into their spines. The subjects stare straight ahead as if they don’t feel a thing. And of course, they don’t.
That’s because their bodies have already been altered at the cellular level by Borg nanoprobes—machines billionths of a meter in diameter that invade an organic life-form and transform it into a drone from the inside out. These nanoprobes are the key to assimilation. Without them, the Borg would be unable to expand their sphere of influence.
Suddenly, one of the drones turns and stares at us. “You are not Borg,” it declares in a flat, dead voice.
I don’t know what we’ve done to attract its attention. My heart banging against my ribs, I look at my guide. “Come on,” she says, beckoning me to follow her as she retreats.
But another Borg moves to block her path, its single black eye gleaming in the lurid light. “You will be assimilated,” it tells us. “We will add your distinctiveness to our own.”
My guide produces a phaser and fires at the drone. The crimson beam slams it in its armored chest and sends it crashing into a bulkhead. Taking advantage of the opening, my guide rushes past it.
My legs like dead weights, I follow.
“Resistance is futile,” says a voice behind me.
A moment later, the bulkhead to my right explodes in a flare of directed energy. It spurs me to move faster.
Before I know it, drones are converging on us from everywhere. I realize that it’s not just a handful who have finally reacted to our presence. It’s the entire collective.
My guide fires a second time and another drone is sent sprawling. But when she spears a third one with her seething red beam, it seems unaffected. It has adapted, I realize.
I feel something hard and unforgiving clamp onto my wrist and pull me backward. Stumbling, I find myself looking up into the hollow-eyed visage of what was once a Klingon warrior.
Its bloated, cracked lips are a ghastly shade of blue. “You will be assimilated,” it rumbles.
Heaven help me, I believe it.
Then my guide calls out, “End program!”
Abruptly, everything around us vanishes. The Borg are gone. So is their dark hive of a vessel. They’ve yielded to the stark, black and yellow grid of a starship holodeck.
All along, we knew we were plumbing a recreation—a three-dimensional program created by Starfleet. My guide, whose name is Coburn, has escorted a dozen others before me. Nonetheless, we’re both sweaty and bandy-legged from the experience.
Star Trek: New Worlds, New Civilizations Page 11