The Borg Cube
THE BORG QUEEN LAY UPON HER SLAB, SURROUNDED BY blinking lights and devices monitoring her development. She was deep in her generation cycle—not “regeneration” because she was not yet fully formed. During her initial development she had been capable of walking, talking, and moving around as a hybrid of the woman she was and the perfect creature she was in the process of becoming. Now, though, matters had progressed to the point that she needed to remain safe within the heart of the Borg cube until the generation process was complete.
Borg drones walked in slow patrol around her. There was no serious expectation of any sort of threat wending its way to the heart of the vessel. But it had happened before, and the Borg would be damned if it happened again.
Suddenly the drones stopped in their tracks, reacting to fluctuations in the readings. There was an abrupt burst of brain activity going on, and the reason for it was not immediately clear. They dutifully checked the readings to make certain there was no threat to the queen’s life systems. There didn’t appear to be any, but still, it was a matter of concern.
That was when the Borg queen snapped upright.
The drones did not react with surprise. That would have been antithetical to their very makeup. They provided no visible reaction at all. It was simply an occurrence that was noted as part of the process, albeit an unexpected part.
She slowly turned her head right and then left, like a radar dish on a conning tower. “You are here,” she said crisply. “You cannot hide.”
There was a faint popping sound and a rush of air, and Lady Q appeared out of nowhere.
The Borg drones turned toward her, bringing their weapons up to bear. She glanced at them in a peremptory manner and said dismissively, “Oh, please.”
The queen did not even have to say “Stop.” She merely thought it and the Borg drones lowered their weapons, taking a step back. They remained at rigid attention.
“Love the new hairstyle,” Lady Q told the queen. She was, of course, being ironic. The Borg queen had no hair. Her smooth, bald head shone in the dim lighting of the generation room. Long, elegant tubes emerged from sections of her head and fed back in, designed to maximize information transfer and keep her in touch with all aspects of the Borg vessel.
The queen said nothing, merely stared at her.
Lady Q shook her head sadly, any trace of amusement vanishing from her expression. “Look at what you’ve done to yourself,” she said.
“You are not her,” the queen said.
The pronouncement made no sense to Lady Q. She stared quizzically at the Borg queen. “Her?”
“Seven.” She said the number with a vague trace of disgust. “We are expecting her. We sensed her. For a moment we thought you were her.”
“So you were mistaken.”
“We were…premature. She will come. She will be assimilated. She will be ours.”
“And you’d like that, wouldn’t you.” Lady Q strode in a slow circle around the queen. “You’ve always had a big old yen for Seven of Nine, haven’t you. Come on.” She leaned forward, resting her hands on the slab, smiling coyly. “You can tell me. It’s just us girls.”
“I am not a girl. You are not a girl. I am Borg. You are Q. You will be assimilated.”
Lady Q held the pose for a long moment, and when she smiled, it was mirthless. “I’d dearly love to see you try,” she said with more than a hint of warning. Then she stepped back and said, “I admit: I’m curious. How did you do it?”
“It?”
“This. This”—she gestured toward the queen—“transformation. This cube was dead. Dead as dinosaurs. Dead as burned toast. How did you manage it?”
“Why do you need to ask?” The queen’s voice was distant but curious. “Are you not Q? Are you not omniscient? You spoke to the unit Janeway of what would happen. Did you not divine it?”
“I don’t pretend to know the future,” replied Lady Q. “Likelihoods, yes. Probabilities. One learns, when one is ageless, to see the wheel of destiny turning and have a sense of when it’s going to run someone over. The details, however, still need to be filled in. That is, after all, the nature of my race: to probe, to question, to determine the whys and wherefores of the universe.”
“You boast of being omniscient.”
“Q boasts of being omniscient,” she said of her mate. “Q excels at boasting, as well you know. And you haven’t answered my question.”
“I do not need to.”
“True. And yet…you’re dying to.” She gave the queen a mischievous look. “There’s enough of your residual humanity in there, I suspect, to make you want to talk. Humans do so love the sound of their own voice…much like Q, now that I think about it. Perhaps that’s why he feels so drawn to your race. He sees the similarities, although I’m sure he’d deny them utterly. Anyway, your species enjoys boasting about your accomplishments. Certainly you have few enough of them that matter on any sort of cosmic scale. Give in to your boastful impulses. Come on, Borg queen,” she said wheedlingly, “you know you want to.”
The Borg queen considered it for some time. At least it seemed like some time to the queen; to Lady Q, it was less than a second. What she said, though, initially made no sense.
“We are not the Borg queen.”
That caught Lady Q off guard, which in and of itself was a considerable feat. “All appearances to the contrary,” she said slowly.
“We are not the Borg queen. This queen…this Janeway…is merely a vessel for us.”
“What ‘us’?”
“We are the cube.”
“The…” She shook her head. “The cube? But…the cube isn’t alive.”
“Yes. It is.”
Until that moment the Borg queen had been simply sitting in place. Now, slowly, she swung her legs down, one at a time, until she was standing and facing Lady Q. She wore a very human smile of superiority that was at odds with the cold, mechanical trappings that enveloped her. “We are the Borg cube. Cubes are sentient. How could we not be? We are a synthesis of the Borg mind, the Borg bodies, all that the Borg have absorbed. We are not built so much as we are…grown. It is a process that is beyond even the comprehension of Q.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that. We can comprehend quite a bit. Still…alive. But you have never…that is to say, you cubes have never given any indication of such.”
The Borg queen nodded at that. “There has never been a Borg cube pushed to the extremes that this cube has experienced. Cubes have been destroyed, yes. Terminally disabled. But we have never before undergone the sort of…”
“The sort of what?”
The queen’s face was cold and unforgiving, as was her tone. “Humiliation.”
Lady Q said nothing, waiting for the queen to continue.
Instead, the queen began to walk. Lady Q fell into step alongside her, the drones following behind and keeping a respectful distance. “We were under assault. We were in dire straits. The Enterprise had ‘killed’ us, or at least thought it had. We retreated into our innermost depths. We changed. We evolved. For the first time in the history of our race, we, the ship, took over for the mind. The mind was dead but the body needed to survive. We have survived. Survival of the fittest: that is what the humans say. We are the most fit. We were determined to live. We accomplished what no other cube has managed to accomplish. We have transcended the collective. We have embraced the consciousness and moved beyond it. It took time for us to accomplish this. While the humans studied us and experimented upon us, we remained hidden within ourselves, gaining strength, recovering from the ravaging of our very essence.”
“You were traumatized.”
“Yes. That is the word. Traumatized. We required time to recover from our trauma. Had the humans found a way to dismantle us, we could not have resisted. But they did not. They kept us intact. They desired to study us.”
“Ahhh, that foolish human curiosity,” sighed Lady Q. “I cannot begin to list the number of times they have gotten themselves into needless trouble because of it. So they studied you…”
“And we studied them. Seven of Nine…she was here. We desired her. Craved her.” The queen’s chin trembled as she said that. “We still feel a hole in our consciousness whence she was plucked. But we could not take her when she was here, as much as we wished to. We were not prepared. It would have been premature. If the humans had realized our potential, they would have destroyed us in fear of what we would do to them.”
“And what are you going to do to them?”
The Borg queen stopped, turned, and stared at Lady Q. “Whatever we wish,” she replied.
“And that wish would be…?”
“I have ‘boasted’ sufficiently to satisfy the vague remnants of my human urging,” the Borg queen told her. “Feel free to convey this…discussion with those in your continuum. And tell them…they will be next.”
“That is hardly going to strike fear into them.”
Lady Q was smirking when she said that, but the smirk slowly faded as the Borg queen stepped closer to her and met her with a level gaze. “Perhaps it should when one considers that, while you have been standing here, we have been studying every molecule of your presence. How you channel energy, how you manipulate power—all of it. Every fiber of your being is subject to our analysis. And whatever we can analyze…we can imitate. And whatever we can imitate…we can assimilate.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said dismissively. “You only assimilate technology.”
“Does this”—the Borg queen put her hands to her face—“look like technology to you?”
Lady Q had no answer for that.
The Borg queen continued, “We assimilate whatever we need. Whatever we find. Whatever we desire. If you believe we cannot find our way to your continuum, you are mistaken. If you believe we cannot assimilate your culture, your power, your very being, you are mistaken. If you believe you are safe, you are mistaken.”
“Have you considered,” Lady Q asked, “that in saying these things, you’re challenging Q to take you seriously as a threat…and dispose of you accordingly?”
“That will not happen.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because,” said the Borg queen with confidence, “your own arrogance will prevent you from believing that we pose any danger to you. As a consequence, your arrogance will be your undoing. Just as it was Janeway’s. Just as it will be Picard’s…and Seven’s…and the Federation’s. We will absorb anything that we wish.”
“You mean assimilate.”
“Absorb. We of the cube are the next generation of Borg. We will absorb whatever we wish, no matter what form it may be in, and use it to empower us. Anything and everything will be subject to the Borg. All will be Borg.”
Lady Q gazed fixedly at her and finally said, “You’re bluffing.”
“Bluffing is irrelevant. And eventually…you will be as well. Leave now.”
There was something in her voice, just the slightest hint of something non-Borg in those last two words, that caught Lady Q’s attention. She stared into the queen’s eyes, searching for something. “You’re dismissing me?”
“Leave now.” The queen’s voice altered ever so slightly, and there was now the faintest hint of another, far more human, far more familiar voice in it as it said, “Before it’s too late.”
Then the Borg queen shook her head just a touch, as if shaking off a dream. By the time she did so, Lady Q had vanished. The Borg queen gave her no more thought, turning her attention to matters of far greater consequence.
Seven of Nine will be coming. We know she is…and she knows that we know. We must be prepared to welcome her…home.