The moment that tractor beam hit our little ship we knew our fate was sealed. My moms and I had been abducted by the most feared beings in the galaxy, merciless creatures who saw us as nothing more than raw materials for their quest to turn everybody, everywhere into what they were. The drones ignored my screams as they replaced my left eye with a more efficient visual apparatus, then replaced other parts of me with tools suited to the tasks I had been assigned to perform. Wires snaked into my brain, and when my mind was linked to the collective I wasn't me anymore. I was no longer anyone.

But I'll say one thing for being turned into a Borg, it did eliminate my gender dysphoria for more than 5½ years. When you're nothing but a component with the designation 13-of-13 gender identity is irrelevant...

ASSiMiLATE ThiS!
A story in the STAR TREK universe
Laika Pupkino ~ 2023
PART OO2 – WE ARE BORG

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My wonderful 16th birthday party in space had seriously turned to crap. In the middle of ice cream and cake we'd discovered that our little yacht was off course and our ship's computer couldn't even tell us where we were.

Then a transwarp conduit opened in front of us and an enormous Borg cubeship came lumbering out of it.

So now instead of arriving at the planet Risa for our appointment at the clinic where my doctors were supposed to turn me into the pretty girl I'd always wanted to be it seemed I was going to be assimilated by the Borg and turned into a clunky grey-skinned thingamazoid out of any sane person's worst nightmares!

There was only one thing we could do to avoid such a horrible fate, and it was absolutely horrible too...

Happy Birthday, Mia Velasco.

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002.000 BORG
002.001 TRACTOR BEAM
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As the conduit closed behind the mammoth ship my mother started powering down our ship's systems.

Nunu screamed at her, “Are you CRAZY?! We need to get out of here!!”

“Running is the worst thing we could do,” said Mom, “It would get their attention. They say that when a Borg cube is on its way somewhere it won't even notice you if you're in a ship this small and you just power down and hold still.”

But this cube definitely noticed us. It came right up to us, stopping so close that just a small portion of one of its sides filled our whole field of view. An ugly black wall of metal plating, bolts, hatches, catwalks, vents, pipes, knobs, rung ladders, conveyor systems that seemed to go nowhere, electrical transformers and sensors that made it look more like some factory or refinery from back during the Industrial Revolution than a modern day spaceship belonging to a race that had absorbed the knowledge of a thousand spacefaring civilizations.

With no geniuses or innovators to lead them and a cross-averaged collective IQ of 100, the giant mishmosh of individuals and species that the Borg has become is actually less than the sum of its parts. All their super-advanced technology was someone else's idea, and they tend to use it badly. And thank God for that! It's the only reason the Federation has been able to defeat them so far.

As we sat there holding our breath and hoping they would move on the whole bridge was flooded with an almost blinding green light. It only lasted a second.

Mom said, “They just scanned us, but don't panic. Now that they know it's just us they'll probably decide three people aren't even worth the bother.”

But for some reason they decided we were worth the bother. What they didn't feel was worth bothering to do was announcing themselves to us- that chorus of a million voices telling us they were the Borg, that they would add our biological and technological distinctiveness to their own, and all that. They only give you the “Be reasonable and give up” speech if they think your resistance actually might inconvenience them slightly. But with us they skipped the introductions and the explanations and went right to the assimilating, figuring once we were linked to the Collective we'd know all they needed us to know.

A tractor beam lanced out, locked onto our ship, and began dragging us toward where a hanger bay door was opening.

“Can we break free by going to warp?” asked my Trill mom.

“Not with a beam this powerful. It would tear us apart,” said my Human mom, and after a long pause she told her, “You know what we have to do.”

Nunu nodded glumly and asked, “How?”

“Warp core breach. At least it will give them an owee. Let them know they messed with the wrong ship.”

“You're gonna KILL us?!” I asked. It came out as a terrified shriek.

“If they get hold of us there won't be any us, Mee. It's the same either way.”

We all like to fantasize that we'd be brave in a situation like this. Then it happens, and you realize you're about to die when just minutes ago you were laughing and eating birthday cake and everything was fine; and you aren't at all prepared for the horrible violence and then eternal nothingness you see barreling down on you! And that hero's fatalism you imagined yourself having---facing death with some perfect little quip---is not only nowhere to be found, you don't even think to go look for it. You feel like you're falling and falling through space, yet somehow also numb- not quite attached to that person you hear whimpering and blubbering, “Oh Mom... Noooo! Please?!”

“Don't make this any harder, Mee-Mee!” Mom begged me, then asked, “How long should I set it for? A hundred and twenty?”

Nunu judged our distance from the approaching cube. “About that.”

“Computer, commence Iggy's Boom Boom Sequence. Two minute countdown.”

“Enter Authorization Code,” said the computer.

“Shit,” muttered Mom. She didn't know it. So there went the antimatter option.
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002.002 The Zap Gun

“Open the airlock?” suggested Nunu.

“It's idiot-proofed,” said Mama, “New regulations, new sensors in there. You have to be docked-and-locked or totally zipped before it'll even open, and getting suited in those old Starfleet surplus things of Iggy's takes minutes.”

Minutes we didn't have. We were halfway to the cube's big open door. Inside I could see several ships the size of ours that they'd captured, piled haphazardly on the deck like trash.

“I'm afraid this will have to be messy,” said Mom. “Find something, anything! And hurry!”

“The kitchen!” said Nunu, and headed for the galley.

“But maybe they'll let us go!” I whined, desperate to believe this could go some other way.

Mama put her arms around me and kissed my forehead, “I'm so, so sorry Baby, but it's got to be like this. They won't just turn us into them. After they do we'll be turning other people into Borg too. and you'll be glad to do it. Your uncle, your friends at school, that little Orion girfriend of yours; you'll look right at them and they won't mean a thing to you but how the Borg can use them.”

Givvi wasn't my girlfriend but I loved her like a sister, and I pictured myself being like that and doing that to her, feeling nothing the whole time...

Mom and Nunu were right. My dream of having a body that matched my real self was ending before it even started. But there really were fates worse than death. What the Borg took from you was so much more than just your life.

She hugged me, saying I was the best thing that ever happened to her, and kept repeating how sorry she was. We didn't even notice Nunu approach us until she said: “I just remembered we had this.”

She had returned not with a big knife from the kitchen but with the cheap little zap gun I'd found yesterday, which she'd stashed in the cabinets just three meters away. She handed it to Mom, saying, “I can't...”

“It's all right, Love,” Mom told her softly. Nunu was always the tender-hearted one.

I pushed free of Mom's embrace, took one last look at my two wonderful parents and nodded that I was ready. I said, “Do me first. I don't wanna watch you die. Please?”

Not a hero's bravery; just barely brave enough that I didn't try to run away and hide. And the sooner I didn't have to stand here being even this amount of brave the better. I scrunched my eyes shut tight. “Just do it!”

I waited for it, the blast of pain then no anything forever. But it seemed to be taking so long I started to wonder if time was stretching out in front of me like it did for the condemned man in a story we read in my North American literature class; I don't think it was by Edgar Allen Poe but it was from around that time and it was his type of story. It started with the guy standing on a bridge over a river with a noose around his neck; and the whole rest of the story about how the rope broke and he got his hands untied and swam away dodging bullets and managed to run almost all the way home with the Yankees and their bloodhounds chasing him... was just a daydream he had in the split-second before the rope snapped his neck.

But I wasn't getting some “Here comes the Cavalry with all new Borg-fighting weapons!!” rescue-fantasy, just more afraid than I'd ever been in my life! And after another long second or two I unscrunched my eyes just enough to take a peek...

Mom wasn't aiming the little gun at me but had it lying in her palm, and was sort of weighing it.

“This seems awful damn light for a phaser, the power pack alone should weigh more than this. Is this thing even real?” she asked, then pointed it at the holo-projector and fired.

Instead of a beam of energy a pencil-sized plastic rod slid out of the end. A little square flag unfurled from the rod. It had a word printed on it:

ZAP!

My uncle the practical joker had struck again.
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002.003 SUICIDE RUN

We were inside the Borg cube now. The tractor beam set us down on the deck of the hangar bay and shut itself off, and the door we'd been pulled in through was rolling shut. But Mom had one more trick up her sleeve. She began pushing buttons on the helm console and powering us up again. Way up.

When it realized what she was trying to do the ship's computer said loudly: “Warning! Engaging warp engine is not currently recommended.”

As suicides went, us going to warp from a standstill inside a closed room would be a quick one, and there wouldn't be anything left of us to assimilate. Plus City of Industry hitting that heavy hatch at faster than the speed of light would do substantial damage to the cube.

But before she could take us to warp a small forest of jaggedy red transporter beams appeared and six Borg materialized on the bridge. Two of them grabbed each of us by the arms, and as the weird red energy cloud enveloped me and my two captors I saw the same thing happening to my moms and their four escorts.

Then we all went off to the next phase of our existence, a hollow place that isn't life or death but something in between. Wherever Mama and Nunu were taken to it wasn't the same part of the cube where I was. I never saw either of them again and I never will. They're on the bottom of the ocean on that planet with 1,500,000 other dead Borg.

I know they would be happy that Mom had failed to murder us if they knew I would survive my time as a drone, would survived our cube's crash landing and four months on a wilderness planet; that I'd learn to be a person again and fall in love, and would get a weird emergency version of the male-to-female body restructuring I'd always wanted; and would even get rescued and brought home to Earth- a miraculously fortunate ending compared to billions of others for whom being assimilated by the Borg was strictly a one-way trip to nowhere.

But mine wasn't a completely happy ending since they're not here to share it with me; And saying “they would be happy” doesn't feel like much of a consolation for losing these two beautiful women who gave me and taught me so much and who I loved so dearly.

But at least they're free of the Borg now. There's that at least.
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002.004 Assimilated

We materialized next to what I now know as an assimilation chamber. Without a word my captors slammed me back against a slanted steel panel. A copper band emerged from slots on either side of me and locked itself around my middle and a boxy plexiglass lid swung down to lock in place over the panel, like I was in a display case.

As metal pincers ripped my nightgown off me and sinister power tools at the ends of jointed metal stalks positioned themselves in front of my face and other parts of my body two more Borg joined them. I could only see them when they were right in front of me because something hard had clamped shut around my head and was keeping it pointed straight ahead. The four of them conferred silently in the Borg mathematical language---all procedure and measurements---their blank expressions never changing. There was awareness of what was going on in their eyes but nothing else; and my terror went into overdrive as I thought: “Soon my eyes will be like that!”

I was only half right about that.

Then there was nothing but pain. A device like a small ice cream scoop unscrewed my left eye from its socket and snipped the nerve. Then a thing like an immense steel dildo with spikes all over began to rotate and plunged itself into my bleeding-

But I'll spare you the slice by slice description of the agony I went through, except to say that after the wires snaked into my brain and I could sense my memories, opinions and hopes all disappearing as my mind was linked to the Collective's mathematics based consciousness I was glad to be losing everything I was if it meant the pain was going away too. My last thought as an individual was that brief flash of regret over how I'd never get to see the fireworks or the Princess Parade in that holo-program my wonderful uncle had created for me; and then there was no "I" or "me". My organic brain still had everything Mia Velasco knew stored in it somewhere but the drone I'd become couldn't have made sense of such things even if she'd had access to them.

The stalks with power tools on them withdrew, folding back up on their rack; then they and the inside of the assimilation chamber's perspex lid were washed clean of the blood that had splattered everywhere by jets of antiseptic cleaning solution. When my transformation was complete I was nearly unrecognizable. My arms had been hacked off just below the elbow and discarded, and where my left hand had been was a thing like a big steel lobster claw. My right forearm had a cylinder with a motor inside that could power different attachments---from drills to bone saws to screwdrivers---that were kept behind a panel inside my other arm. All the hair had been removed from my body and the follicles deadened, but you wouldn't know it because of the dull grey rubber Borg-suit that covered everything from my neck down. The suit and its built-in boots were actually part of me and never came off in the whole time I was a drone and even after; until just a week ago on our way home.

My left eye was replaced by this saucer-sized device you see bulging about 3cm out from my face, its base wedged in the eye socket behind it. The electronic spirally thing that you'll see it doing when it's not just glowing red means it's operating, which it often does all on its own, taking periodic readings. It can see wavelengths way above and below the human visual spectrum, and I can use it as either a microscope or a telescope, and also as a recording device. It's a brilliant piece of engineering that I wouldn't mind owning, just not as part of me.

As I think of the drones I dealt with while doing my job on that cube it seems like no two of us were constructed exactly the same way, with the same attachments in the same places. Some had several different alterations done to them but many had been left more or less intact. With both my arms and an eye replaced by Borg hardware my modifications were fairly extreme. But least they didn't turn me into one of those nightmarish wheeled units like that one I saw once that was a mass of robot arms and gizmos with no more of the original person at the center of it than was necessary to keep it alive.

Everything the Borg cobble together to just get the job done with zero thought to how it looks is lumpy, ugly and asymmetrical, and as a drone I was too. I'm grateful for everything Dr. Crusher was able to do to return the six of us to as close to our original state as was possible; like finding a solvent that could get us out of those damned rubber suits, and removing most of the Borg components, including the ones you wouldn't have but were inside our bodies.

She was able to reactivate the follicles on my head and said my hair will grow back pretty quick; But this eye thing is gonna be part of me from now on. Its cone-shaped base extends clear into my brain and is attached to it in ways that she said she couldn't even begin to figure out. While some of those who got rescued with me might pass for a normal member of their species, with this eye and this gold band around my neck and the fact that my head is so obviously a whole different species from this new body of mine I'm always going to be a freaky looking ex-drone, and be hated by people who don't understand that no individual Borg is responsible for what the Collective as a whole has done; all the assimilated planets and the tens of thousands they murdered at Wolf 359.

Back when I was sixteen a lot of people used to say my big long-lashed brown eyes were my prettiest feature, and I still have one of them but no one's going to notice it once they see what's next to it. But all in all I really can't complain too much. The new body Greg was able to give me on that planet is female at least, and nicely shaped with a really exotic complexion; but the thing I'm most happy about is that I know who I am again. That's the most valuable part of me those machine bastards took away, and I'm so grateful to have it back!

But I'll always be sad that I never really got to say goodbye to my moms when they separated us. That part happened so quick. If I ever did see them on the cube the empty soulless husks we'd been turned into didn't recognize each other. I just hope they were never sent to the place on that cube I worked at. I wouldn't have even known who they were, so they might have been. And that's my nightmare...
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002.005 DRR-30

I was given the designation 13 of 13 and assigned to Diagnostic Repair and Recycling Unit Thirty; which consisted of three rooms way down near the bottom of the cube; that I only left a few in those five years; and I would still be there now if Species 8472 hadn't intervened. And what we were diagnosing in DRR-30 and repairing if we could--or decommissioning and stripping for usable parts if we couldn't--was other Borg. We were the cube's gruesome equivalent of doctors.

Before I was assimilated all I knew about medicine was how to read someone's vitals with a hand scanner, run a dermal regenerator over a scrape or call the nearest hospital for an Emergency Room beam-in. But the hive-mind's information cloud had all the knowledge I needed to do the job they'd given me. When a drone's performing a task they've individual thoughts about what they're doing, but only about the task at hand. There's no daydreaming, no speculating about what tomorrow's workload will be like, no "I wonder what Mom and Nunu are doing now..." And we still fthought of ourselves as being synonymous with the collective as a whole, as "we"...

And actually our unit's repair chamber we put our victims into did a big portion of the work by itself. It was very similar to that clear box I'd been assimilated inside of. Drones from the cube's six bottom decks that were getting worn out or seemed to be acting up were ordered to report to DRR-30 for evaluation. Or they were dragged there kicking and screaming.

Sometimes drones experienced a malfunction called Spontaneous Regression, where they suddenly regained their individual consciousness, remembered the person they used to be and the life they'd had before they became Borg. These drones would become extremely agitated, wouldn't respond to commands and might go running down the corridors in a blind panic screaming, or even start attacking other drones. Drones with SR could sometimes be repaired with cortical implants but they usually had to be decommissioned and stripped for parts; crying and pleading with us for a mercy we had no concept of, until their biological functions were terminated and we dumped them down the chute to the chemical reclamation unit for separation into water, calcium, iron, oils for making plastic; things like that.

But the most common type of malfunction that would mean a drone had to be decommissioned were the ones that will happen to every Borg eventually, even our cube's queen; when they break down simply because they're too old and their bodies are wearing out. These drones were given the command to report to DRR-30 for recycling and obeyed it like it was any other order from the collective; stepping right into the chamber to be euthanized. Which made killing them go a lot quicker and more efficiently than the ones who tried to fight us, or that one who bit me that time.

You might suppose we preferred the terminations that went smoothly to the more difficult ones, or that we'd be glad when we could fix a drone and give them a few more years of usefulness, the way doctors are glad when they can save a patient. But nothing we did seemed any different to us than any other thing we did. We simply made our diagnosis and performed whatever action the checklist in our heads said we should, without any opinion about it.

And of course now I feel horrible about what we did in there. That was some real Nazi concentration camp shit we were doing and anybody who wouldn't feel horrible should be put on that registry for dangerous psychopaths they have and monitored 24/7. But I have to remind myself that anyone who got assimilated would do exactly what I did in there. It's a total bullshit fantasy to think you'd be the exception. There's a lot of things a person with a strong enough will can resist---brainwashing drugs, possession by non-corporeal entities who want to take over your ship, those forced mind-melds that are like the worst crime there is on Vulcan---but not a million other people's minds all pouring into your head like a tsunami into a teacup.

Everyone that I've ever heard mention Captain Jean Luc Picard has said he's a man of character and a great captain; with even my friend Givvi's cynical Orion mom calling him “Everything your Starfleet should be about”. And when I finally got to meet him on the Enterprise he really was all that; plus decent and kind and even funny in a dorky sort of way. If a guy like him couldn't do anything but what the Collective told him to do when he was Locutus, then nobody can!

Everything about being a Borg makes independent thought impossible. The mathematical language the Borg use to communicate assigns a number to every object, action or quality that make up a drone's existence. You would think I'd be fluent in this language after the 5 years, 8 months, 3 days and 17 hours I spent conversing in it but I remember very little of it. It's just too alien to the way I think now.

One thing I do remember is that most of the things that make us human don't even have a number in that language we used, so for the Borg they don't exist. Things like love, freedom, individual happiness or even the very notion of an individual self. The closest thing to a word for freedom in Borg might be the number that means “unassimilated”. Concepts like these, that are beyond the scope of what the Borg can understand---and there's a lot of them---are all assigned the number triple-zero. All the Collective knows about these things is that it has no use for them; and in English 000 translates as “irrelevant”. This is why irrelevant seems to be their favorite word when speaking to anyone who isn't Borg...
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002.006 Hiveworld

There were thirteen of us in DRR-30. We worked in one room, stored stuff in another and had our special regeneration pods in a third. That was our world. And when we did leave our little unit it was to someplace off the cube completely, like the few times they sent us over onto a smaller Borg vessel that needed us for some reason, doing the same job in a different room.

And one time we got beamed down to a planet whose whole population had been assimilated to do some variation on our job there for reasons that were never explained to us. The change of scenery I got from walking around in the perpetual twilight gloom of that planet made it without a doubt the most interesting thing that happened to me in the whole time I was 13 of 13; but the strangeness and the novelty of the experience was lost on the drone I was then. It was only after we got our minds back that I could appreciate what a bizarre and terrifying place that planet had been.

People describe the images of Borg hiveworlds that our unmanned reconnaissance drones send back as “eerily beautiful”, and I can sure see what they mean by eerie. But any beauty those places have comes from the culture that was there before. The historic architecture, the dead unused parks, the great monuments that go unnoticed by the billions of half-mechanical ants scurrying past them. If those cities are beautiful it's in the way we find ruins beautiful; that romance people have about lost civilizations. But crop anything that isn't Borg out of those images and I defy you to show me a single goddamn thing that's beautiful about them.

So aside from that one field trip my entire existence was mostly just dutifully sorting out one drone after another, the same slicing and dicing with my multi-tool arm or hacking things off with my bone-cracker lobster claw one; the same replacing batteries and inserting implants, or pulling them out if they we'd terminated the patient; awake-cycle after awake-cycle and year after year.

Which is why I can't tell you as much as I'd like to about the Borg. I know next to nothing about what was going on in other parts of the cube; it was only after we'd crashed on that planet that Derp the Ferengi told me what happened to the bodies we dropped down the chute; something Borg-me hadn't even been curious about. There was a hierarchy among us when it came to knowledge, with higher-ups directly under our Queen sorting the information that came in as new drones were assimilated, deleting what they didn't consider relevant (anything about the lives they'd had as people) and sending the “important” stuff to where it would do the most good; with individual drones not knowing much more than what they needed to in order to do their jobs. While all the minds in the hivemind are linked, every mind doesn't know everything that's in every other mind. That would just be too much information for any one organic brain to hold. Maybe there's some species somewhere with a head the size of Ceres that could handle it, but not in this galaxy.

Computers would probably be better for storing and routing information, but for some reason the Borg's collective identity doesn't like the idea of that. I guess because if you're going to have a machine mind then you might as well not have any organic parts at all---like that android I met on the Enterprise---and then they wouldn't have the fun of assimilating people. And really, it's better for us if they don't become a thousand times smarter and more efficient, unless it made them realize 'Wait! Why are we going around trying to assimilate everybody?! This isn't a nice thing to do at all!!!'”

But I'm too pessimistic to think becoming more intelligent would actually make them be better. I never used to be such a cynic. As a kid I looked at the progress Humans have made in the last 400 years and assumed it was some inevitable natural trend- that over a long enough time the Klingons would become peaceful, the Romulans and Cardassians would become honest and trusting and the Ferengi would start being generous. And even five years ago as I turned 16 I was young and optimistic. The fucking Borg took that from me!

Our cube was trying out a new type of regeneration chamber for us to sleep in. It wasn't the usual Borg alcove that you plug into and sleep standing up but a tub thing with a lid, like a coffin or a cryostasis chamber. It was filled with this rubbery pink biogenic goo that you lie completely submerged in with the top sealed and locked. Not a good place to be if you're claustrophobic but that's not an issue for drones. While your batteries recharged the pink stuff would also replenish your biological systems; and if it worked like it was supposed to it would add years to our usefulness. One hundred drones were selected to take part in this ten year test, including me and the twelve others in DRR-30. At the time it was just another thing they'd told us to do, but now I'm really glad they chose us. That pod full of goo saved my life!
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002.007 Species 8472

Our cube was destroyed by creatures from a race that the Borg call Species 8472. I've never heard any other name for them, and they aren't a species anyone from the Federation has ever come in contact with. But I have a bad feeling that we will. The place where they attacked us and where the Enterprise rescued us from is just across the border in the Beta quadrants, and as far as that is it's still way too close to Earth for my liking!

Species 8472 considers all other life forms impure and doesn't want to conquer us, they want to eradicate us. They took out a giant Borg cube with one tiny ship in about five minutes and they're the one species the Collective fears. The Borg are as afraid of Species 8472 as we are of the Borg. So if those creepy looking things do decide to pay us a visit...

You know how the old United States used to test nuclear weapons out in the Nevada desert? All of our Federation worlds would be like some ants living at Ground Zero trying to stop one of those hydrogen bombs!

The attack happened during DRR-30's regeneration cycle. I was lying dormant in the goop's warm embrace---probably dreaming of wires---when I was awoken by a General Alarm. It was the one the type of communication that everyone on the cube would get; if they were awake or asleep or whether they'd be called on to help counter the attack or not. And from the apprehension flooding into my head from the 1,500,000 other Borg on our ship I/We knew we were in big trouble.

My pod didn't unlock itself and I didn't receive any instructions so I knew I wasn't needed. But I was given access to what my shipmates were all seeing, and we watched as a sleek little green organiform spaceship approached us and stopped a few hundred meters away. Suddenly I knew what the Collective knew: That the alien ship belonged to this race that came from some weird parallel universe, and that the Borg had been at war with them for the past year.

Our cube transmitted the “You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile” announcement to the vessel's inhabitants, and as I chanted along with it in my mind I felt what the others felt, and together we became more confident. We were Borg. We were mighty.

The enemy ship didn't bother replying. Instead they fired on us, an intense white energy beam that was impossibly wide for any weapon on a ship that size, and powerful enough that it punched a round hole clear through the middle of our cube, big enough to fly a Galaxy Class starship through. In an instant hundreds of thousands of Borg were vaporized, and if our subgroup hadn't been off toward the bottom of the cube we would have been among them. But as big and damaging as the hole was, this by itself it wouldn't have been enough to cripple our cube. All its systems were ridiculously redundant, and it was already beginning to repair itself. And our collective mind was angry now, determined to obliterate the little ship, hitting it with everything we had!!

But the weapon they discharge next was one the Borg had never encountered before, and it was totally devastating!

The last guy that interviewed me, Commander Benton, was really interested in that weapon, and it's obvious why, I'd love to be able to tell Starfleet how to make one but all I don't know anything more than what I experienced; how suddenly my head was filled with intense painful heat and something in my brain went sizzle- POP!! And for the first time in almost six years I knew what it felt like to be completely on my own.

Lying there in the pitch blackness I was horribly confused, not having a clue what was happening outside of my steel coffin; unable to feel the presence of the other drones and with my own thoughts being the only voice in my head---scrambled thoughts I was barely able to form, I was so out of practice --- feeling tiny and weak and oh so alone. I was terrified, my heart pounding in a way that just by itself was alarming, since my pulse rate hadn't varied by more than ten beats a minute in the whole time I'd been a Borg!

I waited. For my link to the hivemind to be re-established, for my pod to go click, click and open, for anything besides this awful isolation and helplessness.

And I waited. My regeneration pod had become a sensory deprivation tank. I'd said the Borg don't get claustrophobia and ordinarily they don't, but nothing about this was ordinary and I was freaking out! Alone in the absolute darkness and silence it felt like I was the only thing that existed in the entire universe, and this “self” that I'd lost all memory of and had no name for was an alien and terrifying place to be!

Seconds ticked by, then minutes. I felt like I was suffocating in that suddenly awful goop, but I was so totally conditioned I just lay there because no one had told me to do anything else.

After close to an hour I noticed something changing. It was starting to get hot. Very hot. I started sloshing around in the goop inside my box, thrown this way and that until I was banging violently against all six of its metal sides despite the thickness of the gunk I was suspended in; and I felt myself tumbling and tumbling---crazily and with no pattern to the chaotic motion---for what seemed like hours, but when it finally stopped I thought to check my internal chronometer and found it had only been 24 minutes and 33.62 seconds. I had no idea of what had happened, why it had stopped happening, or where I was.

And then I waited some more, in the grips of something I had never experienced in all my time as a Borg- sheer terror!

What I didn't know then was I was one of only a handful of drones who hadn't died when our cubeship had come down like a meteor on an uninhabited Class M planet. And that while I'd miraculously lived through the crash I would be facing many more perils and challenges to my survival in the months ahead. But at least I would be facing them as myself again- Mia Velasquez, ex-drone. And with some interesting new friends...
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THE AFTER-THE-CLOSING-CREDITS THINGY:
(Scene redacted from official Starfleet transcript)

Oh yeah. There's one other thing that happened to me on that cube that I honestly don't know what to make of, it was so weird...

As a drone nothing ever seemed good or bad, as pretty or interesting or scary or boring or anything as I sleepwalked through my hollow existence. But this one thing that happened struck me as baffling and disturbing because it had struck every Borg throughout the whole of time and space that way.

Something, this presence drifted up to some Borgs, I don't know if it was our cube or where it was, when it happened or maybe will happen some day, because when the entity spoke every Borg everywhere heard him, drones that were long dead and ones that wouldn't be assimilated for a century.

“Now what do we have here?” the entity asked, sort of like he was talking to himself. I say “he” because it was an identifiably male voice. And then the Collective could sense him studying us.

We didn't know what to do. We couldn't assimilate this thing, we couldn't fight it, it was everywhere and nowhere. But we didn't have to do anything because he'd lost interest. Or actually he sounded like he was repulsed by us.

“Well congratulations,” he said, “You corporeal lifeforms have finally lived down to your potential. You are without a doubt the most tedious thing I have ever encountered. You're like entropy personified. I could have more fun harassing a turnip. Adios muchachos, and good luck!”

And then he was gone.

But he came back a short time later to say one last thing. “On second thought I think I'll introduce you to a friend of mine. That might be amusing. And it would definitely take that insufferable blowhard Mon Capee-tahn down a few pegs. I'll show him 'What a piece of work is Man'!”

And then he went away and never came back. I don't know what you can make of that, but it sure was different. About the only thing that happened to me in all those years that wasn't totally routine...