It was my sixteenth birthday and all my dreams were coming true. We were in my uncle's spaceship, traveling at Warp 8.5 to the famous pleasure planet Risa, where I was scheduled for a miraculous makeover in a modified transporter that would make me a real girl at last!

The 24th Century was a wonderful time to be alive. Trans people like me were understood and supported, medical science had advanced to a point where changing your sex on a genetic level was possible; and all the wars, famines + bigotries that had plagued Mankind since the dawn of history were a thing of the past!

But the Universe was still a dangerous place. And unbeknownst to my two mothers and I every lightyear we traveled was bringing us closer to an unscheduled encounter with the greatest menace anyone in the United Federation of Planets had ever faced... The Borg!

ASSiMiLATE THiS!
A story in the STAR TREK universe
Laika Pupkino ~ 2023
PART OO1 - MIA

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000.000 DEBRIEFING

Another debriefing? Sure, if it helps. Especially if you say all you want is a summary. I've been away so long, and finally seeing Mother Earth down there every time I look out the window is making me anxious to beam down and get back to my life, to my family. Or what's left of it...

I didn't expect to spend a whole week up here getting scanned and questioned, but I do understand why you had to be so thorough. You had to make sure I'm safe and won't go running around assimilating people. Which I don't think I'd be able to do even I wanted to.

As the Enterprise was bringing the six of us home that nice Dr, Crusher did a surprisingly good job of getting me out of that damn rubber suit, removing as many of my implants as she could and deactivating the nanoprobes in my blood. Except the anti-graft rejection nanoprobes, those need to stay functioning for the rest of my life. But I know she could only do so much, and I'll never pass as completely human; Some of this hardware is in me too deep, too integrated with my biology. If you took it all out my head would probably fall off. I'm a bit of a Bride of Frankenstein even by Borg standards.

Although the whole head-swap thing wasn't actually the Collective's doing. That happened later, when we were struggling to survive on that planet. It was our resident mad scientist's best idea for bringing me back to life, and I'm actually pretty happy with it. The female body I'd always wanted, although not in the way I was hoping. A much cruder and more piecemeal version of the transformation my parents and I were on our way to have done when all this started. But I guess that's me now, Little Miss Piecemeal.

And I really can't complain. The Borg took everything from me but I got back the most important thing, the thing that if you don't have it nothing else means anything; or if it does mean something there's no one there to know it; like that tree falling in the forest everyone talks about.

After five years and eight months of being nobody and nothing I'm glad to be me again. Mia...
.

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001.000 MIA

001.001 Appointment on Risa

I don't know what the Stardate was when we set out on our trip, 45363 point something is about as close as I can guess. If I still had my internal chronometer I could work it out in a heartbeat but I'm glad to be rid of it. The less of this circuits and solenoids garbage I have in my body the better.

And I can tell you the exactly day it was by the Common Era calendar we still use here on Earth: May 11, 2368; A date I'd circled with a red heart on the old-fashioned plastic calendar I had hanging above my desk in my bedroom. A day that seemed like it would never get here as I waited to turn sixteen and be eligible for the procedure.

It would've been exciting just to be taking my first real space trip; not just to the Moon but into actual outer space; clear out of the Solar System and across all those light years to the Risian system. Risa is a lot of folk's favorite tourist destination---Christmas, honeymoons, hornymoons; and I hear it's a total zoo during Earth's spring break!---but for me going there meant so much more than just taking a vacation.

We could've booked passage on one of those Jamaharon Express flights that depart from Earth almost daily. But people go to Risa mostly to party and get laid, and a lot of Terrans have exaggerated notions about how much of an “anything goes” culture Risa actually has. The Risians are the most mellow people in the galaxy until you start acting like a total jerk, then you're on the next ship home without a refund. But too many people headed for Risa don't know this. They start pounding down the Risian Sunsets and hitting on the other passengers before the ship even goes to warp, because ir's Risa, where “everybody fucks everybody all the time and stays totally blitzed 24-365; So why not start now?”

Which can make the three day trip pretty annoying for anyone who's headed there for some other reason.

So my moms and I were glad we'd be traveling in our own ship. Or not our ship. It belonged to my Tio Ignacio, who's general manager for the Lancaster-Victorville Fabrication Hub, where they make hardware that's needed in space by just about everyone in the whole Federation. Yeah Uncle Iggy's our family's big shot, but he's just a big kid at heart, and when he learned where we were going and why he insisted we take his private ship; hugging all three of us over and over and saying, “I can't wait to meet my new niece when you get back!”

My uncle had already known me me as his niece for a third of my life---he threw me a big quinceañera for my birthday the year before---but I knew what he meant by his new niece. The next time I saw him I'd have a freshly made body that would be different in so many important ways.

While we did plan to take a quick beam-in from the Risian Transport Center to some of the planet's must-see scenic wonders, and to spend a day at that famous beach resort before heading home; our main destination was an ordinary looking hospital high in the forests on the southern continent, the Sexual Wellness Institute; where I had appointment in its gender medicine wing to be treated with a device called a body restructuring transmaterializer.

A BRT is basically like a transporter, except it doesn't beam you across space or even across the room. It converts your body into energy like a transporter, but while you're bouncing around in there without a body it rewrites the godzillions of bits of information that make up your 'pattern', a mathematical blueprint of everything you are and know; changing all your cell's chromosomes from XY to XX or vice versa, and reconfiguring your anatomy to one that's appropriate for your new sex. Of the handful of places that do that kind of restructuring they say Risa's the best. Their technique, the staff, and all the fun stuff you can do on their planet as long as you made the trip there anyway. Risa's not just for horny people, it's for families too.

This procedure could easily done on Earth, but since technically it's doing genetic engineering on people it's illegal here, because of- You know, that whole mess back in C-21 with the Eugenics Wars and that crazy asshole Khan Singh that still has ou planet afraid of “tinkering with Nature's handiwork”. But I think Nature must've been asleep on the job when was born a boy!

But at least this is one type of modification they'll let you travel off world to have done since it's not trying to make you into some superman, just an ordinary man or women who's comfortable in their own body. But they still check you out, map your new genome against your original one to make sure you didn't get yourself augmented somehow; kind of like the way your doctors here checked me out to see if I was dangerous. I guess that's one part of our original plan for fixing my dysphoria I got to experience...

Sixteen of our years old was Institute's minimum age for using the BRT on Earth people, but my birthday happened on our second day in space so I'd be old enough when we got there. I'd had my first name legally changed from Danny to Mia when I was ten and had been living as a girl ever since. And I'd seen all the doctors and counselors you need to see to have this procedure done. But the specialists at the Institute would evaluate me again when we got there, and could refuse to treat me if they weren't 100% convinced it was what I wanted and needed.

Everyone at the Wilshire Gender Clinic assured me there was zero chance I'd be refused. Their doctors weren't quacks with fake medical degrees on some dodgy little jerkwater planet, but were known and respected by the ones on Risa. And two minutes with the Institute's Betazoid counselor would show her that I hadn't been tricked or pressured into doing this; which is the Risian's other big concern. You can't bullshit a Betazoid. Their species has that emotional telepathy that can tell exactly how you feel, sometimes better than you can yourself. And the next morning I would lie down on the transporter bed, disappear, then be reassembled in the body I'd always known I should have.

Both of my moms, my Uncle, my friends from school; all of them were totally supportive and excited for me. Even my dad, living way the hell off on Setlik III heard about me getting this done and sent me his best wishes. But no one was more excited than I was!

What none of us could have guessed was that Mom, Nunu and I would never show up for my appointment, or that my journey to having a female body would be a lot stranger and darker than the one we'd started on.
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001.002 SPACEDOCK

On the morning of the 14th we caught an air cab to the Palos Verdes spaceport and then the ferry up to Earth Spacedock. We stopped for lunch at the replimat before heading out into the black, more for the gorgeous view of the planet below than for the cuisine, especially since the food materialized by the replicator on Uncle Iggy's ship was so much better; Being not-quite-legal reproductions of dishes created by some of the best chefs on Earth.

“How's the empanada, Nunu?”

“Okay, but not as good as your mama makes,” she said, smiling at her wife.

“How's yours, Mom?”

“I had a better slice of pizza on Nimbus III, where I think one of the toppings was rat...”

“Ewwwwww!”

When you have two parents of the same sex it can get a little confusing when you say “Hey Mom!” and they don't know which mom you mean; So we worked it out that I'd call my biological mother Carmencia by Mom; and would call Edi Zijaan, the woman she married Nunu, which is the affectionate short-form word for Mother on her home planet Trill.

“How's your corn dog, Mee?” asked Nunu. My name is Mia but they call me Mee, which means something in Trill. Pet, beloved, precious; something like that.

“It's a corn dog,” I said, wondering why I'd even ordered it.

Earth Spacedock's main hangar bay was enclosed but it wasn't pressurized, so it was basically just an unbelievably huge room full of outer space. Smaller vessles lined its walls while Starfleet's mammoth Galaxy Class Yamato floated untethered in the center. The Yamato was breathtaking sight, but I wouldn't have traded it or any of the other ships in here for my uncle's gorgeous little space yacht.

The City of Industry was wider than it was long; a streamlined configuration kind of like a giant boomerang that he called a “flying wing”. The bridge was located top, front and center inside a big teardrop-shaped view dome and there was a warp nacelle aat each of the big wing's ends. Uncle Iggy had said that in theory it should be able to enter a planet's atmosphere and land unpowered, like a 20th century space-shuttle; but he hoped he would never have to attempt it. We crossed the forcefield-protected open gangway to it, and as Mama punched the combination into airlock hatch's key pad she muttered, “Let's hope Iggy didn't leave us any booby traps...”

By booby traps she didn't mean anything dangerous, but her brother was quite a practical joker. Like the time he brought a piñata for my eighth birthday that he'd filled with red gagh, making us kids all scream when one managed to bust it open and the big hairy squirming blood-red worms came pouring out. Then he pretended to be surprised that we weren't all delighted with this alien delicacy.

“What's the matter, don't you like gagh?! Good Klingon food! Make you big strong warrior!” he said in some kind of cave-man accent, thumping his chest. But he did have candy for us all, he wasn't that mean!

And two years later when I came out as trans his birthday surprises lost any trace of grossness or teasing, and he had my mothers worried that he was spoiling me with extravagant gifts and events. Uncle Iggy and his wife had already raised three sons by then; but from the way he started treating me I think he'd always wanted a daughter, and it was like he'd finally hit the jackpot having a young relative he could treat like a princess.

I know none of this has anything to do with my time as one of the Borg, but it's important to me to remember who I was before that happened to me; which I'm still in the process of doing. And that's something you do need to know about the few of us who manage to return from being something so inhuman. It doesn't all come back at once.

The first thing we did when we got inside the City of Industry was turn the heaters on. Small ships get cold when they're powered most of the way down, and we hadn't brought along any heavy jackets or gloves on our trip to the climate-controlled tourist planet. When our breath didn't make little clouds anymore my Human mom sat down at the helm and began powering up all the rest of the ship's systems.

It had been a decade since she'd last flown those massive freighters that carried all the stuff her brother's company made to places all over Federation space and a bit beyond. But she'd kept her helmsman's license current, a Class 3 license that made Mom more than qualified to pilot a little private ship like this.

As Mom went through the pre-flight check I noticed a phaser of some kind sitting on the console off to the side of her. It didn't seem like the kind of thing my uncle would even own, much less leave just laying around. I picked it up. I didn't know much about particle guns but to me it looked cheaply made; the kind of weapon they call a "zap gun" and that you might procure from some skeezy-looking Orion in some alley in the bad part of town; only to have it blow up and take your arm off the first time you fired it!

“Be careful with that, Mee!” warned my Trill mom.

“Really, Nunu? I thought I'd start firing wildly at the bulkheads.”

“Don't be a smart ass,” she smirked, and took it from me. She looked the phaser over and went: “Uh oh...”

“What is it?” asked Mom as she adjusted some control or other.

“This doesn't have settings!”

One thing I did know was that if a phaser only had one setting there was no just stunning someone with it; it was permanently set to kill. Which made it an even stranger thing for Uncle Iggy to have.

“Then just put it away somewhere. In those cabinets back ther,” Mom said, and as her wife did this she spoke to the control panel, “Spacedock Control, this is the City of Industry. We're ready to depart. You have our course plan, right?”

“Sure do, Industry. You're clear to go,” said a male voice from the comm, and as the hangar bay's giant door opened he added wistfully, “Man, I wish I was goin' to Risa... Have fun!!”

Mom flew us smoothly through the opening, and when we were a safe 100,000 K from Earth we went to warp.
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001.003 Warp 8.5

The ship would be flying itself until we got to the Risian System, so Mom wouldn't be stuck sitting behind the controls for the whole trip, but just had to stay close enough to get back to them if a warning sounded. If she had to go take a shower or use the head one of us would stand watch, and hope we would know what to do if the ship's computer's voice alerted us to some danger. This wasn't too likely to occur; but if it did, you can bet that's when it would happen. In space all problems seem to come up when you're on the toilet.

This was how you did things when you only had one qualified pilot for a multi-day trip. There was a couch sitting in the bridge, a replica of an ugly old plaid pre-war thing from the late 20th or early 21st that my uncle loved for some reason. This was his bed when he flew solo somewhere, and would be Mom's bed for the next three days. Nunu and I would probably sleep in here too, dragging in mats and bedding so the three of us could treat the whole trip like one long slumber party. And if Nunu or I needed some alone time there were four cabins to chose from.

With the computer flying the ship we all sat down on the couch and watched the stars outside the big dome streak past like glowing white parallel lines. Traveling at warp was something I'd only done once before (Our vacation to Nix Olympus Planetary Monument, when Mars was clear on the other side of the Sun + getting there on impulse power would've taken all day...) and the sight had been utterly mesmerizing, even through a much smaller window at only Warp 2. It was just mind-boggling and a little scary to think that every time I blinked we were taking a thousand trips around the world.

Sitting snugly between two moms I felt like a mom sandwich. At home they usually sat together on the love seat but they were letting me know this trip was all about me. Each took one of my hands.

“Are you excited about getting your new body?” asked Mom.

“It's all I've been able to think about all week! I'm pretty sure I did crappy on that history test yesterday. Things I should of known. Things I did know, but not when I needed them.”

Nunu made a Pssshhhhh!! sound. “The day you get less than a B on a history test I'll eat my spots! I've looked in on you from the parents room down at the holo-arcade. While the other kids were battling demons with magic wands in Tales of the Sorcerer Knights, you were attending the second Continental Congress. The real one, not the version with the zombie attack. Or marching down Pennsylvania Avenue with Alice Paul and the National Women's Alliance giving Woodrow Wilson the finger...”

“My little Suffragette!” said my 'real' Mom proudly, like I'd actually done something.

When I was six years old my father had wanted our family to move to Setlik III. The settlement there needed civil engineers, and he'd needed a challenge- to help build infrastructure on that rocky windswept planet at the very edge of Federation territory. But Mom didn't think any planet that close to those warlike Cardassians was a safe place to raise a kid, and after a couple of bad fights about it she told him to go follow his dream---no hard feelings---but we were staying here; And when I was seven he did.

Shortly after that Mom met and fell madly in love with a beautiful Trill woman, and they got married fairly quickly. My father had been a reasonably good dad, and I knew he loved me, but my new mom really seemed to understand me. We were the same in so many ways, and she was so much fun!

My moms both laughed when I took a printer-pen and painted two rows of spots all the way down my body from my temples to my feet; and they let me go to school that day as a Trill girl, in the cute party dress I had fallen in love with when I saw it in a shop's window and wore around the house sometimes. M y three best friends at school---Dawn, Hanami and a really cute Orion girl named Givvi---were delighted, and said I made an adorable girl!

As I was turning ten I had a huge revelation: That my “I feel like a girl sometimes” thing was actually a “Who I was, period!” thing, and my name was Mia.

“You know it's okay to just be a feminine boy, right?” said Mama when I told her about this.

“I know it is,” I told her, “But I'm not a feminine boy. I'm a girl.”

She still had doubts though, wondering if I only thought I had to be a girl because the whole rest of our household and most of Mom and Nunu's friends were females. Probably something she had read could happen in one of those ebooks she had about single-sex parenting. But my Nunu believed in my ability to be the best judge of who I actually was pretty immediately. At least about something that came from as deep inside a person as gender identity did. We'd had an amazing rapport right from the start, and I think she had seen this coming.

If you only know one thing about the people on planet Trill (aside from the fact that they look mostly human but have those spots) it's that they have a symbiotic relationship with another sentient species, these eyeless sluglike thing the size of a baguette that live in underground lakes on their world. When a Trill is selected to be “joined”, the “symbiont” is placed inside their abdomen and lives there for the rest of the humanoid's life, if it's ever removed both of them die. The host and the symbiont have a mental link, and the slug's first host's mind is influenced in subtle ways by the symbiont's consciousness.

It's when the symbiont's host dies that things get interesting. The slug-creatures can survive if it's quickly placed inside another Trill. And suddenly the new host remembers the whole life of the symbiont's previous host. They say it can be disorienting for a male Trill to suddenly remember what it's like to have a baby. The new host also takes on abilities, tastes and personality traits from the previous host, becoming a slightly different person. Each of the symbiont's new hosts remembers more and more previous lives. It's a way for Trills to live on a thousand years or so past death, or sort of. ..

If you only know two things about Trills, the second is probably that there are a lot of Trills and very few symbionts, enough for about 1% of the people on Trill. It's a status they consider a sacred honor, and every Trill dreams of the day when they might be chosen to become joined.

Every Trill except my Nunu, that is. She'd never had the slightest desire to be joined with a symbiont, and in fact found the whole idea deeply repugnant.

“I like being who I am,” she told me when I asked her about it, “One life is enough for me to figure out. Who I am and a how to become a better person. I don't need a bunch of dead people being backseat drivers in my head; telling me what I feel, what I like or don't like, what I think!"

Nunu took her personal credo from one of those long fancy speeches in Hamlet: This above all: To thine own self be true. I'm sure this philosophy had a lot to do with how quick she was to support me in wanting to be true to my girl self.

“As you go through life a lot of people will try to tell you who and what you should be. And there are things you should at least listen to someone's advice about, and think it over; if that someone has earned your trust. But even your Mama and I don't get to tell you that. Nobody gets to decide who you are but you!”

[Which made what would happen to us the next day ironic on top of all the other ways it was horrible. In twenty four hours none of us would have a self to be true to...]

But it didn't take my Human mom long to trust that I knew what I was talking about, especially after a real professional counselor who specialized in adolescent gender issues backed up what Nunu and I were saying. Because it's not like she was against me being a girl for some weird moral reason, like people used to have back in the Dark Ages when being gay or transgender was considered a mental illness and having homophobia or transphobia wasn't.

And I guess some people think like that even today; on those miserable religious-colony planets that have cut themselves off from the rest of this sinful, wicked galaxy and have all kinds of weird barbaric laws. Anyone like me or like my moms who's living there must be going through Hell. I know the Prime Directive has to be what it is but sometimes I wish Starfleet would make an exception, go into these places and start kicking ass and taking names if they're abusing people.
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001.004 Sulok

After a dinner from the replicator of copyright-protected meals by famous chefs---starting with Greek salad and ending with a desert of Thai sticky rice and mangoes---we were in the mood for some holographic entertainment. Iggy's ship did have a holosuite (more like a holo-broom closet) but none of us felt like running around in some imaginary place interacting with imaginary people and having to figure out what to do next. Sometimes you just want to sit on the couch and watch something made by a good director, with a music score and better actors than just you and your goofy friends in there playing King Arthur or Zephram Cochran. And that's why good old fashioned holofilms hadn't died out as an art form like they were predicting would happen when holosuites became a thing. Watching 3-D scenes projected into the air in front of you is something people will be doing for a while.

Iggy had the bridge set up so he could watch holoflickers from this couch and keep one eye on the helm. We had the computer dim the lights and put on a flicker that my moms and I had been meaning to see but none of us had yet in the nine months since it came out. This one seemed appropriate with where we were going; Rendezvous on Risa, the holofilm that seemed like it would be the last one created by the beautiful young Vulcan actress Sulok.

People on Earth loved Sulok as much as the Vulcans hated her; Although they'd never admit to something as blatantly emotional as hating someone. But they definitely denounced her---in strictly logical terms---for her rejecting her culture's values and embracing emotions, then moving to Earth and becoming a writer, director and star of four holofilms in that most un-Vulcan of all genres of fiction, the comedy.

To the Vulcans everything from her fashion sense to her Holo-wood lifestyle seemed like a great big slap in the face; even though she was never one of those "dangerous radicals" who wanted to change Vulcan society and liked to go giggling through the streets as a form of protest. She'd merely done what she needed to when she realized she would never fit in there; Finding a world where she could be happy and try to make other people happy with her art.

Watching her first flicker I'd had a 13-year-old's crush on the gorgeous twenty-something starlet, and a 14-year old's when I watched her second. But her third production was my favorite, because instead of playing opposite a male romantic lead like the first two her third was a lesbian Rom-Com, and when she kissed the girl I dreamed she was kissing me.

As her comedy recorded on Risa began my 16-year-old's crush was in full bloom...

“You like her, don't you?” teased the mom on my left.

“I love her,” I admitted, “She's amazing!”

But then didn't everyone? Me, both my moms, Uncle Ignacio, the critics; and she had fan clubs on some of the most unlikely planets. Even Qo'noS; where her flickers were banned for some reason. And here on Earth, the way she saw our world with fresh eyes and that SMILE she faced life and its challenges with made us remember to appreciate what we had here- our lives, our loves, our freedoms; all the things we valued.

Rendezvous on Risa had Sulok's character arriving on Risa for an archeological symposium, where---thanks to some magical artifact no one knew was magic---love was in the air, and she found herself suddenly torn between falling in love with a charming Bolian male, a cute soft-butch half Human/half Klingon female, and a person from that androgynous race the J'naii, who suspected that they had a gender but couldn't decide which it was.

In the final act the holoflick got kind of weird, ending more like an art flicker than a rom-com. She didn't chose any of her three suitors and seemed conflicted about her life in general. She went for a late night walk on a lonely stretch of beach under the Risian moons, where she met a Medusan- those energy creatures that live in a containment chamber and are supposedly so hideously weird looking that anyone who looks inside their levitating box will instantly go crazy and never get sane again.

Sulok and the Medusan got to talking, and you could tell they were falling in love. She asked the Medusan if she could see what it looked like, but it didn't want to drive her insane. She talked it into it, opened the cover on its container and peered inside, and we saw what she saw. I assume it was special effects but swirling in the air on City of Industry's bridge it was both totally abstract and pretty damn disturbing; until the swirling chaos of the fake Medusan began to change, and somehow became incredibly beautiful, like a hundred rainbows of pure goodness and joy all making love together! And we heard Sulok's voice say “Oh wow... You're beautiful!” and right then the story ended.

“What the Hell was THAT?!!” cried my Earth mom. She thought this was the most weird, stupid, pointless, out-of-left-field ending it could have had, and that it wrecked an otherwise charming flicker.

And my Trill mom just said, “I'll have to think about this one...”

But this ending moved me in some way I couldn't explain and I thought it was a pretty good holo all around, but not as good as her lesbian one. And it seemed like a shame that this would probably be her last venture into holofilm making.

Right after completing Rendezvous on Risa Sulok posted a message saying she needed to get away for a few days to think about some stuff, and then vanished.- A few days turned into a few weeks and by now it had been nearly a year since anyone had heard from her. There were all kinds of crazy rumors and theories. One said she'd reconciled with her people's culture and was at a monastery on Vulcan, and another claimed that the Vulcan government had assassinated her; and some were just plain silly; but no one had a single shred of evidence to back these theories up...

And as our talk turned to the missing Vulcan star I speculated, “I wonder if she'd been planning it a while; and the reason this flicker ended like this is it's a clue she was trying to give us...”

“That's it, she ran off with a Medusan!” said Mom, and she and Nunu busted up at her joke.

“No, not that!” I said, “But maybe it was like... symbolism. About finding beauty in something most people are afraid of. Or maybe she's saying she was sick of her life and wanted to disappear, and got a job as a waitress some little town where nobody will find her. Or- Oh hell I don't know!”

“Maybe,” admitted Mom, “Her just dropping out is more plausible than these articles talking about time travel or evil alternate universes. I swear, they'll publish any old crap these days!”

But of all the weird theories circulating the one I never heard mentioned seems so obvious now. The same reason billions of other from all over the galaxy have disappeared. Maybe the notion that such a beautiful, lively intelligent young holo-star was now shambling around a Borg ship without the slightest glimmer of individual awareness inside her was just too ghastly for anyone to want to think. It might be fun to spin wild theories about Unit 31 or parallel timelines since there's mystery and glamour in those; but being assimilated by the Borg is about as mysterious or glamorous as hitting your head, landing face first in the toilet and drowning.

Before bedding down for the night I took a nice long bath, grateful that my uncle had splurged on a real sit-down tub and plenty of hot water for his ship instead of just the usual sonic shower. People say they're relaxing but I hate everything about those things, and the fact that sonic showers is all they have on those big fancy ships like the Yamato or the Enterprise is probably the main reason a career in Star Fleet never appealed to me.

As I toweled myself dry I looked at myself in the full-length mirror and wondered what my new body would look like. Probably not that much different than the one I had now except it would be curvier where this one was flat and flatter down where it needed to be.

My face probably wouldn't be too different either. I know it's what's on the inside that counts, but I always liked it when girls at school said I made a pretty girl. I was lucky that I'd inherited my mother's delicate features, her cute nose and straight raven black hair; and not my dad's wide squashy nose, big square jaw, his ginger-ish hair and complexion. He wasn't ugly, but no one ever assumed he was female and I'm sure he was glad of that

But my wanting this genetic makeover on Risa had never really been about how I looked so much as needing to be a female in every way I could, inside and out. And I'd always had this sort of ache inside me to be a mom myself someday, and I was happy that it would soon be possible; although if and when I did it wouldn't be until some time after college at the soonest.

I slipped into the favorite nightie I'd brought along, white lace and very pretty but not some skimpy little thing designed for showing off your curves, which this scrawny androgynous body of mine didn't really have. I dragged a mattress and blankets in from one of the cabins, while my moms grabbed the bigger one from the captain's stateroom.

Our “slumber party” on our first night in space wasn't quite the giggly all-night gabfest I'd assumed it would be. Me and both of them were all fairly talked out and sleepy and didn't really say much more than good night. There would be time for giggling tomorrow.

I lie there watching the hypnotic sight of the stars streaking past at many times faster than lightspeed. It put me right to sleep. My last thought before I conked out was I could get used to a sight like this. Maybe those sonic showers that Starfleet ships or the commercial freighters had wouldn't be so unendurable after all...
.

001.005 Grace

I slept soundly all night and woke up sort of wondering about my day at school, until I opened my eyes and saw the stars warping past us around the bridge's dome and knew this wouldn't be a school day for me. Then I remembered it was my birthday, and where we were going, and why. And I smiled.

Mom and Nunu's mattress and bedding were rolled up and leaning against the bulkhead. Nunu was sitting on the couch in her jammies reading something on her PADD. She glanced up, “Ah, you're awake. Good morning, Sweet Sixteen! Breakfast will be ready in a half hour.”

“A half hour? What takes a half hour to replicate?”

“You'll see,” she said, and held up her PADD, “Your uncle left a message saying he has a whole day planned for us in the holo-room since he couldn't be here today. You know how he is about your birthdays and all the Earth holidays. But today is your day and we don't have to if you don't want to.”

“No, it sounds fine. What's the program?”

“It doesn't say, Mee. Just 'American Fun, 1963' and that it's six to eight hours long.”

The only event from American history I knew for sure was in 1963 was what happened in Dallas that year. Uncle Iggy might have some weird notions of fun but it wouldn't be that weird! Maybe we'd be watching one of those old chemical reaction rockets get launched from that first spaceport in Florida, which they must've been doing in 1963 if we got to the Moon by 1969. That would be fun.

A voice called out from the dining nook. “Come and get it!”

The little table was set with three real china plates, each of which held two eggs cooked sunny side up, frijoles refritos sprinkled with cheese, a spoonful of chile verde, a big warm tortilla with actual scorch marks, a few slices of avo and some salsa ranchera. Good old North American comfort food.

“What restaurant's this from?” I asked.

“Velasco's in Santa Monica,” said Mom.

“You cooked this? But how?”

She slid a big hatch in the wall open to reveal a little refrigerator and an oven with four burners on top that I never knew were there. As she pulled her chair out and sat down she said, “I can cook.”

I stabbed some eggs and chunk of pork with my fork, ran it through the refritos and popped it into my mouth. I swallowed it and said with a big grin,“I guess so!”

Mom cleared her throat like I'd done something wrong. I looked over and saw she had her hands clasped together.

“You're kidding!” I said. This really was an old-fashioned breakfast.

“My cooking, my rules,” said Mom, and after Nunu and I put our hands together she addressed the stars dopplering past overhead, “Heavenly Father, we thank you for this meal, for this spaceship and for bringing us together as a family. We ask you to keep us safe on this journey, and bless and guide our beautiful daughter on her journey to being complete, and all our days ahead. Amen.”

It was odd that Mama had insisted on saying Grace, which we'd only ever done when we had meals with my Abuela, who wasn't a Quantum Catholic or Church of Christ, Metaphorical but the real deal. And now years later I'm wondering if my mother hadn't somehow sensed that we were in danger and in need of divine protection. If she did I guess we were just too far out in space for God to hear.

We finished our huevos rancheros and as we all headed for the holosuit I realized there'd be nobody to keep an eye on the helm and asked, “So how are we gonna do this, in shifts?”

“We'll be okay in this stretch of space,” said Mom, “The ship will alert us if anything goes wrong, and even in 1963 I 'll still only be thirty paces from the controls.”

I realized I was still dressed in my nightie and said. “I better go put on some clothes.”

“Why?! she laughed, and with a nod in her wife's direction said, “If those NPC's in there won't notice she's an alien they're not gonna care if we're in our pajamas.”
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001.006 A Fistful of Ignacio

Nunu told the holosuite what program to play and we stepped into a whole simulated world. The ground was flat and covered in that black stuff they used to make roads out of--covered with neat rows of automobiles slotted between painted white stripes--that stretched off as far as the eye could see under a beautiful blue summer sky. The ground vehicles of 1963 were all big bulbous whimsical looking things. A lot of them were painted two different colors, a few looked like they were partly made of wood, and they all had what looked like weird shiny metal mouths on the front of them, sparkling and gleaming under the bright summer sky.

I said, “Wow, these are GREAT! Can we drive one?”

“You might find one with the keys in it, but then you'd probably get arrested,” said a familiar voice from behind us.

I turned around and there was Uncle Ignacio, dressed in a bright blue shirt with pink hibiscuses on it, goofy looking plaid shorts, and sandals with socks. I threw my arms around him and hugged him tight. He hugged me back, saying, “I'm not really here, remember? But thank you anyway, Sobrinita.”

“Oh right,” I said, realizing I wasn't really hugging anyone, and let go.

“Sorry I couldn't get the time off to be here or I would've flown you all to Risa myself.”

“That's okay,” I told him, “So where are we?”

“This is a place where people went for fun in 1963 called an amusement park.. And this is just the parking lot,” he said, “the fun starts over there!”

I turned, and there at the end of a parking field was a building that was supposed to be a bunch of buildings, like a shining green metal city. Of course everything in here was fake, but the city-building was supposed to look fake or he would have done a better job with the trick perspective and the smaller buildings toward the top would have actually looked farther away instead of obviously just being built smaller. Between the outermost tall green towers at each end was a huge sign that arched over the whole fake city, with cutesy green neon lettering on it spelling out: MIA LAND.

“Wow,” I said.

“And that's just the entrance, wait'll you see the rides! But here comes your tram, so...”

“Tram?” I asked the space where he'd just disappeared from.

A thing like a gasoline-powered fiberglass Chinese dragon pulled up alongside of us. Its seats were full of holo-characters in period clothing. The driver, who was Uncle Iggy in a clean white Mia-Land uniform said to hop on, and it took us to the green metal castle-thing, where the the lady selling tickets---who was also my uncle minus his mustache and goatee---told us we were already paid for and to go on in.

Which was a good thing, because I'd only ever seen money in a museum.

“Remember to stick close together,” said Mama as we headed for the entrance, not because of any danger here but because if any of us got more than a few meters apart one of us would bump into one of the holosuite's walls, which were invisible to us but very hard.

We hopped on the shiny gold moving sidewalk like everyone else was doing, and it carried us into the simulated city, past a scene where a bunch of fake looking robot Ferengis and a much larger fake robot human girl in red shoes were dancing around singing about a dead witch.

“What's with the Ferengis?” I asked.

Mom laughed. “Those aren't Ferengis. 1963, remember? Those are Elves.”

The golden sidewalk took us past some pretty rainbow fountains and a bunch of other scenes with more singing and dancing robots that didn't make much sense either, to the far end of the building where where the moving sidewalk ended, where all the rides all were, hundreds of them extending forever to our left and right, but not as far in front of us because they were on a big wide pier sticking out a kilometer or so into whatever ocean that was supposed to be out beyond it.

One thing we didn't have to do was stand in line for the rides like everyone else was doing. They all treated me and my moms like royalty and insisted that we go on ahead of them. But it didn't take long for the way all these strangers were going “Yay! It's Mia!!!” and wishing me a happy birthday started to feel kinda creepy.

“We've got to stop meeting like this,” said the Uncle Iggy in lederhosen who helped us into the little bobsled-shaped car of the first ride we got on, a sort of roller coaster that zoomed around and through a big fake plaster mountain.

This was what people did before they had holorooms. they actually built their fantasy worlds. We rode a simulated parachuting experience that dropped us on a wire from a high tower, then rode the “Jetsons” ride that was supposed to show the twentieth century people what the future would be like, but from the way the other guests were laughing I think they knew it was pretty inaccurate. We traveled deep under the ocean on the “Irwin Allen's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” ride, then rode another submarine ride called “Fantastic Voyage” that was just bizarre, because our little three-woman glass sub had supposedly been miniaturized and was taking us on a tour through a human body! Each ride was bigger, wilder and more imaginative than the last; and my moms and I agreed that Uncle Iggy had really outdone himself with this program...

While out beyond the walls of this little holographic fantasy land the City of Industry was wandering farther and farther off course, and for reasons I will never know the ship's computer failed to notify us of this.

What finally made us leave the holographic amusement park was hunger. None of the food that was for sale everywhere in here was actually edible; so we decided to halt the program, go eat and have my birthday party then come back and see the rest of Mia-Land later.

A clown in a rainbow wig who was selling balloons with my picture on them overheard us and said, “Be sure to come back tonight for the fireworks and the Princess Parade!”

”There's a princess parade?” I asked.

“You're in it, Mee. On the Big Float!”

I remembered something I'd been wondering about since yesterday and asked him. “Hey what was the deal with that phaser that way laying on the helm controls?”

“A phaser?! On my ship? I have no idea! You'll have to ask the real me,” said Iggy the Clown.

Then we saved and exited the program, revealing the tiny empty room with grid-patterned gray and white walls we'd been in the whole time.

“I love my brother, but I think I'd go crazy if I kept having to see him everywhere like that!” said Mom.
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001.007 THE LAST BIRTHDAY PARTY

We had Indonesian for lunch, then following the instructions on her PADD Nunu told the replicator to make us “Mia's Sweet Sixteen Cake.”

It somehow materialized with sixteen already-lit candles on top. My moms brought it over to the table singing the song, I did the wish thing and we dug in. It was a white chocolate mango ice cream cake from some bakery in Seattle, and it instantly became my favorite kind of cake! (I'm having some at that bakery later today when I beam down to Earth from here; if they'll serve someone who looks as much like a Borg as I do...)

I didn't get boxes and boxes of presents but the two envelopes I got were exactly what I needed. Uncle Iggy gave me a bunch of downloadable replicator patterns (probably one of his “fell off a truck” acquisitions, whatever that means...) for clothes I could have our machine at home make when we got back from our trip and I knew my new sizes for sure. And from my mothers I got gift cards for a clothing botique and a jewelry store on Risa.

Then I saw the cash amounts the cards were for, “That's a lot of zeroes. Are you sure we can afford that?”

Mom laughed. “Where else are we going to spend it but on a planet that uses money? Don't worry about it, Sweetie!”

“We'll then thank you so much,” I said, and hugged them both. And where did they even get money??? If I live to be 150 I'll never understand 24th Century economics...
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001.008 Anomaly

My moms and I planned to go back to the holochamber for the rest of the amusement park program but we were feeling stuffed and sluggish after one too many slices of rich ice cream cake and all wound up back on the couch, listening to an old pre-War Earth musician Nunu liked named Miles Davis, who could make his trumpet sing like an angel.

As I sat gazing at the stars out beyond the view dome, stretched into blazing white lines by the warp effect I saw something strange. One of the lines was a whole lot fatter than all the others. It was pastel pink and blue instead of white, and not quite as bright. I squinted to make sense of what I was seeing. “What is THAT?!??”

“I think that's what a nebula looks like when you're moving at warp.” Nunu said; then asked her wife, who had logged a lot more days and weeks in space than she had, “Isn't that a nebula?”

Mom gawked at it. “It sure is, but I don't know how it got there! There shouldn't be any nebulae that close by on this course we're taking.'

“Maybe it's a new one. Not on the charts,” I said. It didn't happen that often but sometimes they had to update the maps because an aging star had blown up and become a nebula.

“Then it wouldn't be that big. It takes years for them to spread out that far,” said Mom, who I guess could tell how big it was even when it looked like this. She asked the ship, “Computer, what are the City of Industry's current coordinates?”

“Unknown,” replied the ship's female voice flatly.

“What the f-” Mom lept off the couch like we were in Moon gravity, rushed over to the pilot's seat and started hitting buttons. The stars outside shrank from lines to points of light and came to a stop.

Now I could see the dead star off our port bow in its true shape. I had never seen one with my own eyes before. A glowing pink and blue cloud in space bigger than a solar system, it was shaped like a butterfly and astonishingly beautiful, but I wasn't enjoying the sight. Something was seriously wrong here.

Mom scowled at the console's star map display, muttering, “Coordinates unknown?! We're only two days from Earth, we have to be somewhere the stupid thing would know!”

“Maybe the new nebula has it confused,” suggested Nunu,

“It's not a new nebula!” snapped Mom. She was clearly worried. She said, “Computer, run a diagnostic on-”

Suddenly the bridge was flooded with an eerie light as an enormous jagged hole opened up in space, with ugly whorls of black and purple energy churning inside of it. There was something unwholesome about it that reminded me of the special effects in that Sulok flicker we'd seen, the part where it was showing what a Medusan supposedly looked like. But I doubted if this angry wound full of surging and spasming energy and lightning hitting itself was going to become beautiful all of a sudden.

“Okay that's not normal,” said Nunu, “Some kind of wormhole?”

Mom said, “If it is it's not a natural one.”

“Then could it be one of those artificial ones the Zonn left behind?” asked Nunu. The Zonn Empire was a half-mythical civilization that had conquered half the galaxy and then disappeared long before Humans or Trills had even evolved. The legends described a race that was as wondrously technically advanced as they were ruthless and cruel, making whole worlds just vanish for minor infractions of their rules.

“Except no one but the Zonn ever figured out how to open those wormholes,” said Mom and began backing our ship away from the opening, “I don't know what that thing is. Unless it's a transwarp conduit.”

“Let's hope not!” gasped Nunu, “Let's hope the Zonn are back!”

“Why?” I asked. (What could be worse than the Zonn?!!)

“That's why!” said Mom as something came creeping out of the hole at impulse speed.

Something impossible huge, and square, and black. The gigantic vessel moved silently in the vacuum of space, but if this was a holoflicker deep ominous sinister music would be thundering.

It was the Borg.
.

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End of Part O01. NEXT: Assimilated

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THE AFTER-THE CLOSING-CREDITS THINGY:
(Deleted scene)

I fell asleep and dreamed that I was serving on a Federation vessel, a big exploration ship, but this was back in the past during that brief period about a century ago when the top ranks of Star Fleet had been infiltrated by a secret cabal of lecherous old men who made all the women in the fleet wear dresses so short that their panties were always at risk of showing. But I was female now and had the legs and the boobs to pull off such an outfit, and unprofessional as this outfit was I liked how I looked in it. And I was having fun flirting with a cute blonde yeoman named Rand; probably more confident and forward than I would be when I was awake.

Our ship was on a humanitarian mission, carrying thousands of tons of grain to some starving planet. Which seems weird because they've always had freighters for that, but dreams never make any sense.

And there were tribbles everywhere.