Chapter 46
The reign of One of Many, née Annika Hansen; Queen of Borg.
Year 01, Month 04, Day 05, Hour 14, Minute 47.
"Status," Seven said shortly as she walked into conference room one.
"My Queen, the situation has been confirmed," Captain Wolkav Zakad'e said hesitantly.
Seven closed her eyes for a moment. "You mean that it has been confirmed that there are no other options."
"Yes, my Queen. When cube 2,975,884 was caught in the event horizon, their shields acted as a conductor and the subspace tear closed around the cube instead of spreading."
"How did the tear start in the first place, and why was the cube there to be caught in it?" B'Elanna asked.
Wolkav turned to her before explaining, "My Princess, the cube being caught was nothing more than sheer coincidence. A lottery on stellar proportions. They were on a routine mission for drone redistribution. Pick some people up here, drop some people off there. Nothing that thousands of other cubes aren't doing at this very moment. There was no set route that is traveled at specific times. It was a matter of simply having to be in different places and picking out the most efficient schedule for doing so. A cube has never before been in that exact spot in space. But,"
"But on the one instant in time that one of our cubes happens to pass through an otherwise perfectly safe part of space, a subspace anomaly erupts," B'Elanna finished as she dropped into one of the empty chairs.
"Yes, my Princess. As for the tear forming... it's so rare that it actually took six hours of digging in the Main Data Storage Facility to find that the Borg have witnessed something similar before. Twice in the entire existence of the Borg. The last time we were advanced enough to actually study the event. As you know, there are several universes that exist at the same time, just that normally they don't interact because they take up different dimensions."
"We know," Seven assured. "We are well informed in the matters of Quantum Mechanics. While on Voyager we had an encounter with a Voyager from an alternate Universe. As a matter of fact, both Naomi Wildman and Harry Kim are actually from that universe."
"The simple explanation most often used so that people understand it, is chance," B'Elanna added. "If an event has several potential outcomes, then all of them happen. Just that they happen in different universes that are as real to the people living in them as our universe is to us. We just happen to be in the universe where the cube got stuck. In millions, maybe even billions, of other universes that never happened."
Wolkav nodded. "The problem is that sometimes some of those universes are unstable and collapse. Normally this goes unnoticed because we have no connection to those universes from ours. But sometimes those collapsing universes are close enough to ours to do some damage."
"Kinda like a house being torn down and some of the falling bricks taking a window of your house out," B'Elanna said as she made a 'go on' motion with her hand. Indicating with both, the motion and the statement, that they understood the explanation, and that they wanted Wolkav to move on. Not that they didn't appreciate the explanation, it was simply that in this situation it was not needed.
"Well, those proverbial bricks then do damage to our universe in the form of a subspace tear. An explosion of space itself, if you like." He hesitated before adding, "The last time this happened there was nothing there to regulate the event, so to speak, and the event spread. It destroyed everything in a thirty light-year radius around the event. It took over fifty-thousand years before faster than light speeds were even possible in that area."
B'Elanna groaned. "Let me guess, the area is now a huge sphere of almost empty space. The only thing left is an extremely high level of dark matter, which results in you not even being able to see the stars outside the event once you enter this area." Before Wolkav could confirm, she added. "We came across an area like that once on Voyager. We didn't know what it was. We only knew that it was so big that we had to get through it instead of around it. It was somewhere in..." She looked at Seven.
"Though not in our space, the Borg call it sector 354.994."
"Then we are speaking about the same event, because that is the area of space I was talking about," Wolkav agreed.
"So," Seven said slowly, "The options are still as following. The cube does have the power to break free, simply by entering transwarp and traveling out of the event before it can collapse and forms the explosion. However, that would mean the destruction of all in a several thousand light-year radius, including three Borg planets and several billion drones."
Her statement was answered with a nod. So she continued with the next option. "We cannot leave the cube in the event while the event wears itself out because we cannot beam through the radiation, so we cannot save the crew. Plus we do not know how powerful the explosion on the other side is going to be and the brunt of the destruction of the other universe might destroy the then unmanned cube, and still destroy those three planets. Or,"
"Or," B'Elanna spoke up so that Seven didn't have to say it. "The cube can initiate a self-destruct, which will result in a counter explosion that will be enough to close the tear and save the planets. Save them by sacrificing the cube."
"Yes, my Princess," Wolkav agreed.
"How long before you need to know?" Seven asked.
"My Queen," Wolkav said slowly, "Every minute waited is a fraction of a percentage closer to the chance that the event horizon will destroy the ship in a blowout explosion that simply pushes the cube out of the event horizon while destroying it. When that happens the explosion of the cube will not even register on the scale of things. But now the explosion of the ship will still be enough to close the rift."
"How certain are you that it will work?" Seven asked.
"At this moment? I asked Lach and he gave me the numbers a few minutes ago. Lach has estimated a 98% chance of success. And you know him and numbers."
Seven gave a fond smile that immediately disappeared again. She closed her eyes. "Hail them. First the captain, then a ship-wide. But do not use a Hive message link. The Hive can analyze a computer generated transcript of the the recording later."
"Yes, my Queen," Wolkav said as he linked to the Computer to make the preparations. A moment later he pointed at a viewscreen that came alive with the image of a relatively young man that looked not much older than Seven herself. "My Queen, Captain Randr is awaiting your orders."
"Captain," Seven said softly. "We have been going over options."
"As have we," Captain Randr said in a deep and warm voice. "My Queen. We know what we need to do. I will order the self-destruct as soon as we finished talking."
"No," Seven said resolutely. "I will not settle someone else with making that choice. I am the Queen. My orders better the lives of so many, and sometimes they kill. I will take the weight of this. Captain Randr, thank you for your extraordinary service to the Borg, and me. I hereby order you to initiate the self-destruct of your ship. Set the timer for five minutes."
"My Queen?" The Captain asked, surprised about the five minute timeframe.
"Five minutes, starting as soon as you opened a ship-wide broadcast."
"Yes, my Queen. Ship-wide is active, now."
Seven spent a minute to quickly explain to them what she was sure that they already knew; they were Borg drones after all. With four minutes left on the timer she said, "I know that you saw this coming, and you already spent your time in the past hours thinking about your faith, and about the people you know and leave behind, and the people that are now with you. I could tell you about the greater good, but you also know that. You are Borg after all. Instead I want to ask you to close your eyes, if your station allows for it. Close your eyes and listen to me. Yesterday I was on the holodeck with B'Elanna and Vasha. We were playing in the sand on a wonderful beach. We..."
She continued to unfold her story. Her voice had the warmth that she normally reserved for B'Elanna and their closest friends. It was enthralling, and it made you want to picture the scene she was describing. It made you forget about other things, especially if you wanted to forget. The drones on the cube realized only too well what she was doing. The Borg Queen was giving them a final gift of sharing an experience with them that no other Borg drone would ever get such a first hand description of. The Queen was sharing a moment of her life with them.
Seven looked at the timer, ten seconds left. "How could we be angry at her after that? Vasha had just said 'love you' for the first time."
Five. She laughed. "I think she knows us only too well."
Three. "She has discovered the power of the word love."
One. "I love you, every one of you, thank you."
She closed her eyes and a tear escaped as fifty thousand voices went silent. "Captain?" She finally asked.
"The long-range sensors of all three planets confirmed that the tear has closed."
"Thank you." Without another word she turned and left the conference room. B'Elanna followed, but Pagsha and Katzi didn't. They knew what would come now. They had seen it before. They knew that they were welcome to follow them into the Royal Quarters, but they felt that it was too private.
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Seven didn't hesitate and almost fell into her lover's open arms. They were quiet for almost an hour, just sitting there on the couch while B'Elanna simply held the Borg Queen.
"I just killed 50,382 people," Seven finally said softly. B'Elanna knew that this was coming. The first time this had happened she had done the obvious, tried to convince Seven that she hadn't. But how could you truly counter the fact that, yes, she had? How could B'Elanna say that Seven had not killed half a million people then by ordering the fleet that was attacking a Borg planet destroyed? They might have been the enemy. You might bring in arguments like, that they asked for it, or that by giving the order, many more lives were saved in the end. But still, if you looked at the evidence, the fact remained that Seven had given the order, that Seven had indeed killed them by giving the order.
Oh, B'Elanna knew that this would not last. The next day Seven would once again be absolutely confident in her conviction that the greater good needed sacrifices sometimes. Tomorrow she would remember that she had just saved billions of lives by ordering fifty thousand lives to end. Tomorrow Seven would once again think that being the Borg Queen was a good thing. Tomorrow.
"Tell me about them. Show me that they won't be forgotten," She urged softly while placing a soft kiss on Seven's forehead.
"Thirteenth Officer Lia Orloz," Seven began. "He was so young that he had to beg his mother to be allowed to join the Borg. He wanted the adventure. To travel between the stars before coming back and helping her with her business. Now he never will. She has no other children, nobody else to train in the business, to keep the company that has been in their family for generations alive. Eleventh Officer Gran'l G'ranl. She just gave birth two weeks ago. Oh, Lanna, there were five infants on that ship. Five beings that were even younger than Vasha."
"Tell me," B'Elanna urged. Closing her eyes and willing the tears not to come.
"Gran'l was so happy when she found out that she could have children. A genetic defect had prevented her from having children before she joined the Borg. She was so happy that she cried when she found out. She..."
~~~~~~~~~~{}~~~~~~~~~~
The reign of One of Many, née Annika Hansen; Queen of Borg.
Year 01, Month 05, Day 06, Hour 04, Minute 41.
Seven looked around in great confusion. She was standing in the middle of a truly beautiful nature scene. A glade, covered with short grass and the occasional bunch of wildflowers spread before her. Behind her, and to the right, were the big trees of an ancient forest. While on the left there was a slow moving riverand behind it once again ancient trees. And in front of her, across the glade, was a small cliff with a small, but beautiful, waterfall that fed the river. It was a warm and sunny day with only a few thin clouds in the sky. It was beautiful; a place where you would love to spend an afternoon doing nothing but listen to the soft sounds of the waterfall, and maybe cuddle with your lover.
The only problem with it was that Seven shouldn't be there. She had gone to sleep in her bed on Unimatrix 01, with B'Elanna in her arms.
"What the hell?"
Seven looked behind her when hearing the exclamation in a voice she knew so well. Where seconds before there was nothing but grass, now there was B'Elanna. Seven noted that B'Elanna was dressed in her favorite 'comfy home clothing' outfit; a gray sleeveless T-shirt, and a pair black sweatpants. Looking down at her own body, Seven noted that she herself was dressed in her favorite Zamonan outfit; a leather top that was just decent enough to also be worn outside of quarters, and a leather skirt that came halfway down her thighs, both in a yellowy/brown earth color. And, she also noted, neither of them was wearing shoes.
"B'Elanna? Is that truly you, or am I dreaming?"
Despite the situation, B'Elanna chuckled at the question. "Baby, even if this was a dream, do you really think that I'd say that I wasn't real? But no, I don't think this is a dream. All of this is much too coherent for that. Maybe we're on some kind of holodeck?"
"Actually, you're in my world," Another voice suddenly spoke up.
They both turned to the voice and saw an older man about ten meters away. He too hadn't been there mere moments before.
"My Queen, my Princess. I hope you can forgive me for bringing you here, but I, we, thought that it was time that we brought our existence to your attention. And hopefully could persuade you to let us serve the Borg with more than just being some of the many voices."
"Who are you, and where the hell are we?" B'Elanna asked.
"I am one of the Ancients, as we like to call ourselves. Once we were known as the Grakee, then we were known as species 3, and then we were just some of the many voices. I have long since forgotten what name I personally went by before joining the Borg, but once I joined the Borg I became 3 of 29,842; I guess you could call me Three."
"Species three?" Seven asked, surprised by the low number. Long ago the Borg had formed when several different species that lived in the same solar system had united themselves into one group. B.O.R.G. had once stood for the four letters that indicated the name that this united group had given themselves. Then things had changed when a small group of people that wanted to bring more unity to this group had created the first version of the neural link and had started to unite their voices into one linked Collective. Soon after that they started adding the rest of the Borg group; whether they wanted to or not. But none of those first species had been species 1, 2, or more. They had simply been 'the Borg.' Species 1 had been the first species that had been added to the Collective that had not been part of the original BORG group before.
Going from that, the man in front of her had to be a member of the third species added to the Collective after the BORG was a fact. But as Seven searched her mind for information, she could only find that species 3 had been added to the Collective 473,853 years ago. She told the man as much.
"You are correct, my Queen. Unlike species 1 and 2, we actually wanted to join the Borg," He explained. "We saw the potential and we saw that we could bring joy to people that could appreciate our ability instead of hunting us down for it like others had been doing for centuries. Once there were billions of us, but by the time we entered Borg space there was only a group of almost sixty thousand refugees left. The Borg took us in, protected us from our pursuers and we shared our gift with them. For over two hundred millennia we existed like that and the Borg were complacent with what they had, never truly wanting to expand more than they already had."
"So you're almost half a million years old?" B'Elanna asked because the man kept talking about 'we' and 'us'.
"I am. But unlike what you might believe from what I told you until now, we were not a long-living species. Our average lifespan was only half of that of your species, my Princess. But the existence of the Hive mind enabled us to do something no other species the Borg ever encountered before, or since, could do. When our bodies died, we noticed that we did not. We continued to exist as... spirits you might say. We were part of the Hive mind. We continued on while the others go silent when their body dies. We didn't mind; in fact, we loved it. We were proud to be a part of the Borg and we were glad that we could continue to provide our services to the Borg for apparently as long as the Borg will exist."
"I assume this changed, since I do not know of your existence, nor what your services are," Seven guessed.
"It did, my Queen. As for our services, I will get to that in a moment, but," the man lifted his arms to indicate the surroundings, "This should give you a good indication. But yes, things changed. The Borg then were not the Borg now. Now there are many safeguards in place, created because trial and error showed that they were needed. As you saw when your daughter joined the Hive for the first time, within seconds of detecting an unauthorized presence the purging procedure was started. When we joined and eventually died of old age such safeguards did not exist yet."
"I believe that the automatic detection of new entities in the Hive was added about one thousand years ago," Seven said, mostly for B'Elanna's benefit.
"936 years ago to be precise," Three clarified. "As said, back when we joined safeguards like that didn't exist. Then two hundred millennia after we joined a new species entered Borg space and they were added to the Collective. They were expansionistic by nature and their minds were strong. From them the Borg got the urge to expand, something we hadn't done for those two hundred millennia. In itself this still wasn't bad. The bad part came when because of this expansion drive, we came in contact with more and more species, which were added to the Collective. The Collective changed with every species. Once we negotiated, much like you do now, my Queen, then we simply started to take. Species no longer joined the Collective; they were assimilated. The mind of the Collective changed to where only the Collective was important and the rest just had to adapt."
Three smiled before adding, "By now I'm sure you're wondering how we fit into this. Well, once we were honored for the services that we provided the Borg, then things changed there as well. We were considered a threat because we gave people an opportunity to think freely. Then the Collective we were once such a proud part of started to hunt us down just like those others had done so long ago. But luckily for us it's not easy to catch ghosts. Nowadays, with the security measures in place, we would be caught within minutes. But we had turned into 'ghosts' before those measures were in place, and from then on we were on the inside so to speak, and all security measures implemented considered us authorized identities."
"And that's all it takes?" B'Elanna asked. "Once you're a drone labeled 'safe' you can't be caught? But then, how come we're very capable of finding those drones that harbor dangerous thoughts so that we can kick them out of the Collective?"
"Because they have a body," Three explained. "Their voice might be one of many voices in the hive, but it's still clearly connected to a physical entity. Since we didn't have physical bodies the Borg could not find us as long as we acted as just some of the many voices. While hunting us down the Hive mind would close in on one of us and we would go, what we called 'silent'; become just one of the many voices. Even add suggestions as such a voice on how to find those ghosts. But we knew, we knew that we could do this for only so long before the Borg would start searching for a technology that would enable them to catch the ghosts in their midst. So we went silent permanently. We became just some of the many voices. The Borg stopped hunting us, believing that we had faded out of existence; we had not. We merely went to sleep, waiting for the time where the Borg would change again and we could awake."
Three shook his head a little. "But it was a long time. Safeguards that weren't there before had been set up, the Borg made sure that adding more species would no longer change them, but would change those species. The Borg Collective was safe from the risks that adding new species and new ideas to the Collective could bring. Unfortunately they never changed to where the changes awakened us again. That is, not until you negotiated with the Siill and showed the Hive that negotiating with species might bring benefits, and that you would nevertheless do whatever it would take to neutralize a threat to the Borg Collective. This awakened us and showed us that it might be time to offer our services once more."
"And your services being a fake environment?" B'Elanna asked.
"This environment is very real," Three disagreed. "You could drink from the water of that river, or you could drown in it. It's just that while it's real, it also doesn't exist. Right now you and my Queen are still lying in bed, asleep."
"That makes no sense," B'Elanna noted. "Still lying in bed, doesn't exist... sounds pretty unreal to me. So tell me, how is this different than a dream, and why is this something that we wouldn't be able to offer people by something as simple as a holodeck?"
Three walked over to a picnic table that was suddenly standing beside him and sat down; making a hand gesture to offer the other side of the table to the two women. Once they were sitting, he continued.
"A dream is nothing more than the brain processing information that is already stored in the brain. This is why dreams are sometimes so strange, because different parts of information are added together while there really is no connection between them. That's also why the Borg were able to use dreams to try and lure you back, my Queen. They were using information that was already in your brain. Deeply hidden and normally inaccessible, but it was there never the less. Entering this world also involves the brain, but that's where all similarities end. When you're awake, all that you experience, all that you see, taste, smell, feel... all of it is processed by the brain and then translated into information that lets you as a person realize that you see a tree, smell grass, taste water, feel how warm and soft the skin of your lover is."
Three stopped for a moment to see if the women were with him so far. Then he continued. "This world skips the first step of processing information and goes directly to interpretation and giving that information to the brain. Your brain is now receiving the information that it hears water falling from that waterfall, that you're now sitting on a bench. Your brain registers the information my world is giving it, therefore you now feel as if you're sitting on a bench, but you are in reality lying in bed."
"So," B'Elanna said slowly, trying to see if she understood. "What you're saying is that while not a real place, this place is still real to us because the information is processed exactly the same way in our brain as it normally would process the information coming from our senses, like smell and touch, outside this world. There would be absolutely no difference in perception for me if I were sitting in a situation like this for real, or now in this world that you created."
Three smiled, glad to see that his guests understood the concept so far. "A very precise summation. Also, this world is active, not reactive. You've never been in this location, yet you see the waterfall, you could decide to go stand under it, or not. Your choice, but the point is that you actually do have that choice."
"But not the choice to come here, or leave," Seven pointed out. "You brought us here, and we have no idea how we could leave now."
"For now, that's true," Three admitted. "But that's only because you don't yet know how to leave. Allow me to explain. Normally a person in this world would have no control over it, save making physical changes. If you had the tools you could actually cut those trees down and use them to make a cabin, and the next time you would visit, that cabin would still stand there. As such this too is a real world. Something doesn't disappear simply because you left the world for the moment. Unlike a holodeck this world cannot be reset, with the exception of me actually changing it back to an older state. Every minute spent here is a minute in your physical life as well; therefore you could call this a 'real time' environment. Our worlds don't stop existing simply because someone left them. They only stop existing if we, the makers, stop allowing their existence."
"Alright, I get the real time part," B'Elanna noted. "But what about leaving it?"
"Normally there's one thing in our worlds that everyone does control for themselves and can access at any time. Everyone has a personal door that they can activate by thinking that they want to open it. It actually compares to the new Borg link where someone has to specifically think that they want to open a channel. If you think of your personal door like that, it will appear wherever you are and you can leave. When you step through the door you will then wake up, or go back to the comatose regenerating; depending on what you were doing when you got here. As you can guess, this 'door' is really simply a manifestation of the exit and therefore will be there whenever you want to exit. Coming here is different though. Once, when our services were still in demand, people had to make a choice when they went to regenerate. If the picked program one, they would regenerate without entering our world, and if they picked program two, they would enter it."
B'Elanna frowned. "So, besides the real time thing, which can be argued as even being a drawback, care to tell me why this place is different than a holodeck? Personally I only see advantages to holodeck. You can reset, you can pick places to go to without having you first create that place. And so on."
"True," Three agreed. "There are advantages to a holodeck over this word. Just like this world has advantages over a holodeck. For instance, there's the obvious fact that you're now still lying in bed and therefore you don't need a special room that is lined with holo-emitters. There would be no limited 'holodeck time' that is available and has to be divided because there's only a limited number of holodecks available. But these are just small side-benefits. The real benefit, and the reason why we were once so admired by the Borg, is because this is not limited by distance. With a holodeck you still need two people physically together if they want to spend time together; with our world this is not needed."
"As you should know, we have created the ability to have people on different holodecks interact with each other," Seven pointed out. "It is how our Royal Guard are being trained."
Continued...