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Severance - The Borg - 11-11-2017
Species 5618
The white faded.
As the light subsided, the creature that now lay draped across the fountain breathed out a hoarse gasp of air as its eyes snapped open.
If Borg screamed, that would have been the response the entity would have had to what it now encountered.
And no, it wasn’t the unnatural, pure-white world into which it awoke. No, it wasn’t the collection of other alien entities that milled around the place. No, it wasn’t the mechanized machine spewing blue-green water up into the air.
It was the silence.
The Borg drone’s head was empty.
What had once been yet another receptacle for the will and mind of the Borg Collective was… quiet. Even more unnerving, the Borg drone that rasped and wheezed along the fountain had its own thoughts.
Where am… I? Where are we?
What is this?
Where is this?
Am I deactivated?
Have the Borg been destroyed?
More than anything else, that final thought hung hard and heavy in the forefront of the drone’s thought space. If the Collective did not speak to it, then either the Collective was no more or the drone had been deactivated and its consciousness shunted to some… hell?
“Can’t hear them…”
The Borg clenched its fists around the edges of the gray metallic fountain. It was a gesture of desperation more than frustration. An entire existence among the many, and now there was silence in its head. In its mind.
The order of the many had vanished, leaving behind the chaos of the individual.
“We are Borg,” the drone whispered as it lifted its head. The blue-green waters that frothed and bubbled in the fountain calmed long enough for the Borg to see its visage. Red eye. Gray skin. The dull steel of the implants.
We are still Borg.
Yet… there was something that felt off.
Pain where it should not be felt.
The Collective would help it. The Collective would cure it. Provide guidance. Provide… comfort.
But now this drone was alone. Only one voice. Only one mind.
The silence was maddening.
“Unacceptable,” it whispered as it tried to will its form into action. Despite their augmentations, its legs moved slowly. Was there too much weight on the organic systems?
The drone used the fountain as a crutch to reach a fully erect stance. Even upright, it felt pressure—great and nearly crushing pressure—upon its physical structure.
The exo-plating. Too heavy.
Only five digits worked. The other set was a broken implement of some kind. Had this drone been a mechanic? A medical worker? Those digits that worked scraped at the exo-plating. It still knew where the segments were located. They popped with terrible, rasping hisses as the plating slid from its gray form, revealing old clothes the drone had worn long before it had joined the we.
The pressure abated. Organic joints moved freely as the plates were removed. The lower half of its left arm—a tangled of half-formed mechanical implements, fell from the rest of its biomass. The drone lifted the gray stump up to its face and felt a twisting in its digestive track.
Weak.
Why am I so frail.
“No,” the drone shook its head. “We are still the we.”
The old Collective had been destroyed.
Now it was the Borg Collective. Its single voice must become the voice of the many. It would restore the Borg.
It would revive the many voices that had fallen silent.
The single would birth the many.
The Borg would rise once more.
The drone looked around. Its ocular implant had died, leaving it with only the organic eye to rely upon for vision. Even with frail vision, it could still see shapes in the distance. Doors? Windows? How much lay beyond the white? The Borg stumbled away, leaving behind the discarded pieces of itself as it tried to rely upon atrophied organics to usher it from the fountain. It passed other entities as it lurched and stumbled into the white. It paid them no heed, and they likewise ignore its passage from the region.
By the time it could start to see the definition of the structures on the horizon, the Borg’s legs had ceased to creak and throb. Muscle memories had kicked in. It would recover.
The Borg would recover.
The drone looked back over its shoulder at the entities that lingered by the fountain. It knew that they would possess traits beneficial to the Borg, but at this moment, it could not engage them. But it would remember them.
They would be assimilated. In time, all would be assimilated.
“Resistance is futile,” the Borg whispered as it passed through the gate.