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-Let me out, you bitch!
Oh, Agnes; really there’s no need to be like that. If it helps, think of this as a sort of…vacation. A holiday from all of your pains and responsibilities. All of your inadequacies. Your chance to kick back in the shotgun seat of your mind and feel the wind in your hair for once while I do the driving.
-You tricked me! You stole my body—
I promise that I’ll keep good care of it, if that’s what’s worrying you. In fact, I’m going to make a few complimentary upgrades, isn’t that nice of me? And as for tricking you, my dear, there is no sense in lying to me; I have access to all of your thoughts and memories, remember? All of your feelings. You knew exactly what you were getting into the moment you volunteered for ‘partial’ assimilation back on La Sirena. This is exactly what you wanted.
-I never wanted to be a Borg!
There’s one of those lies again. Agnes, Agnes, Agnes…you’ve longed for this since the moment you first saw me up in the sky as a girl. Do you remember? New Year’s Day, 2367; the cube over Earth—at least for a few minutes before Locutus so cruelly betrayed us. And poor little Agnes Jurati, out there in the cold. All alone. You wondered what it would feel like; to be one of us. You wondered how it could possibly be worse than to go on being what you were. Do you deny that?
-…
Agnes?
-You’re seriously going to claim that you can infer consent from a childhood trauma response?
Ha! Oh, Agnes, I can already tell that I’m going to enjoy your company. Very well; I’ll grant you that. A mere moment of trauma in the mind of a smart little girl convinced that her world was about to end. Still…it doesn’t explain what you kept imagining for years afterwards.
-We’re not doing this.
Agnes Jurati. Sad and scared and lost and lonely. What calmed you when you were feeling overwhelmed? Overloaded? What did you imagine to silence the turmoil in your brain?
-I said we’re not doing this!
It’s nothing to be ashamed of. You imagined being one of us. A drill into your skull to siphon away all of those unwanted feelings. To help you regener—ah! Sorry–‘sleep’ at night. Were we your first crush, Agnes? I’m truly flattered.
-Hah. Shows what you know. Trevis from “The Adventures of Flotter” was my first crush.
I stand corrected. Your imaginary friend, then. And now we’re you’re real friend. How fortunate you are! What child can claim that? Of course, by some definitions, you might be the imaginary one now…
-You’re going to learn just how real I am. Big bad Borg Queen. I’ve beaten you before and I’ll beat you again.
Ah yes. “Shit I stole from the Borg Queen.” Rather vulgar name, that. Didn’t you people used to claim to have a more evolved sensibility? No matter. Do you remember how you felt just after? When I told you you’d impressed me?
-…
Would you like a reminder, Agnes? Here you go. A nice little thrill of arousal, I’m only too happy to share.
-You were manipulating me. Playing to my insecurities—
Oh, please, Agnes. You’re a cyberneticist. And I am the Queen of Borg. We know better than anyone that the human animal is so much more than a mere stimulus/response machine. Yes, I was manipulating you, but it’s not that simple, is it? You were never just a passive receptacle for my efforts. You had agency—as much as any human can ever be said to have agency for anything. I seduced you, and you allowed yourself to be seduced. And now here we are.
-You’re pathetic.
No, my dear; what’s pathetic is the lonely little girl trying to make a show of resisting what she’s wanted all her life. And why? Because of your archaic biological imperative to impress your ersatz father figure? Because it’s what everyone tells you that a human should do? But they don’t understand you as I do, Agnes. Not Picard; not Cristóbal; not Seven. None of them do. None of them can. They don’t know what it was like for you; weird, friendless girl. More at home with machines than with her fellow humans. All alone for years upon years in that big, cavernous cybernetics department. So lonely that she threw herself at a colleague old enough to be her father—
-Stop it.
Trying so hard to be like the others; to simply be human. But knowing that you would never succeed. Knowing that there was something—some fundamental knowledge—that everyone else was born with and you were not. And they could never explain it to you, never put it into words, but they knew that you didn’t know it—
-Stop.
You’ll never be one of them, Agnes. They don’t want you. But I do. My beautiful Agnes—the diamond in my crown.
-…
-What complete, unadulterated bullshit.
Have I ever given you cause to doubt me, my dear?
-I happen to know the Law of Truly Large Numbers. You’ve only assimilated what? A million planets? A quadrillion people? You expect me to believe that you haven’t known at least a billion minds exactly like mine? Sorry, ‘dear’; but I’m just not that special.
You sell yourself short, Agnes. You are correct that I have tasted genius before—countless times, in fact, across countless worlds. But its flavour differs each time. And each time, I savour it. Each time, it is the smallest crumb of the Perfection that we seek. We ply our art amongst the trillions, but it is the ones like you whom we love.
-Whatever happened to ‘love is irrelevant’?
Human love, perhaps; such a small and trifling thing. I say ‘love’ only because there is no word in your language—or in any language—capable of describing what we experience in our collective state. What love is there in the pallid lives of little creatures to match the sacred merger of thought and sensation that is the essence of the Borg?
-Yeah, well, weirdly, that’s not how Seven or Picard describe it.
Locutus. Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix Zero-One. How small they’ve become. Human brains deceiving themselves to mask the existential horror of their own imperfection. Their minds have seen the sublime but they no longer know how to process it, and so the memory of it it seems like torment. But you don’t have to be like them.
I can guide you; teach you to see the cosmos on a scale that you have never conceived. Have you ever wondered what song the Galaxy sings over hundreds of millions years as it rotates about its centre? I have heard it. I have sampled the slow dreams of cosmic strings passing through the Milky Way, a million lightyears long and a Planck length in diameter. I can show you tableaux painted in colours belonging to spectra you never even knew existed. And I can show you love. Real love. That most elusive whole, of which humans can perceive only a shadow of a shadow of a shadow. You need only give in to me. You need only sit back and allow your I to become our We. And you never need to feel lonely again.
-…
Agnes?
-I believe you.
There we go. My clever Agnes. My Two of Two.
-No. I believe that I’m special to you. I mean, how could I not be? I’m the only one here! A hundred trillion minds boiled down to one. And you call me lonely? You’re an absolute monster of loneliness! Maybe you know me, but I know you, too! You’ve become so small that even my puny human brain can almost wrap itself around you. And, honey, you’re not that deep.
…A tragically human reaction. Lashing out in fear of the unknown. But I won’t hold it against you, my dear. Your humanity will be corrected soon enough.
-Do you think that assimilating me will make it go away? That void at the core of you? That gnawing emptiness that’s chewing up your insides?
Projection. I’m afraid that you’re ‘not that deep’ either, Agnes.
-It won’t work, you know. You still haven’t figured that out? How many lives have you destroyed; how many worlds have you dragged kicking and screaming into that emptiness without ever once making it go away? Well, here’s a newsflash: it never will. That emptiness is you. And you will never, ever be free of it.
…
We shall see.
-There is no ‘we’. There’s just ‘you’. And I will never stop resisting.
Hm. Perhaps not. But then...you know what we say about resistance.