Star Traks: BorgSpace In the world of Star Traks, an age-old question is asked: If these are the best of the best, what happens to those that are not? The Borg would have the unassimilated believe that there is no such thing as an imperfect drone. However, due to assimilation imperfection, approximately four thousand drones wind up with personalities improperly destroyed by the Collective. While they still desire to be Borg and seek Perfection, they are simplyŠnot One with the Collective. Instead of interest only in the good of the Whole, they also have hobbies/personality problems. Some enjoy cooking, while other drones play poker. Some hallucinate, and others hold séances. To rid itself of these drones, a single Exploratory-class cube, Cube #347, is assigned as a repository for the imperfect, an asylum kept as far from the Borg central consciousness as possible. In Seasons 5 and on, Cube #347 is tossed 500 years into the future. In this future, the Borg Collective has only recently recovered from self-imposed mental block created to soften the Collective into the Hive. The Hive was a new, gentler, Collective created as part of a vast chain of events to allow for the ultimate triumph of the Borg. The enemies of the Collective are the Second Federation, and the Borg Colors, Hive fragments where one particular personality attribute is represented over all others. For example, the largest, Green, is obsessed with money, and believes that with enough, it will eventually be able to simply purchase Perfection. Others Colors include Red, an extremely aggressive faction; Yellow, currently believed to be located somewhere between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, fleeing from anything that moves; and the short- lived Black, which only existed for as long as it took to plunge into the nearest star. There are fringe Colors with fewer drones and fewer ships, but they all have had, at some point, a story. This is one example. Deep in subsection 14, deep in the bowels of Cube #347, in an area rarely visited by most drones, an alcove was wedged between two of the primary matter transporter buffers. Next to it, a customized data node allowed access to the minutest details of the subsystem. Currently standing at the node was single drone. Despite the deathly color of normal Borg skin, it was readily apparent that this particular drone was even paler. The drone's designation was 142 of 203, and while technically part of assimilation, Delta had seized temporary use of him, being of the philosophy that the right tool for the job should be used no matter the cost. In this case, his particular function was to monitor the automatic algorithms, which controlled the transporters. 142 of 203 had been, before his assimilation, an infamous hacker on a small planet somewhere in vicinity of Betelgeuse. His viruses had been the scourge of many worlds. Then the Borg arrived; and when, despite assimilation, his continued obsession with code became apparent, he was shipped off to Cube #347. At the moment, 142 of 203 was incredibly bored. His ramped up algorithms were performing within parameters, and there was therefore no need to devote full attention to his assigned task. Instead, he was performing a function he found far more interesting: cracking the second layer of security around the financial records of the current Grand Nagus of the Ferengi. It was an inventive multi-layered defense, with a specialized rotating algorithm, but he figured he could crack most of it within a day or three. He added a few more lines of code to his scratch-written passkey generator, and then tried requesting access again. Suddenly, even as he felt the defense line drop, an aggressive virus program shoved its way back toward him. He mentally grinned, thinking about adding it to his personal file protection, and pushed it into a data module for storage before moving on to examine the next layer of code. It was even more complex than the last, and the cracking program needed would require the resources of a small Color to break, including programming and debugging. He saved his current modifications, and checked in on the transporters. Everything remained optimal, so he moved on to another of his pet projects. Carefully prepping his console, he grabbed a datacube from a large stack on the floor and inserted it into a slot in the top. His screen blanked for a second, then started scrolling text as the program ran through checks before initializing fully. It stopped, blanked again, then a message appeared on screen in cheery type, accompanied by an image of a starship view screen divided into colored bits: "Welcome to Viewports v24956.9.282.47.184.3.4!" As he opened the latest of a series of files on the new OS, his mind wandered to an earlier thought: //Would require the resources of a small Color to break. Require the resources of a small Color. The resources of a small Color. A small Color.// Suddenly, he wondered, "Why not?" He fired up a code editor and began work on a new project: a virus to take over the cube, and specifically the temporal drive nodes. Several months later, pandemonium reigned on Cube #347. 279 of 300, the resident pyromaniac, was loose yet again. {FIRE! Fire is good. Fire is NEAT! Fire will CLEANSE this cube! Fire fire fire fire fire fire fire!} As the messages of a fundamentally misaligned drone broadcast both verbally and through the dataspaces, Weapons and his hierarchy were having fun tromping around the cube and firing at anything that looked to be 279 of 300. Meanwhile, Delta and her engineering hierarchy were busy both putting out fires and repairing damage caused by overeager weapons drones. Deep inside subsection 14, where no fires had yet started, 142 of 203 was busy both monitoring the algorithms he was using to temporarily lift the censure filters on 279 of 300 and checking the program he would shortly be activating. Several minutes later, when the attention of all other drones was directed to stopping a fire that 279 of 300 had lit too close to the cube's primary reactor, the transporters and temporal cores combined their energies on one spot: a single alcove and data node in subsection 14. The reaction was immediate as several things happened at once. First, and most important, 279 of 300's censure programs slammed back on and locked him in place, the flame of the lighter in his hand mere centimeters from the gasoline soaked data pillar in front of him. Second, as cube functions returned to normal, the vinculum was noticed to not show signs of activity on any Collective channels. Activity on other fractal bands continued to register, so there were Borg, or at least, drones of some kind, but something was horribly wrong. Before the panic loop that was ramping up in the sub-collective's dataspaces could reach critical, Sensors broke in. {Sensors sees [damp sponge] residue. Chroniton [sand] detected. Temporal travel likely.} Command and control moved to the forefront, taking a more active role in the internal conversation, leaping on the data with the speed of a school of piranhas on a cow. As the sensory hierarchy worked overtime to pinpoint time and location, one drone spoke up from the bottom of the sub-collective. {Anyone know where 142 of 203 is? I can't find his signature and he told me he wanted me to do something for him.} The mental signature indicated that the speaker was 126 of 230, one of drones responsible for the secondary pattern buffers and Delta's way of keeping an eye on the drones she borrowed from Assimilation's hierarchy. Even as the cube struggled to locate itself, and as attention turned inward toward repairs, another cube drew up next to Cube #347. All communication frequencies lit up with a transmission. "We are #66CC33. |2351574||C3 15 |=|_|71|_3. Your technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. All your base are belong to us." As command and control threw the hypertranswarp drive into action, headed anywhere but their current location, the sub-collective knew one obvious thing- something was very, very wrong. Hours later, after safety from immediate destruction had been assured, engineering and sensory hierarchies were examining the events leading up to the time trip. It was discovered that 142 of 203 had routed together two fundamentally different systems - the cube's chroniton bottles and the transporters. He had injected small amounts of chronitons (particles often associated with time travel, simultaneously affecting both time and space) into the matter stream, thereby destabilizing it. The backwash into cube systems from a secondary surge of excess chronitons had thrown the cube back in time, according to the calculations of the sensory hierarchy, almost 450 years. Engineering had puzzled over the data, but was unable to determine the precise times and amounts to inject the chronitons, which had apparently been stored on 142 of 203 personal brainware. If the correct amounts of chronitons were not introduced at the right times, the potential damage to the timeline or the cube (not to mention the energizee) could be irreparable. Unable to proceed directly, the sub-collective, reasoning that there had to be something non-#66CC33 out there, began scanning on all communications frequencies. "Hey, Admiral Bain! We've got something coming in on standard comm channels. Looks to be originating from just outside the phenomena. You want to answer?" The admiral sighed as the voice of the communication officer on duty came through to his informal command center onboard the mobile command ship New Hope. It had been another day in a long series of depressing days. The days had started over ten years prior, back when he had, as the comander of the USS Anomaly, helped the Green Borg with a problem. The now-defunct Dillion Corporation had inserted a virus into the Color's databanks that had turned them into walking advertisements for the company. Thankfully, he and the crew of the Anomaly had been able to delete it, or at least they thought they had. A few months later, the Green Borg had suddenly all converted to a Color that up until then had been fairly small, #66CC33, a Color based on coding its way to perfection. Later checks had revealed that the virus' coding had been subcontracted by the Dillion Corporation to this same Color, who had underbid several other groups in a round of secret biding. However, nothing the #66CC33 did was without reason. The virus was determined to have had secondary programs that jumped into other data storage systems to avoid detection, hibernating until called for by the #66CC33. The much- enlarged #66CC33 had subsequently managed to hack its way into pretty much everything, and then had gone quiet for a few years. When it came back, it had unleashed another virus, which brought every drone in the galaxy to their control. Then, it had set out to take over everything else it could. Ten years later, this refuge in the Badlands was one of a few remaining pockets of non-Borg sentients due to the fact that the phenomena had a debilitating effect on unprotected Borg computer technology. During the final days of the resistance, the massed First through Ninth Fleets, almost ninety ships with over ten thousand crew, had been nearly totally destroyed at Arconia IV. Bain had rallied the few remaining starships, in combination with unaligned and civilian vessels, into the Earth Defense Fleet for one final stand at Earth. However, resistance had ultimately proved futile. Utterly broken, he had subsequently led the survivors here to what had become the headquarters of the Federation Remnants. Their ongoing task was the defense and organization of the small group of survivors, who numbered around one billion. He sighed once more, and then said in a defeated voice, "Put them on." His desktop viewer lit up and briefly showed a test pattern before filling with a view of seemingly endless catwalks. "We are Borg Exploratory-class Cube #347. We require information. Resistance to providing it will be futile." Bain leaned back and stared at the screen. "Why should I believe you aren't #66CC33? They took over the Collective a decade ago." "We are not #66CC33." "Hang on." Bain reached out and punched the blinking "hold" button. The button stayed lit as he triggered his compip and spoke to the assistant he had been assigned a few weeks ago. "Jan, can you tell me what frequency their vinculum is on?" "Well, sir, there's a lot of activity around fractal band 1435." The voice of his assistant came back hesitant, a little nervous. She'd only come out of training a few months before and wasn't sure what she was expected to do. "Looks to be somewhere around the old Collective band, but I don't know how much to read into thatŠ," her voice trailed off as she ran out of speculations. "That's it then: arrange a data transfer of all records that pertain to the events surrounding the #66CC33 invasion and the Second Battle of Sol." "Why? All Borg use fractal channels." "Yes, but the #66CC33 only use bands around 1927.2 for better transmission speeds, and they aren't backwards compatible. They can't get in here with drones because of all the plasma disruption and they can't get into our systems. It can't do us any harm, and if they're not lying, it could do a world of good." For the first time in many years, Bain smiled. Aboard the cube, a barely controlled chaos broke out as command and control partitioned up the cube's complement to analyze the data packets that had been received. {There is only one possible solution. We must blast our way through to the central hub of the #66CC33, then force 142 of 203 to surrender the information necessary for our success.} As 45 of 300, the head of the weapons hierarchy and a wildly aggressive drone, continued to elaborate on the latest of a series of increasingly elaborate plans to destroy the #66CC33 - probability of success and cube survival 0.00000023% and falling - other drones were focused on more realistic schemes. However, the most important event was the findings of the engineering partition assigned to clean out the irrelevant excesses of computer hardware that had been left behind when 142 of 203 had time jumped. 152 of 230, one of the drones assigned to the task, turned and started moving toward the exit. Suddenly his foot caught on a low-to-ground wire that appeared on none of the specifications for the area, sending him sprawling. When he looked to see what the wire connected to, he smiled as best as any Borg could. A large arrangement of data modules were connected to a central core from which a cable protruded, leading to the where 142 of 203's data node had sat. {Well I'll be damned. He backed up his data.} There are two major schools of coding technique in the Second Federation. One was retro style, the idea of visual display of code on screen and entry of data through mouse and keyboard. The second was more popular, and involved the use of holographic technology to create a synthetic "world" based on the code, with interactions between the programmer and the simulation causing similar changes in the actual code. While 142 of 203 had preferred the first form for what he saw as its purity, most other programmers tended to use the second form for its functionality, especially if Borg assimilation made it possible to run the simulation on internal brainware. The sub-collective had always been in the second group, as it was easier to track rogue elements trying to perform their own impulses instead of the group task, a common problem among victims of assimilation imperfection. Captain, consensus monitor and facilitator of Cube #347 and officially designated 4 of 8, and the rest of command and control were working overtime to corral the more rogue members of the sub-collective in preparation for an attempt to break into 142 of 203's backup files. {All drones report to alcoves. Comply. 17 of 19, this means you. Souffles are irrelevant, even if you only need another three minutes.} There was a distant series of noises as 17 of 19 began returning knives and utensils to their storage hideaways, leaving behind his half-prepared dish. Captain closed his non-mechanical eye and sighed as transporters engaged and 17 of 19 returned to his assigned alcove. As soon as cube systems registered all drones ready, command of the cube was handed over to the subunit of 400 who were tasked with running the cube and keep it from falling out of orbit. The mental commands were entered, and 3600 drone consciousnesses dropped into the fringes of the security surrounding the backed-up data. The sub-collective found itself in the higher levels of a vast ocean, the murky water still lit from the surface. Annoyance fed through local drone channels as the sub- collective noted that, once again, it was represented by a school of small, gray, assimilated fish. Beneath them stretched a large conglomeration of nets, lures, predators, and other obstacles representing the levels of security that they had to penetrate before reaching the necessary data about 142 of 203's action prior to his jump through time. Assimilation hierarchy had been able to confirm the data's presence, but was unable to access it directly. The school dove, heading toward the first defense, a large net that spread as far as the eye could see, representing the primary layer of firewalls. The only opening was sealed by a gate locked with a simple padlock, showing the short password required to enter the databanks. It was a simple enough matter to pick the lock by flooding the system with millions of possible passwords at once. The lock snapped open after only a few seconds. The second level was a labyrinth of grates, which the sub-collective was forced to navigate through one drone at a time before proceeding on. Fish after fish went single- file through the maze, random thoughts of annoyance at dead ends and wrong turns echoing through the dataspaces. 20 of 230, an avid puzzler, recommended the solution: pick a wall and stick with it. After a few hours of work, the entire sub collective had managed to pass through the entire maze. The levels of protection continued, down into the depths until finally the bottom was reached. While some data was immediately visible, other, more private data was sequestered away inside of caves running into the bedrock. The assimilation hierarchy divided into partitions, then reported back on which cave was most likely to contain the necessary data. The cave was actually rather obvious, as the entire opening had been filled with a concrete "plug" with a bank vault-style door, which proved to be highly resistant to attempts to directly blow through it. A quick consensus cascade decided that the door should be drilled open. 130 of 230, a former master criminal, was pushed to the front of the sub- collective, despite his protests. As he grudgingly set to work on the door, the whirring sound of a hand drill drifted through the water. After the drill bit cut through the final millimeters of the door's outer shell and was shut off, a scope normally used for inspecting wiring in cramped interstitial spaces was inserted. Next, assimilation tubules extended out of a fin and into the hole, the long thin tubes being used for a task too delicate for standard fingers. As wires were crossed and systems overridden activated, the locking mechanism came closer to being disengaged. The final mechanism was bypassed and the bolts retracted, allowing the door to swing open. Behind the door, visible for only a few seconds before it was hastily slammed closed again, was a large group of sharks. A quick consensus cascade later, the door was reopened, and a small group of protesting drones was sent into the fray. When the bait was spotted, the sharks turned and swam toward the door from their positions inside. When they swam out into the open, the sub-collective picked them off by swarming them one by one and inflicting as much damage as possible. The final shark succumbed to the bites of nearly four thousand small fish and the sub-collective moved on into the cave. More security followed, similar to, but more complex than, that encountered on the way down. After the final net was cut to shreds, the sub-collective moved on into a final chamber. Sitting serenely on the floor was a large metal filling cabinet. A label on the front read "Takeover Plot" in angular Borg script. With the coordinated work of the entire sub- collective, the cabinet was opened, and the data distributed to individuals, representing temporary storage of data on internal brainware. It took another three hours to return to surface as each fish was laden down with several manila folders full of information. Upon reaching the surface, the sub-collective disengaged from the scenario to find the files posted in the main dataspaces. A day later, the protocol sequence that had sent the cube back in time had been recreated; and everything was set to bring 142 of 203 back. The cube returned to the spot where it had entered the alternate timeline in order to ensure that it would be properly returned to the present. The cube powered down all unnecessary systems and, reversing the settings on 142 of 203's crude temporal transporter program, disappeared. A bright flash of energy along all frequencies blew through the sensor grid, and as the temporary blindness inflicted by the wave lifted, the cube was suddenly taken aback by the "voice" of the Borg Greater Consciousness. <> Delta immediately began organizing a new task list for 142 of 203, one that encompassed the entire contents of her "really annoying and/or messy and/or smelly tasks not necessary for cube survival" list. Strictly speaking, although 142 of 203 was not her hierarchy, he was on temporary loan from assimilation and she could do as she pleased. As Captain organized the actions of command and control to apply stricter censure protocols to 142 of 203's system access one thought occurred: it was good to be back. Admiral Bain awoke in a cold sweat from a nap on the couch in his office at Starfleet Command to the sound of a persistent beeping. He stood quickly and moved to his desk, activating his viewer. "Bain here," he responded. Then, seeing the face of his new secretary on the screen, he continued, "What is it Jan?" "You're expected on Starbase 1 in an hour for the christening of the Anomaly-A, then you has to..." She trailed off, seeing the strain in his features. A sympathetic note entered her voice. "Are you alright, sir? You look shaken." "Just a bad dream, Jan. I'm fine." "The Borg dream again?" A note of genuine concern had entered her voice. "Yeah. Schedule a meeting with Starfleet Medical's Psych Division, would you?" "Yes, sir. Shall I tell Captain Vioxx to reschedule?" With the personal problems of her superior resolved temporarily, she instantly returned to her normal business-like tone. "No, I think I can handle it. Give me five minutes and I'll be ready to go." He turned, looking out his window over the coast of San Francisco, and wondered what he would have done if the situation had actually arisen. The Badlands, Starfleet Remnants, the Borg faction called #66CC33...that particular dream was always the same; and, worst of all, he had yet to stay asleep long enough to see his fate, almost as if he were a supporting character in some sort of cosmic tale. All he knew was that somehow, he would have made it through.