“The consciousness of the past weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”

Karl Marx (1848)

Six couldn’t sleep.

It is true perhaps that a ship never sleeps. There is no day or night, no natural diurnal or nocturnal meridian to divide when a biological entity should be active or at repose. Certainly, aboard a vessel as small as the USS Kirk, there was always a steady pattern of activity when at least half of her crew compliment of 80 souls were either at work, rest or play somewhere aboard the relatively cramped confines of the tough little escort.

So, after extricating herself from the tangle of sheets, Six shrugged off the listless attempt to sleep, dressed and left her quarters – driven by the need for community, whilst also hoping she could avoid any meaningful contact with her shipmates.

As a fresh young Ensign, social interaction had been a meaningful and satisfying aspect of service aboard the USS Agincourt. Her first engineering assignment aboard the expansive Nebula – class Research Cruiser promised a bright future of comradeship and exploration. Often the life of the party, the young officer from Petrograd saw the universe as a place of abject wonder and unfettered promise.

That was before the events that would become infamous as the Battle of Wolf 359 that led to her capture and assimilation of the Borg Collective. Vanya Anouska Petrovna ceased to exist in any meaningfully human sense of the word and spent the next 25 years as Six of Eleven, Tertiary Monitor of Unimatrix – 8.

It was impossible to describe to another soul what it was like to be part of the collective. To be an indivisible part of a whole, to be party to an immense group mind whilst simultaneously part of an individual function and adjunctive data – set. Each voice blending together to create a harmonious whole, rising in joyful synergy with that of the unifying comfort of the Queen.

The only way to effectively convey the experience was to assimilate.

Similarly, the experience of ‘liberation’ was equally indescribable. To be sundered from part of your whole. To experience the sudden silence of the voices that were also your own. To feel ripped from your very consciousness to languish terrified and alone. When Six had been separated from the Collective, her sorrow at being treated so, left her inconsolable and the path to ‘recovery’ that she now trod was as traumatising as climbing each bladed – rung of Jacob’s Ladder.

As she made her way down the companionway towards the Mess Hall, thankfully at this ‘Late – hour’ a third of the crew would be asleep, a third manning the current watch – rotation on the Bridge and in Engineering and the remainder at the pursuit of whatever leisure activity pre-occupied their minds. Thankfully the Kirk, with its small crew compliment, only had two small holo-suites and it seemed as if half of Ensign Gaca’s duties seemed to be balancing bookings for access to these popular spaces, so that Six was reasonably confident that she would not be disturbed as she entered the Mess.

This assertion was proved mercifully correct. As Six entered the small space where both Officer’s and Ratings alike took their repast (and also doubled as a social space), the mess hall was empty.

It was incongruous that an individual who had spent a quarter – century so intrinsically melded to so many countless thousands of others would seek solitude, but even though it had been nearly 4 years since her liberation from the hive mind of the Collective, she still found human interaction awkward and sometimes she dreaded having to converse with other members of the crew if the subject strayed from the comfortable confines of engineering matters.

She approached the small bank of replicators and paused.

Eating, orally imbibing, masticating and swallowing to let peristaltic action convulse organic matter to her stomach, was not only a fantastically inefficient way to provide power to an organism, but it also came with a plethora of social convention and etiquette that still seemed quite alien to her.

Six had had no reason to power herself so and even though Dr Voe had provided a full nutritional regimen for her to follow, that was designed to aid the therapies that would enable regeneration of the human parts and organs that the Borg had deemed irrelevant to her effective functioning as a viable Drone – Six found that her tastebuds seemed overamped.

The food she ate tasted too – much, as if every flavor was amplified and electric, making the sensation one more thing that she struggled to acclimatize to over the last 4 years.

She set her mouth in a grim line and ordered.

“Hot water. 72 Degrees Celsius. Lemon Juice.”

There was the agreeable swirl of complex energies as the replicator reassembled biomass to constitute a cylindrical drinking glass and 200mls of Oxygen and Hydrogen atoms, heated to order and flavored with citric acid with a PH value of 3.

To live in a time where minor miracles are commonplace.

Six took up the glass, gripping it carefully less the slick container slip from her metal – sheathed fingers. With an unbidden thought she willed each fingertip to attain better grip and what Nanites that were still left to be purged from her body, responded by creating a micro-thin adhesive layer between glass and metal – enabling her to carry the drink safely and set it down at a table near one of the thin lozenge shaped viewports that lined one wall of the Mess.

She had hoped to go over the latest drive telemetry and had brought up the data on her Padd and started to interrogate the data the ‘old’ way, using her human eye and ocular implant in observational mode to parse the figures. Woefully inefficient again, but Dr Voe insisted that she make more of an effort to regain the ‘human experience’.”

Six sighed.

One of the things that made Six of Eleven such a consummate engineer was her ability to use her remaining implants and nanotechnology to directly interface with the ship’s systems (once Starfleet Engineering had approved a comfortable level of ‘demilitarization’ of her more worrisome abilities). Whereas social interactions with other beings was messy and dissonant, when Six communed with the pure data – streams that translated the functions of the Kirk directly to her consciousness, it was akin to touching the face of God.

It was almost like being part of the Collective again.

Thoughts of the purity of connection that she had lost and the painful constraints of this weak body that now housed the useless junk of implants that had once gifted her power beyond imagining, did little to help her concentrate.

Six sighed again and set down her Padd in frustration.

Taking a sip of her drink, the former Drone chanced to look out of the viewport as another vessel made the Transit.

The space around Framheim station seemed to grow busier and busier with every passing day. It was the USS Kirk’s mission to patrol to operating space surrounding the Station and provide security for the vessels that massed there as they issued forth from the Alpha Quadrant via the Transwarp conduit that the Borg – Queen had torn in the fabric of existence.

Thoughts of the Queen elicited a flood of confusing and conflicting emotions in her heart. To be a drone was to know the Borg Queen so intimately, that the point where one intersected and the other departed was effectively indivisible.

Although, paradoxically, the Queen that had forged her detente with the Federation and their uncertain allies was not the same Queen that she had known better than herself.

Her Queen had been malevolent, the antipodal extreme to the comparative benevolence of the Hybrid Queen that had emerged when the Queen had joined with Dr Agnes Jurati.

The resulting Collective spawned by this curious union was infinitesimally small compared to the tens of billions that the original – Queen had had as her cohorts. A concept as incomprehensible to Six, who had been liberated prior to these events taking place – leaving her sense of separation and isolation all the more terrible.

She looked out at the shimmering vastness of the event horizon of the Transwarp conduit, it’s familiar pale glamour of green energy playing across the surface of her single, organic eye and she felt something akin to homesickness.

And trepidation.

The Hybrid – Queen’s motivations for helping the Federation were her own and (of course) oblique to Six now that she was not part of the collective consciousness of the hive – mind. But one thing she did know with absolute certainly, was that a Borg Queen never did anything without an intricate web of self – interest and subterfuge squarely in mind.

To think like a Queen, you had to project your vast consciousness beyond the paltry confines of 5 – dimensional space and let your mind roam the infinite wonders of hyper-reality.

The true meaning of the Splinter – Collective’s apparent altruism would come to bear in full time, of that Six had no doubt. The Jurati – Queen’s intent of laying out a pathway to the Shackleton Expanse would be made clear.

She just hoped that Starfleet would be prepared for what would come?

“Good morning Vanya, can’t sleep?”

Six was startled by a warm effusing – voice from behind and turned from the viewport to recognize the smiling form of Dr Denah Voe, who stood nearby holding a tray containing a very early breakfast.

“I…No.” Six replied awkwardly and lifted her Padd half – heartedly as she attempted to stammer out a coherent response. “I was working on some engineering computations Doctor.”

Dr Voe smiled his brilliant smile and nodded sagely.

“Well, you’ve certainly picked an excellent spot to work.” The impossibly handsome Deltan physician replied evenly. “Although the Gamma watch finishes it’s shift rotation in a few hours and then this place will be noisier than a Ferengi commodities – exchange. Do you mind if I join you? I hate to breakfast alone?”

Before Six could refuse, Dr Voe slid into the seat opposite and set his tray down and took up his eating utensils.

Six of Eleven sat awkwardly, not really wanting the company but at a loss of how to frame this desire in any way that would not cause some sort of social embarrassment for them both. This was exactly the sort of thing that she found so difficult in learning to navigate the tenuous path to recovery.

Dr Voe smiled as he put fork to mouth and then delicately dabbed his lips with a napkin.

“Truth be known I appreciate all too well the desire for solace, especially on a ship this small.” Denah admitted self – depreciatingly. “My…..effect, on some members of the crew can be hard to manage sometimes, so I too look for opportunities to conduct my business in peace.”

Six smiled wanly, not sure of how to respond.

Dr Voe was Deltan. Whist outwardly indistinguishable from a standard human (apart from the complete lack of body – hair), his natural pheromonic secretions and subconscious telepathy could (if not held in rigorous check) cause some species to experience an overwhelming enticement towards sensuality and abandon themselves to passion. Male, Female or Inter – the net effect was invariably overwhelming and contrary to the harmonious efficiency of the ship.

That Voe himself was classically, physically beautiful himself did not really help matters any. Nevertheless, the good Doctor tried his best to keep himself to himself and maintain a professional bedside manner that did not suggest the patient invite him to share their Bio-bed (although many thought about it) . With the judicious application of Beta – blockers, he was able to keep things in check.

Six, with her Nanite – infused nervous system, was proofed against this unintentional ‘Casanova – effect’, so she regarded the Doctor levelly as he spoke again.

“It’s not easy being somewhere you don’t naturally fit in and still have a job to do.” Dr Voe spoke rhetorically and gave a meaningful nod towards the shimmering Borg Transwarp conduit that persisted outside, disgorging yet another ship out into the vastness of the Shackleton Expanse.

Six followed his gaze and then returned it impassively.

“That was my past, Doctor. It has no bearing on who I am now and the job I have to do here.” Six protested, holding up her Padd and making a pretense of studying the engineering data, but even she knew that this rang hollow and was a half – hearted attempt to dissemble the truth.

“The past shapes our actions, often leading to oppression and resistance to change.” Dr Voe nodded his shining bald pated-head knowingly as he stirred his coffee. “The weight of historical experiences, in your case your assimilation into the Borg Collective and subsequent liberation by the Borg Reclamation Project, serve to limit your potential for personal and social growth.”

A troubled look furrowed Six’s brow, causing the implant that housed her searching ocular implant to pucker the skin around her eye socket as she replied.

“Then what hope is there for my future, if I am forever wedded to my past?”

Dr Voe put down his cutlery and folded his hands together, replying in earnest.

“It’s not a question of abandoning one as a means to sacrifice and attain the other Vanya….Six.” Dr Voe asserted evenly. “It’s about duality. You will forever be both Six of Eleven, Tertiary Monitor of Unimatrix – 8 and Lieutenant Vanya Anouska Petrovna. Your future cannot erase your past and your past will forever determine your future if you continue to choose to treat it as a separate eventuality, distinct from your current situation..”

Dr Voe actually took Six’s implant – encrusted hand in his own, his fingers warm as he held her cold – own.

“I know it’s hard and it is something that you will probably deal with every day for the rest of your life. We can heal your wounds, we can regrow amputated body parts, we can teach the Nanites that remain within you to exist in harmony with your organic self, but we cannot regrow your Soul.”

Dr Voe looked upon her with compassionate eyes and indicated the Transwarp Conduit outside.

“ Until you find a way to make peace with your past, Vanya, it’s always destined to influence the progress of your future.”

For the longest time Six stared at the Doctor. She could not find the words amongst the turmoil of emotions that plagued her but she knew, deep – down, that he was right.

Eventually Dr Voe nodded and released her hand, rising to his feet and taking up his tray – his meal mostly untouched, leading Six to wonder if the man had been hungry at all or if he had planned this chance encounter all along?

“Well, I think that we can both agree it’s a good thing I took up general – medicine and the ship is too small for a Counselling department?” Denah smiled kindly and winked, turning on his heel to carry the tray to the matter decompiler and exiting the mess – hall with a swish of the doors.

Six of Eleven held the glass tightly, it’s cooling contents forgotten.

She turned her augmented face to the viewport, where it was bathed in a ghostly – glow of green light from the conduit, as she whispered wistfully.

“Resistance is futile…”