Command teams from all four starships filled Cargo Bay 1, standing on the other side of the quarantine zone. Captain Walton stood at the front of the group, PADD in hand. “Lieutenants Eseri and Maguire found something.” She turned to Eseri, who stood on the other side of the thick glass, “Lieutenant?”
Eseri’s antennae stood confident as she stared down the various members of the senior staff from across the squadron. “There have been questions about V’ger and the part it played with the Borg of this universe. We’ve spent the last two weeks searching for a clue or an indicator of what happened.” She explained what they had found and the still low-powered unit that held a functional computer and memory bank. “There’s still plenty of data to examine, but what we determined is that V’ger was not truthful to us. The reason we’ve only found the one Borg cube on the planet with our cadets is that V’ger consumed them. All of them.”
There were collective gasps around the room as senior officers turned to another. Eseri tapped at the console, and a large holo-screen appeared above her. “The Borg of this universe have something we’re tentatively calling a ‘personal memory echo’. The drones, or spiders, or whatever you want to call them, have them. It’s as close as they come to having individual thoughts. We’re working to understand why each unit had this and what purpose it held. The point is, we have a record–a nearly complete record. After consuming the cubes, the nodes, everything…it ejected the remains like refuse. That’s not the worst part of what we found.” She glanced at Maguire.
Matilda tapped at the console next. “The drones, nodes, all of it kept conscious in a simulated loop. That loop contained the moment the Borg were judged by V’ger to be ‘inefficient’ and ‘carbon adjacent’. Once V’ger had consumed what it needed within its superstructure, it severed the loop connection and threw the rest out. That was two years ago. V’ger intentionally became part Borg through this process.”
Captain Peter Crawford stared at the holo-screen. “Do you think Spock knew?” His eyes were wide. Shock was the only emotion he felt capable of experiencing at the moment.
Wren swallowed hard. The question was hard. It brought its own host of questions: what they had done and how they had done it. “I don’t think he did. V’ger hid the truth from him, even when he asked it. Not even Spock could get the truth out of that thing. Consuming the Borg and taking the best parts from them gave them an advantage.”
Captain Park stepped forward, asking, “Do we dare go down the train of thought about what we created? What we released into not just this universe, but whatever universe the Voyager selects? The goal of our V’ger was to ascend into a new being and peacefully fly away. What if we got this V’ger all wrong?” She shuddered at the thought. “What if we created the monster?”
The room fell silent.
Each officer felt the weight of the question resting on their shoulders.
Had they done the right thing?
Or had they created the ultimate evil?
