“Can you blame them?” Dr. Brooks asked. He understood why the colonists had been so upset. He’d been upset too. The synth ban had been an impulsive overreaction to a catastrophe that, while horrible, hardly represented the entire potential of synthetic life.

“Not one bit,” Lieutenant Balan replied, shaking her head. “The population crisis has disproportionately impacted their outlying Andorian colonies, and Beta Serpentis III’s sub-zero summers don’t exactly attract non-Andorian residents. Synths were the backbone of their workforce, and then this far-off government they barely know bans them. Their reaction makes perfect sense, and honestly, I’m surprised they didn’t end up leaving.” The cultural affairs officer from the Advanced Science, Technology and Research Activity had never heard of Beta Serpentis III before yesterday, but since coming aboard the Ingenuity, she’d been pouring through every record she could find. The Admiral wanted to extend the olive branch to this estranged backwater, but it looked like it might be a tall order.

“The Federation has a habit of banning that which it does not understand,” Dr. Brooks pointed out, thinking back to his own experiences. “They don’t have the stomach to understand that science doesn’t happen without trial and error.”

“You sound like you speak from personal experience?” Lieutenant Balan asked. She didn’t know much about Dr. Brooks’ background. No one really did. The man had returned from Sol with Admiral Reyes and Captain Lewis, and he certainly knew his way around the physics that underwrote their universe, but that was about it. Well that and the rumors. There were plenty of those floating around. But now she found herself together with him in a temporary office aboard the Ingenuity, so she seized on the opportunity to get to know him better.

“That would be an understatement,” chuckled Dr. Brooks. “I’ve spent my life being shut down by those who would rather stifle innovation than unlock the mysteries of the universe. Sure, once in a while, you lose a few lives, but lives are lost for all sorts of reasons. In what more noble a pursuit could you go out than unlocking the secrets of a post-Alcubierre subspace model or expanding probabilistically-compressed variations of the universe’s spatiotemporal waveform?” Or, in layman’s terms, experimenting with transwarp and temporal mechanics.

Lieutenant Balan looked at him awkwardly. Surely he was joking. Right? Right? No, he looked completely serious. “I believe there’s a beauty and a sanctity in life, Commander,” she replied, hoping he didn’t actually mean lives had been lost. “Surely, we can find a way to experiment that doesn’t have such mortal consequences?”

“That’s naive,” Dr. Brooks countered. “If Marie Curie had been more restrained in her experiments, it might have been decades before we developed our classical understanding of radioactivity, and countless more would have died without the lifesaving treatments her discoveries made possible. The same could be said for Rozier with his balloon, Hunley with his submarine, and Valier with his rocket, among many others.” History was full of innovators who forfeit their life in the pursuit of science.

The young lieutenant looked unconvinced.

“I’m not reckless though,” Dr. Brooks assured her. “Just realistic. Something the Federation most certainly is not. I spent four years in New Zealand because our uptime equivalents are no better either. They feared my incursions would erase their existence, but for all the visibility they have, they are as blind as we are. Doesn’t bode well for our future, does it?”

She just stared at him blankly. He’d lost her somewhere between New Zealand and uptime. “If you’re such a skeptic of the Federation, why’d you reup your commission then?” she asked. The man sitting across from her seemed less than happy with the institution they served.

“Because who else would hire an ex con like me?” the scientist chuckled, and it was only half a joke. “But seriously, and far more importantly, what you all are doing out here with ASTRA, this is how and where real progress will be made, and that’s where I belong. Out here, we have the opportunity at incredible discoveries that’ll never be made in a lab or derived on a whiteboard.” He also knew that if this was half the operation Reyes and Lewis implied it to be, he’d get to operate free from some of the onerous restraints imposed by the worrywart bureaucrats of the Federation Science Council..

“I guess I’m sort of here for a similar reason,” Lieutenant Balan smiled. “I’d never have experienced the hopeful art of Tzenkethi romantics buried deep within their post-war cities, nor enjoyed the deep baritones of Barak-Kadan reverberating through the Grand Hall of Har’Doth, if I hadn’t ventured from the rolling hills of Surrey.”

“I find it quite impressive you found a way to use hopeful and romantic in the same sentence as Tzenkethi,” Dr. Brooks observed. She certainly had a brighter way of looking at the universe than most. “But just know, this whole affair, it may disappoint even your optimistic take on the universe.”

“You’d be surprised,” Lieutenant Balan winked. “There’s beauty everywhere. You just have to know where to look.”

Alright, he thought to himself. No need to crush her bright world view. The universe would do that soon enough itself. He looked down at his PADD briefly to check the progress of their trip. They were getting close. 

When he looked back up, he could not notice something had changed in his officemate. Where there’d previously been a twinkle in her eye, now there was something else. 

Darkness. Fear. Terror. 

“What’s on your mind, Miss Balan?” Dr. Brooks asked empathetically. She’d been such a ray of positivity just moments earlier, but the look on her face now, it was as though someone had just walked over her grave.

“Don’t you worry they’re out there somewhere?” Lieutenant Balan asked as she looked out the window. Bright stars raced past them as the Ingenuity made for Beta Serpentis III at warp, but behind them was the darkness. All encompassing darkness. Darkness that obscured the blacker than black shapes that were supposedly once again on the move.

“Who?”

“The… the…” she fumbled with her words, struggling to even say their name. “The Borg.” She’d been trying to stay positive, to stay optimistic, to just enjoy an early morning conversation with their new crewmember, but it only took one quiet moment for her to remember the monster that was out there. Frontier Day had shown what they could do, and the thought they were still out there, it chilled her to her bones.

“They are out there, Lieutenant,” Dr. Brooks said flatly. There was no doubt of that. “The only question is what they’re doing out there.”

“How can you say that so matter of fact?”

“Because it is a matter of fact.”

“But what about Admiral Picard? Didn’t he kill their queen?”

“Sure, and so did Janeway,” Dr. Brooks explained. “But when one queen falls, another rises, as long as the Collective’s consciousness remains. You could say this makes them an invariant facet of our universe, and regardless of what we do, I can all but guarantee they’ll be here long after you and I are gone.”

“How can you be okay with that?” Lieutenant Balan asked. While the USS Polaris, USS Diligent and USS Ingenuity had been unaffected by the Borg signal, she’d heard the stories from those who’d been aboard the USS Serenity over Earth on Frontier Day. They were horrible, heartbreaking tales from young men and women who had their freewill stripped from them, made completely powerless as the Collective used their bodies to commit unspeakable horrors. There was only one way to put it. The Borg were the antithesis of everything she believed was good in the universe.

“I don’t think the universe cares one way or the other how I feel, so I try not to worry about it either,” Dr. Brooks shrugged ambivalently. “It simply is what it is. And, in the way the Collective is infinite yet unitary, diverse yet uniform, and complex yet simple, you’ve got to admit there is a certain sort of beauty to it.”

Lieutenant Balan shuddered. She certainly didn’t see it that way.