1
Like the waters of a vast ocean, the voices threatened to drown him. They surrounded him, weighed him down, pulled him inexorably into their midst. As uncountable as sea waves and as unsympathetic, they battered him from all sides.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard lay on his back, the metal table beneath him once cold and hard, but now beyond his ability to feel. He stared blindly upward, no longer seeing the complex equipment pervading the alien vessel. Numbness suffused his body, a welcome release from the thousand natural shocks to which his flesh had been heir.
A glimmer of recognition darted through Picard’s awareness. Shakespeare, he thought, grasping for the paraphrased fragment of dialogue, desperate to latch onto something—anything—familiar. Shakespeare, The Tragedy … The Tragedy of …
William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, said a voice in his head—said all the voices, knit together as one. Hundreds of Borg—perhaps a thousand or more—spoke in unison, a chorus of unremitting pressure. Until now, their refrain had articulated only pronouncements of conquest: Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own.
A single voice loosed itself from the whole and spoke to him through the continued din of the aggregate. To die, to sleep—no more; and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. The words came in flat tones, devoid of emotion, the cadence robotic. Act Three, Scene One, of Hamlet.
How do they know that? Picard wondered. Had they extracted the information from his brain, or had they gleaned it from some other source? Even as he posed the question, he understood the answer. Though he and the Enterprise crew had discovered from their first encounter with the Borg that the physically augmented humanoids procreated, it had grown clear just how they added the “biological distinctiveness” of other species to their own: by brute force. The restraints that bound Picard prevented him from peering down at himself, but earlier he’d heard the awful sound of a drill penetrating the side of his skull, he’d felt the strange sensation of tubes pushing into newly opened holes in his torso, he’d watched a dark, plated mechanism being secured to the right half of his face.
And he had begun to hear their voices, no longer without, but within, side by side with his own thoughts. As he resisted, they continued to tell him that he had been chosen to speak for the Borg in all communications, in order to facilitate their introduction into Federation societies. The Borg would make him one of their own, both physically and mentally—just as they had with so many others. Their knowledge of Shakespeare had not come from him, but from some other individuals they had incorporated into their hive.
When did you learn Shakespeare? came another lone voice, barely distinguishable from that of the Borg mass, yet divergent enough to impose a primacy of attention.
Where did you learn Shakespeare? asked a second.
Why did you learn Shakespeare? demanded a third.
Picard did not intend to respond in any way, but his mind’s eye conjured the image of a classroom. He saw himself in school at the age of fourteen, listening to Ms. DeGiglio, his literature instructor. He knew at once that the Borg had in that moment ascertained the answers they’d just sought, and more: the appearance and name of his teacher. The mere act of hearing their questions had amounted to an irresistible interrogation.
More voices peeled away from the ongoing swell of Borg thought rushing through Picard’s mind.
What else did you learn?
What scientific concepts did you learn?
What scientific applications did you learn?
Though he made no conscious effort to do so, Picard thought about the warp-field effect, about the equations he’d studied during his years at Starfleet Academy. He envisioned the classroom, the campus in San Francisco, diagrams in textbooks, and schematics he’d seen in Enterprise’s engineering section. Distressed by the idea of the Borg gathering any information at all about Starfleet and its abilities, Picard attempted to blank his mind. He understood that the human brain did not function as a computer did, or even as Data’s positronic brain did. The Borg could not simply download his organic intelligence and memory, so that they could then scour the data for useful information, but after connecting their collective mind to his psyche, they could “see” and “hear” his waking thoughts. If they could compel him to think of some particular detail, then they could incorporate