Dead Borg.

[Borg451]

Hello.

I have a question about Dead borg. In TNG we see that other Drones take a thing from the dead ones.. and they disappear. ..

in Vendetta by Peter David.. he says they turn to ash.. is this seen in any ST shows.. cosi like this idea..

either way.. what happens to the drone... turns into energy. .for the collective?

do u think its possible the Drone is later turned back to a real body.. for example... what if The original mind of the drone was a frequent visitor to unimatrix Zero.. (or whatever it was called.. the dream world) then whose body would they return to...

tbh.. i thought that once ur assimilated ur midn wouldnt be stuck in that body anymore.. but.. it appears so...

so what do you reckon?

[Timo]

When we see Borg bodies disappear, for example in TNG "I, Borg", this always involves their fellow, live Borg removing something from their corpses, and a functional Borg ship hovering nearby. When at least one of those elements is absent, no Borg corpses are ever shown disappearing.

So we could simply deduce that the Borg sometimes but not necessarily always go to corpses they have lost contact with, physically remove a memory element so that they can get the full picture of what happened, and then use their ship's transporters to either evacuate or disintegrate the corpse so that the enemy can't get that picture, or otherwise make use of the corpse.

tbh.. i thought that once ur assimilated ur midn wouldnt be stuck in that body anymore.. but.. it appears so...

Now does it? It may be that while there remains a brain in Seven of Nine's body, loss of that brain and body doesn't mean loss of Seven of Nine. Her consciousness could also reside in the Collective, and could echo there forever, as sort of suggested in "Infinite Regression".

In "Unimatrix Zero", the idea that individual Borg would die for good when their bodies die would be more tied to the fact that the Queen or the Collective was specifically targeting these Borg for execution. Of course the Queen or the Collective would then take care to kill both the body and the disembodied consciousness.

Timo Saloniemi

[prometheuspan]

being linked as a node to a larger collective does not erase the individual
mind, or its porcesses. My computer links to the net. Your computer links to the net. But that doesn't mean that our computers don't maintain their individuality.

There are different aspects to individuality and the language used to talk about it on trek is imprecise. However it would be rational to assume that personality and ego are both lost by communion in the collective but that individuality is not. 7 of 9 reports being a thinking being as a borg and reports having her own thoughts as a borg.

[Timo]

Perhaps one of the most interesting quotes in this respect is from "Infinite Regress":

EMH: "During your time with the Borg, the Collective assimilated hundreds of different species. All of those neural patterns were integrated into the Hive Mind."
7of9: "Of course."
EMH: "That means they're in your mind too, stored within your cortical implants. Dormant until now."

The Doc's "all of those" is probably exaggeration, and Seven doesn't accommodate the sum total of Borg knowledge in her body - but we know she accommodates a lot. One wonders if all personalities are stored in as complete a form as the ones that surfaced through Seven in that episode, or if those thirteen were merely specifically preserved examples of each species.

Odds clearly are, though, that the physical deaths of those thirteen would not mean the end of their lives, if any random Borg (or at the very least the ones separated from the Collective at the time of the physical deaths) can store their consciousnesses or personalities in such detail.

Since the personalities remain in the original individuals, at least in some state of dormancy (like the Seven and Locutus examples indicate), I agree that we must start speaking in more multifaceted terms, or at least accept complexity when using simple terminology, in all things dealing with "self". At least when the self in question has been assimilated...

Timo Saloniemi
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[Unicron]

I seem to recall one TNG ep saying that when the dead drones disappear, they're being disintegrated. Essentially a self-destruct mechanism once they're no longer useful to the Collective, though I can't recall where this was mentioned.

[Timo]

That's from "Best of Both Worlds II":

Data: "Possibly. But as you may recall on several occasions, we have witnessed the Borg removing key circuits from injured comrades, no doubt separating them from the group consciousness."
Riker: "The injured Borg immediately self-destructed."
Data: "That is correct, sir."

Whether we choose to trust Data with that last one is up to us. After all, our heroes were dead wrong in most of their guesses on the nature of the Borg in these early episodes.

Since we see no such "self-destruct" effort later on, when isolated Drones are cornered or killed, it seems that this destruction cannot really be achieved by "self" alone...

Timo Saloniemi