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Is it too easy for a Borg drone to be set free and live?

James89901

Lieutenant Commander
Red Shirt
Under the assumption that all drones have the same knowledge of all Borg technology. Wouldn't it be a huge risk to not implement some kind of self destruct or nano virus death if any drone member is released?

Just having Seven aboard Voyager gave them quite the edge against the Borg in a few situations. She also became an essential member of their crew and helped in non-Borg related episodes. So she in fact added to the overall effectiveness of the federation really. Imagine liberating thousands of drones just like Seven (well maybe not just like Seven ) and they are given key positions in a military organisation that is hostile towards the Borg.

It seems the Borg are a little too careless about basically opening themselves up to sharing their technology with pretty much anyone that has liberated just one drone.
 
Achilles heel of having to source your ranks from other populations, who won't want to be consumed, & will do everything to adapt ways to prevent or undo it. It's clear that certain things about a Borg drone ARE deadly if removed, even from liberated ones. So maybe there are some methods at play to keep from giving up a drone to liberation, but as will any creature fighting for survival, we came up with workarounds, & solutions to counteract it?
 
Are we sure all drones DO have the same knowledge? Seven was a high-up adjunct hence her assignment to be liason to Voyager during the alliance against 8472... plus she grew up Borg - more of her info on the Borg is "learnt" rather than downloaded. Hence more likely to stick with her after de-assimilation. Picard doesn't know one end of a transwarp coil from the other after being Locutus, or he'd be passing Borg tech ideas to Starfleet left and right...
 
Achilles heel of having to source your ranks from other populations, who won't want to be consumed, & will do everything to adapt ways to prevent or undo it. It's clear that certain things about a Borg drone ARE deadly if removed, even from liberated ones. So maybe there are some methods at play to keep from giving up a drone to liberation, but as will any creature fighting for survival, we came up with workarounds, & solutions to counteract it?

I had a think about all of that stuff before posting actually and I did tend to lean towards the opinion that they do share the same knowledge, more or less.

With Seven's roll as a support drone, rather than a designated systems drone, she no doubt would have knowledge of all systems irrespective of differing opinions on this subject. So I have to rule her out as a deciding factor here.

Yet what can't be ruled out is that she was part of a unit within her cube that played a support role. So there are no doubt many others like her in each cube. Most likely even many support units within the one cube. So that would still be a huge risk of information leakage when talking about just that type of Borg alone.

The main reason I'd tend to believe that all drones posses the same knowledge is that it makes for quicker adaptation in the event of unforseen circumstances. It means more minds working on more problems.

I don't view the Borg as simply worker drones that do their job only in the physical realm. Such as repairing something using their hand tools. Rather they also apply mental cohesion to tasks to adapt and repair or build most effective and efficiently.

Seven once said that for one single problem, there is the entire collective working to solve it. Therefore any encounter with them gives them the ability to think things through with as many minds that are available to do so.

The Borg aren't limited to subspace communication time delay because they use transwarp techniques it seems and their communication is instant. So the only thing they have to worry about when it comes to allocating minds to the task of solving a problem is pretty much just the priority of the problem and how many free minds are available to solve and the processing speed of each drone. So if there are two problems of the same priority level that come about at the exact same time and need solving instantly, such as two photon torpedoes launching at two separate cubes. Then the collective is forced to split the labour in half and devote half the available minds to the task of preparing for the impact of the torpedoes and how they will react to them.

This ^ kind of situation would be severely inhibited if the collective made the choice to not bring all of their drones up to the same level of knowledge. Rather than a split of 50/50 of the overall available minds of the entire collective. They would be limited to only those that were about to be affected by the incident. Therefore solutions would come slower, and there would be drones left around doing things of lesser priority simply because they just could not add anything of value to the solving of the current problem.

My theory on Picard not having the knowledge that Seven does is that he has no cordical node anymore, and Seven does. Her implants were clearly more difficult to remove than his. Perhaps because of time. She still had the eye thing and her hand as well. It certainly was two completely different types of freedom from the collective that they both experienced. She could barely escape it, and it seeped into her personality to the point it changed her mannerisms and way of speaking completely from what she was as a child and her body held onto parts of the technology as though it was apart of her. Whereas for Picard it was just like a bad dream basically and it seems that practically no information from the cordical node was retained within the biological part of his brain.
 
I also tend to think drones share knowledge, but ex-Borg have a physical limitation. How could a single human-like brain, implants or not, contain all the data accumulated by trillions of Borg across centuries of time? While a drone may have had access to everything back when he was essentially one node in a distributed computing network, upon being severed from that, the knowledge he retains is necessarily just a tiny part of the totality.

What info remains may have something to do with what the drone was occupied with at the time. This could factor into why freed Borg cope with individuality to different degrees. A drone who was crunching numbers for the magnetic field of a device to chase a pesky ship out of a nebula, if cut off at that moment, might not have "how does language work?" or "what are clothes for?" in there.
 
Barring situations where it happens to all drones on board a particular ship (like the ship that retrieved Hugh, the cube from Unity, and the cube on Picard) not man Borg have been "set free." Just Picard, Hugh, Seven of Nine, Icheb and the other Borg children on Voyager. And the Queen claimed that she intentionally let Seven go free as a means of gaining better insight on the Federation (Dark Frontier). So less than ten Borg have been successfully liberated from the Collective by means other than a calamity striking their ship. Less than ten out of a total of billions if not trillions of Borg. And of those, one was intentionally set free by the Queen herself. So, no, not seeing how it's easy to set a Borg free at all.
 
I also tend to think drones share knowledge, but ex-Borg have a physical limitation. How could a single human-like brain, implants or not, contain all the data accumulated by trillions of Borg across centuries of time? While a drone may have had access to everything back when he was essentially one node in a distributed computing network, upon being severed from that, the knowledge he retains is necessarily just a tiny part of the totality.

What info remains may have something to do with what the drone was occupied with at the time. This could factor into why freed Borg cope with individuality to different degrees. A drone who was crunching numbers for the magnetic field of a device to chase a pesky ship out of a nebula, if cut off at that moment, might not have "how does language work?" or "what are clothes for?" in there.

Oh yes very good point. The collective probably does act as a complete storage device. Possibly it might have back-ups in terms of 2 nearby ships sharing all of the data between them completely in case of the loss of one of the ships. So that total information of the lost ship can be then relayed throughout the collective and retained.

Other than failsafe memory storage protocols such as that, the Borg would probably store as much memory as possible in each drone to the point where only room is left for enough to be constantly re-written to serve the purpose of its current task.

Also I'd imagine the permanent memory the drone has could be organised in a such a way that it's useful across as many possible different tasks as possible. Such all of their known mathematics is a permanent memory, and could be applied to multiple tasks. Therefore any extra information they might need about a mathematical task is merely "full-in" knowledge they can quickly download from another drone which had previously needed to use that knowledge and then now passed it onto another one who was in need of it.

There's so many interesting possibilities to the how the inner working of a theoretical hive Mind species like the Borg might work. Pretty fascinating to think about I find.
 
Barring situations where it happens to all drones on board a particular ship (like the ship that retrieved Hugh, the cube from Unity, and the cube on Picard) not man Borg have been "set free." Just Picard, Hugh, Seven of Nine, Icheb and the other Borg children on Voyager. And the Queen claimed that she intentionally let Seven go free as a means of gaining better insight on the Federation (Dark Frontier). So less than ten Borg have been successfully liberated from the Collective by means other than a calamity striking their ship. Less than ten out of a total of billions if not trillions of Borg. And of those, one was intentionally set free by the Queen herself. So, no, not seeing how it's easy to set a Borg free at all.

You're forgetting "descent" from TNG and "unimmatrix zero" from Voyager.

In descent we meet many "freed" and individual drones. Even though they are following Data's brother who is not an ideal role model and leader. They are still nonetheless free and liberated.

In unimatrix zero there potentially thousands of drones that are freed from the collective as the ones with the ability to enter unimatrix zero revealed to us that their intention was to seize control of whatever ships they were on. The Queen even said there would be thousands that were freed because of unimatrix zero and that it had the potential to start a civil war with the Borg. I would say that any Borg that was set free as a cause of that event was in fact liberated.

Also this is only what we see from the perspective of Voyager. It's safe to assume that there are many more instances of Borg being liberated by other cultures considering there are quite a few of species around that are just as powerful as Voyager was.

Even though I wrote in the last sentence of the OP that liberation of a single drone was a source of risk to the collective. I was mainly just using that as an example of how big of a problem such a small incident could seemingly cause for the Borg. The other episodes where cubes or any other Borg were disconnected from the collective and regained individuality should also be included in this thread because they pose the same basic threat that a liberated Borg does.
 
You're forgetting "descent" from TNG and "unimmatrix zero" from Voyager.
I didn't forget Descent, those are the ones on "the ship that retrieved Hugh" that I mentioned. Okay, I did forget Unimatrix Zero, but since they were the result of a malfunction within the Collective, I don't see how that points to Borg freedom being easy.
 
If not for Kes Seven would have died, I presume drones who have come from maturation chambers like Seven are far harder to separate from the collective if not impossible.
 
I didn't forget Descent, those are the ones on "the ship that retrieved Hugh" that I mentioned. Okay, I did forget Unimatrix Zero, but since they were the result of a malfunction within the Collective, I don't see how that points to Borg freedom being easy.

Oh sorry I missed you mentioned the high episode. I don't understand why those Borg on that cube aren't counted as being liberated though.

Granted, it was an "easy" task in freeing those Borg in unimatrix zero. Yet it could of been made far less easy if the Borg had better fail-safes in place to prevent wayward drones from regaining their individuality and possibly turning on them.

It seems that any Borg that loses contact with the collective, for whatever reason, can regain their own thoughts again within a day or so. We saw this with Seven's group of Borg.

A simple sort of thought "experiment" (for lack of a better word here) is all we need to do to assume incidents like that probably have happened quite a bit. I mean just think of all the federation ships that crash, or ships that the enterprise or Voyager come across in trouble. Then think of all the conflict the Borg are involved in which could lead to drones being disconnected from the collective. There would be heaps of drones that have been separated from the collective over time most likely.

I'm just saying that the Borg should have better methods in place to restrict their information being released if a drone is severed from the collective.

A drone does take a day or so to regain individuality, and in that time they do attempt to still be re-assimilated. So no information purge should happen during that time. Yet once it's clear they have regained individuality, the cordical node should erase all of its information. There's no harm in that. They don't lose the possibility of re-assimilating the drone. They can still upload all of the information again if they capture the drone once more, and it leaves less possibility of information escaping the hive mind.

From my point of view, when I say it might be too easy for a drone to become a hindrance to the collective if it regains it's individuality. I'm just trying to think of it from the perspective of the Borg, who should have extremely high standards for stuff like this.
 
If not for Kes Seven would have died, I presume drones who have come from maturation chambers like Seven are far harder to separate from the collective if not impossible.

Seven seemed like a unique case. The other 3 Borg that escaped in her adjunct got out just fine. Even when exposed to crude medical procedures to remove their implants.

Also it's probably important to note that the only reason Seven was at risk of dying was not because she was released from the collective, but rather that Voyager crew was attempting to restore her human anatomy.
 
Well, there is Sevens cortical node that begins to deteriorate after three years or so, which is then replaced by Ichebs cortical node, who was able to survive without it because he "emerged from the maturation chamber before he was fully assimilated".

Then, half a year (or so) later, we have this scene (Human Error):

EMH: .... What you experienced was no malfunction. Your cortical node was designed to shut down your higher brain functions when you achieve a certain level of emotional stimulation.
SEVEN: Clarify.
EMH: It appears to be a fail-safe mechanism to deactivate drones who start to regain their emotions. Knowing the Borg, it makes perfect sense. Finding one's heart is the surest road to individuality.
SEVEN: I'm no longer linked to the hive mind.
EMH: The technology's built into your node. It simply remained dormant, until now.

(As a side note I wouldn't expect someone with " shut-down higher brain functions" to do much more than vegetate, rather than just have their emotions checked, and not even that to a full extent, but OK )
Of course, the EMH finds a way around with surgery.

So there apparently are such mechanisms at work, but they wouldn't appear to be eurm, have achieved perfection.
 
Well, there is Sevens cortical node that begins to deteriorate after three years or so, which is then replaced by Ichebs cortical node, who was able to survive without it because he "emerged from the maturation chamber before he was fully assimilated".

Then, half a year (or so) later, we have this scene (Human Error):



(As a side note I wouldn't expect someone with " shut-down higher brain functions" to do much more than vegetate, rather than just have their emotions checked, and not even that to a full extent, but OK )
Of course, the EMH finds a way around with surgery.

So there apparently are such mechanisms at work, but they wouldn't appear to be eurm, have achieved perfection.

Oh yes you're right. The cordical node does has fail-safes installed to some degree. Although they are quite delayed in activating it would seem. The Borg could do better! Haha
 
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