Human Borg in DQ from Wolf 359?

We have some smart people here. Did anyone figure out how humans who were assimilated at Wolf 359 ended up in the Delta Quadrant when that same cube was destroyed in Sector 001?

The universe is a big place, but you couldn't help running into the Alpha Quadrant while in the Delta Quadrant wherever you turned, whether it was humans, Klingons, or Amelia Earhart.

 

I just figure the cube sent some samples of assimilated humans back to the DQ in a sphere ship or something before it reached Earth.

No worse than Kirk's Enterprise periodically encountering Earth-parallel cultures.

Really, though, they should've encountered more Alpha/Beta Quadrant ships in the early years, because we know that the Caretaker abducted a bunch of other ships from all over the galaxy before abducting Voyager. So there should've been multiple ships from known and unknown races that were just as much refugees as Voyager's crew, not just the Equinox. I wrote a spec script for VGR (which I never submitted because I got to pitch to the show after pitching to DS9, so I never needed the spec script) in which Voyager came across a Cardassian crew taken by the Caretaker, leading to tensions with the Maquis crew. I wonder what the creators were thinking when they created this whole elaborate Maquis backstory for the sake of a show that would take all the Maquis characters far away from where that story was relevant.

 

Supposedly it was usually the Caretaker's habit to send those ships back to their places of origin, but things went awry with Voyager. Not sure why Equinox remained. The Maquis thing was useful for maybe the first half of season 1, and that's it. I tried to address the tension that ***should have*** taken place with Seska in the thread "Maquis following Seska the Cardassian?" Just a lot of wasted opportunities, and you had some good ideas there.

 

It was presented in such a way that I'm not sure if the writers were aware that that cube had been destroyed, although I find no fault with your explanation. It just didn't enhance the VOY storylines at all to throw in random humans who were no more interesting than anyone else, and it seemed far-fetched that Voyager would bump into the tiny percentage of assimilated humans among the billions of other Borg species.

 

As far as I'm concerned, I'm OK with them encountering assimilated humans in the DQ (not too many though). They could be from the Neutral Zone colonies that were found missing at the end of TNG Season 1, (or even as late as Jouret 4 and shipped off before the Cube was found by the Enterprise-D), or from the Enterprise when they lost some crewmen in system J-25. I'm also OK with drones reciting / having memories from people that were assimilated during Wolf 359 - As 7 of 9 tells us, an "image" of the drone is kept forever within the collective, even if the drone itself perishes.

I do have more problems with surving ex-drones claiming to be assimilated themselves during Wolf 359 (such as that Riley ex-science officer from Unity). Imho, it is possible (but highly unlikely) that drones were shipped off to the DQ in the small time span between Wolf 359 and the final confrontation above Earth.

 

We already knew from "I, Borg" that there were other Borg ships around after the Cube in BOBW was destroyed. And we never found out what happened to all the colonists at Jouret IV. It's fully possible the Cube transported any people it assimilated to one of these other ships before continuing on its path to Earth.

As for for Alpha/Beta Quadrant Aliens in the DQ....I did a rewrite myself wherein the Caretaker had a Klingon crew, Romulan crew, Ferengi crew and Cardassian crew all being held on the Array as well (or in the Ocampa City) and instead of a Federatin Starship they all had to leave on an ancient Nascene vessel the Caretaker let them have before he died. So instead of Voyager being about a Federation/Maquis crew, it would be a single vessel with Starfleet, Klingons, Romulans, Ferengi and Cardassians all being forced to live together.

 

The most appealing route for me is to assume the reason there are Wolf 359 assimilees in Delta is related to

1) why the Borg spent so much time at Wolf 359 to begin with
2) why the Borg left so many starships basically intact at Wolf 359
3) why the Borg bothered to capture and keep captive even the old tub Saratoga, and
4) why there are no lifesigns around when the E-D arrives.

All we need to tie this all together is to remember ENT "Regeneration". Given enough time, the Borg will turn any pile of junk into a Borg Cube. Indeed, quite possibly this is how all Borg Cubes begin. So the E-D caught up with the big Cube chiefly because it had supervised the construction of many little Cubes out of Starfleet hulks, and their crewing with carefully assimilated Starfleet personnel.

But we don't know that the Caretaker would have released any of those. The two Starfleet ships struggled free, one because the Caretaker as already dying; there was a whole junkyard of ships that didn't make it, though, plus then ships the Caretaker might have sent back (he had the ability, although we don't know if any return attempt was ever made, or if any ever made it back). Neelix seemed pretty well informed, and he only knew of about fifty abducted ships; the Equinox and the Dreadnought managing to escape could well be the full extent of exemptions to the rule (unless the Caretaker captured more crewless spacecraft in error - he'd have released all of those, of course).

Timo Saloniemi

 

I thought that the vanished ship commanded by LaForge's mother (the ship was called the Hera) should have been one of the Caretaker's abductee's. It disappeared in early season 7 of TNG. So that IMO would probably put it in the time frame of when the Caretaker started abducting ships.

 

The Borg do seem somewhat obsessed with humans for some reason, so after Wolf 359, where they would undoubtedly assimilate some of the crews (for up to date information on any other resistance Starfleet will mount between there and Earth). After preliminary assimilation on the Cube, they'd be loaded into a Sphere and sent back to the DQ via the transwarp network.

 

"First Contact" alleges the Queen was there at Picard's assimilation, so taking that at face value there'd have to be other ships in the vicinity as otherwise she would have gone *boom* along with the rest of the ship when Data put them to sleep. But it's in "Voyager" where we see the transwarp hub ("Endgame") that allowed them to traverse the universe a lot more quickly, so there must be a junction near enough to the Alpha Quadrant like a big train station.

And initially I thought you meant something like this:

 

That Queen did die, but another was created in her place. The body we see as "the Borg Queen" is not an individual, it's just a central processing node for the collective consciousness of the Borg, a consciousness which is the sum total of the mental activity of every single drone, just as the consciousness of a human brain is the sum total of the activity of its neurons. I see the Queen as being sort of the equivalent of the frontal lobe of the brain, the part responsible for coordinating and guiding the efforts of the other parts and giving volition to the whole.

We've seen more than one Queen die onscreen -- in First Contact, in "Dark Frontier," in "Endgame" -- but presumably those are just specialized drones hosting the Queen programming (which the novels have nicknamed the Royal Protocol). If one Queen body is destroyed, the program is simply downloaded into the next suitable drone. I figure maybe the Queen bodies are cloned from a couple of different lines, one of which looks like Alice Krige and the other of which looks like Susanna Thompson. (And personally I think that Seven of Nine was being held in reserve as a backup Queen body, which would explain why she was being stored in a special chamber when we first met her and why she seemed to have more self-awareness and autonomy than a typical drone, as well as why the Queen took a special interest in her later on.)

 

Yup, we know that the Queen can go physically kaboom, snap-crackle-pop, splat, and still survive to appear another day. Why, she even appears in two distinct bodily forms, on alternating dates (the aforementioned Krige and Thompson models). So the Queen apparently is everywhere, via the Collective - perhaps aboard every ship at all times at that (although not necessarily bothering to inhabit a body in every case).

The Borg wouldn't need their transwarp network to get folks from Wolf 359 to Delta Quadrant in the time allotted. But they certainly could make use of it. Yet they choose to fly to Earth via conventional means, giving Starfleet time to put up some futile resistance. Perhaps that's the very point, and the expedition would have been a failure had Starfleet been taken by surprise so that nothing about Starfleet defense techniques and technologies could be assimilated?

Does the network reach everywhere? In "Endgame", there's an offramp close to Earth. But perhaps those have to be specifically bulldozed, possibly by using the transwarp coil (because one can use the ramps and conduits without the coil), and the Earth ramp had not yet been built in the 2360s or was in need of some dredging?

Timo Saloniemi

 

I've always seen the Borg Queen as the embodiment of the Collective as opposed to an individual drone, hence why she states: I am the Collective. But that's just me.

 

Mentally, yes, but not physically. That's the whole point of "I am the Collective" -- that her consciousness is the sum total of all Borg and thus is not contained solely in one physical body. The Queen body is the Collective's focusing/coordinating node and the interface through which it can speak to individuals, but it's still just a part of the unified whole, and that means it can be replaced like any other part. Destroy the body and the Queen's consciousness still exists within the hive mind. It just needs a new body prepared for it.

 

Of course, the defining attribute of the Queen is that she tells lies. This appears to be her excuse for existing, no less: to bring the human element to Collective interactions. But this could just as well be another of her many lies.

So we don't and can't really know what the Queen is. A useful interface feature for the Collective? An emergent lifeform that has taken over the Collective? An outside lifeform enslaved by the Collective?

For all we know, the Queen is actually many, and we only meet the one that has a fetish about humans, while another aspect of the Queen simultaneously obsesses about the fish people of Gamma Pisces, and chooses her bodies to match.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Put for more eloquently than I could manage on my lunch break.

 

We also know from "Infinite Regress" that the Borg assimilated the USS Tombaugh (and all aboard) in 2362. This may have been in response to the Raven or after receiving the 200-year-old transmission from "Regeneration", but it's clear evidence that the Borg were already sneaking around the AQ/BQ border and gathering up resources and intel on the Federation long before they met Picard and crew.

 

Sure, I was just responding to certain episodes where the characters made assertions that they were assimilated at Wolf 359.

It's interesting that the Borg were initially introduced as a mutual threat to the Romulans and the Federation, but the Romulans' story arc pretty much faded to nothing. One could argue that a Federation of many planets was a more appetizing target to the Borg than the Romulans were, but it still would've been an interesting story arc to develop more.

 

On the other hand, if the Romulans were attacked by the Borg, would they really be inclined to tell anyone about it? They're a secretive society, and they wouldn't want to advertise weakness or defeat.

 

That may even be in relation to the 'matters that needed their attention'.

For all we know, a Borg cube or sphere entered their space decades before TNG's "The Neutral Zone" and they successfully destroyed it, but not before it decimated a good chunk of their fleet. They obviously wouldn't want the Federation, Klingons, or anyone else knowing they were weakened, so they became ultra reclusive for those decades while they rebuilt their forces. The Borg may not have scooped up the Romulan side during that initial encounter, which would explain why they didn't connect it as a Borg incursion during that episode.

This could also explain those rumors that the Hansens heard about the Borg, which would reconcile how they knew about them before Picard first encountered them at J-25. Add to that them piecing together what Archer went through 200 years prior with those rumors and "DARK FRONTIER" actually makes sense, from a canon point of view.