Resistance Is Futile - Pt 49

Perhaps because she was expecting the pain, it didn't hurt as badly as she recalled from Picard's memories...or perhaps because she was more used to pain, it didn't hurt as bad. Or maybe the pain was so bad that she was actually in shock and it just didn't register. Virginia didn't know.

They had strapped her down, something that made sense because one certainly didn't want the subject to suddenly bolt when they saw the wicked looking assortment of instruments brought out. The long needle they were presently wielding her way particularly terrified Virginia and she closed her remaining eye. They had already taken the other one, though they hadn't plugged the new improved version in yet.

Lt. Haskas had tortured her with needle when she had been his prisoner in the Eugenics War. Slowly, methodically tortured her over a matter of several days. She hadn't liked needles before that...but afterwards, she abhorred them.

The needle bore deep into her, delivering a powerful serum designed to weaken her mental facilities and allowed the Collective Consciousness to indwell her.

There was nothing gentle about the intrusion of the Borg consciousness into her mind. One moment she was alone in her thoughts, save for the comforting Presence, and then suddenly they were there. There was no order to the cacophony of voices suddenly in her head. It was worse than her normal telepathy, a thousand times worse. She struggled against them...struggled to retain her identity, her self...it wasn't an easy thing for her to give control of that type over to anyone. Her body might be immobile, but her mind fought and clawed for survival.

And beneath the pain, beneath the voices, beneath the drugged obedience of the Borg consciousness...there lay an undercurrent of despair and anguish. Loved ones that had been left behind, or killed, when they had been assimilated by this madness. Guilt for having done the same to thousands of other people who had their own loved ones. Grief for the worlds they had devastated. Muted, far beneath the layers, but she sensed it. And compassionate woman that she was, Virginia grieved for them....grieved for the broken dreams, for the lives stolen and destroyed...

"Lord," her heart asked. "Is there no way to save them? Free them?"

Most of them have been dead for years, their bodies kept alive and used by this machination evil. For the rest, their only freedom can be found in death.

Then the Queen came into the struggle. "I thought you wanted this?" she mocked. "Oh, they all fight at first..."

Mid sentence, Virginia seized the Queen's mind with her own. "I will not rest until you are destroyed!"

Wordlessly the Queen fought back, trying to assert her will over the other woman.

Virginia dug deep, accessing the despair and the guilt the Borg felt...and she threw it into the face of the Borg. "Do you see what you have done? This is not order, this in not optimum...this is evil...we were not created for this..."

"The Borg were created to conquer and assimilate...we are Optimum," argued the Queen. "We are perfection..."

"You...are...an experiment gone wrong!"

The two fought...minds sparring in the dark void...until at last, The Queen was overcome when a third presence entered into the fray. A Being so powerful, so frightening. It wasn't the Q...those she knew. She wasn't afraid of them, they had never bothered her. But this Being that came with the half-breed was more powerful than the Q. He was someone she knew from a memory of a memory...memories of memories as she was filled not only with her own memories, but those of thousands upon thousands of drones. She had long ago rejected Him, before she had ever been assimilated, as had many of her drones. She rejected Him now, even as the other woman clung to Him.

One by one, the Borg were overwhelmed...and then the order to self-destruct was issued...