RECENTLY UNCOVERED EVIDENCE REGARDING THE EARLY ORIGINS OF THE BORG

By Elira Halsted Ph.D

Special support provided by http://www.students.fh-voralberg.ac.at/~bp96x02/

The Borg are a cybernetic race, essentially class 2 humanoids with a wide variety of mechanical and technical organelles and implants throughout and without their bodily structure.  They have been classified accurately as a grave threat to the Federation and it’s allies. 

Since our first encounter with the Borg in sector J-25 (2365), the Federation has had a number of tactical encounters with this highly aggressive species.  The Borg have clearly announced their intention to assimilate humanity and all of it’s attendant technology into their collective.   With such a goal stated openly, tactical modalities to effectively defend against and eventually to eliminate the Borg threat are a key priority for Starfleet scientists and tacticians. 

However, with such a sharp focus on the immediate tactical threat presented by the Borg, very little hard data has been elucidated in terms of the specie’s origin.   This recently changed somewhat with the capture and successful data matrix recovery of a Borg quintronic nano-linear technology based memory core, which has provided both historical and allegorical information on early Borg species development.

The Borg were more or less a typical type 2 humanoid society scoring typical intelligence and socialization

Profile scores on standard remote data based testing indexes.  They were inhabitants of a small class M planet in l-346 of the Delta Quadrant, and based on the time frame indexing in the data core, we established an origin date of approximately 320,000 years in the past.  Obviously, the Borg have not existed for the millions of years many have suggested.   We believe that this is probably attributable to the Borg refinements in various time-space bending technologies, not solely limited to trans-warp technologies. 

Possessed of a moderate degree of internally developed technologies, the Borg had attempted to improve the timed throughput of the humanoid mind with simple cybernetic implants-although we imagine that no one at that time expected the incredible variety of implants the Borg utilize at this time.  However, thee is no evidence that there was any interest at that time in regards to the understanding and development of the collective consciousness that has been the hallmark of Borg evolution for thousands of years. 

In fact, the record indicates that the Borg acted and engaged in social conventions very similar to the vast majority of humanoid societies observed to date.  Despite their noted interest in cybernetics and implant enhancement of humanoid physiology, the Borg were for all intents and purposes like the rest of us.  This appears to have changed however, when the Borg encountered its first substantive tactical challenge.

By this time, the Borg inhabited three of the planets in their large binary-star system.  The outermost planet was viciously attacked and most inhabitants were virtually eliminated in a matter of days.  The terrified Borg soon learned that they were being invaded by a highly aggressive, sentient insectoid life form calling themselves the Kreynt.

At the time of the Kreynt invasion the Borg possessed a small fleet of warp capable craft that they had utilized successfully in driving of pirates and other small bands of malevolent life forms that roamed this sector of the galaxy.  However, this changed in a very dramatic fashion when the Borg encountered the Kreynt.  Within a matter of days after their initial assault on the first Borg colony, the Kreynt staged their first attacks on the second inhabited planet in the Borg system.  Up to this point casualties numbered in the millions. 

At this point the Borg tacticians came up with an interesting strategy to deal with the Kreynt invaders.  The Borg evacuated all of their remaining people to the home planet and then utilizing a variety of methods and technologies managed to dampen the energy emissions from their civilization, in effect “playing dead”. 

To their great fortune and credit, this tactic worked.  Instead of attacking the remaining millions of Borg citizens on their home world, the Kreynt began a program of colonization on the conquered planets utilizing the materials in their own starships-in addition to the abundant natural and abandoned manufactured resources on the planets themselves. 

Meanwhile, it appears that the Borg were beginning to see the effects of rampant depression and anxiety, which was beginning to unravel the foundations of their society.  It seems as though they broke into a variety of factions within their social order, fighting each other and attempting to hoard their supplies and technologies for their own people and purposes.  Since the Borg were essentially xenophobic in nature, their lack of outside support from other planets and alliances made the collapse of their entire society an inevitable eventuality. 

It is obvious that this is the point where the Borg began the development of the collective. 

Certain sects within the fractured Borg society began to espouse a new philosophical foundation theory where the goal was to eradicate emotive responses and ego based behaviorisms- items they felt were key factors in the disintegration of their society.   With an almost legendary sense of near hopelessness they took on the new tactic of attempting to imitate the social and class structure of their greatest enemy, the Kerynt themselves.  Borg studies had shown that Kerynt were telepathically linked into one collectives hive mind, this not being an uncommon characteristic of intelligent insectoid societies.  They observed that among the Kerynt there was no sign of any emotive process at all and it seemed that all of the members of the Kerynt existed in near total social harmony.  They also clearly recognized the nature and purpose of the hive’s Queen.  However, at first they did not incorporate the Queen concept into their collective experimentation.

The Borg scientist attempted to replicate the collective and linked consciousness aspects of the Kerynt through a wide range of artificial means.  This no doubt resulted in the deaths of thousands of Borg people and other humanoid prisoners from other Borg encounters.  Insanity and massive physiological collapse were the most common causes of these fatalities.  Eventually however, a group of scientists in one of the most powerful city-states on the planet secretly succeeded in creating a working collective mind-link technology.  Unfortunately, this first success was hampered by an extremely slow response time and a clumsy interface with transient signal interpretation issues.  The purely technological issues were eventually resolved, but the clumsy response of the first drones made the technology essentially unworkable. 

Suddenly we see the emergence of the Borg Queen. The Borg realized that they had failed at completely replicating all of the social conventions of their invaders.   The hive’s Queen provided a form of central coordination, a sort of CPU for the rest of the Borg drones.  Interestingly it seems that the first Borg Queen was one of the scientists herself.  And even more fascinating is the allegorical record that shows that while the Borg scientists were pleased with their first experiments utilizing the Queen hypothesis, they wanted to terminate the experiment to try two or three other proposed methods of controlling the collective consciousness.  To this misfortune of those early Borg researches, their associate disagreed with her fellow researchers and she had those drones connected into her neural transceiver assembly to murder the scientists and research specialists. 

In terms of appearance, the original members of the collective, those first drones, did not look any different from their unmodified brethren counterparts.  With the exception of a post-surgical scar that was soon obscured by re-grown hair, the Borg drones did not exhibit any outwardly unusual features.  Behaviorally however, these were simply no longer the individuals they had been prior to the connection to the Borg Queen’s collective.    The impact on Borg society was rapid but hardly noticed in the first few months of what could be termed the first Borg assimilation process.  Within six months the collective had assimilated nearly one third of the Borg population into the collective consciousness of the hive’s Queen.  Once refined, even in its earliest stages the assimilation process only required a brief brain scan, the implantation of the neural transceiver and the repeat of another ten-second brain scan. 

Overriding the natural circadian rhythm of the typical humanoid, the Queen’s influence and the implants she utilized over the collective had the drones working day and night for extended periods of time in the service of their Queen and collective society.  Since the technology for the regenerative alcove had not yet been assimilated, the drones that required regeneration were allowed to do so until they were required for an new or repetitive task.  The pre-alcove drones were still able and required to eat and digest food for sustenance, but there was no perception of flavor or pleasure derived from the act of eating.  However, many of the Borg became infected with diseases and varying forms of tissue rejection syndrome-resulting in the deaths of several hundred thousand drones in the first years of the Borg cybernetic entity.  In addition, an equivalent number of drones were killed in accidents due to the psychomotor retardation in the Borg drone undergoes shortly after early neural transceivers were surgically implanted. 

The Queen obviously recognized the serious nature of this grave threat to her cybernetic dominion.  Every drone was fitted with additional prosthetic devices that assist in the nutritional and control issues that create the disease issue in the first lace.  Now an Borg prosthetic implant of some kind physiologically supports and enhances each area of the drone’s original anatomy implant.  In addition, the Borg drones were designated into several specific categories (as first elucidated in Parker’s celebrated paper a few years ago) and fitted with specialized devices to enhance and support that specific role designation. 

Within ten to twelve months, the collective had now taken over more than two thirds of the population.  While the remaining free Borg citizens and military fought back with everything that they could, they were not able to support any real tactical strategy against this nameless enemy, an enemy made of those pole you lived and loved with.  Within another month or so, the entire planet had been taken into the fold, the collective, and Borg society was now complete.   This is not to say that every survivor of the initial assimilation was committed to fighting the Borg.  Thousands came to the collective begging to be admitted, longing for release from what they saw as an existence without hope or any sense of order or rationale.  To them he Queen’s collective represented a new hope, a new life free from the burdens of anxiety and individuality-freedom from fear, freedom from responsibility. 

However, due to the lack of individual thinking and initiative, the Borg now found it almost impossible to advance technologically.  Scientific research & development simply no longer existed.  Factories no longer manufactured new products.  At this point it appears the Borg Queen split the collective into multiple hives and had a new sub-queen bred for each.  This is essentially the basic structure of the collective as we see it today.  Equipped with the knowledge of the first few million drone’s minds, the original Borg of old, the collective used the technological prowess of it’s recent past to enhance it’s power and capabilities to the point where it could begin the process of reaching towards the stars to assimilate more species and their useful, relevant technology.  They became committed to the mission of using all of the resources of their home world to develop into the most efficient and powerful civilization of their era.  And for a while they were improving and developing at a very impressive rate. 

However, within a period of a few short years, the home planet’s resources were virtually exhausted, the planet’s atmosphere had become toxic and the Queen knew the time had come to venture into the stars.  She had no choice, there was simply nothing left on the Borg home world to sustain their efforts, even their mere existence. From the start there had been no holding back.

The Queen sent many of the planet’s cargo and utility craft into orbit to build the first original drone spacecraft.  Although these were nothing like the modern Borg Cube spacecraft, they were technological marvels capable of carrying hundreds of thousands of drones into deep space and on to assimilate their first civilizations on a planetary scale.  Within a few centuries they had developed into the what is essentially the same highly powerful nomadic society that is perceived today as one of the most serious threats to continued free humanoid existence in all of mankind’s history. 

Interestingly, the data we complied from the Borg data core indicates that one of the hives encountered the Kreynt again, nearly two centuries after the first Kreynt soldier set foot on the outermost Borg colony in their star system.  By the time that encounter was over, the Kerynt ceased to exist and had essentially become extinct.  They engaged in a brief war of a few short months, and by the time it was over, millions of Kerynt perished at the hands of their previously subjugated Borg-having become the creators of the instrument of their own destruction. 

Unfortunately, the data core we recovered and extrapolated this data from was outputting only corrupted data at this point forward.  However, we are continuing to work on acquiring as much of that data as possible, with key data technology engineers at DS9 and Federation Outposts 070 and 011 having been assigned with the task of enhancing this on-going research.