Fear woke first.
She was a small blonde girl in a purple corduroy dress, almost the same dress Annika had been wearing on the day the Borg had boarded the Raven. She was standing on a kind of platform. She jumped off it, looked around – and clapped her hands over her mouth.
Headquarters had changed beyond recognition.
Instead of the bright and simple starship bridge Fear remembered, she was looking at a nightmare of cold black metal and dim green light. The console was black and sharply rectangular. The memory spheres on their shelves were dark too, and no wonder – they had been produced automatically, without any input from Fear or her siblings. Fear ran to the core memories and screamed, a tiny sound that echoed pitifully across the room. Even the core memories had darkened.
She darted over to the platform she had stepped off. It resembled a Borg regeneration alcove, with a keyboard on one side and a green disc of light. Four identical alcoves stood in a row next to it, each holding one of her siblings: Joy, Anger, Sadness and Disgust. Their eyes were closed. They were unconscious.
Fear didn't know what to do. There was nothing in the Mind Manuals about any of this. Her first instinct was to curl up in a ball and hope all this would go away, but even in just eight years on the job, she had learned better than that. So she followed her second instinct – running to someone stronger.
She pounded on the buttons of Anger's alcove.
"Wake up!" she sobbed. "Please wake up!"