=/\=
Her visits to Unimatrix Zero continued after that. She spent a lot of time with Axum when they were both there. He was always very kind and looked out for her, especially when the bigger children played too rough. Once two years had passed after Annika became Borg, between her visits to Unimatrix Zero and the awake periods when she was being indoctrinated into the ways of the Collective, Annika had matured a great deal. She no longer felt the need to cling so tightly to Pennia and Axum. She greeted them warmly whenever she saw them, of course, but now she went directly to the children's shelter to play. Annika didn't ask for a hug and a kiss from Pennia every time she visited now, and the games she played with the other children no longer interested Axum very much. She noticed he had grown even taller, and that he was very handsome, but he was an adult now. He spent most of his time on the other side of the clearing, with them. Axum was too grown up to be included in her circle of friends.
Annika was totally unaware of the changes in her own body which were transforming her into a much different being, even though her physical image reflected those changes when she visited Unimatrix Zero. For a while she became very long limbed, like the baby horses in the pictures Mama had shown her on The Raven's computer screen. Thanks to the maturation chamber's influence, both form and face developed much earlier than they would have if she'd remained Annika Hansen, the daughter of Magnus and Erin Hansen, who lived on the small starship The Raven. She still remembered they'd performed very important experiments on their ship, but Annika could no longer recall exactly what they were.
By the time Annika had been Borg for five years, she no longer looked like a coltish girl child or an adolescent. At a chronological age of eleven terrestrial years, Annika looked more like an eighteen-year-old human, a woman grown. She was now a beauty, although she had no concept of what that term actually meant. Beauty was irrelevant.
During one of her awake periods, as she floated in her maturation chamber, an alarm sounded. The waters around her receded, until she was sitting at the bottom, coiled into a fetal position, naked except for the many metal implants which had been sprouting all over and through her body from the time she was first assimilated on The Raven. The door of her chamber opened. The mask over her head and face opened and fell away. Two medical drones stood before her and pulled her out of her chamber. A multitude of voices sounded in her mind, all saying the same thing: "Adjunct of a Unimatrix To Be Assigned, it is time."
One drone walked in front of her. The other pushed her forward from behind. The three walked along the corridors of the Borg cube, turning right, right, left, and right again. The schematics of this cube had been forced inside her brain. She knew exactly where they would end up: the Assimilation Center. The medical drones pushed her onto a table. They encased her body in a suit of black leather and connected the terminals of her metal implants to the leads in her suit. Energy surged through her body along the pathways that had been built inside her by nanoprobes. For five years they'd done their work as she'd grown in size, until she'd become their end product: a fully formed, adult drone.
Two things remained to be done. The drones fit her left arm with circuitry sufficient to support whatever instrumentation would be attached to that limb once her initial assignment took place. The second was to gouge out her left eye and replace it with an ocular implant, which vastly increased the range of visual frequencies a member of Species 5618 could perceive naturally.
When they were done with their tasks, the medical drones pulled her roughly up and off the table. Blood still spurted out of her orbital socket and ran down her face as they thrust her down another corridor. Eventually, they reached a particular cubicle.
The voices in her head announced her designation. "Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix 01, this is your assigned regeneration cubicle. When your energy reserves require refurbishment, you are to go here."
The voices were unaware of an essential fact about Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix 01. While her depleted energy reserves were being replaced in her cubicle, she would also travel to a virtual sanctuary of forested hillsides, rushing streams, grassy knolls, and individuals like herself, all of whom bore, as her mother also had, a recessive gene which had mutated at the time nanoprobes were first injected into her body - when she had become Borg.
Seven of Nine was different from most. She was "one in a million," a drone who had the capacity to recapture a smidgeon of the consciousness she would have known throughout her waking life if she had not become Borg. Seven of Nine/Annika Hansen was one of the fortunate few who could experience a virtual existence, a life, in Unimatrix Zero.
=/\=
