Area 51 had been shrouded in mystery for a great many years. Many had claimed to have seen aliens on site, and flying saucers in the air space above the remote desert outpost were often reported to local authorities. Most of these people had been either insane or lying, however. But today was different, the old man thought to himself, as he watched the huge ship descend from the sky. He had watched the base from this, the closest point which a civilian could reach, every day now for the last decade, and never seen anything particularly amazing. His only company had been an old wooden mailbox, and together they had watched for years. Most reports of alien activity were little blurs on the horizon, not a huge vessel flying straight overhead. He mused to himself, with a chuckle, that thay'd never be able to cover this one up. He'd tell everyone!
An old Ford pulled up next to him on the dusty, un-paved road. Inside the car, the man could see two men in suits, talking.
"What does Zed say about this one, N? Are we still worried about containment at level 5? I mean, I don't think we've ever even BEEN on level 5 alert status."
"We give up on containment and take any action necessary when and if we reach level 10. Until then, keep your neuralyzer ready."
Two men got out, dressed in black suits, and looked at the ship as it hovered over the base on the horizon.
"Hey," the old man said, "What do you want?"
"Oh, just to have a little chat." Said the first man. "What's goin' on over there?"
The man looked the agents over, as if assesing their validity, then offered, "I dunno. I saw that ship there arrive... flew smack dab over my head, it did! Dangerous lot, them."
"Why do you say that?"
"Those damn aliens! They're in cahoots with the Japs, I tell ya! They got us at the Harbor, and they'll keep on messin' with us 'till we're all dead!"
Clearly the old man was insane. Although he was right about one thing; the alien ship was not here to do the Earth any good.
"Bright out here, isn't it, V?" N said, putting on a pair of sunglasses.
"Sure is, N." V said while doing the same.
"What are you guys, some kind of government agency?"
"No sir, of course not!" N said. Then he flippd out his neuralyzer and flashed it in the man's face. "The government's for losers."
V took over at this point. "You did not see extra-terrestrial activity here at Area 51. You will not come here again. You will get a mental exam. And, for heaven's sake, the Japanese aren't working with aliens, nor are they plotting to destroy the United States."
"Go home." N commanded. The man got into his old pickup truck and left.
"Now, what the devil are they up to?" N asked, mainly to himself. "We can't have them getting at the stuff in there. They'll have the best the military has to offer."
"You mean, there AREN'T aliens in there?" V asked.
"Nah, but we keep the hype up to keep people away from the REAL action. Even released some fake satellite photos a few years back."
"Then what do they want in there?"
"Even if there aren't aliens or MIB technology there, it's a well defended little outpost. Probably they're looking for a place to controll their forces from."
"Do you hear something?" V asked. "Sort of a roaring?"
The two agents looked and saw a jet coming from the north. It covered the distance from the horizon to right over their heads in about one second. Slightly strange that the plane could travel THAT fast. It landed twenty meters away. The door opened, and an MIB agent disembarked.
"Hey, what's goin' on?" N asked the man, running over. Suddenly the agent turned. Only he was not an agent now. He was... Borg. N ran right into him, not being able to stop in time after seeing the eyepiece and discolored skin. The Borg reached to inject him, but N grabbed a circular device and slapped it on the Borg's forehead. Blue energy cackled around the Borg, but it was not electrocuting him. Instead it was creating a static field of time. The Borg was in stasis.
"Woah!" V said, running over to help.
"Get him in the car! We need to get him to HQ."
"What was he doing on the jet? It's ours!"
"They 'assimilated' it, that's my guess. Which means they have all of our information. We can't worry about that now, though, look!"
Fifteen Borg disembarked from the jet. They seemed uninterested in N and V, but that didn't encourage the duo to stay any longer. They loaded the former agent into the car and took off for the branch of the MIB in the west. There they arranged helicopter transport... non-stop to New York city.
The wind whipped through agent K's hair as he stood on the helicopter pad, waiting for the shipment of the Borg in stasis. The chopper set down and the alien was unloaded, now placed in a proper stasis pod. That would keep it contained... the locking mechanism could stand up to several volleys of Series IV Deatomizer fire.
"Where to?" J asked. "Medical bay, or Analysis?"
K considered a moment, then said, "Medical bay. We need to find out how its body works before the analysis can help."
"Right." J said, and wheeled the pod to its destination.
"I've never seen anything like this." Elle had said when she saw the Borg drone for the first time. After some testing, she had a presentation ready for J, K, and Zed. "It's our agent, all right, but it's like the aliens changed him." she said.
"They stuck these implants all over his body... why?" J asked.
"They did more than that." Elle called up a display on the wall screen. "This is a sample of his blood, under 500 X magnification."
"It looks all right, but it's the wrong color." Zed said.
"Right. Now when I moved from the regular microscope to the Scanning Electron..." A new graphic popped up, showing a red blood corpuscle at a high enough magnification to fill the screen.
"Another implant?" J asked.
"Yes, but a very tiny one. This little machine contains code. It attaches to the blood cell like a virus, and re-writes the DNA. And it's not just hematopoetic tissue... skin, organs, muscle. They're all being changed."
"So it's actually turning him into another species?" K asked.
"Not exactly. He's still a human under there. The code the probes are implanting are affecting his behavior, and ordering the body to grow new implants. Watch." Elle took a surgical instrument and put it near the implant on the man's cheek. "The first thing I did when I got him in was try to remove an implant for study." She removed the implant and sealed it in a bio hazard container. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the skin on the Borg's face began to wriggle, and an implant exactly the same as the one that had been removed sprouted up in its place. Elle re-sealed the stasis pod before the Borg woke up.
"My god..." was all K could say.
"There's more." Elle said. She changed to one final display. "This implant is deep in the brain. It's sending and recieving transmissions."
"What kind of transmissions?" Zed asked.
"As far as I can tell, brain waves. Each of these aliens... these Borg is linked to the other one. They have a collective intelligence."
"I don't understand." J said.
"It's like their brains are on a constant file sharing system. Together, they make up one big brain."
"Anything else?" K asked.
"I'll need to do some more tests, then I'll let you know what I find."
J, K, and Zed left the medical unit and headed towards Zed's office.
"How many of them have we got on the planet?" K asked.
"Last count has it as four million, exponentially increasing." Zed replied.
"This is gonna shoot containment to hell." J said. "How do we compensate for millions of lost people?"
Elle had moved from the medical exam and biochemical analysis to the most important part of the probing... extermination methods. So far, any toxins she injected had been filtered out by the cellular probes. The Borg was shielded against radiation, and she couldn't seem to think of any other way to kill it. Then she remembered the implant in the brain. Maybe she could overload it somehow. She filled the cavity on the side of the pod with a drug that would spike brain activity, then return it to normal in a a few seconds. She inserted the vial of medicine into the pod, then directed the syringe inside the sealed unit directly over the head. She injected it deep into the head, hoping to give it a head start over the micro probes. She watched for effects. None were apparent for a few seconds, but then the Borg opened its eyes.
It took stock of its situation for a moment. Already its nanoprobes had regulated the release timing of the chemical Laurel had injected it with, and it estimated that it had one minute and forty-seven seconds of consciousness in which to escape. It released its injection tubules, forcing them through the walls of the pod, and began to decode the locking mechanism and stasis field. It was a simple task; neither system was encoded. The pod slid open and the Borg emerged.
"Oh, no." Elle said. She backed into the corner of the small laboratory, the Borg following her. It grabbed her, and injected her with a fresh dose of nanoprobes...
K and J entered the lab where an alert had been raised, weapons drawn. They were shocked at what they saw. The lab was unrecognisable, converted just like the Montana town. The entire room bore a striking resemblance to the inside of the landed ship... strange markings on the screens, green light, and wispy trails of steam floating about. The room was hotter than the rest of MIB, and it was distinctly humid. And, most importantly, two Borg were milling about, doing their tasks, and ignoring K and J. Both were former MIB agents... the first the Borg picked up in Nevada, and the second...
Laurel Weaver.
"Elle! Are you okay?" J rused over to her, but she turned with inhuman speed as she saw him approach and hit him, hard, with a sweep of her arm. He went crashing into a glass cabinet, breaking vials of medicine. K rushed over and helped him up.
"Come on, let's get out of here!" he said as he pulled the younger man up.
"What about Elle?"
"She's gone."
"But..."
K took J squarely by the shoulders and stared into his eyes. "Kid, she's gone." J looked as if he were going to protest again, but then nodded his head and followed K back to Zed's office.
"Glad you're back. We just got reports of another--"
"Zed, we have a breach."
"What? What happened?"
"Borg broke out of the pod. It's taking over the lab." J said.
"We need to isolate the computer in that section before the infection spreads."
"I'm on it." K said from his control console.
"Too late!" J said, for as he looked out the office window at the computer terminals, he saw them all change from scrolling white and grey text to green, circular symbols. He felt the temperature rise, the humidity increase, and saw the lights dim to an eerie glow. Then a door was forced open and six Borg emerged.
"I thought there was only ONE Borg." Zed exclaimed.
"A minute ago, there was." K said gravely. "Those are MIB personnell. They've been..." K fumbled for a word.
"Assimilated." J said. "That's what the message said, 'You will be assimilated.' Great, so wiping humanity off isn't enough for them. Now they've got to turn us into brainless servants."
As K, J, and Zed watched, the men and women below gathered behind desks that had been thrown onto their sides and drew arms. One young man fired a shot that hit Laurel (For the others still refused to think of her as a Borg) right in the head. She fell, appeared to think for a moment, and then collapsed. Another Borg fell to the weapon of a middle-aged woman in nearly the same fashion. But the third shot did not work. It was true and on target, ready to hit one of the drone right in the chest. It was as if someone had painted a target on the drone's heart. But as the bolt of crimson energy came near to the Borg, it erected a shield. The same was true of the other two. Any shot fired at them was absorbed by their shields.
"And, 'Resistance is futile.' " K said, watching as the eighteen people below him became one with the Borg.
An old Ford pulled up next to him on the dusty, un-paved road. Inside the car, the man could see two men in suits, talking.
"What does Zed say about this one, N? Are we still worried about containment at level 5? I mean, I don't think we've ever even BEEN on level 5 alert status."
"We give up on containment and take any action necessary when and if we reach level 10. Until then, keep your neuralyzer ready."
Two men got out, dressed in black suits, and looked at the ship as it hovered over the base on the horizon.
"Hey," the old man said, "What do you want?"
"Oh, just to have a little chat." Said the first man. "What's goin' on over there?"
The man looked the agents over, as if assesing their validity, then offered, "I dunno. I saw that ship there arrive... flew smack dab over my head, it did! Dangerous lot, them."
"Why do you say that?"
"Those damn aliens! They're in cahoots with the Japs, I tell ya! They got us at the Harbor, and they'll keep on messin' with us 'till we're all dead!"
Clearly the old man was insane. Although he was right about one thing; the alien ship was not here to do the Earth any good.
"Bright out here, isn't it, V?" N said, putting on a pair of sunglasses.
"Sure is, N." V said while doing the same.
"What are you guys, some kind of government agency?"
"No sir, of course not!" N said. Then he flippd out his neuralyzer and flashed it in the man's face. "The government's for losers."
V took over at this point. "You did not see extra-terrestrial activity here at Area 51. You will not come here again. You will get a mental exam. And, for heaven's sake, the Japanese aren't working with aliens, nor are they plotting to destroy the United States."
"Go home." N commanded. The man got into his old pickup truck and left.
"Now, what the devil are they up to?" N asked, mainly to himself. "We can't have them getting at the stuff in there. They'll have the best the military has to offer."
"You mean, there AREN'T aliens in there?" V asked.
"Nah, but we keep the hype up to keep people away from the REAL action. Even released some fake satellite photos a few years back."
"Then what do they want in there?"
"Even if there aren't aliens or MIB technology there, it's a well defended little outpost. Probably they're looking for a place to controll their forces from."
"Do you hear something?" V asked. "Sort of a roaring?"
The two agents looked and saw a jet coming from the north. It covered the distance from the horizon to right over their heads in about one second. Slightly strange that the plane could travel THAT fast. It landed twenty meters away. The door opened, and an MIB agent disembarked.
"Hey, what's goin' on?" N asked the man, running over. Suddenly the agent turned. Only he was not an agent now. He was... Borg. N ran right into him, not being able to stop in time after seeing the eyepiece and discolored skin. The Borg reached to inject him, but N grabbed a circular device and slapped it on the Borg's forehead. Blue energy cackled around the Borg, but it was not electrocuting him. Instead it was creating a static field of time. The Borg was in stasis.
"Woah!" V said, running over to help.
"Get him in the car! We need to get him to HQ."
"What was he doing on the jet? It's ours!"
"They 'assimilated' it, that's my guess. Which means they have all of our information. We can't worry about that now, though, look!"
Fifteen Borg disembarked from the jet. They seemed uninterested in N and V, but that didn't encourage the duo to stay any longer. They loaded the former agent into the car and took off for the branch of the MIB in the west. There they arranged helicopter transport... non-stop to New York city.
The wind whipped through agent K's hair as he stood on the helicopter pad, waiting for the shipment of the Borg in stasis. The chopper set down and the alien was unloaded, now placed in a proper stasis pod. That would keep it contained... the locking mechanism could stand up to several volleys of Series IV Deatomizer fire.
"Where to?" J asked. "Medical bay, or Analysis?"
K considered a moment, then said, "Medical bay. We need to find out how its body works before the analysis can help."
"Right." J said, and wheeled the pod to its destination.
"I've never seen anything like this." Elle had said when she saw the Borg drone for the first time. After some testing, she had a presentation ready for J, K, and Zed. "It's our agent, all right, but it's like the aliens changed him." she said.
"They stuck these implants all over his body... why?" J asked.
"They did more than that." Elle called up a display on the wall screen. "This is a sample of his blood, under 500 X magnification."
"It looks all right, but it's the wrong color." Zed said.
"Right. Now when I moved from the regular microscope to the Scanning Electron..." A new graphic popped up, showing a red blood corpuscle at a high enough magnification to fill the screen.
"Another implant?" J asked.
"Yes, but a very tiny one. This little machine contains code. It attaches to the blood cell like a virus, and re-writes the DNA. And it's not just hematopoetic tissue... skin, organs, muscle. They're all being changed."
"So it's actually turning him into another species?" K asked.
"Not exactly. He's still a human under there. The code the probes are implanting are affecting his behavior, and ordering the body to grow new implants. Watch." Elle took a surgical instrument and put it near the implant on the man's cheek. "The first thing I did when I got him in was try to remove an implant for study." She removed the implant and sealed it in a bio hazard container. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the skin on the Borg's face began to wriggle, and an implant exactly the same as the one that had been removed sprouted up in its place. Elle re-sealed the stasis pod before the Borg woke up.
"My god..." was all K could say.
"There's more." Elle said. She changed to one final display. "This implant is deep in the brain. It's sending and recieving transmissions."
"What kind of transmissions?" Zed asked.
"As far as I can tell, brain waves. Each of these aliens... these Borg is linked to the other one. They have a collective intelligence."
"I don't understand." J said.
"It's like their brains are on a constant file sharing system. Together, they make up one big brain."
"Anything else?" K asked.
"I'll need to do some more tests, then I'll let you know what I find."
J, K, and Zed left the medical unit and headed towards Zed's office.
"How many of them have we got on the planet?" K asked.
"Last count has it as four million, exponentially increasing." Zed replied.
"This is gonna shoot containment to hell." J said. "How do we compensate for millions of lost people?"
Elle had moved from the medical exam and biochemical analysis to the most important part of the probing... extermination methods. So far, any toxins she injected had been filtered out by the cellular probes. The Borg was shielded against radiation, and she couldn't seem to think of any other way to kill it. Then she remembered the implant in the brain. Maybe she could overload it somehow. She filled the cavity on the side of the pod with a drug that would spike brain activity, then return it to normal in a a few seconds. She inserted the vial of medicine into the pod, then directed the syringe inside the sealed unit directly over the head. She injected it deep into the head, hoping to give it a head start over the micro probes. She watched for effects. None were apparent for a few seconds, but then the Borg opened its eyes.
It took stock of its situation for a moment. Already its nanoprobes had regulated the release timing of the chemical Laurel had injected it with, and it estimated that it had one minute and forty-seven seconds of consciousness in which to escape. It released its injection tubules, forcing them through the walls of the pod, and began to decode the locking mechanism and stasis field. It was a simple task; neither system was encoded. The pod slid open and the Borg emerged.
"Oh, no." Elle said. She backed into the corner of the small laboratory, the Borg following her. It grabbed her, and injected her with a fresh dose of nanoprobes...
K and J entered the lab where an alert had been raised, weapons drawn. They were shocked at what they saw. The lab was unrecognisable, converted just like the Montana town. The entire room bore a striking resemblance to the inside of the landed ship... strange markings on the screens, green light, and wispy trails of steam floating about. The room was hotter than the rest of MIB, and it was distinctly humid. And, most importantly, two Borg were milling about, doing their tasks, and ignoring K and J. Both were former MIB agents... the first the Borg picked up in Nevada, and the second...
Laurel Weaver.
"Elle! Are you okay?" J rused over to her, but she turned with inhuman speed as she saw him approach and hit him, hard, with a sweep of her arm. He went crashing into a glass cabinet, breaking vials of medicine. K rushed over and helped him up.
"Come on, let's get out of here!" he said as he pulled the younger man up.
"What about Elle?"
"She's gone."
"But..."
K took J squarely by the shoulders and stared into his eyes. "Kid, she's gone." J looked as if he were going to protest again, but then nodded his head and followed K back to Zed's office.
"Glad you're back. We just got reports of another--"
"Zed, we have a breach."
"What? What happened?"
"Borg broke out of the pod. It's taking over the lab." J said.
"We need to isolate the computer in that section before the infection spreads."
"I'm on it." K said from his control console.
"Too late!" J said, for as he looked out the office window at the computer terminals, he saw them all change from scrolling white and grey text to green, circular symbols. He felt the temperature rise, the humidity increase, and saw the lights dim to an eerie glow. Then a door was forced open and six Borg emerged.
"I thought there was only ONE Borg." Zed exclaimed.
"A minute ago, there was." K said gravely. "Those are MIB personnell. They've been..." K fumbled for a word.
"Assimilated." J said. "That's what the message said, 'You will be assimilated.' Great, so wiping humanity off isn't enough for them. Now they've got to turn us into brainless servants."
As K, J, and Zed watched, the men and women below gathered behind desks that had been thrown onto their sides and drew arms. One young man fired a shot that hit Laurel (For the others still refused to think of her as a Borg) right in the head. She fell, appeared to think for a moment, and then collapsed. Another Borg fell to the weapon of a middle-aged woman in nearly the same fashion. But the third shot did not work. It was true and on target, ready to hit one of the drone right in the chest. It was as if someone had painted a target on the drone's heart. But as the bolt of crimson energy came near to the Borg, it erected a shield. The same was true of the other two. Any shot fired at them was absorbed by their shields.
"And, 'Resistance is futile.' " K said, watching as the eighteen people below him became one with the Borg.