Author's Note: Brain used writer's block on 6thfloormadness, it was super effective! I don't know why but for some reason this chapter was really hard to write.
The Birth of a Hybridization
Borg Collective American Headquarters, California January 1, 2090 AD
Jeff was laying on a chaise on the rooftop of the Collective's headquarters, staring up at the sky. He had been working late as a way to keep his mind off of his cravings for a cigarette. With the new tax laws kicking into effect as the new year started, tobacco was just becoming too expensive to smoke anymore. Theoretically, he could have the Collective smuggle cigarettes from Brunei or another country with lower taxes, but drones didn't really like breaking laws. Something to do with drones not trusting individuals because they weren't on the neural network so the only thing drones could put faith in was the laws of the land and hope that individuals would respond with reciprocity. It wasn't so much that the drones actually thought all individuals obeyed all laws, but they still found the concept of breaking laws that you agreed to follow to just be really odd. Jeff needed to stop thinking about cigarettes, it was just making the situation worse. Instead, he should think about...how the the 2080's had been an eventful decade, yea that ought to work.
The Moon had experienced an economic boom after the Collective had built a giant vacation resort, The Celestial Maiden. The start-up cost had been enormous but so many people wanted to visit that there had been a successful return-of-investment after only three years. With all the Moon tours, gambling, amusement park rides based on alterations of the gravity, copious amount of drugs for sale, and so on, Jeff suspected the Collective wanted the Moon to become the new Las Vegas or Amsterdam. At first he had been against the idea, mainly because he didn't think enough people would want to come to ever make it financially worthwhile. What changed Jeff's mind was that the Collective had decided to license the designs for the impulse rocket engines in order to encourage expansion into space. As much as Jeff hated to admit it, many people just didn't trust the Collective and that had been why they didn't want to go into space with them. Once other companies started doing it, the moronic plebs realized it was safe to go into space and space tourism became a big moneymaker. After people became comfortable with the idea of the average person going into space for a vacation, the Collective had partnered with several of the companies running tours to finance construction on the Celestial Maiden. The Collective hadn't actually needed to bring any of the companies in, they could have afforded it themselves, but figured it would make the tourists more comfortable to know it wasn't just drones in charge of everything. Though if any of the idiots had stopped to think about it, the Collective essentially was in charge of everything. The Collective had all the experience when it came to building...well anything in the vacuum of space. All the businesses that sprang up as a result of the success of the Celestial Maiden (the clothing stores, the restaurants, et cetera) had to have buildings constructed to house them that could withstand the pressures of space or be constructed in locations specifically dug out for them. Manual labor on the Moon was not easy for non-drones.
Thanks to the inefficiency that was a natural part of government bureaucracy, the United Nations still hadn't worked out all the legal problems that came about from having people living on the Moon. Who were the people supposed to pay taxes to? If they decided to move to the Moon permanently, what country were they citizens of? If they committed a crime on the Moon, where would they be tried? The Collective had decided to simply declare any part of the Moon that they had built something permanent on to be private property owned by the Collective and that people living there were going to be treated as renters under Brunei law. This had caused quite a stir among the people living on the Moon at the time until Roma had given a speech explaining that, despite the fact that it seemed to have been decided as truth by public consciousness, Brunei law did not not actually require people living there to get assimilated. Several countries had complained in the UN about the Collective making a decision like that, but since they hadn't reached an agreement on what the alternative would be, the Collective's decision was going to be the status quo for the foreseeable future. There was also the odd loophole that the Collective was still technically a private company so, legally, they were within their rights to lay claim to property on the Moon while nations were forbidden to do so. There was also the fact that the Collective knew there wouldn't be any violent or overly negative reactions to them claiming the Moon thanks to pyschohistory, so everything was working out.
Roma had been assigned to the Moon on a permanent basis once business started booming...or maybe she had volunteered, Jeff didn't remember. The Celestial Maiden grew so fast and had so many people traveling through it that a spokesperson was needed, and both Jeff and Thurgood were too old to fit the role. Roma fit the image of the young, hip executive that was willing to organize a party for you. Things had gotten a little complicated when she ended up marrying one of the tourists. Jeff had thought it was a stupid, spur-of-the-moment decision made after an evening of drunken sex (and turns out that was exactly what had happened) but surprisingly, Roma and her husband had decided not to get a divorce and were still happily married. Roma was even pregnant with their first child. When he had gone to visit (because otherwise Thurgood was going to nag him about it forever) Jeff had noticed that the drones spent an awful lot of time taking care of Roma. They were incredibly attentive to her needs. Roma had noticed it as well and found the attention overbearing. Jeff didn't understand why the drones were acting like that, he was pretty sure the porn star had survived giving birth in space and that had been without gravity so Roma should be fine, with the gravity generators working it was like she was on Earth. She was due any day now, hopefully Jeff wouldn't have to go up there again.
The metropolitan nature of the Moon's first resort (though since it was now the size of a small city, the word 'resort' didn't seem like the proper word to use) was in stark contrast to the Ares Center on Mars, which was so small it was practically a rounding error on the Collective's financial statements. The Mayflower Expedition had gone to Mars in 2081 and had established humanity's first permanent outpost on another planet. Once there however, there wasn't a whole lot for the drones to do. Unless it was specifically about Mars, research was easier and quicker to do on the Moon or Earth. The drones at Ares Center had spent the last nine years simply existing, staying on Mars merely to prove that they could live there. Granted, the center would receive occasional visits from scientists looking to study Mars (as well as one couple that wanted to have a wedding there) but for the most part, the only people on Mars were drones. In a way, it was depressing that humanity had finally achieved a permanent settlement on another planet whose only purpose was to be a permanent settlement on another planet. Still, it was progress.
When the Collective had first discovered subspace, there had been enough buzz in the scientific community over it that they had garnered some media attention, but overall not many people cared. String Theory held that there were multiple dimensions, so what was the big deal if the Collective discovered another one? The drones had been sure that subspace was not like other dimensions. Subspace was a dimension that, with the right technology, humans should be able to interact with. It had made headlines when the Collective successfully sent a message through subspace that arrived faster than the speed of light could travel, but 2083 was when the Collective's experimentation with subspace paid off. The Collective had modified an impulse rocket engine to see if it was possible to send a ship through subspace. In orbit around the Moon the drones on the Jemisonhad activated the engine and basically tore a hole into subspace which they disappeared into. When the Jemisonemerged back into normal space two minutes later, near Mercury of all places, the ship had been badly damaged and nearly out of power. While most people would have considered that a dangerous failure, Jeff and the drones had realized that the experiment proved that it was possible to travel in subspace, they just needed more safety and control features.
After a year of study, the Collective decided to try again, though they did things significantly different. Rather than using the engine to push the ship into subspace, the drones had constructed a device more in line with that of the Alcubierre drive theory, specifically that a subspace bubble was created around the ship and it was the bubble that propelled the ship forward rather than the push of the engine. The problem with the first attempt had been that the Jemisonhad forced its way into subspace; it had created a suction effect that caused space debris around the tear to follow the ship. When the Jemison hadexited subspace, the debris followed and, unlike the ship, didn't slow down so the Jemison was riddled full of tiny holes. The bubble would avoid that problem by only altering the space around the ship. Furthermore, by having the subspace generator as a separate machine from the engine, both with different power sources, there wasn't the danger of floating dead in space due to lack of fuel. The fusion reactors could last for years provided they didn't suddenly receive drastic drains like when the Jemison's reactor had to pull double duty as the engine and the subspace generator. When the Collective had finished retrofitting the Jemison in 2086, they put it into space without delay. This time things went off without a problem, the ship traveled to Mars and back to the Moon in under five minutes.
The only problem Jeff had found with the whole situation was keeping the bubble created by the warp drive stable (Thurgood had wanted to call it the bubble machine but Jeff refused to allow the first safe-to-use faster-than-light engine be called something a kindergartener would think up so they had settled on the name 'warp drive'). The reason the Jemison had ended up near Mercury was because subspace was constantly shifting, it was incredibly difficult to move in a straight line in subspace. The drones hadn't noticed the shifts before because their experimental messages were all sent and received on Earth, the distance wasn't great enough. Sending an object through subspace with a specific destination that was farther away than the far side of the planet required that a monumental number of calculations be done in a very small amount of time. Additionally, adjusting to accommodate and conform to the results from those calculations required almost instant reactions from all members of the crew, whether it was the pilot, navigator, or one of the engineers manning the warp core. Because of that, Jeff didn't think it was possible for non-drones to ever use warp drive. If they tried, the ship would probably end up someplace completely different from their intended destination. It was bad enough when you got lost driving around somewhere on Earth, getting lost flying through space could be a death sentence. Roma had advised the Collective to sit on the warp core technology for a little while. While licensing impulse rockets and opening the Celestial Maiden had done a lot for the Collective, many people were still worried about the idea of drones having unrestricted access to space with no governmental oversight. They needed more time to adjust. So while the Collective had successfully sent a ship to the Alpha Centauri binary star system where they had discovered a planet that was actually suitable for human life (Jeff had decided to name the planet Chiron) they had yet to make any announcement of the event. There was also the additional problem of jurisdiction; if the bureaucrats at the UN couldn't decided how laws would work on the Moon which was only a few hours away from the Earth Jeff didn't want to imagine how much they would argue about who was in charge of a whole new planet.
The Collective had successfully built and then used a teleportation device in 2086. While they had only moved an empty cup across a ten foot room, they had moved an empty cup across a ten foot roomvia teleportation. Well, technically they hadn't actually moved the cup. The cup had been scanned on a molecular level and after the Collective's quantum computer had done the calculations to account for the position and direction of all the subatomic particles composing the cup to create a map of its physical structure the cup had been broken down, disintegrated really, on the spot. A cup had been resembled across the room based on the map that had been compiled, but it wasn't really the same cup. The original cup had been atomized. The new cup had been created from whatever particles the machines happened to have available, so it shouldn't really be considered the same object. Roma and Thurgood hadn't understood the difference until a year later when the Collective had teleported a drone; once an actual person was broken down in front of them and a clone was reassembled across the room the implications of the technology finally sank in. Since the Collective had basically just invented a murder/cloning machine, Jeff had advised that this particular experiment not be released to the public. If the machines ever became widespread without people properly understanding how they worked (and given how most people didn't even know how their cars worked, that seemed like a strong possibility) Jeff didn't want to be put on trial for crimes against humanity. There were many things Jeff aspired to do, racking up a kill count greater than that of Hitler was not one of them. Still, the drones hadn't actually cared that their bodies were being destroyed and reassembled, it would be like a normal person caring about clipping their toenails and then watching them grow back, so they kept right on using the teleporters, though Jeff had insisted they be renamed to transporters in case there was ever a leak. A paper trail about research into transportation technology would raise a lot less eyebrows than one that mentioned teleportation technology.
Putting aside the fact that the transporter killed whoever used it, there was also the problem that the technology was strictly site-to-site. Because of subspace's constantly shifting nature the data had to be sent directly from one transporter to another otherwise message degeneration would start to occur. While interference was not a big deal for most messages, when the information contained instructions on how to properly reassemble a person (well OK, reassemble a drone) it was vital that nothing interfere with the message. It was for this reason that, while subspace communication was theoretically possible on a galactic scale, transportation technology was limited to a range of about 40,000 kilometers which was enough to clear the Earth's atmosphere but not enough to make it to the Moon. The Collective had built twenty transporters on Earth and as well as one in the Zenith Space Station. They had wanted to build more but Jeff had worried people would notice if too much of the Collective's cargo was suddenly getting moved large distances without any discernible vehicles doing the shipping.
The Collective's artificial gravity generators all functioned in various different ways depending on if they were based off of the Galilei or Newton designs and what version they were at (Jeff was pretty sure the latest Galilei design was a Mark 5 while the Newton was only on its third iteration) but they all drew their gravity altering ability from the harnessing of gravitons which were some kind of particle that was only theoretically believed to have existed in quantum mechanics...or something like that. Jeff didn't remember the specifics. As a result of their discovery and manipulation of gravitons, the Collective had made a very interesting discovery. With relatively few alterations to the design, a gravity generator (if it had a lot more power running through it) could create energetic distortions with the gravitons creating...well, a force field really. The Collective figured this out a few months ago so Jeff wasn't sure what the ramifications were yet (he had watched enough sci-fi movies growing up to have a bunch of ideas on what the force field might be used for but this was reality, not a movie, so Jeff refused to speculate).
Jeff's thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the door opening. Jeff didn't bother to turn to see who it was; Thurgood was at a New Year's Party, Roma was on the Moon, and since it was a holiday visitors weren't allowed on the premises so it could only be a drone. Sure enough, a drone soon appeared in Jeff's vision, staring down at him.
"You're blocking the sky drone," Jeff said as he sat up. The drone took a step back as Jeff swung his legs of the chaise so he could stand up. "I hope you had a good reason for interrupting my musing. What if I had been calculating star trajectories? You could have ruined my equations by sticking your big head into my view."
"We thought you would like to know that Ms. Gupta is now in labor."
"You mean she still hasn't changed her last name yet?"
"Ms. Gupta does not wish to change her last name to Powell, she feels that would be ignoring her heritage."
"Right right, even though she was concerned about her kid having a different last name than her. Women." Jeff rubbed his forehead. "So the question is: do I care enough to bother doing anything about this information or should I go back to staring at the stars?"
"If you aren't there for the birth of her child, Mrs. Gupta will be upset with you."
"It is mathematically impossible for me to give less of a crap about the emotional state of a hormonal woman that I see maybe twice a year."
"Once Mr. Jenkins awakens from his alcohol-induced sleep he will wish to be with the Powells and will not be happy to learn you decided not to come up."
"Again, I do not care."
"If that was true, Dr. Borg, you would not have gone to visit Mrs. Gupta when she first told you about her pregnancy."Jeff sighed. "Fine, you can take me up at sunrise, I want to get some sleep."
C.H.E.E.S.E, Earth's Moon. January 1, 2090 AD
Jeff was glad he had insisted on going to bed after the drone had told him about Roma because the chairs in the waiting room were incredibly uncomfortable. If he had had to sleep in one of these, at his age, his back and neck would be knotted all to hell. Jeff didn't even want to be here, if he was going to be in C.H.E.E.S.E. he would have prefered to have been checking in on the various experiments going on but Thurgood said they had to sit in the waiting room with Roma's husband (Jeff still couldn't remember the buffoon's name, he knew it was something stupid though) because they needed to "be there for her" despite the fact that their presence would have no effect on Roma's ability to push the kid out, especially since they were in the waiting room and not the delivery room with her.
"Dr. Borg, Mr. Jenkins, Mr. Powell, you may go in now," a drone said as it walked out of the delivery room.
The three men stood up from their chairs and cautiously walked in to check on the new mother and child. Jeff heard Roma's weary voice speaking as he and Thurgood followed Whatshisname through the door, "Hoyt dear...come meet your son." Hoyt right, no wonder Jeff couldn't remember the man's name. It wasn't a name, it was a barely a syllable. Friggin' New England old-money parents.
"WHAT THE HELL IS THAT THING?" Hoyt shouted as he came to a sudden stop.
Jeff and Thurgood peered around Hoyt's shoulders to see what could cause such a reaction. Thurgood's reaction was slightly more subdued than Hoyt's, though he still jumped in shock. Jeff merely raised an eyebrow at the sight before him. A standard drone stood in the corner of the room, staring at medical equipment that was hooked up to Roma who lay in the bed in the center of the room. In her arms was...well apparently her child. It was not what Jeff had been expecting. Roma was very petite, maybe five and half feet tall, with long, dark curly hair. Hoyt was incredibly pale (Roma had once joked about Hoyt getting burned from a full moon), with short blond hair and was built like a football player. Rather than being a combination of traits from both parents the baby in Roma's arms was something that resembled a drone, but it was radically different from any drone Jeff had ever seen. Its blue-grey skin was covered in what appeared to be scales that had an almost plastic-like sheen to them. The baby had funnel shaped devices on its head instead of ears, they reminded Jeff of the horn section of a phonograph. He noticed that the 'ears' were moving around independently of each other, listening to the various sounds of the room. Something about their movement reminded Jeff of a dog. There was something off about the baby's eyes, but Jeff couldn't tell what the exact cause was at this distance. It didn't have hands, its arms ended in bundles of wires that were wrapped together in a vague semblance of fingers though Jeff noticed that the wires were uncurling and wrapping back together as if the baby was trying to figure out what sized 'fingers' it wanted to have. Other than all of that, it looked like a perfectly healthy human baby.
"This thingis our son, Hoyt," Roma said tersely. She looked down at the child and smiled as she gently stroked its cheek.
"I've seen assimilated gorillas that look more human than that! How did this happen?" Hoyt said angrily as he stepped forward to point menacingly at the child. As he did, Roma cradled the baby protectively and Jeff noticed the drone in the room stop what it was doing at the medical machines to move toward Hoyt. Hoyt noticed the drone's movement as well and lowered his arm.
"When we were having trouble getting pregnant I had the drones take a look at me...you know, just in case. They said that I couldn't have kids of my own, that my eggs were malformed or something. They offered to let me use an egg from one of the drones that was in the Crick/Watson Project but warned me that the child would have some alterations due to the experiments."
"SOME alterations? Roma, look at it!" Hoyt shouted. "I agreed to raise a kid, not a drone! How am I supposed to explain this to everyone? People are gonna talk. They're gonna think I had sex with a toaster or something."
"Hoyt, it doesn't matter what other people think. What matters is that we have a healthy son and he needs a name," Roma said calmly.
"I think you mean he needs a serial number," Hoyt muttered under his breath but still loudly enough that everyone heard him.
"Hoyty toity, I think you need to go for a walk. Come on, I got some pineapple express you can try," Thurgood said as he slapped Hoyt on the back. Hoyt merely grunted in agreement and allowed himself to be led out of the the door closed Roma sighed deeply. She looked at the child in her arms and smiled sadly. Jeff could see tears beginning to form in her eyes. "I was afraid he would react like that. I'm sure he would have preferred us just not having kids to having a kid like...this," Roma said as she gestured at the baby. "But I just wanted to be a mother so bad and when the drones offered me the chance to not only be a mother, but a chance to be a mother to one of the most important member of the Collective, how could I refuse?"
"There, there," Jeff said awkwardly as he leaned forward and patted Roma's leg. "You're just being hormonal from the birthing process. Give it a couple hours and you'll be thinking straight and then you and Hoyt can decide how best to raise your drone child."Jeff knew that he was somewhat lacking in people skills, he understood and accepted this fact. But he still did not understand what it was Roma saw in Hoyt. Roma had come to the United States from India with her parents when she was two so she didn't have an accent nor did she dress in typical Indian styles but she was still a total opposite from Hoyt. Whereas Roma came from working class immigrant parents, Hoyt was a WASP that received a monthly stipend from his rich parents. Between that and Roma's paycheck, Hoyt never had to work. Jeff wasn't actually sure what it was Hoyt did with all that free time up here.
"I am not being hormonal! I am really worried that Hoyt will leave rather than stick around to raise his son! He cares what his idiotic, drunken friends think of him. If they make fun of him for fathering a drone he might actually leave!"
Before Jeff could respond Roma's drone attendant spoke up, "Ms. Gupta, Dr. Borg, pardon the interruption but we need to correct an error in your statements."
Roma looked startled when the drone spoke, she had probably forgotten it was in the room, Jeff certainly had. It was weird the way people got used to drones after a while and just tended to think of them as part of the furniture rather than as a person, not that drones were people exactly but it was still an interesting phenomenon.
"Alright drone, what error needs correction?" Jeff asked.
"You both referred to the child as a drone, it is not a drone. A drone is an individual subsumed by the Collective's gestalt, this child is a holographic fractal entity formed from the emergent structure of the Collective. From the moment of conception, this child was part of the Collective. It developed alongside us."
"I...did not follow any of that," Roma said with a shake of her head. "Well besides that fact that he's apparently not a drone."
Jeff sighed, seemed he was going to have to simplify things for Roma. "Brain development is a physiological process, alter the biology and you alter how thoughts work. Since the kid's nervous system was formed differently from normal people, fiber optic cables or whatever, the exact specifics aren't important," Jeff said as he waved his hand dismissively. "The point is a drone is a person, a singular person, that is a part of the greater whole of the Collective. Your son isn't a singular person, he has no individual personality, he is a microcosm of the entire Collective. He isn't just the most important member of the Collective because his augmentations were grown on him rather than grafted, he is important because he is fundamentally different on a psychological level from any other human being in history."
"Oh...that's...uh, something I guess." Roma said. Jeff couldn't tell whether she still didn't understand or if she understood but didn't grasp the significance. "You know Jeff, we're not movie stars or anything but we are public figures. The media follows us, people know I've been pregnant, they're going to want to see what my son looks like, we're going to need a way to explain this without scaring everyone into thinking normal humans are about to become obsolete." Alright, maybe she did understand the impact after all.
The drone decided to step back into the conversation. "You are correct Ms. Gupta. How your son is presented will determine how people react. Our analysis of pyschohistory has shown that we are rapidly approaching a point of no return. While opinion about the Collective is more-or-less evenly split between positive and negative and has been for years, this reveal will sway the majority one way or the other."
"So basically 'don't screw it up' is what he's trying to tell you," Jeff said, grinning at Roma. "No pressure. It's not like the entire fate of this company, hell the future of the human race, rests on your shoulders or anything."
"Well actually Dr. Borg-"
"Shut up drone, I was being sarcastic. I'm just glad this is all someone else's problem now and not something I have to deal with."
Roma just sighed and hugged her now sleeping child. "My little boy is going to change the world...and he doesn't even have a name yet."
C.H.E.E.S.E, Earth's Moon. January 4, 2090 AD
Roma took a deep breath and counted to ten before exhaling. Hoyt hadn't come out and said that he was leaving her, but he wasn't doing a whole lot to show that he wanted to stay either. She only seen him once since their fight about Robert (though she was beginning to think she'd start calling her son Bobby for a few days, see if the nickname stuck) and he hadn't been very talkative but at this point she realized she didn't have time to worry about it. If she wanted to be able to safely raise Robert she needed to ensure society would be accepting of his differences, if that required her to sacrifice her marriage then so be reporters had been allowed in to take pictures of Robert, once they finished they would record a speech from her and that would be the extent of her involvement. After that it was up to the talking heads at the news networks to spin the story how they wished to the world. She had decided honesty was likely to have the best results. Jeff had suggested lying and saying that though Robert looked like a drone, he was still a normal baby. Roma knew that that would blow up in their faces once Robert got older. He was the equivalent to children of the President of the United States, he wouldn't make the news if he didn't do anything out of the ordinary but the moment he did, everyone would know about it.
As Roma had told Jeff to counter his suggestion, "Due to the potential repercussions of Robert's birth, the Collective's survival, I believe, can only come from understanding, not hostility, built on knowledge, not faith. If we lie to people we will be no more trustworthy than the governments that you so despise."
Roma took another deep breath, she had wasted enough time. When the reporters had shown up she had decided to walk around the hallways for a little bit, just to stretch her legs and think about what she would say, and they were anxiously waiting outside her room so that they could take the pictures and record her speech. As she approached the room she and Robert had been staying in, several of the reporters jumped up from their seats. She received a variety of reactions from the group.
"Why are you hiding the child, are you ashamed of your son?"
"It's about time, just because you're on maternity leave doesn't mean the rest of us are."
"Roma, ready for that speech now?"
"Will your husband not be joining us?"
"Roma, what do you say to the accusations that your child is a bastard from a tryst between you and Dr. Borg?"
"Look this way, smile for the camera!"
"Gentlemen, ladies," Roma said to quiet the group down. "I thank you for your patience, I just need some time to myself, to get away from all the medical scans and the drones constantly fussing over me or my son. I'm now ready to let you see Robert and then I'll give my thoughts on the whole matter."
Roma stepped forward and opened the door to her hospital room. Her bed was in the center of the room with the headboard against the far wall, to the right was a variety of blinking, beeping medical equipment, to the left of the bed was a crib in which Robert was quietly laying there, just looking around at stuff. A drone was standing by the crib, bent over so that it could stare down at Robert. It was rather odd to see, the drone was perfectly still, held in a pose that would not be comfortable for a normal person.
Roma walked over a reached down to pick up Robert, while shooing away the drone as it moved to assist her. It moved over to stand in the corner by the monitoring equipment. Roma sat down in her bed so that the reporters could all get a good look at her and Robert as they came into the room. She could tell from the startled looks on their faces as they entered that they had not expected a child with any cybernetic augmentations. Still, most of them recovered quickly enough and began snapping photos of the mother-son duo. After several minutes of posing, Roma leaned over and deposited Robert in his crib, who proceeded to stare intently at her, waiting to see what she would do.
Roma took one last calming breath and then began her speech. "Drones have been ostracized by various parts of society ever since they became publicly known. We have been accused of kidnapping and assimilating people against their will so that their minds and bodies become slaves to the Collective. These allegations and discriminations stem from a lack of understanding of what the drones, and the Collective as a whole, actually are. It is hard for an individual person to grasp the idea that the drone in front of them is not one person, but a hivemind entity. So rather than try to understand, they dismiss a drone as 'not human' because it has no sense of itself as an individual. But the mere existence of the Collective begs an interesting question: what is the self?
Most of us share a strong intuition that our own self is an irreducible whole, that there must be some place in our brain where our perception and our sensation all get together and create thoughts and imagination and define our future. But neuroscience has discovered that there is no single brain structure that embodies the self. It points to the fact that what's creating the sense of self is a complex mental neurological map allowing us to function as one single living organism. Biology tells us that the human body is actually an ecosystem of trillions of bacteria, microbes, viruses, all with their evolutionary agenda. What is the self if what I call 'me' is not one organism, but really trillions of different living entities? Look at the Internet, this amazing web of connection in which each one of us is like a neuron, giving input and receiving information much as viruses and bacteria are doing inside our bodies. Body and mind, our skin, can no longer be used to define the boundary of our self. We are all connected, with nature, with billions of people! Could it be this illusionary image of our self as separate beings be what is keeping us in this perpetual state of anxiety, scarcity, fear, and dissatisfaction, leaving us, as a society, in a very delicate point in evolution with the current ecological, economic, and social crisis? We need a new story, a new myth, to redefine our role as human, in this interconnected universe. As the astronomer Carl Sagan said, 'We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way Galaxy which is one of billions of other galaxies which make up a universe which may be one of a very large number, perhaps an infinite number, of other universes. That is a perspective on human life and our culture that is well worth pondering.' The drones have spent a great deal of time pondering and have concluded that they need to create a better society, a better culture, than what we currently have if humanity is to survive. My son, Robert Prometheus Gupta, is a result of that decision. He is the first, but he won't be the last. And that is all I have to say on the matter."
Author's Note: How a mom feels about her newborn that can barely be considered human, not exactly something I had any experience writing so I hope it turned out well.
A big part of Roma's speech came from a video I found on Youtube by Scienceandnonduality called "What is the Self?" Check it out because reading it just doesn't do the speech justice.
Since so many people asked about it last chapter I have to address this point. I realize the story is taking a while to get going and I apologize for that. I want to show the effects the Borg would have on the development of human civilization and explain how their technology came about rather than just do a one chapter timeline like in so many Alternate First Contact stories. I feel like this creates a more believable universe for them to inhabit. That being said, pretty much all the necessary Star Trek tech has been established now so the only thing left is to find those Prothean ruins...