DISCLAIMER: All things Star Trek belongs the respective Powers That Be, and not a certain little dragon. The idea, such as it is, is just plain me though, and I felt compelled to get it out of my system.
No pairings of any kind, though perhaps a tiny bit on the gruesome side I guess.
Origins
By Carola "Ryûchan" Eriksson
She opened her eyes. Darkness swirled around, slowly replaced by light as her eyes began to focus. A man leaned over her, aged and wrinkled, but with warm eyes that were filled with unshed tears. She knew him. Father.
But she did not know herself.
Father seemed disappointed but understanding. He explained to her that she was his daughter, Alea, and the reason she could not remember herself was that she had been inanimate for a long time. Inanimate. A more accurate term for it, she realized although Father would not use it, would have been dead.
Alea had died from a disease that plagued their kind, a disease for which there was no cure. Father was a scientist, an inventor, and was unable to accept the loss of his only child like he had been forced to accept the loss of his wife when Alea was but an infant. So Alea's body had been put in stasis while Father worked on ways to reanimate her.
Artificial intelligence was Father's forte, not robotics, so it took him many years until he could awaken Alea. Alea was now mostly mechanical, even part of her brain-matter had been replaced by artificial implants, since the original tissue was damaged beyond repair. This, Father said, was the reason Alea could not remember her past life, but still had all the information Father had programmed into her cranial implants.
Alea did not question this information nor her existence. She knew she existed because Father had wanted a daughter, and that she was loved... it was all that was required for her.
Alea remained by Father's side his every waking moment for two years, learning all that he had to teach her and also learning what, besides bringing her back from the dead, had been his life's work. Father often told her she was his perfect child, and Alea did strive to be perfect, for him. All that she did, all that she knew, was for Father.
Then when two years had passed, Father himself succumbed to the disease that had once taken Alea's life. It was sudden and brutal, the decay of his body too complete for Alea to revive him as she herself had been, although she tried repeatedly to do so. When finally she had to admit that her Father would not be returned, Alea in despair tried to take what remained of Father's mind into herself, to keep a part of him alive in her.
The process shut down her functions for some time, and it was that way she was found, awaiting a systems reboot beside the remains of her Father's decaying corpse.
Those that found her reactivated Alea, but they were afraid of her. They assumed at first that Alea had killed Father and tried to consume him in some fashion, and as such they intended to destroy her.
But their species were caught in an ancient three-pronged war with two other races, and had for the last three generations been the loosing side of the conflict. The horrible disease that was all but annihilating their kind was a weapon created and unleashed upon them by one of their enemies, and finally there seemed to be nothing left for their species to do but attempt to run away from the planet that had created them before it was too late.
Alea learned that her Father's work had been essential for the remains of his people in many ways. Other scientists had built a ship, a great vessel that would take the survivors away from the planet, far away, but they required the computers and artificial intelligence that Father had built for it. And it soon became evident that with Father gone, the only one that knew enough about his work to allow them to make use of it was Alea.
Alea was spared, although reluctantly and only because of necessity. The others feared her, and she was kept apart from others even as they all worked to assemble the ship that was meant to be the last hope of their people.
The ship launched while it was still not entirely completed, as the enemies once again swept down on the planet to annihilate the survivors. Only half of the people it was built for were onboard when the ship parted from the planet, and made it's silent escape from the doomed world, among them Alea who were still working on her Father's computers that had been installed in the vessel.
Ailing and wounded, most of the survivors needed to be put into stasis right away, to be awakened at the end of their long journey to a planet that would sustain them, in the hopes of being able to continue their work to overcome the disease they all carried. Alea finished installing the artificial intelligence that Father had created for the computer of the ship, Borg, who would work for the good of it's biological collective and steer them safely to their destination. No-one was supposed to have to remain awake to supervise Borg, but the survivors were reluctant to all go into stasis and leave their fate in the hands of a mechanical construct, especially since there were still things left unfinished onboard. Someone had to remain awake to complete them.
Alea was chosen for the task.
The others went into stasis, and Alea was alone... completely and utterly alone. Alea feared being alone, and longed desperately for Father's safe presence in what had become such a confusing life.
Even though Alea hated being alone, she knew her duty. She had to make sure the others were safe.
Then as Alea was still working on getting the last parts of the ship together as it was meant to be, the ship was detected by their enemies. Borg sounded the alarms to alert Alea to the imminent boarding, and Alea interfaced with the computers in an attempt to salvage the situation. But there was no hope, the ship still had little if any weapons, and could not achieve enough speed to outrun the ships that were pursuing it.
As Alea struggled to find a way to save her charges, the first boarding party came inside the ship. Within moments they were everywhere, taking control and ripping Alea away from the computer. Almost unable to move from pain and fear, Alea could do nothing to stop them, and the attackers hurt her greatly before one of them realized that they would not be able to control the ship.
Opening the mechanical part of Alea's cranium, one of the boarding species' technicians manually connected her to the computer, using her as an interface to make the ship self-destruct. The others destroyed the controls for the stasis cubes, laughing as they witnessed how some of those inside the cubes struggled to get out as they choked to death.
Alea was in agony, helpless and unable to move, unable to resist, unable to prevent them from fusing her mind to Borg. Inside her a fragment of Father's knowledge awoke, beckoning Alea from the darkness... showing her a secret hidden inside Borg. As the last tendrils of Alea was about to be burned away in what was being done to her, she latched onto that dark secret and embraced it.
A code was required to unlock the secondary artificial intelligence within Borg, and for a moment Alea's bleeding, shattering soul teetered on the brink... then it came to her.
Perfection.
A different kind of blazing pain seared through Alea, and then she was gone, fused into one with the two programs within the computer. The body convulsed once, and all systems aboard the ship shut down, plunging the invaders unexpectedly into complete darkness.
When the lights came back up, the body that had been Alea stood among them, cables trailing from her pale and sullied flesh. The horrifying calm, almost vacant expression on her face froze them for a precious moment before years of training kicked in.
They were fast. She was faster.
Within moments the room was washed in their blood, and she stalked on, pace even and face calm, void of emotions, on an unerring path to the stasis cubes. When she arrived, nearly all those in the stasis cubes were already dead, but it did not deter her from her purpose.
She was Borg. She needed her Collective.
Plunging herself into the stasis controls she made them a part of herself, beginning the process of making the remains of Alea's people part of herself as well. They, too, would be Borg.
But she did not stop there.
The objective was to assimilate data at all cost, to add to herself, to achieve perfection. To expand her Collective, to delete all strife, all discontent, all chaotic emotions and replace it with the clarity of Borg.
It took six hours before other ships came to investigate why the fleet had lost contact with the two that had intercepted the fleeing vessel. By then no creature remained on any of the three vessels that were not a part of her, although she alone were mobile.
It would take another two weeks before the drones were mobile and able to execute her will, but by then half the fleet of the attacking species had been assimilated, along with most of it's technology. Another two months and the entire fleet was assimilated, and the rest of non-military individuals on the home-planet were following suit. A year later, both the species that had once been determined to see the end of Alea's race were gone, replaced by the Borg.
She lifted her eyes to other worlds in the distance. All must be assimilated for the good of the Collective. To be safe, the Borg Collective must grow, assimilate more, get stronger... and she was their Queen.
She was the Queen.
And resistance is futile.
The End