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He makes an agreement with the Federation. If they will give him the surgeries he needs, a replacement for his right arm and his ocular implant, and citizenship, they can have all the Borg technology that they can strip from his body without killing him.
The agreement stalls for a long time, mostly because of the citizenship request. He has to sit in front of a committee to make his case, stared down by some of the most important people from four different planets as well as countless others in attendance, and explain why he is a good enough candidate to benefit from the privileges of Federation citizenship.
He has to explain that he is not Borg anymore, while his voice is still modulated, his skin unnaturally pale, and his body is covered in cybernetic implants. No one from the Enterprise is able to attend the hearing, but a few of them send recorded messages of support for his citizenship.
In the end, he doesn’t believe that he really convinced them. They give in because the technology on and in his body is worth more to them than their fear of this one former Borg.
The first part they remove is his right arm, from the elbow down. There had been something organic left of his arm underneath the Borg prosthetic, but the doctors say it wasn’t salvageable. They replace it with a prosthetic that closely resembles his left arm, except there is a socket connector a few inches below his wrist. They’ve told him that his digestive tract is nonfunctional, and he will have to continue sustaining himself on electrical power.
The new prosthetic is much weaker than the Borg prosthetic was, and it takes him months to adjust to the less precise motor functions. Sometimes he holds his hands out, one next to the other, and imagines that they are both his own.
The next surgeries are on his legs. Some of his bones are replaced. He will have pain in his left knee and ankle for the rest of his life, but he doesn’t know that yet.
He needs five surgeries to remove his chest plate and several of the implants beneath it, six more to remove the rest of the Borg coverings and implants on his torso. He’s left with a horizontal ridged scar on his chest, which covers an implant beneath the skin, and several visible implants along his abdomen and spine. He spends a year barely able to leave a biobed.
During this time, he notices that the doctors and nurses make small talk with their other long-term patients. They talk to and about them like friends, almost. When one of them takes a turn for the worse or passes away, there is a heavy sense of grief and loss.
When the doctors and nurses talk to Hugh, they talk about his condition, about further surgeries he might need, about how well he’s healing. One time, when the nurses think he’s asleep, one of them tells the other that he wishes Hugh would die, so they wouldn’t have to have something like him there. He says Hugh scares the other patients. He says they should’ve just killed Hugh and taken everything out of him so they could figure out how to protect everyone from the Borg.
Except he doesn’t call him “Hugh.” He calls him “it.”
Hugh is transferred to a different hospital for the surgeries on his neck, face, head, and brain. He stays at that hospital for three years.
These are the worst surgeries, but the doctor is nicer there. She talks to him through the surgeries he has to be conscious for. She talks about her family and the things she does when she’s not on duty. She asks him how he’s feeling whenever she comes in to talk to him. She tells him that he’s brave.
One morning, he is woken from a pain-induced sleep by the sound of a child. He opens his eye--the other is gone and hasn’t yet been replaced--and sees a girl with thick brown hair tied back in a ponytail, staring at him. She’s wearing little blue earrings that Hugh recognizes from one fo the stories the doctor told him. This is one of the doctor’s daughters.
He smiles a little and whispers, “Hello.” His voice is still strange to him, now that they’ve taken away the implants in his throat.
The girl opens her mouth to say something, but the doctor appears behind her, and frantically drags the girl away from the doorway. He can hear the doctor’s voice fading as she tells her daughter. “You can’t go in there. It’s not safe.”
He spends a year at a physical rehabilitation center, learning which pains will heal and which will not. He has to learn to see again, now that he has the new ocular implant, and how to use his prosthetic arm so that doesn’t seem much different from his organic arm. He has to learn exercises that will keep his legs strong without aggravating his knee and ankle. He has to learn how to speak and make facial expressions that won’t unnerve other people, despite all the nerve damage in his face and throat. His skin has warmed to its natural color. He’s begun to grow hair.
They make him talk to a therapist there. Sometimes he even says what he’s really thinking instead of what he’s sure he’s supposed to be thinking.
He knows he’s supposed to be grateful. And sometimes he is.
“Do you think anyone will ever see me as anything other than what I used to be?” he asks her one day, when he is feeling honest.
She raises an eyebrow at him. “Is that what you want? To be seen as someone who was never assimilated by the Borg?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “It’d be easier, I think.”
“But it wouldn’t be true,” she says.
He still sees a stranger in the mirror, sometimes, years after all the surgeries. He touches his face with his left hand, where he can still feel implants holding the right side of his skull together. He touches the implants that are visible over the place where an eyebrow would be, and the scars and metal coverings where a tube used to connect to his jaw.
He wonders where the Federation keeps all the parts they took from him. He wonders what they do with them. He wonders if they ever think about who they used to be connected to.
Somehow, he doubts it.