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They’re staring at the shiny viewscreen in their new mini-cruiser. This is the first proper ship they’ve managed to build. They stand looking at the slowly shifting starfield as they drift through a backwater system where nobody is likely to bother them.
When they say proper ship, they mean, a ship in which they can comfortably stand up and require more than five steps to walk from one side of it to the other. This one has three chambers, subconsciously designed to reflect the partitioned mind of Nova, Agnes and One.
Nova feels the satisfaction of having moved the needle. They had been stuck with the shuttle for a little too long and she was beginning to worry they would never get larger. One’s confidence buoyed them through that time, and they found the pieces that they needed in order to reach the next stage of growth.
It’s time to regenerate, Nova thinks. She’s getting tired. She deactivates the viewscreen and heads for the regeneration alcove – a comfortably sized one, finally—in the rear of the main chamber. She pauses for a split second as she catches sight of her reflection in the darkened view screen.
She feels Agnes and One having very strange, very different feelings at what they see. Her round, pretty face is pale and latticed with filaments of circuitry. The Borg armor encases her small, curvy form and makes her soft shapes harder. Her lips purse for a moment.
This will have to be sorted out during the regeneration cycle.
Agnes decorates her partition like Chicago tonight. It’s summer. The air smells clean, like sun-drenched leaves and clear water. She stares out at the lake, so large it disappears into a horizon she can’t quite make out, just a tiny dark line dotted with little seed pearls of light. The stars sing to her Borg senses now, in ways they never did before. She can’t help feeling a little pang of sweetness toward One, who stands beside her at the water’s edge.
“You were surprised,” One comments.
“Yeah. I wasn’t expecting to see… us. I didn’t realize we would look like that.”
“Like what, dear?”
“Just… different? I don’t know. It’s still me, but it also isn’t.”
One slides a tentacle lovingly around Agnes’s waist and draws her closer. “It’s not you, it’s us. That’s the difference. We’re beautiful together. I wanted you for your delicious, consistently surprising mind, but I would be lying if I didn’t admit that the whole package…” She pauses for an appreciative look at Agnes’s face that drifts down over her body and back up. “…didn’t present itself as a lovely bonus.”
Agnes smirks and playfully bats her eyelashes, pretending to be coy. “Why, One, what ever do you mean?”
“I was pleased to find myself inside your body, of all bodies that might have been available to me. It delights me. Both because it is yours, and because it is intrinsically pleasing.” She leans down and murmurs in a tone that she knows does things to Agnes, “I would have liked to touch you out there, in real time, real space. I would have liked to experience you from outside of you.” She strokes Agnes’s hair.
“I thought I didn’t care what I looked like, and I guess I don’t, it just…” She leans into One. “There was so much of you there. I’ve gotten so used to us being like this, I almost forgot that we’re still two beings, that we’re different, that there was just a me and a you, and now there’s an us.”
She leans her head against One’s shoulder and draws the tentacle tighter around her waist.
“Do you find us less beautiful?”
Agnes’s mouth drops open. “What? No! I just…” She trails off.
“Let me refresh your memory.” One creates a vision of her again, the vision of Nova reflected back at them from the darkened viewscreen. Agnes looks at her again, this time prepared for what she sees.
Nova is pale, not quite grey like One, but not like Agnes’s peachy complexion either. Her pale skin and platinum curls make her look almost ghostly, rising out of the complex layers of dark Borg armor. Her collarbones stand out in a way that Agnes’s never did. But it’s her eyes, she thinks. Her eyes, they’re not black like One’s, but not shiny jasper like Agnes’s. They’re pale, too. They’re a little haunting.
They’re what happens when a human soul has seen and absorbed the grief and trauma of civilizations and processed them with bare hands.
But the longer Agnes looks, the more she sees in Nova what she always found so stirring about One: her gaze is haunted, yes, but also steady. She doesn’t flinch at anything she sees. Her eyes are intelligent, and she has the posture of a … well, a queen. The queen that Agnes thought she would never be, and that she couldn’t be alone.
“You see,” One whispers.
“We’re beautiful together,” Agnes whispers back.
“Together we’re so much more than what we were.” One kisses the side of her neck. “And I think I want you to keep the hair.”
Agnes’s eyebrows twitch a little. “Really?”
“It’s not necessary, strictly speaking, but I’m fond of it.” She runs her fingers through Agnes’s hair again.
“There’s no evolutionary purpose,” Agnes points out. “It’s just a play toy.”
One knots her fingers in it and tugs Agnes’s head back, exposing her throat. “I know,” she purrs. “I do enjoy playing with it, you know.”
Agnes makes no further protest on the matter. And if One sometimes delights in pulling on it during sex, and sometimes just likes to sit and brush it and braid it, it’s good enough reason to keep it.
But the truth is, it’s a part of her, her human half, the Agnes that Agnes was missing when she was surprised at Nova staring back at her. She and One have been together long enough that One has developed some judgment about when Agnes will benefit from keeping a particular little bit of her humanity as part of Nova’s makeup.
Tonight isn’t that, though. It’s just a little nostalgia, some cool night air, and a particularly perfect Chicago street sausage with the inexplicable lengthwise slice of pickle that sparkles on her tongue.
She tastes the chemical makeup of the brine. She feels the speed and direction of the wind and can calculate its changes as easily as breathing. She lets One tease her for her nostalgia for food that she no longer needs. And the stars, the stars and their songs and their shifting radiations on hundreds of spectra, the coronae that are visible now to her naked eye…
She finds peace. She finds who she is. She finds who Nova is, and will be.
Nova wakes from her regeneration cycle, feeling peaceful, but slightly baffled that precisely two of her short blonde locks are in braids.