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It had been half an hour since systems were restored aboard La Sirena. Agnes had stumbled away from the Borg Queen in a haze after she’d succeeded in beaming Seven and Raffi out of danger. The Queen’s words still haunting her.
“’Betrayal’ is just an anagram for ‘believe me’.”
“That's not even…”
“*sigh* God. Poetry, dear.”
Agnes had gone back on her word. She left the Queen hanging there, screaming her name, while she simply walked out of the warp core deck. It had taken every ounce of willpower that she’d had to tune out the screaming and walk away. She hated to admit it, but she really had wanted to keep her end of the bargain. It was just that she didn’t trust herself to not follow that road to the end.
As she headed over to the dining area and replicated a cup of earl grey, all she could think about was how the Queen was right about her being cruel. Why should she feel sorry for that monster near the warp core?
“You...are accustomed to this feeling anywhere.”
“ What feeling?”
“Unbelonging.”
The Queen saw right through her the moment that she had laid eyes on her. No neural interface was even necessary. Her entire life was a testament to her disconnect from the rest of humanity and she wore that disconnect on her soul’s sleeve. Rios had been right when he had said she could only relate to synthetics.
Even on Coppelius, she had felt she was moving in the opposite direction to those around her. Agnes had always admired the precision and clarity of machine life – the reliability and the consistency. If a computer was given a request, its response was always as crisp and clear as the input data allowed for. And yet, the Soong family’s work strove to replicate all the imperfections of a human’s psychology. How irrational was it to want to die simply because that was what evolution had programmed the previous organic model to do? She cared for Picard, kind and compassionate and a pillar of conviction, but he could be so frustrating at times, so obtuse in the way that he put up walls to stop people seeing what he was actually feeling.
That last complaint felt so very hypocritical right about now. Wasn’t that exactly what she was doing at the moment?
Agnes truthfully felt more like a human interface than a human being. She didn’t see the point in simply reiterating the human blueprint with alternative source materials. Picard’s synthetic body was such a painstaking replica that he was vulnerable in all the same ways. A viral infection or a traffic accident could harm him just the same as in his original body. Wasn’t that even what Arik Soong had sought to get away from when he first steered the family project toward robotics and away from genetics?
A chill ran down her spine as she saw where this train of thought was going. Somehow, the correlation between a lifetime of technophilia and the Borg had gone unrecognized in all that time spent in classes on the Borg Collective back at Starfleet Academy. But it was impossible for her to ignore now. This was insane. How could she even think of offering herself up to the Borg Queen like that? Those classes had spelled out exactly what sort of entity she was. She even had first-hand accounts from Picard and Seven of the pain they had each suffered as a result of the Queen. Hell, she’d seen some of those atrocities herself when she was probing her head earlier and...
Oh.
Agnes felt her breath quicken as she recalled the experience of being... entwined …with the Borg Queen. While it was true that the Queen had forced her to relieve her lowest ebb as she passed through that room called sadness, the truth was that Picard had -- if anything -- understating the experience that was assimilation. In the moments between each of her emotional cores being laid bare, it really was euphoric. It would have been so easy to lose that clear line between where she ended and the Borg Queen began.
And it was then that she realized what she was feeling right now as she tried to calm herself with a cup of earl grey at an empty table. This was like having had a limb torn violently from its socket, or the skin flayed from her body and covered in bandages. It wasn’t just that hollow feeling she’d masked with humor and sarcasm all her life. No, this was even worse. There was now a sense of visceral wrongness at being separate from the Queen now that she’d experienced that connection for herself.
Had Picard and Seven felt this way, too, when they were severed from the Collective? She had heard that Seven’s path back to humanity had been long and difficult aboard the USS Voyager and the years that followed the ship’s return to the Alpha Quadrant. But never in either Picard or Seven’s stories had she heard anything described that felt quite like this. What was wrong with her that she felt this way?
Agnes found herself staring down at the bottom of the cup, still so very on edge. She felt around in her lab coat to see if the other Agnes P. Jurati kept a diary in the same place. Sure enough, she felt a small book nestled in one of the pockets. It made sense, really. Keeping an electronic log in a fascistic regime was just asking for trouble. There were some things that it was better to do analog.
Abruptly finding herself staring through the eyes of another Agnes like that reminded her of an antique visual novel that she’d played once. The diary was filled with notes pertaining to the Borg Queen’s imprisonment. Reading such casually eugenicist language written in her handwriting was so very unnerving. Real Hyde of the Dark Dimension vibes here.
She took the ballpoint pen from the back of the diary, turned to a blank page and started writing down her feelings in poetic terms. It was best not to describe anything literal in case anyone accidentally saw. If she wrote in metaphor, she always had plausible deniability that the other Agnes said those things. A hot spring in the middle of the arctic is vague enough, right?
It was only after she paused to take in what she’d written down that she noticed that she’d actually been writing in Borg alphanumeric code. She had felt strangely cold ever since she was disconnected from the Borg Queen, but she went ghostly pale at what she saw right now. This was so not good. Her subconscious was already thinking of herself as Borg. She snapped the diary shut and buried it back in her labcoat.
Agnes got back up and paced around the ship as she frantically searched for something else to help compose herself and soothe her nerves.
“Computer, do you have Kasseelian opera?”
“Negative.”
Figured. Why would a ship built by a genocidal human-centric regime have alien culture in its databanks? Agnes took a deep breath and went with a more likely choice.
“How about Mozart? You must have Mozart, right?”
“Affirmative. Which composition are you looking for?”
Agnes pondered for a moment.
“C-Could you give me Symphony no. 41?”
At once, the sound of Mozart’s Jupiter began to play throughout the ship’s speakers. Agnes closed her eyes and breathed a gentle sigh as she basked in the interplay of the notes. Losing herself in the clockwork precision of the lines at play, Agnes began to idly wander the ship. She walked nowhere in particular, more focused on the rhythm of walking, the movement in time, the pace of her steps like a metronome for her thought process – stiming by symphony, the thought came and went. To her surprise, or perhaps not, Agnes found herself standing back at the warp core staring up at the Borg Queen as she smiled back at her, covetously.
“Have you come to fulfil your end of your deal, Agnes?”
Agnes tensed up and jumped right there on the spot as she realized what she had done. What she had allowed herself to do.
“I-I...it was an accident, I hadn’t meant to...!”
That smile on the Queen’s face grew wider still as she gazed at her with those pitch-black sclera devoid of irises.
“Universal gravitation, my dear.”
“Excuse me, what?"
“The closer two celestial bodies are to one another, the greater the force exerted between. As they revolve around each other, adjusting distance, they will never stray. And if the gravity between is sufficiently strong, well. Species 5618 calls it KIC 9832227, the light from its inevitable collision visible in your night sky as we speak. How I long to see you shine like that red nova, Agnes.”
Agnes breathed deeply as she fought to hold onto what scraps of rationality she had left.
“Okay, just… what the hell did you do to my head?!”
The Borg Queen’s eyes narrowed, that predatory grin never fading.
“Whatever do you mean, my dear?”
Agnes grabbed her diary out of her pocket and thrust the most recent entry up at the Queen in a fit of frustration. An electric sigh left the Borg Queen’s lips as she drank in every line of code voraciously.
“Oh Agnes, you do have a sense of poetry…”
Agnes pulled the diary away and shoved it back in her pocket, terrified of how her heart suddenly fluttered at the cooing, tender sound of the Borg Queen’s approval.
“I-Is this like... normal for xBs?”
The Queen chuckled lightly.
“While I believe Seven of Nine retained a certain... appreciation for the Borg language for many years after leaving us, it is my deepest pleasure to reveal that this is all you, Agnes. By no means is this the mean average for those severed from the Collective.”
“Y-You’re lying.”
“Do you believe that Locutus could have returned to his duty as a Starfleet captain so quickly if he were struggling to write in Federation Standard English?”
“N-No, of course not...”
“Then what does that tell you, Agnes?”
“Alright, I’ll play. What you want me to say is that I’m so ideal, so perfect, so radiant that my subliminal mind just up and allowed itself to get memetically assimilated even though the medical tricorder verified after our entwinement that I have zero nanoprobes inside me? Did I hit the bullseye, your majesty?”
Agnes flinched as she caught herself using the Queen’s own term for their recent union. It felt so horrifyingly right. Her words were dripping with sarcasm, but even as they left her lips, she knew that they were undeniable.
“Sarcasm. Irony. Deflections to avoid observing one’s own perceptions and value judgments. You believe sincerity makes you weak. But the truth remains the truth even if you avert your gaze. How can you address reality if you do not acknowledge it?”
“So... what? I keep quiet about this until we get back home and then I-I-I have myself committed at Starbase 5, because I’m so obviously out of my fucking head if I’m seriously considering…”
Agnes trailed off, afraid to finish that sentence. It occurred to her in that moment that there was a far more definitive way of keeping herself from succumbing and it was something that had crossed her mind every day since she had taken Maddox’s life under Admiral Oh’s influence. That it wasn’t her first thought here was another sign that her entwinement with the Borg Queen had affected her far more profoundly than she thought. Her head was a mess right now and this situation was doing no favors for her feelings of self-hatred, but her suicidal ideations had practically switched off like a light. It was as if the part of her that was already Borg simply wouldn’t let her die.
You know what you need. You could simply reach out for her hand and never suffer like this again.
“Considering what, Agnes? You fear that speaking it aloud will make it all the more real. I have already seen your confession inscribed in analog. If the act of observation makes it reality, then it is already far too late, my dear.”
“I-It’s insane! I-I can just imagine how disgusted Picard and Seven would be with me if they knew that I wanted to be assimilated! Their own personal nightmare and here I am going gaga at the thought of...of…!”
“What is that saying Species 5618 has? ‘’What they don’t know won’t hurt them’’?”
“You’re suggesting I lie to them.”
“You’ve been lying your entire life, Agnes. An act as autonomic as drawing breath.”
“That’s not fair! Masking isn’t the same! I-It’s…!”
“You allow others to believe that you perceive the same reality, that you share their irreconcilable sentiments. Then you perform the ice queen when the veil is broken and they catch sight of your dazzling complexity. What is that if not a lie? Have you ever truly connected with another of your species?”
“Of course I have! Or are you just conveniently not acknowledging Picard for one?”
“You can lie to the others, Agnes, but you can’t lie to me. Locutus may appear to be a surrogate father, but his rapport is one of obligation. You know deep down that his heart will not sing at the symphony like yours does at this very moment.”
It was then that Agnes consciously noticed that the sound of Mozart’s 41th symphony was still playing through La Sirena ’s speakers as it entered the fourth and final movement.
“Wait, wait...what? Since when did Borg have a sense of music anyway?”
“Quintuple Invertible Counterpoint. This composition is unique in the history of your species. Of all the thousands of species that we have assimilated, we have only ever encountered another 17 pieces like it. Each line complete, a masterpiece unto itself, entwined together to create something that none could achieve alone. Perfection.”
Agnes’ breath hitched as the implications struck and her face flushed red. She was already intimately familiar with the musical theory behind the herculean feat performed in Jupiter’s fourth movement. There was a composition of equivalent sophistication in Kasseellian music. The Borg Queen knew exactly what she was doing as she appealed to Agnes’ lifelong love for Quintuple Invertible Counterpoint. It wasn’t just that she could appreciate the phenomenal level of skill needed to balance five lines at one. There were plenty of people who understood the theory. It was that her entire philosophy of life could be extrapolated from that theory. And yet she had never paused to consider where that philosophy ultimately led to.
“You understand, Agnes.”
“Yeah, I understand that I’m completely out of my mind here!”
“Does mathematics lie?”
Agnes was at a loss for words. Any theory, moral or otherwise, ought to be consistent. The model was fractal in nature. The whole can be extrapolated from any individual facet, but this model was too monstrous to even contemplate. Her world was threatening to collapse in on itself. She forced herself to start backing away again, her legs feeling like they were caught in quicksand.
“Agnes!”
The Borg Queen screamed her name just like before as Agnes willed herself away from the warp core. Once the Queen was out of sight, she hurried in the direction of sickbay and frantically looked around for a medical tricorder to run a scan on herself. Her blood ran cold as the results started coming back a second later. Vastly elevated levels of dopamine and norepinephrine.
You really have, haven’t you? You’ve fallen head over heels for the Borg Queen. There’s no denying it anymore.
She had to get off this ship. It was stupid to leave the Borg Queen alone, but the utilitarian calculus was clear in saying that it was still safer than staying on board as her will to keep up this exercise in futility continued to wane. If she stayed on board where her subconscious could easily betray her again in leading her back to the Queen, she would definitely end up allowing herself to be assimilated by the time that the others got back.
There was a line from an antique sci-fi film that came to mind. The choice is an illusion. Barring interruptions, her assimilation was an inevitability, anything between now and then was merely detail. She knew that. The Borg Queen knew that, and knew that she knew that.
It was dusk outside as Agnes opened the hanger doors and walked in the direction of Château Picard. She covered herself in as many blankets as she could find as she lay down on the dilapidated couch and tried to get some sleep. If she was lucky, she wouldn’t wake up until the others got back and could stop her from doing something that she was afraid she wouldn’t regret at all.
Closing her eyes, Agnes focused on the sound of the antique clock that Picard had taken the time to wind up again during their visit here earlier. The rhythm of the cogs and gears moving in perfect synchronicity was relaxing. Before long, the cumulative exhaustion of the past day allowed her to drift asleep.