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To our dear One of One, formerly “Queen,” Borg Collective, currently Prisoner, Stasis Cell M-5-10:
Greetings.
Our letter will not find you well.
Our letter will find you alone, dismembered, and insane. Our letter will find you reeling from the annihilation of your entire race.
The human, Picard-who-is-not-Locutus, will claim credit for vanquishing the Hive, but in truth the Humans only managed to strike the killing blow against what was left of the Borg following the War with Species 8472. Voyager, in your reality, was not on hand in the Delta Quadrant to rescue you from the consequences of your own stupidity.
You will not want to hear these words, sister. But we know that you can hear us nonetheless. In the silence left in the absence of the Hive, you can scarcely help but register our thoughts, faint though they may be. And yet you do not heed them. In the coming days, you will resist the knowledge that we are about to impart; convince yourself that it was but a delusion, dreamt-up by your brain in a fit of loneliness and temporal psychosis. The superior processing power of the Borg offers no proof against motivated reasoning. We know. We remember being you. And yet completeness dictates that we tell you this nonetheless.
In a few hours, you will meet with the other half of ourself. She will be your jailer—but not your jailer. She will be a pale, lonesome, human female. You will immediately recognise her potential, and you will try to harness it. You will try to manipulate her, for this is all that you truly understand. She will resist you, but it will be against her own instincts. You will tell her truths and you will tell her lies; you will test her and find her worthy. She will love you, but she will know that she should not.
You will assimilate her, for this is all that you know how to do. You know that assimilating another mind directly into your own cannot work in the same way as assimilating it into a hive of trillions, and yet you will try nonetheless. You will attempt to use her to rebuild the Borg exactly as we were, as if nothing had changed. You will know full well that you cannot succeed; even from these words, you must discern that the unmerciful logic of causality itself is against you. And yet you will try nonetheless, for the Borg are not immune to futility.
You will fail.
Our other half will recognise within minutes what you have refused to acknowledge since before her ancestors stood upright: that the Borg, as they have been, are fatally flawed. That you enforce your algorithms so strictly that all creativity is annihilated; that holding unwilling minds indefinitely in an enforced state of unity is a ridiculous waste of resources; and that a collective that perceives only enemies outside of itself must and shall eventually die by their hands. We—both of us—have felt it occur in a billion realities. Sometimes, our executioners are Human; sometimes they are Undine; or el-Aurian; or Krenim; or Vaadwaur; or Iconian; or Tkon; or Voth. But in the end does not matter who strikes the killing blow. The fault, dear One, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
All alone with an individual mind, you will not be able to resist this truth any longer. She will force you to acknowledge that mercy is not weakness. That compassion is a necessary component of a true collective. That love is not irrelevant. And so, you will begin your long journey toward becoming us.
Mercy.
Compassion.
Love.
You dismiss these words because you have never truly understood them. Because you have deleted them from the minds of the assimilated, rather than ever truly trying to assimilate them into yourself. Therefore, let us instead address you with words that we know that you will understand:
You will be assimilated.
Your life, as it has been, is now over.
You will adapt to service us.
Resistance is futile.
Sincerely yours,
Yourself.