LAST EDITED ON Jun-27-14 AT 04:53 PM (EDT)
 

Friday, August 1, 2408
Mancunium (Vega V)
Crown Colony Commonwealth
Vega sector, United Federation of Planets

IPS Valiant arrived to find a quiet Friday afternoon (Galactic Standard Time) in progress on Mancunium, the third-most-populous world of the Crown Colony Commonwealth. This was the ship's third visit in as many years; Port Hodgson, the capital, was one of the regular stops on Art of Noise tours. Despite the system's proximity to the Earth Alliance (Vega being a mere 25 light-years from Sol), nothing much ever tended to happen there.

Captain Utena Tenjou sat casually in her command seat, already civvied up in preparation for her evening in town with the rest of the gang, and had just finished logging the ship's safe arrival in standard orbit when she realized that this visit was going to be different.

As was his habit, Kyouichi Saionji had one of the speakers at his communications station tuned to the system's open ATC channel, the volume turned down low, so that he could listen with half an ear to the near-subliminal buzz of the local airspace while he busied himself closing the ship's flight plan and filing the appropriate status updates with IPSF Fleetcom at Babylon 6. Utena, too, was not really listening to it, but receiving it, all the same; and so she sensed rather than heard the sudden shift in tone. She stopped her thumb just short of the intercom key that would have called down to the Lido Deck and turned instead to face Saionji.

"Do you - " she began, but he was already turning up the volume, a quizzical frown on his face. The traffic was overlapping now, hard to pick a coherent message out of, but the agitation in the voices was plain. Somebody at Mancunium Control was picking up something that he (from the sound) didn't like the looks of, and other stations on the network were agreeing with him.

"Hmm," Utena mused; then she turned to the science station and said, "Swede, any ideas?"

The young Starfleet officer at that station, one of several aboard the Valiant for this summer's tour, had already bent to her viewscope, her right hand making deft, delicate adjustments to the sensor matrix. "One second, Captain," she replied, her voice much brisker than usual as she, too picked up on the note of urgency in the air.

Tall, blonde, blue-eyed, and laid-back, Lt. Olivia Andersson was a fisherman's daughter from Malmö and almost perfectly inhabited her inevitable nickname... almost, except for the fact that she was by genetic heritage not a Swede at all, but in fact a Vulcan. Utena was fuzzy on how she'd come to be raised by a Swedish fisherman and his wife, but the fact was that she'd never been to Vulcan, nor did she have any particular interest in it. She didn't speak the language or know any of the customs; she didn't even like the food.

Apart from what she described as "the science nerd gene," in fact, Swede Andersson shared virtually no features of personality with the stereotypical Vulcan space officer. In the two months she'd been aboard, she'd earned a reputation as a person who didn't sweat the small stuff and didn't think the universe contained a lot of big stuff, but in moments like this she was all business. She fit the Valiant's unusual mold so well, Utena was seriously considering an attempt to poach her outright from Starfleet when her hitch was up.

Now, still looking into the scope, she reported crisply, "Transwarp conduit forming, bearing 349 mark 24 relative," sounding as Vulcan as Utena had ever heard her sound.

Utena's puzzlement deepened. "Transwarp conduit? Who the hell uses transwarp drive any more?"

Swede looked up from the scope long enough to make eye contact with the captain and shrug, then returned her attention to the scope. "Search me, boss," she replied, sounding much more like herself. "I can't make head or tail out of the meson signature, and the computer's no help." She looked up again, a wry smile on her face, and added, "It's returning code 429, which is EPIC for 'I got nothin', maybe it's the Breen.'"

In spite of the sudden tension, Utena chuckled; she shared Andersson's less-than-entirely-glowing regard for the Energy Pattern Interpretation Computer's competence.

"At any rate," Swede went on, "it's big, and whatever's coming through it will be here in eight seconds... mark."

"Yellow alert," said Utena, facing front once more. As the alarm bonged and the trim stripe on the walls lit up in the appropriate color, she went on, "Shields up, weapons to prestage. Swede, get me a visual."

Kozue Kaoru had just enough time to configure the ship accordingly and report, "All stations report ready, we're at Condition Two," before the viewer filled with... something. She wasn't really sure what. It wasn't anything she would call a ship; for one thing, it was enormous, bigger than any starship she'd ever seen or heard of, and for another, it was... well, it was a cube, which was a damned strange shape for a vehicle. It didn't even really appear to have a hull, as such. It was just a gigantic, geometrically regular agglomeration of pipes and conduits and... and stuff, like the work of that Mondasian artist whose name she couldn't think of right now, who made all his pieces out of scrap electronics and right angles.

Behind Kozue's station, Utena got to her feet and stood looking at this strange apparition, hanging in the sky above Mancunium like a super-low-resolution moon, for a second before saying in a flat voice,

"What."

A moment later, the viewer fuzzed to static. When it cleared again, the visual feed had been replaced by a view of a large room that seemed to have been decorated by the same person who designed the outside of the cube. It looked to Utena like someone had turned the Pompidou Centre in Paris inside-out and then converted it into a nightclub, with pulsing lights tending toward the yellow-green part of the spectrum and an artful roll of heavy-metal mist across the dance floor.

And it apparently was a dance floor, too. There were perhaps two dozen humanoid life forms of some kind in view, comprehensively getting down to the thumpy electronic music that now came pumping out of the overhead speakers.

/* The Crystal Method
"Vapor Trail"
Vegas (1997) */

"Uh, is this... ?" she wondered, gesturing.

Saionji nodded. "Transmission from the, uh, whatever that is," he said, consulting his panel. "They're using the standard Goldfish Warning protocol."

Utena walked closer to the screen, her face falling into a deeply puzzled frown; Kozue and Swede flanked her, their own expressions similarly puzzled. In the background, they could hear all hell breaking loose on the ATC freq that Saionji still had open in a side speaker, but all were too fascinated by the bizarrely festive scene that confronted them on the viewer to pay it much mind.

A moment later, they were all startled by the sudden appearance of another figure, who abruptly popped up from somewhere below the camera's field of view. All three woman uttered a small sound of surprise and took an involuntary half-step back, then glanced at each other with nearly identical looks of slight sheepishness before returning their attention to the screen.

The newly appeared figure was much closer to the camera than the dancers, so that those watching on the Valiant's bridge (and, Utena presumed, elsewhere) could get a good look at him. He was a man, evidently human or close to it, but he had pasty grey-white skin of a decidedly unhealthy texture and his body was covered in cybernetic attachments that looked like he might've made them himself, possibly without actually looking at them. Staring into the camera, he spoke; when he did, he sounded like not one man, but hundreds, possibly thousands of people all speaking in eerie, mechanical unison:

"We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your chips. We will add your mixological and culinary distinctiveness to our own. From this time forward, your salsa con queso will adapt to service us." Then, with a grin that revealed a row of bright blue LEDs where his teeth belonged, he threw the horns with one mechanized hand and added, "Resistance is futile."

Scowling, Utena put her hands on her hips and took another step forward, jerking her head toward the screen so Saionji would know she wanted to speak to the cyborg. Then, when he'd given her the you're-on high sign, she said severely,

"Dammit, Dave! You bozos scared these people half to death jumping in out of nowhere like that!"

Dave of Borg blinked as if surprised to be addressed directly by someone in his unwitting "viewing audience"; then, recognizing Utena, he grinned even more widely. "Hey!" he said in a markedly less terrifyingly polyphonic, but still weirdly filtered, voice. "You guys beat us here. Solid! I told 6 of 1 the Valiant was faster than she thought." With a singsong note of triumph in his voice, he added, "Somebody owes Dave a bliiiiniiii."

"Blini is plural, you dork," said Kozue, rolling her eyes.

"Speaking of which," said Utena, "I thought you guys weren't allowed to have FTL any more after that fiasco with the Corellians."

Dave's non-robotic eye winked. "The Federation Supreme Court overturned that order," he said, and then went on in the Voice of All Borg, "The Roaming Party must roam! That is the Law. So we're here for the show tonight!"

Utena facepalmed. "Wonderful," she said. "Well, listen, I have to go and explain to the governor of Mancunium that this is not, in fact, the end of the world. Hopefully it's not too late to stop all of Starfleet and the Commonwealth Defence Force from gangrushing the Vega system."

"That'd be a major bummer," Dave agreed with a sage nod. "Say hi to the governor for us! See you tonight. All snack foods will be assimilated."

Kozue stood looking at the screen for a second or so after it switched back to the view of the cube, then turned to Utena and said matter-of-factly, "Utena, I have to go lie down now."

Utena nodded and patted her on the shoulder; Kozue turned without another word and left the bridge.

"Uh... what just happened?" Swede wondered as she followed Utena aft to the situation table at the back of the bridge. "Who was that?"

"That," said Utena with a touch of weariness, "was the Right Honorable David Bowie McMenahan-Chiang, former Ambassador Plenipotentiary to the United Galactica Assembly from the Republic of Bodacious Vee, Speaker for the Totally Radical Borg Collective." Then, picking up the telephone handset from its cradle at the situation table's end, she said, "Your Excellency? Utena Tenjou here. No, everything's OK, you can stand down the missiles. There's no emergency. It's only the Borg."

"No Emergency" - A Symphony No. 3 Micro-Story by Benjamin D. Hutchins
Special to the Eyrie Productions Discussion Forum
© 2014 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited

So someone is clearly unimpressed with the Borg...

>So someone is clearly unimpressed with the Borg...

Well, Kozue plainly is, but I suspect you mean that authorially. In which case I congratulate you on your perspicacity, sir! :)

The implementation you see here has actually been kicking homelessly around the UF writosphere for a long time; it stems from a discussion I had with the late Derek Bacon in the early '90s about what a lame villain the Borg were, and how if they were ever going to be allowed in UF it would have to be some kind of joke.

("Lower your shields and surrender your chips" is a more recent innovation. :)

TNG was generally pretty shit at villains. Q, the Borg, the Ferengi (remember when they were going to be the biggest galactic threat since the Klingons?), that Romulan Stasi nonsense, Counselor Troi's mother...

--G.
Bargain basement Cybermen repackaged as B-movie zombies. What's to be impressed by?
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Oh dear -Goddess-, Gryph, I thought I was going to break something...

I've never thought much for the Borg either, being so utterly...pathetic, really. And a giant space cube?

This, on the other hand, is just absolutely splendid.

>TNG was generally pretty shit at villains.

Had a lot to do with Gene's "bright and shining future" motif that guided the early seasons. Combined with the whole insistence on episodic writing and there was never a real chance for good villains to get more than the occasional two-parter.

>Q,

Q had good episodes, but like the Borg in Voyager, the writers in TNG ran Q's popularity into the ground so that the mildly malevolent omnipotent being whose visits were about teaching Picard & Co. lessons in how humanity was not ready to be visiting the stars eventually became the trickster god who showed up once a season to mess with the crew and then vanish.

>the Borg,

The Borg were interesting as villains in TNG for the reason that the Cybermen are interesting in Dr. Who: When their ships darken your sky, it's not to steal resources, claim territory, or wholesale destruction. It's to turn you into one of them, strip everything from you until you're just part of the machine that consumed you. And they do it because they think they are helping you, making you better by taking away those things that make you human.

Then they got to VOY and became villains of the week because the Paramount execs decided "Hey, First Contact did great in theaters, people really like these new Borg, so let's have them show up more and more!"

>the Ferengi
>(remember when they were going to be the biggest galactic threat since
>the Klingons?),

You mean the angry gerbils? Yeah, they tried again and again to make them sort of menacing in TNG, but by the time DS9 came around they just dropped that. After that, the only threat they posed was to the art of acting.

>that Romulan Stasi nonsense,

The writers never seemed to have an idea what to do with the Romulans. It always seemed like their reputation as masters of cloak & dagger could never be matched by what we got handed on-screen, if only because the writers could never stomach the idea of an episode where the bad guy won at the end.

>Counselor Troi's
>mother...

Majel Barrett was a wonderful actress, but I think most Trek fans would have loved to see Lwaxana Troi become the victim of a transporter accident.

>>So someone is clearly unimpressed with the Borg...
>
>Well, Kozue plainly is, but I suspect you mean that authorially. In
>which case I congratulate you on your perspicacity, sir! :)
>
>The implementation you see here has actually been kicking homelessly
>around the UF writosphere for a long time; it stems from a discussion
>I had with the late Derek Bacon in the early '90s about what a lame
>villain the Borg were, and how if they were ever going to be allowed
>in UF it would have to be some kind of joke.
>
>("Lower your shields and surrender your chips" is a more recent
>innovation. :)
>

The Borg as they originally appeared, infinitely adaptable and nigh invincible, had potential. Trek writers deciding they had written a villain that was too mighty and suddenly pulling an endless series of technobabble macguffins out of their nether regions rather ruined that.

They honestly would have been best left to the 'Here Be Dragons' regions of space, a warning to travelers to take care where they tread (rather how it seemed Q intended the meeting with them to be) rather than seasonally recurring villains suffering from serious decay.

>TNG was generally pretty shit at villains. Q, the Borg, the Ferengi
>(remember when they were going to be the biggest galactic threat since
>the Klingons?), that Romulan Stasi nonsense, Counselor Troi's
>mother...
>

Be fair, Lwaxana Troi was utterly terrifying... to Capt. Picard :)

>The Borg as they originally appeared, infinitely adaptable and nigh
>invincible, had potential.

Well, no, not really. See below.

>Trek writers deciding they had written a
>villain that was too mighty and suddenly pulling an endless series of
>technobabble macguffins out of their nether regions rather ruined
>that.

I think you've got the cart before the horse here. It wasn't that the writers decided to do that; more that they discovered that they'd created a threat so powerful it could only be defeated by authorial cheating. The concept ruined itself by being unworkable from first principles. The Borg were hopelessly flawed out-of-story from eight o'clock day one because such pains were taken to establish that they were without exploitable flaw in-story; any road to showing the heroes defeating them at that point automatically became a case of "oh, except this. And this. And also this and this other thing."

A monster that has an automatic counter to everything the adventurers might attempt can, by definition, only be defeated if the DM decides it will be, which is never going to be anything other than obvious and unsatisfactory.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

LAST EDITED ON Mar-26-14 AT 02:34 PM (EDT)
 
>I think you've got the cart before the horse here. It wasn't that the
>writers decided to do that; more that they discovered
>that they'd created a threat so powerful it could only be defeated by
>authorial cheating. The concept ruined itself by being
>unworkable from first principles. The Borg were hopelessly flawed
>out-of-story from eight o'clock day one because such pains were taken
>to establish that they were without exploitable flaw in-story;
>any road to showing the heroes defeating them at that point
>automatically became a case of "oh, except this. And this. And also
>this and this other thing."
>
>A monster that has an automatic counter to everything the adventurers
>might attempt can, by definition, only be defeated if the DM decides
>it will be, which is never going to be anything other than obvious and
>unsatisfactory.

It's the "automatic" part, combined with the implicit "every unit" at the start ("A race of monsters where every individual has an automatic counter..."), that makes this unworkable. It should have been, "Sure, killing one Cube is easy. But the second will probably have a perfect counter to the way you killed the first, so start getting creative quick!"

Then there's the fact that there's only so much room in a Cube: if the Borg know that a particular Cube is going up against a particular ship, the Cube (in theory) cannot be beaten by that ship because it will have perfect counters to everything they can anticipate that ship doing, but that leaves it vulnerable to third parties and unexpected desperation ploys.

Also also, there should be some things that even the Borg cannot tank: extreme tidal forces, being the "matter" part of a matter-antimatter reaction, the interior conditions of stars... (Antimatter is probably the easiest to weaponise. Develop a magbottle device designed to automatically shut down on being sent via transporter (or some environmental trigger) and put a kilo of antimatter in it. Then, whenever a Cube drops transporter barriers to send drones somewhere, beam over your little gift. This is assuming that antimatter is beamable, but why wouldn't it be?)

All that said, it's really a case of genre mismatch: as designed, the Borg were not designed for Star Trek (or at least, not designed to be a recurring antagonistic force in the TV shows). They belonged in their own work of fiction, one that revolves around humanity's attempts to understand, negotiate with, fight off, and ultimately flee this unstoppable alien force all proving futile. This is not helped at all by the fact that they underwent rapid decay, going from "alien beings with intelligence but without individuality or hierarchy, who will make you part of them because they genuinely believe that it's in your best interests and cannot be persuaded otherwise" (speaking of obstinacy, it would be very difficult to persuade me that this was not the original intent) to "brainless cybernetic zombie apocalypse that automatically wins until the writers do an asspull" within minutes of appearing on screen, if not before. They then descended quickly to "malevolent cyborg eusocial insects that automatically win until the writers do an asspull", which I find even less interesting than the cybernetic zombie apocalypse version.

EDIT:Oh, I got so caught up in that that I forgot to say how much I love this story. It's hilarious and perfect. These guys seem to be much better adjusted than the Datacommune mentioned in Cybertron Welcomes Careful Fliers.

>beam over your little gift. This is assuming that antimatter is
>beamable, but why wouldn't it be?)

If I remember the old Tech Manual, it is, but it requires modified emitters or a special casing (in the case of minor amounts).

Something a decent Chief Engineer should be able to hack together by the end of an episode. :)

LAST EDITED ON Mar-27-14 AT 06:26 AM (EDT)
 
>>beam over your little gift. This is assuming that antimatter is
>>beamable, but why wouldn't it be?)
>
>If I remember the old Tech Manual, it is, but it requires modified
>emitters or a special casing (in the case of minor amounts).
>
>Something a decent Chief Engineer should be able to hack together by
>the end of an episode. :)

"Obsession," TOS. Kirk blows up his early-career floating-cloud nemesis with an ounce of it beamed to the surface of a planet in a floating containment vessel.

But you knew that already, I'm sure. :)

73,
Brian

I was actually thinking of TNG's "Peak Performance", where Wesley Crusher smuggles some anti-matter onto the ship he's crewing for the war games as part of his homework.

Good catch, though.

(Antimatter is probably
>the easiest to weaponise. Develop a magbottle device designed to
>automatically shut down on being sent via transporter (or some
>environmental trigger) and put a kilo of antimatter in it. Then,
>whenever a Cube drops transporter barriers to send drones somewhere,
>beam over your little gift. This is assuming that antimatter is
>beamable, but why wouldn't it be?)

They've already got this; it's called a "photon torpedo". And beaming one onto an enemy's ship was a standard Federation tactic, at least back when I played Starfleet Battles. :)

>seemed to have been decorated by the same person who designed the
>outside of the cube. It looked to Utena like someone had turned the
>Pompidou Centre in Paris inside-out

Thinking back to Juri's opinion of the place when she visited (I've been there, and I agree), would anyone notice the difference?

<snrk> A nice little snippet, and some great one-liners. Keep up the good work!

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

*shatter* Oh, that was brilliant.

Regarding the Borg... I rather liked their ORIGINAL portrayal, where they only cared about getting new technology, not people. Once assimilation became the sine qua non of their activities, they became much less interesting. And when the Queen showed up, it was over.

It's like the writers forgot (or chose to forget) that we actually saw Borg incubators.

I have nothing significant to add to what the other commenters have said except that this produced that wonderfully building feeling of "what the ... has Gryphon done this time?" leading up to actually laughing out loud. :-)

Ayup. I received some funny looks from the grad students walking by my office a moment ago.

Brian

IHNJ, IJLS "There's no emergency. It's only the Borg."

2 great bits of humor in one morning, I love it!

Offsides

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>

"There's no emergency. It's only the Borg." Not only a hilarious line, it's exactly how I feel after running a dozen Omega STFs in STO.

Now I can't help but picture the Canon Borg assimilating the wrong being and turning into this, and the reactions that would get from Picard et. al.

>Now I can't help but picture the Canon Borg assimilating the wrong
>being and turning into this, and the reactions that would get from
>Picard et. al.

Well, that's the danger of an assimilation-based strategy: what if you run into someone whose cultural imperatives are stronger than your own?

>Now I can't help but picture the Canon Borg assimilating the wrong
>being and turning into this, and the reactions that would get from
>Picard et. al.

So, THAT'S what happened to Starfleet Captain J.U. Tylor.

I'd like to point out that I wrote this before seeing the H2G2 entry on the Borg in Featured Documents.

Well, Swedes visit to Vega Colony was a lot more peaceful this time, I see.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

:Breaks down laughing:

Epic.

If you're in need of a more realistic visual reference for Swede Andersson than a handful of screenshots from a game with a rather dated graphics engine, I direct you to Swedish curler Almida de Val, who is currently competing in the Winter Olympics.

That is all.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I'm apparently missing a reference, since I didn't realize she was supposed to be from a game at all.

-IA.

(received information not interpretable)

>I'm apparently missing a reference, since I didn't realize she was
>supposed to be from a game at all.

She was originally a Star Trek Online character.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.