Trekipedia

Borg Cooperative

After their cube was disabled, a group of former Borg were forced to establish a new community without the advantage of the collective consciousness. At some point in 2367, a Borg cube traveling through the Nekrit Expanse was disabled, apparently by an electrokinetic storm. Because the equipment on the cube was no longer functioning, the Borg’s collective consciousness collapsed and the members of this hive regained their former senses of identity and individuality.

These former Borg had extremely diverse origins and included members of several races from the Alpha Quadrant, who were assimilated during the Borg incursion of 2366. Among them were Humans, Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians. The 80 thousand former Borg transported to the surface of a nearby Class-M planet, and, free and grateful for the opportunity to reexperience their own thoughts and memories, attempted to start their lives anew.

Many of the former Borg found ways to remove most of their cybernetic Borg appendages and slowly became something akin to their old physical selves. Their natural skin pigmentation returned, and their memories reemerged. However, many of the former Borg belonged to races which had historically been enemies. Without the unifying force of the Borg collective consciousness, they struggled to coexist, and several of the races began to fight among themselves. Before long, the colony had descended into anarchy.

In the midst of this chaos, one group of former Borg from different races shared a vision of a cooperative, productive, communal society. They worked together to create a new life and began to grow all their own food in a communal garden. However, desperately short of supplies, the other former Borg were determined to overpower them, and the cooperative was forced to defend itself. The former Borg were all still equipped with neural processors, which were implanted in their nervous systems. The cooperative was able to temporarily reinitiate the connection between their minds using a portable transponder, to create a “mini-collective” within a small group.

This link enabled them to communicate with each other “telepathically” and to send healing neuroelectric energy to one another’s organic or inorganic body parts. It seemed the members of the cooperative were able to take advantage of their Borg abilities while still maintaining their distinct personalities. They shared one another’s thoughts; the connection they had to one another far exceeded the intimacy generally experienced by humans, and could be quite erotic. Each new mind that was added to the group, even temporarily, extended the interior world of the cooperative as each individual brought new energy, hope, ideas, knowledge, and memories.

Horrified by the chaos around them, the cooperative planned to force the disparate races on the planet to live in harmony by reestablishing the neural link between all of the former Borg on the planet, recreating the collective. The cooperative believed this new collective would not be dominated by the Borg’s desire to assimilate other races and that it would be able to utilize the Borg’s unique ability to cooperate and solve problems to build a new society. In order to reestablish the collective, the group planned to reactivate the neuroelectric generator on their abandoned cube and redirect it toward the planet. Within a few minutes this would generate a strong enough neuroelectric field to link all of the former Borg into a new collective. However, the members of the cooperative had no means of returning to their vessel.

When Commander Chakotay of the U.S.S. Voyager NCC-74656 crash landed in a shuttlecraft on their planet, they were finally given the opportunity they needed. Chakotay was briefly linked to the cooperative’s mini-collective to heal wounds he sustained after the crash. Afterward, there was a residual link between him and the members of the Cooperative which allowed them to temporarily control him. When the cooperative came under serious attack, they used this ability to send Chakotay to the cube, where he restored power to the neuroelectric generator. With the generator active again, all of the former Borg were joined in a new collective, which instantly destroyed the cube. The new collective seemed to have its own agenda and did not appear to be governed by typical Borg “ideology.” It was clearly not connected to the rest of the Borg collective, and seemed to have no desire to assimilate the crew of Voyager.^[1]