But that's not really what I want to talk about. We think of the Borg as a group consciousness, but are they really? Is the Borg Mind the totality of the units within the Collective, or does it come from somewhere else? I think it's the latter. . .

You see, it seems quite obvious that the personality of the the average drone plays no part in the running of the Collective. We can't be sure how many drones were taken by assimilation, and how many are actually born into the collective (like the baby in "Q Who?" - and a method that seems to have fallen out of favour). But even assuming a 50% split, that's billions of individuals who have had their brains and bodies co-opted against their will. Yet no sign appears in the 'overMind' that assimilation is a bad thing. Drones are apparently conscious underneath (sometimes) and are capable of having their memories and experience accessed, but the original individual remains powerless.

Therefore where does the consciousness of the collective come from? The Queen? Let's table that for a second (if not indefinitely - the whole concept of the Queen has irreversibly damaged the concept of the Borg in many ways). There have been no signs of any Borg Superbrains, unless there are features of the Power Distribution Nodes we know nothing about. The only other candidate are the nanoprobes - do they represent the true CPU of the Collective, with the drones reduced to mere parasite host bodies? Nanoprobes are resourceful little beasties, yet ultimately harmless until they enter a hostbody they can reconfigure to allow them a connection with the hive Mind.

This idea would also allow for the existence of a Queen or Queens. She would then become a more localised control node, an essential one in First Contact because originally there cannot have been more than a few dozen drones on the Sphere, and they would have been completely severed from the Collective during their temporal excursion. The main consciousness of the Collective could be embodied in the Queen, and easily replaced. In addition to the two we've seen, there could have been a third on the Cube in "The Best of Both Worlds" that we never saw - and all running a local copy of MS Borg Queen 95 or whatever (hence the 3-dimensional comment?).

(another point: my hypothesis that the individual Borg original personalities do not impact on the overall Collective can also be proved by First Contact. The SphereBorg were deattached from the Collective yet none of their original personalities (including those of assimilated Cardassians and Klingons) did not surface; and they would have soon been 'ouvoted' by ex-Starfleet Borg, yet did not waver.)

To summarise: something controls the Borg, yet it's not a group Mind that is a sum of the parts. It's not the Queen because she's replaceable (unless she IS just a software copy - we keep getting told how soulless the Borg are, after all). I don't think it's a never-seen Borg superMind because there's been no evidence of one, and such a control freak mechanism woouldn't send drones back in time with just software in command. It has to be the nanoprobes, mechanical beings that act by blind instinct until in sufficient numbers (across more than one host?) whose only motivation is to remake non-mechanical life in its own image.

(Maybe V'Ger did come from there after all. . .)

Thoughts?

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Phase 1: Steal Underpants
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Profit!

-is each Borg ship a unique collective mind?
-does every cube have a queen?
-do the Borg reproduce?

Oh, the baby Borg in "Q-Who" might have been a normal baby that was assimilated.

I had another thought just now. . . remember the Krell from "Forbidden Planet?" They developed mighty machines to bring out their subconscious minds, and perhaps that's what the Borg are - everyone's subconscious desire to control, to acquire and keep on acquiring. . . but maybe that's a little too metaphysical. The Borg as "Creatures from the Id?"

But: consider the Krell "Great Machine" What might their ships have looked like? We know they once travelled between worlds, before giving it up to explore the inner mind and artificial intelligence (much as the 2001 aliens are implied to have done by Arthur C Clarke).

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Phase 1: Steal Underpants
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Profit!

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Outside of a dog, a book is a mans best friend. Inside of a dog, it's to dark to read. Groucho Marx

Remember, the Borg are jacks of all trades, masters of none. They have the ability to do anything to a certain limit, after which they assimilate someone who can do the rest. I don't think we want to overstate the importance of the Queen to the overall operation of the Collective - she's a tool like any other drone. With the abilities of the full Collective within reach, the need for such centralized control becomes moot. But when circumstances require, the Queen comes to the fore.

But she can do more than that. She's an interface between the Collective and the assimilated - on a few occasions. One was needed to persuade Picard to speak for them - she failed. Another was needed to run the Borg in the 21st Century, and took on a secondary role as seducer of Data (for his codes, and that his distinctiveness be given to the Collective). A third was needed to persuade Seven of Nine for similar reasons.

Why then didn't one appear to negotiate with Janeway in "Scorpion II?" Maybe one wasn't on the cube, an no where near either. Maybe they wanted to keep the existence of a Queen secret to people ignorant of the events of "First Contact." Maybe with all the other stuff going on with Species 8472, she was too busy to work on a small science project - the Collective had been hit hard, and would need backup processors.

It seems clear there must be levels of individual intelligence within individual drones. Locutus was very aware, but was a failure and a weak spot in the collective. Anneka Hansen had had her original personality effectively wiped, however, as had the woman in the TNG novel "Vendetta." "Unity" showed that ex-Borg recovered in varying degrees from assimilation.

As some of you may know, I work in business-oriented computing. That means networks, and I tried to come up with a way of putting it simply. So, let's go to the analogy!

The Borh are a mainframe - drones are dumb terminals. But the full processing ability and knowledge store of the Collective are spread all across the network in mcuh the same way electrons are dissociated around an atom. The Queen is a control terminal that can only be active when made so from somewhere else on the mainframe.

One final question: have you ever stopped to consider why the Queen first appeared in two pieces in "First Contact?" Perhaps as purely localised CPUs they don't need to be ambulatory. As for why they look the same, that's because they're not 'really' even remotely organic. No way would the core out a human CNS and just leave the skin - Data was in fact snogging his own future, a covering of skin over a machine.

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"Screw you guys - I'm going home. . ." - Eric Cartman

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"You don't need a gun."
"That depends on your definition of 'save sex'."

1.) An organizing influence on drones who are disconnected from the Collective proper, (First Contact), or who are perhaps likely to become disconnected for whatever reason. (The Best of Both Worlds)

2.) Speaker for the Borg, ala Locutus.

In working on my upcoming Borg page, which will hopefully address all this, I've had a few thoughts. First of all, I dislike the word queen. It was never spoken in First Contact, and I only vaguely remember it being used in Dark Frontier. And I might be mistaken about the latter.

So, in fine treknological form, I've come up with my own awkward and unnecessary designation. What we call a queen is in reality a Collective Nexus Proxy Unit, or CNPU. In simplist terms, the CNPU can stand in for the entire Collective when such a need arises. And there are two main reasons such a need would arise.

1.) We have seen that, if seperated from the Collective, drones do not have the ability to create their own. For this reason, if a ship is likely to be seperated, a CNPU or two is sent along to take temporary control in an emergency.

2.) Whenever possible, the Borg like to conserve energy. Why send a fleet when one cube will do? Why engage in battle when the mere threat of assimilation might be enough to send a species into panic? And so the Borg send out their famed speeches first. But those aren't really invites to negotiation. When the Borg say "Resistance is Futile", they mean it.

However, there are times when they might want to be a bit more subtle. Dealing with Picard, for instance. Or Data. Or Seven. But the deal with Janeway didn't require any subtlety, because the Borg never intended to let Voyager out of their grasp.

So why can't the Collective deal with he second reason directly? It's my contention that a collective consciousness as the Borg finds it difficult to deal with such limited minds on their level. How do you explain the sensations of being a hivemind to someone who has never experienced them? The obvious answer is to assimilate them into it, which is what the Borg do. But another option is to use a go-between. A speaker.

As for the Collective itself, I'm going to need a bit more time to organize my thoughts on the subject.

(disengaging hyper-ventilation mode)

Anyway, that's a good story to end a season with! Hee Hee Hee... Kaboom!!!

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And on that highly succesful burn I'm going into the polarbear-cage to get me some wallets
so I can get some beer-money. Adios! "Daaaeaehh" "Splash"

If it was only a small group of ships, the queen(s) may have realized that if their goal was to be achieved (finding the Omega), then the lore was somewhat valuable. if the queens are at all self-controlled, as in not totally collective-ized, then maybe they acted without sanction from the collective when following the trail of Omega particles, and the queens eventually began to revert to the ability to create things on their own, without assimilation.

The cubes in this team that may have existed in the Borg's Omega project may have assimilated the ability to allow theh collective to develop new methods and technology, which slowly filtered through to the rest of the colletive minds, since there must be trillions of billions of minds, and each queen may have thought it necessary to decide wether the data on creativity was needed, since it took so long for the upgrade to filter to them, and there is no CPU toattach an order to just install the new config files to the ships operational ability folder thing... *LOL*

1) A humaniod species in the Delta Quadrant were working with nano technology possibly with AI. When the nanoprobes became self aware they infected their humaniod creators. This effectively assimilated them and the nanoprobes controlled them. There goal was to dominate and protect themselves by purifying the planet's species and assimilated its entire population becoming the Borg.

2) The nanoprobes were a living space borne race, they found the planet and assimilated its population since they'd need them to do work, build ships and so forth.

Make sense? I'm rather partially to the first one. I think the introduction of the queen was a bad idea.

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"Let's make sure that history never forgets the name...Enterprise."
Federation Starship Datalink