“We are the Borg.
Lower your shields and surrender your ships.
We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own.
Your culture will adapt to service us.
Resistance is futile.”
Located primarily throughout the Delta Quadrant, the Borg Collective were a species of cybernetic-humanoids
who grew their ranks and advanced their knowledge by assimilating distinct life forms and technologies,
resulting in the conquest of countless worlds and systems.
Suppressing individual identity, the Borg shared information and thoughts through a collective
consciousness, allowing them to act a singular unified entity.
Obsessed with achieving a state of perfection, they pursued a policy of focused aggression
and ruthless expansion, where they assimilated anything deemed useful and destroyed any direct
opposition.
Yet this pursuit of efficient, continued advancement was enacted without malice or intentional
cruelty, meaning they largely ignored less developed species and technologies unless
they attempted to interfere with Collective Operations.
Although the exact origins of the Borg were unknown, with even their own memories fractured
and incomplete, some believe their history traced back hundreds of thousands of years,
when they may have once been a more typical humanoid race, whose great advances in cybernetics
eventually transformed their society into the Collective.
Others meanwhile have suggested alternative theories, claiming they may have originated
from the merging of a humanoid species with non-organic, non-humanoid, group mind beings,
formed from specialized atoms which acted as programmable matter, able to alter their
physical state.
In addition to these theories, there are some who believed the Borg resulted from failed
experiments in nanotechnology, a rogue artificial intelligence program, or else might even have
a connection to Earth through the Voyager 6 Space probe, later known as V’Ger, which
may have travelled through a spatial anomaly sending them across the galaxy and back in
time, where it landed on a planet inhabited by living machines.
These beings then rebuilt and upgraded the probe, before sending it back into space with
the ability to continue learning, allowing it to eventually achieve sentience.
Adding to the uncertainty regarding their origins, the exact timeline of their development
was also in question, with some believing their artificial components and technology
developed over thousands of years, while only becoming a hostile space faring civilization
a few centuries before the formation of the Federation.
This rough approximation can be deduced by tracking the numbers they assigned to species
deemed worthy of recognition and through the testimony of the Vaadwuar, who claimed the
Borg had only conquered a handful of Delta Quadrant systems by the 15th century.
In any event, at some point in their development a Borg Queen emerged as a single unifying
voice which represented their shared will, bringing order to chaos with the ability to
speak and act as an individual while remaining part of the Collective.
The Queen made her home and issued commands from the Central Nexus of the Borg Unicomplex,
a vast region of interconnected ships and structures in the heart of their space.
Though Borg drones often came from different planets, species and backgrounds, their appearance
became more uniform after assimilation, losing body hair and greying their skin color.
This process began with the injection of nanoprobes, microscopic machines able to transform their
physiology, causing the emergence of cybernetic implants.
Their bodies were then surgically enhanced with external cybernetic components, usually
resulting in the amputation of at least one biological arm and eye to be replaced with
advanced prosthetics.
Each Borg was also equipped with a Neural Transceiver keeping them linked to the hive
mind, a cortical processor for the rapid assimilation of information, a neural processor which recorded
communications with the Collective and assimilation tubules to inject nanoprobes into future victims.
Those selected for specific roles within the Collective were then outfitted with specialized
equipment like the installation of weapons on Tactical Drones, while Medical Drones were
granted medical and diagnostic tools.
With so many cybernetic implants and changes to their biological bodies, individual drones
were often far more physically capable then they were as members of their original species,
made so strong and resilient they no longer required food, water or air, even able to
survive in the vacuum of space.
All they truly required was regular intervals spent in a regeneration unit, which powered
their artificial components, allowing their internal system to perform maintenance and
basic repairs.
When injured beyond self-repair, drones were treated unless the damage was too great, in
which case they were disassembled and parts scavenged for reuse.
Yet even if a drone died, their memories were preserved within the Borg’s collective consciousness.
If however, a drone, ship or piece of sensitive technology was lost and could not be recovered,
they possessed a built in fail-safe system, which allowed them vaporize or destroy themselves
before falling into enemy hands.
As for Borg vessels, which were designed and built in a strictly utilitarian manner, they
often appeared in simple geometrical shapes like cubes and spheres, constructed with no
living quarters or social comforts, as Drones were constantly working, and only paused to
regenerate.
As the Borg reproduced through assimilation, many of these ships were equipped with Maturation
Chambers, where they stored and developed captured children, increasing their growth
rate until reaching adulthood when they joined the collective.
In addition to travelling at warp speed, Borg ships contained transwarp coils allowing them
to fly 20 times faster than 24th century Galaxy Class Federation ships.
This technology then made possible the creation of 6 Transwarp hubs, massive mega structures
they used to rapidly deploy ships across all 4 galactic quadrants.
Emerging as a superpower in the Delta Quadrant, the Borg began by assimilating and conquering
neighbouring worlds sometime before the 15th century, so that by the 24th century, the
Borg had eliminated all known rivals and major powers in the area, holding dominion over
a vast region of space.
Their influence even expanded beyond the Delta Quadrant, conquering worlds in both the Beta
and Alpha Quadrants, becoming one of the most feared and well known species in the entire
galaxy.
Though most in the Federation was unaware of the Borg threat until 2365, by the 2350s
rumours circulated about a species of hostile, technologically advanced beings from the far
side of the galaxy, which had already made inroads into the Alpha and Beta quadrants
by conquering peoples like the long-lived Listeners of the El-Aurian system.
Though most did not give these stories any serious consideration, a pair of exobiologists
named Magnus and Erin Hansen were convinced of their validity.
Leaving their old lives behind, they brought their daughter Annika on a deep space mission
to the Romulan neutral zone, where they disobeyed Starfleet and broke Federation law by abandoning
their original mission in order to find seek out the truth about this mysterious species.
In time their determination paid off, as they found a Borg ship and even followed them through
a transwarp conduit to the Delta Quadrant, where they continued to document their findings.
Although they observed the Borg for some time without issue, the Hansan family was eventually
discovered and assimilated by the year 2356.
Annika, the young daughter of the Exobiologists was placed in a maturation chamber until reaching
adulthood, when she was given the designation Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix
Zero One.