First Look at The Beginning, a Star Trek Short Story

The Beginning is a short story set in the Star Trek universe about the origin of the Borg Queen. From the looks of things, this story seems to take place pretty close to the beginning of the Star Trek chronology and while I’m not 100% sure it falls into cannon, I can see it as a reasonable starting point for the Borg and their march through the galaxy.

Issue: Short Story in Star Trek Strange New Worlds VI

Name: The Beginning
Published: 2003 by Pocket Books

Blurb:

Creators:

Writer: Annie Reed
Editor: Dean Wesley Smith

Characters:

The Bad: The Borg Queen, Borg
The Undecided: Grandfather

My Reading:

We’re introduced to a young child who was looking forward to studying at school but is instead stuck in a hospital. She’s got the same virus the rest of the populous has and things are not looking good…she’s dying. Fortunately, her grandfather is First Elder and has some clout. He’s able to get her the best doctors on the planet but so far, nothing they’ve done has helped.

The disease first attacked her legs causing them to become useless and deformed. Then she loses control of her arms. And finally, the worst part starts…the virus infiltrates her brain and she starts forgetting things.

So her grandfather signs her up to be the first subject in a new experimental treatment and she receives an injection of bio-organic regenerators. They’re machines designed to kill the virus and repair damaged tissue. As the machine race through her body she passes out in pain.

When she wakes, things are different. She’s able to move her toes under the bedsheets so that’s gotta be a good sign, right? But as they pull back the covers, they see her legs are gray and have tubes jutting in and out of them. None of the doctors know what is going on so they give her an injection to knock her out.

Her grandfather is furious when she wakes up again and she realizes she’s in some kind of military installation. But she doesn’t feel the virus anymore. The little machines healed her and what they could not heal, they replaced. She’s now become more than she was as a child, she’s now part machine and part girl. And she’s getting stronger.

With her growing strength she begins to feel her superiority. She breaks outta the lab and starts injecting her regenerator probes into people and assimilating them. She’s now become full on Borg and Resistance is Futile.

What did I learn:

• The Borg nanites were designed to try to stop a powerful disease.
• Looking up things online this story quite possibly happened 100,000 BC according to our calendar.

My Thoughts:

Well, I list off the Borg Queen as a bad guy but that’s based on my knowledge of her evil in the long term. She’s not really that evil in this story…at least at the start. I also list her grandfather as undecided but he seems to have good intentions in the story, they only go bad…as experimental science sometimes does.

On the whole though, I enjoyed the short story. We don’t learn who the girl is or who the grandfather is or even what planet they’re on but it doesn’t matter. This is pretty much just an origin story for the Borg Queen and it could happen anywhere.

From research, I think there are other origin stories for the Borg, but this is the first I read and it certainly makes sense. I could totally see the good intentions of doctors and scientists inadvertently creating something that turns into the Borg. Is this an anti-science or anti-medicine story, perhaps but in the Star Trek universe, I think the Borg were just meant to be and would have emerged regardless of anything science or medicine tried to do to stop it.

My Rating: B-

This short story can be found in Star Trek Strange New Worlds VI.

Daily Ramble 247.3 | Comics – Star Trek – The Beginning