- "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."
A group of Borg drones, lit by their occular implants
The Borg were a pseudo-race of cybernetic beings (cyborgs) from the Delta Quadrant region of space. They were the single greatest threat that the denizens of the galaxy have ever known. No single individual existed within the Borg as they were linked into single collective consciousness with one goal: perfection.
Physiology
A Borg drone of Klingon origin
The Borg assimilated beings from every species they considered worthy (with the exception of some species on whom assimilation attempts failed, such as Species 8472). (VOY: "Scorpion, Part II") For this reason the physiology of Borg drones varied. The assimilation process did impart some common characteristics to all Borg, regardless of species; no Borg had hair, for instance, and all possessed a pasty, grayish skin coloration.
Their organic bodies were enhanced, and some parts completely replaced, with cybernetic implants. The nature of these implants was determined by the drone's intended function; for instance, a tactical or medical repair drone would be fitted with appropriate hardware. These modifications allowed at least some drones to operate in the vacuum of space without spacesuits. Nor did drones require food, as their cybernetic components synthesized all required nutrients. (TNG: "I, Borg") Every drone was equipped with a homing device and had the ability to assimilate beings by means of nanoprobes, dispensed through two tubular structures located in the hands or forearms. (Star Trek: First Contact) Each drone also had its own unique translink frequency by which it kept in contact with the hive mind. (TNG: "The Best of Both Worlds, Part II")
See also
History
- Main article: Borg history
The Borg always assimilated species they consider worthy into their Collective. Not only did the Borg assimilate starships, but entire planets they encountered. After an assessment of the target's tactical strengths and weaknesses, and their worthiness of inclusion into the Borg Collective, the assimilation process began.
Very few species could resist them or stay out of their way. Because of this, the Borg were present in several quadrants of the galaxy. They assimilated many species. This is what some survivors or people who have dealt with them have said or compared them with:
- "The Borg is the ultimate user. They're unlike any threat your Federation has ever faced. They're not interested in political conquest, wealth, or power as you know it... they're simply interested in your ship – its technology. They've identified it as something they can consume."
- - Q
- "You can't outrun them, you can't destroy them. If you damage them, the essence of what they are remains. They regenerate and keep coming. They are relentless."
- - Q
- "In their Collective state, the Borg are utterly without mercy, driven on by will alone: the will to conquer. They are beyond redemption, beyond reason."
- "It is my opinion that the Borg are as close to pure evil as any race we've ever encountered."
- - Amasov
- "I wasn't there personally, but from what I'm told, they swarmed through our system. When they left, there was little or nothing left of my people."
- - Guinan
- "My mind keeps going back to the Borg... How I despised their... indifference as they tried to exterminate us. And I have to ask myself: would I be any different if I destroyed another universe to preserve my own?"
- "You know, in some ways you're worse than the Borg. At least they tell you about their plans for assimilation. You're more insidious... you assimilate people and they don't even know it."
- - Michael Eddington (to Benjamin Sisko, Commander of Deep Space 9)
- "The Borg Collective is like a force of nature. You don't feel anger toward a storm on the horizon, you just avoid it."
- - Arturis
- "The Borg wouldn't know fun if they assimilated an amusement park."
- - B'Elanna Torres (to Seven of Nine and Tuvok, about recreational activities)
- "The Borg – party-poopers of the galaxy."
- - The Doctor (to Seven of Nine)
- "If the Continuum has told you once, they've told you a hundred times: Don't provoke the Borg! "
- "The Borg? Sounds Swedish."
- - Lily Sloane (to Captain Jean-Luc Picard)
Although the Borg were a powerful species who continuously strove for perfection, they had their flaws, and at one time even faced extermination.
Culture
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A group of drones in 2153
The Borg had no culture in the traditional sense of the word. Their sole purpose was the assimilation of other beings in their pursuit of perfection. Being a Collective, members lost any sense of individuality. The moment someone was assimilated his or her individuality was integrated within the Borg hive mind and they became a part of the Borg Collective.
Art, music, leisure, wealth, political conquest... all were irrelevant to the Borg. However, they held a near-reverence for the Omega molecule, which they considered to be an expression of perfection. The molecule itself was known throughout the Collective as particle 010 (pronounced zero-one-zero). Although they tried to create the molecule themselves, only one drone ever witnessed the molecule in its stable form, and only for a few seconds. Because of their failure to create it, every drone within the Collective was required to assimilate the molecule once discovered. (VOY: "The Omega Directive")
While part of the Collective, assimilated beings were referred to as "drones". Stripped of their individuality, their former names were replaced by designations such as "Two of Nine" or "Third of Five", combined with the area they performed their duties such as Unimatrix 01. After performing its duties, a drone could be redirected to perform another duty or to regenerate in its alcove until needed for something else. There was no way to avoid the Collective. (VOY: "The Raven")
Although the drive for perfection made the Borg assimilate other beings, they did not assimilate everyone. The Collective was not interested in species they did not see as having something to offer them, such as a biological or technological characteristic that would enhance the power of the collective or advance their pursuit of their ideal of perfection. The Kazon were a species the Borg did not assimilate because they were considered useless. (VOY: "Mortal Coil") They also referred to species not by their name but by a number, presumably the order in which they were encountered by the Borg.
Juvenile Borg drones
Since the Borg added lifeforms to their Collective via assimilation, there was no need for procreation, although they apparently did so nevertheless, as evidenced by the neonatal drones discovered by Federation crewmembers and the fact that the Borg had access to extremely sophisticated abiogenic reproductive techniques. (TNG: "Q Who"; VOY: "Drone") No differentiation was made between children and adults when assimilating a race. (VOY: "Collective") Unlike non-Borg species, these youths did not need to go to school to obtain knowledge. The moment they joined the Collective they could access its entire memory. However, when they were too young they were placed in maturation chambers where they remained for up to seventeen cycles before they would serve the Borg Collective. (VOY: "Year of Hell")
The Borg Collective knew neither fear nor pleasure, but they did 'care' for their drones. When a drone was injured in some way, the Collective tried to repair it. Their linkage to each other made it possible to heal both organic and artificial parts. When a Borg ship was damaged, the Collective attempted to retrieve it. (VOY: "Unity") If a drone became isolated or lost, and sent out a distress signal, the nearest ship would answer, and would endeavor to retrieve the drone and return it to service. (VOY: "Survival Instinct") If, on the other hand, a drone's injuries were beyond repair, it was deactivated and stripped of usable parts. (VOY: "The Raven") After a drone was salvaged in this way, its comrades would activate a self-destruct mechanism which energized the drone's body, most likely to prevent enemies gaining Borg technology, though the captured drone Third of Five stated that this auto-destruction was a form of resource re-absorption. (TNG: "I, Borg")
The Borg Collective is made up of at least trillions of drones (VOY: "Dark Frontier"), all connected to the Collective. Despite this, they are known to have chosen a single drone to speak for them. In 2373-74 Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix 01 was selected to negotiate an uneasy truce with Captain Kathryn Janeway during the brief but destructive, six-month Borg-Species 8472 War. In 2366, Captain Jean Luc Picard was abducted near the Paulson Nebula, assimilated, designated Locutus and spoke for the Borg at the Battle of Wolf 359 and the subsequent attack on Earth. (TNG: "The Best of Both Worlds", "The Best of Both Worlds, Part II")
There was also the Borg Queen, a role that is still not fully understood. She appears to have had control of the Collective, as well as an independence that the other drones did not. When Data encountered her, he asked her what her role in the Collective was. She replied "I am the one who is many. I bring order to chaos." Data did not understand this, and thought it a contradiction. She replied "You imply disparity where none exists. I am the Collective.". Magnus Hansen compared her to a Queen of an insect colony.
See also
Spacecraft
Borg vessels were among the most powerful in the galaxy. Highly decentralized, they had no bridge, living quarters or engineering section. All drones collectively operated the vessels under the general direction of the Collective.
While each of their vessels was unique in its design, all Borg vessels shared common elements. These included the ability to repair any spacecraft structure that was damaged in battle, as well as a Vinculum (which was the core of every Borg vessel) that was used to interconnect all the drones on board and to purge any individual thoughts, and a Central Plexus, which tied the Vinculum, and thus the ship's crew, with the rest of the Collective. Borg vessels contained ubiquitous distribution nodes and power waveguide conduits, which were used to tie drones in a section together, and to distribute plasma energy throughout the ship, respectively. A critically-damaged Borg vessel would self-destruct, destroying all vital technologies, such as any transwarp coils.
Borg vessels were equipped with deceptively simple defenses. Each possessed a basic electromagnetic force field, as well as, among other things, holding tractor beams and cutting beams, phaser-like weaponry, torpedo-like weapons and energy-draining weaponry. It is unknown how these systems functioned, but they were not detected by standard Federation scans. The true strength of these systems lay in their rapid adaptability – because they were controlled by the combined intelligence of the Collective, they could be modified within seconds to exploit enemy weaknesses and completely neutralize most threats. For instance, to block incoming weapons fire from the Enterprise-D, the force field, which had previously admitted destructive phaser blasts, was frequency modified so that further attacks, including powerful photon torpedoes, were completely ineffective. Weapons were similarly reconfigurable, allowing the Borg vessel to render most enemy ships completely helpless with minimal effort.
The atmosphere of a Borg vessel, as of all other Borg constructs, had a constant temperature of 39.1° Celsius (102.38° Fahrenheit) and a relative humidity of 92%. Air pressure was about two kilopascals above that of Federation starships. The quantity of tetryon particles was a sign that Borg atmosphere was present in a structure. Borg ships had no doors or airlocks, unlike Federation ships. A significant quantity of the atmosphere was held in the ship by force fields. This was dangerous, since a substantial power loss, however unlikely, could de-pressurize part or all of a vessel. However, Borg drones had the capacity to survive in a vacuum for prolonged periods, rendering this less a threat to the Borg than to their enemies.
The Borg used a powerful method to travel through space, different from the travel methods of most other species in contact with the Federation: transwarp conduits. These conduits were connected to each other by means of a transwarp hub, and each Borg ship had transwarp coils, presumably to tap into or temporarily create conduits of their own. This gave the Borg the advantage that their vessels could reach any part of their realm, or any destination in the galaxy for that matter, within a very short time. By 2378, they had at least six transwarp hubs. One of them was situated within a nebula in the Delta Quadrant. It was discovered by the Federation starship USS Voyager, which used it to get back to Earth and then destroyed it with anti-Borg technology brought from the future. (VOY: "Endgame")
See also
Technology
Although the Borg could, and did, develop and construct new technology, such as a harmonic resonance chamber, they also assimilated technology from other species and used it for their own purposes.
Ship technology
- Autonomous regeneration sequencer
- Auto-regenerative hull
- Central plexus
- Cortical processing subunit
- Cutting beam
- Data node
- Distribution node
- Interplexing beacon
- Maturation chamber
- Power distribution node
- Regenerative shield
- Reticular node
- Tractor beam
- Transwarp coil
- Transwarp drive
- Transwarp hub
- Vinculum
Drone technology
See also
- Borg species designations
- Borg species
- List of Borg
- Borg spatial designations
- Borg starship classes
- Borg starships
- Borg philosophy
- Borg language
Background
- The Borg were initially conceived of by Maurice Hurley as a race of insects (which were shown in the TNG Season 1 episode "Conspiracy"), but were changed to the more budget-friendly cyborgs that went on to become so famous.
- They made their first appearance in the Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 2 episode "Q Who". Chronologically, however, their first appearance in the Star Trek universe was made in the 1996 motion picture Star Trek: First Contact, in which the Borg traveled back to the year 2063 to enslave the Human race.
- While "Q Who" featured the first appearance of the Borg, their influence could be seen as early as the TNG Season 1 episode "The Neutral Zone", in which Federation and Romulan starbases along the Romulan Neutral Zone were mysteriously wiped out. This was intended to lead into a series of episodes that would have introduced the Borg as replacements for the Ferengi as TNG's villains. Unfortunately, the Writer's Guild strike in 1988 prevented this, as well as many concepts, from coming to fruition in TNG's early days.
- While it is not explicitly stated in the aforementioned episode, the overall ambition of the Borg seemed to be the acquisition of technology, not the assimilation of other species as in later episodes. While "The Best of Both Worlds" (the next TNG episode to feature the Borg) dealt with this changed premise by stating in dialog that their objectives had changed, subsequent Borg episodes would ignore it entirely.
- Similarly, Star Trek: Enterprise's "Regeneration" and Star Trek: Voyager's "Dark Frontier" episodes indicated that not only was Earth Starfleet previously aware of the existence of the Borg, Federation scientists actually pursued them – even if they were considered mere rumor. While it is not impossible to imagine that humans might have been aware of the Borg prior to "Q Who" (especially considering the events of Star Trek: Generations and Star Trek: First Contact), it is nonetheless a strange continuity situation. Of course the problem can be vaguely explained away, stating that the events of First Contact and "Regeneration" had changed the timeline for future (Voyager) episodes, this was by no means an intention of the creators.
- The Borg were considered by some to be the greatest villains of Star Trek: The Next Generation, however, they were featured in only six episodes throughout its seven-year run. The creators have stated that this was due to the fact that the Borg were so powerful, it was not easy to come up with solutions for beating them. However, as time passed and future series went into production, the concept of the Borg would evolve to include inherent flaws that could be exploited in many different ways – leading them to be used in nineteen episodes of Star Trek: Voyager.
- It is this generous use of the Borg as villains on Voyager that caused many fans to complain that they were being used too often. TNG, DS9 and one-time VOY writer Ronald D. Moore once said of their perceived overuse, the Borg had been defeated so many times, they had "lost their teeth".
- It is no wonder that even more fans were outraged by their appearance in an episode of the next Star Trek series, Enterprise. However, though there was criticism for the anachronism, that appearance actually lent itself to established continuity, though the creators dodged a bullet by simply keeping the Borg from identifying themselves.
- While the Borg force in the "The Best of Both Worlds" duology appeared to be only one cube, later episodes of Voyager including "Unimatrix Zero, Part II", would seem to indicate that humans were not only assimilated at Wolf 359, but also taken back to Borg Space (see Laura). This seems hard to fathom, as the only Borg ship seen in the episode was destroyed. The Borg Queen (Star Trek: First Contact) also later claimed to be present at the Battle of Wolf 359, despite the fact that she acknowledged the destruction of that ship and all the Borg on it.
- The existence of the Queen herself was a controversial change made to the Borg during the writing of First Contact. While the writers had intended to stay true to the original concept of the Borg as a collective hive, they found it difficult to maintain the dramatic impact of villains without a central face. Thus, they created the Queen.
- While the Queen appeared to be killed at the climax of First Contact, the Borg would appear to have survived unaffected by their next appearance in Voyager's "Scorpion". While many fans have attempted to reconcile this, there has never been an official explanation for the Borg's survival, and the appearance of relatively identical Borg Queens in later episodes. Some, though, have theorized that the Borg Collective contained many queens that served as focal points to different branches of their society. Still another explanation is that the Borg were in possession of innumerable copies of the Borg Queen and that the superficial death of one version simply resulted in the activation in a similar version to take her place, in a similar way to the Vorta.
- In 2006, the Borg were honored with their own DVD box set Star Trek: Fan Collective - Borg, featuring a number of their more memorable appearances in the Star Trek universe.
Alternate Timelines
In one alternate timeline seen in the episode "Parallels", the Borg managed to conquer the Federation, with a battered Enterprise-D one of the few remaining ships.
Apocrypha
In the alternate timeline seen in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine book series Millennium, the Borg forged an alliance with the Federation to defeat Weyoun. The entire Borg collective was destroyed along with the universe. This entire timeline was later reset thanks to Benjamin Sisko.
In an alternate timeline in Star Trek: Armada, the Borg succeed in conquering the Alpha Quadrant. Using a clone of Locutus, the Borg manage to assimilate Spock, kill Worf, and assimilate Earth. The timeline was reset thanks to Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the Enterprise-E.
Appearances
- TNG:
- "Q Who"
- "The Best of Both Worlds"
- "The Best of Both Worlds, Part II"
- "I, Borg"
- "Descent, Part I"
- "Descent, Part II"
- DS9:
- "Emissary"
- Star Trek: First Contact
- VOY:
- "Blood Fever" (corpse)
- "Unity"
- "Scorpion"
- "Scorpion, Part II"
- "The Raven"
- "Living Witness" (holograms)
- "One" (hallucinations)
- "Hope and Fear"
- "Drone"
- "Dark Frontier"
- "Collective"
- "Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy" (holograms)
- "Child's Play"
- "Unimatrix Zero"
- "Unimatrix Zero, Part II"
- "Imperfection"
- "Flesh and Blood" (hologram)
- "Shattered"
- "Q2"
- "Endgame"
- ENT: