Voyager is temporarily docked at the Markonian Outpost space station for Shore Leave and cultural exchanges with the many Delta Quadrant alien species that frequent the massive installation. The starship is holding an open house to all interested visitors. The mess hall and larger corridors are bustling with social activity. While eating lunch at a small table with the Ktarian child Naomi Wildman, played by Scarlett Pomers, Seven of Nine is approached by a male stranger. He is carrying a case full of Borg artifacts which he offers to sell. The objects are synaptic relays from Seven’s original unimatrix group. She purchases them. The mysterious man utters words that are not his own. He is in telepathic communication with two other aliens aboard the ship.
The Borg relays precipitate vivid visual recollections, and call up sounds and smells from the past for Seven of Nine. She brings the items to Lt. B’Elanna Torres in Engineering for evaluation. The strangers infiltrate Voyager’s security systems by rerouting internal sensor input to secondary processors. While Lt. Tuvok investigates the breach, the alien trio finds Seven’s regeneration alcove in the converted storage area on deck 8, where she is “asleep.” One of the intruders pierces Seven’s neck with Borg assimilation tendril tubes extending from his arm. A second one, who is female, inserts an “interlink module” into the alcove control unit near Seven’s left shoulder to access her memories. Tuvok and a security team enter Cargo Bay Two and fire on the outsiders with phasers on stun setting. The three recovering Borg regain consciousness in sick bay and tell their story.
Eight years previously, a small Borg sphere-vessel carrying Seven of Nine’s unimatrix crash-landed in a dark, swampy region of the life-sustaining Planet 1865 Alpha. Only four drones survived the crash. They were the males Two of Nine, primary adjunct of unimatrix 01, played by Vaughn Armstrong, and Four of Nine, secondary adjunct of unimatrix 01, played by Tim Kelleher; the female Three of Nine, auxiliary processor of unimatrix 01, played by Bertila Damas; and Seven of Nine herself. The unit’s communications link to the Collective was cut off. In such an emergency circumstance of “input failure,” secondary maintenance and survival protocols are automatically initialized. They include the reactivation of dormant memory files.
Instructed by Seven of Nine to remove technological body parts from a dead drone, the others feel a resurgent sense of shame. Standing around a campfire, the armored-body drudges orally ingest food or “bio-matter” for the first time in years. Pre-assimilation memories and fragments of individual personalities reemerge. Seven is reminded of a childhood experience of heating food over an open flame with her father. Three of Nine recalls the taste of a species of fowl she once ate. Two of Nine was a mathematician in his former life. He has a restored mental image of sharing a meal with his work colleagues just before the Borg attacked. The unimatrix’s auxiliary processor suddenly recollects that she is a Bajoran named Marika Wilkora. She worked in Engineering aboard the Federation starship Excalibur. Four of Nine also remembers his name: P’Chan. He professes his hatred for the Borg, realizng that they murdered his parents. Staring at the prehensile part of his bio-mechanical arm, Two of Nine bemoans that “this is not my hand.” His individual name is Lansor.
The flashback to the unimatrix 01 members marooned in the nighttime wetlands is interrupted by the situation unfolding in Voyager’s sick bay in the present. The three former drones explain that they were reassimilated after this incident, but somehow became permanently joined to each other as a mini-Hive with its own neural link. Their left-brain parietal lobes got cross-wired as organic “interlink nodes.” Life with the Borg became a doubly intolerable condition of “three voices whispering in one ear, and a crowd screaming in the other.” Even after escaping from the Collective years later, the threesome still lives in a telepathic prison-house of never being able to act without consensus or feel emotions on one’s own. “We’re not individuals,” begins Four of Nine, describing their private hell. “We’re not Borg,” continues Three of Nine, picking up the thread. “We’re nothing,” Two of Nine decisively concludes. Moreover, the post-escape job of their surgical de-Borgification was botched. As the Emergency Medical Hologram states after physically examining them: “Whoever removed their implants was a poor surgeon. Their internal organs were damaged during the procedure, and their bodies are covered with scars.” The ex-drones have no memory of what occurred eight years ago after the campfire scene of their repressed selves beginning to resurface. They have come to Voyager in search of Seven of Nine to see if she remembers what subsequently happened on the obscure planet. Seven agrees to help them try to retrieve the memory. She must link her neural interface to theirs, risking the possibility of getting trapped in the neural link, thus “turning the triad into a quartet.” They recline into cargo bay alcoves.
Going on with the flashback story, Seven of Nine is witness to the last breath of a dying drone with blood on his face. The Collective locates the four stranded survivors through a homing beacon. Seven becomes aware that a Borg vessel is on its way. She has become distressed by the prospect of separation, and declares that they “will be one with the Borg again.” But the others, who have rekindled their individuality, do not wish to rejoin the Hive Mind. Two of Nine smashes the communications beacon. The three of them wander off in different directions, hoping to evade the approaching recovery ship. Seven of Nine pursues Four of Nine in the forest. She shoots him from a distance with a phaser set to stun. She injects him with nanoprobes from the tubes protruding from her hand. He stands again and walks like a drone. Seven arrests the flight of the others. She similarly forces specialized nanoprobes into their left cerebral hemispheres, creating the mini-Collective network link of reinstated drones.
The Emergency Medical Hologram breaks the memory-inducing neural connection. Marika, P’Chan, and Lansor are irate at Seven of Nine. It was her action eight years ago of establishing the interlink that caused their longstanding suffering and led to their reassimilation. Seven realizes that she acted out of fear. Unlike the others who were adults when assimilated, she was taken by the Borg as a child. Finding herself suddenly in a situation of being alone, she was overcome by childlike trepidation. “After I saw the drone die in the swamp, I panicked. I began to envision my own death.”
The shock of the neural link, combined with their anger at Seven of Nine, overloads the microcortical implants of the three former drones. They slip into a comatose state. “Their higher brain functions were somehow tied into the interlink,” explains the Emergency Medical Hologram. “When they broke the connection with you in the Cargo Bay, the shock to their cognitive systems was too great.” Seven of Nine and the Holographic Doctor make the moral decision to revive them by extracting their implants. The stultifying mind link among them them is finally broken, but they will each die within a month. A few weeks of life as an individual is better than going back to being a drone, Seven, Holodoc, and Commader Chakotay reason. As Chakotay points out in a poignant dialogue with Seven of Nine, Becoming-Borg is living-death. The former Maquis resistance fighter states that being in the Collective is not being alive, and Seven should know that better than anyone. A few brief moments alone is preferable to a lifetime with the Borg, because being a drone is zero-life.
Gathered in the mess hall after the operation to remove their implants, the three ex-Borg drones bid farewell to each other and to Seven. “It’s so quiet,” says Marika. “I didn’t know you were going to say that,” comments P’Chan. “I’d forgotten what it’s like to be alone with my own thoughts,” offers Lansor. Each has a different affective attitude towards Seven of Nine. Lansor refuses to speak to her at all. Marika cannot forgive Seven, but understands why she did what she did after the crash-landing eight years ago. P’Chan forgives her. He tells Seven that his people do not hold grudges, and he wishes her well. He is departing for a small nearby planet to “spend his last days in the fresh air.”
Asked why she retains her Borg designation of Seven of Nine, rather than reclaiming the human appellation Annika Hansen, Voyager’s newest crew member explains that she has come to the decision that her former name “was no longer appropriate.” Unlike the others, Seven of Nine is not searching for “pure individuality.” She has a certain chosen relationship to her destiny of Becoming-Borg, willing to explore an existence where living-death is conceived as a potentially enriching relationship, rather than as the off-limits territory for a life defined by its exclusion of death.
Young Naomi Wildman visits Seven of Nine in Cargo Bay Two. The child thought that Seven might want to spend time with her “family.” Seven nods in agreement.
The impossible predicament of the trio of former Borg drones is a mirror-story shedding light on and offering insight into the challenge of Seven of Nine herself. Like cyborg Spock in relation to the first wave of cybernetics, and android Data with respect to the second wave, becoming-Borg Seven of Nine, in the context of the third wave of cybernetics, is a “Body without Organs,” a possible figure of resistance to a new yet cumulative mode of social control. Seven of Nine is a Body without Organs because she lost her organs when her Borg armature and implants were removed.
The situation of the Body without Organs is like that of the cyber-cowboy Case in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, who has crashed out of the web and must seek radical solutions for dealing with corporality such as unconventional spinal surgery or the “simstim” metamorphosis of riding inside Molly’s body. But the circumstance of Marika, P’Chan, and Lansor in Survival Instinct is a botched attempt at creating a Body without Organs. The ex-Borg trio’s mini-Collective embodies an utterly hopeless social conundrum or inoperative community. It symbolizes the short-circuiting of any moderate possibility of establishing a communal or political body between the extremes of implacable totalitarianism and abstract, self-absorbed individualism. Such molar-molecular community is perhaps what Star Trek: Voyager clumsily calls “family.” The mainstream Star Trek mythology of Borg and anti-Borg is stuck in the predicament of rigid opposition between absolute repression and “consumerist” self-indulgence of the individual. The dead-end consequences of this dichotomy are depicted with perceptive irony in this Voyager episode. Either the triad’s brain organs are connected one to the other in the horrific stifling manner, or each member becomes a detached individual and dies. Seven of Nine’s reverse nomadic or “Becoming-Borg” potentiality is contrasted with this no exit scenario. The Borg body was that armored body in which the flesh was augmented and replaced in the most restrictive way by organs of total collective control. It will do little good, in the quest of the recovering Borg, to simplistically adapt an alleged individuality where the question of the body and its organs is not posed. Liberal humanism retains an atomistic conception of bodies, without context or relation to each other. What is graphically demonstrated in Survival Instinct is that Seven behaved wrongly in acting like a “panicked small child,” fusing the fleeing rebel drones into the oppressive configuration of the interlink. This is clearly not the way forward for the third-wave cyborg.
There is an urgent need for a way out of the dilemma of impossible community. One cannot become a Body without Organs if one is hard-wired to a Collective network. But, reversing the formula, one can develop “Organs without Bodies.” One can become part of a rhizomatic network of “particles, assemblages and flows.” In the philosophical tradition of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, influenced by Spinoza and Leibniz, what constitutes a body is a relation of forces between bodies. It is a “dynamic capacity of affecting and being affected. This is an intensive body never attaining a final state, or a defined form or function.” (Parisi and Terranova) Opening up and diversifying the interlocking network of brains, the Emergency Medical Hologram could have reprogrammed decentralized mulitiple connections among heterogeneous bodily organs, especially those of sense and perception. To create the preconditions for complex molecular lines of flight, “any point on a rhizome can and must be connected to others” as “proliferate roots spreading in multiple directions.” (M.W. Smith, Reading Simulacra)
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe the Body without Organs as a self-dismantling body that disappears from the social, biological, and technological codes of surveillance, scanning, simulation, and identification. It is the opposite of the “armored body” or “organic organization of the organs.” Other than the totalizing unity of subject or organism that allows society to exercise its control, this specific kind of third-wave cyborg cultivates deterritorialized organs in the arrangement of an anti-body that appears on no map. Her subversive project is becoming an elusively distributed “connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities” (Deleuze and Guattari) or a re-sequencing and re-splicing “bodily unity that transcends consumption.” (Critical Art Ensemble, The Electronic Disturbance) Without father or mother, the Body without Organs is an experimental site for inventing new aesthetic and ethical sensibilities.
Most interesting is Arthur Kroker’s cyber-cultural elaboration and inversion of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept as “Organs without Bodies.” In recombinant culture, technology is infused with a genetic logic and assumes “living species existence.” The electronically permeated body counters by metamorphosing into an android processor, “morally rearmed and technologically fit” for outriding the envelope of high-tech systems of exteriorization of the human sensorium. Cyber-commodified designer emotions and sampler memories are the experience-material for hacker recoding. The Emergency Medical Hologram could provide Seven of Nine with the constituent techno-organ implants she requires to become an “active incept” of the media matrix. She would acquire “recombinant ears with amplified hearing for editing sampler culture, new skin for swimming in the ocean of telemetried data, techno-gills in the form of patches for breathing in the air of cyberspace, improved tongues for tasting liquid reality, and scanner eyes for a culture of body parts.” (Arthur Kroker, Spasm: Virtual Reality, Android Music, Electric Flesh) With third-order cybernetics and against third-wave consumerism, as Becoming-Borg or nomad in reversion, resisting Seven of Nine is tasked with reinscribing ethics into the most deeply nihilistic latticework of the system.
In Voyager’s symptomatic recombinant episodes, techno-organs or scraps of Borg technology left in Seven of Nine’s body are used as story constructors. In Mortal Coil, the starship’s senior officers discover that Seven’s Borg nanoprobes can revive the dead. In One, the former drone is unaffected by severe nebula radiation that is potentially fatal to the rest of the crew. In Timeless, Seven of Nine’s Borg “interplexing beacon,” embedded in her skull, is used to send a message fifteen years back in time. In Relativity, her ocular implant, or cybernetic eye upgrade, is revealed as capable of detecting “irregularities in spacetime.”
