MOBILE UNIT BODY (ENTITY)
By Angelina Vansen (angelina@gunmetaldark.com)

RATING: NC-17
CODES: J/7
SUMMARY: Back in the Alpha Quadrant, Seven has given herself away.

I dream. When I dream, I dream of things I've barely seen.

You'd think I dreamed in numbers. My day is numbers. My day is increments, precision, changes, responses. My day is being watched.

My day is one of many.

Today was number three of seven. Today, forgive me, was Wednesday. Today I was in pieces on a table, one eye resting on my cheek. Today my skin was fire.

I eluded them for forty-five minutes today. My personal best. Of course, I never left the building, that would be cheating. But they used everything from tricorders to a magnaton scan, trying to find me.

There wasn't so much as a heartbeat.

I was smart today. I was the dust. Spread myself thin across a large surface, was moved and picked up by the movement of air. I danced in sunlight in front of the windows.

They walked through me, over and over.

Later. Doctor Gladwell praised me. He talked to me like I was a child as I sat drained on my bed.

"You did well, Seven," he told me. "They were looking for something living."

I said nothing. I looked at the veins in my bare feet. A little grey with nanoprobes today. A little burned from the morph.

I had no intention of doing something living. The day before, I'd tried being insects, but they were all imperfect. They were slightly the wrong shape, and they made the incorrect sounds.

They were moths, but I'd seen them only as a child. Only, as I said, in my dreams.

I've been having strange dreams.

Dreams of Earth. Dreams where the Earth fills me, becomes me. Crawls all through my blood. I lie there, loving it, betraying myself. I am the water of its oceans, floating. I am growing grass through every pore. Living things wriggle within me, nourishing. They have fur and feathers, they are worms and slugs and fish, and insects. They burst up through my eyes and nose and mouth, wings fluttering and choking. They are part of my hair and my eyes and my breath.

They are part of Earth and they are part of me. When I wake up, I am displeased.

I know what this is about. It's about Kathryn. I suppose since the first time I opened my eyes on her ship, the first time I couldn't hear the others, everything's been about Kathryn.

Mostly, though, these dreams are about that day that I made Kathryn cry.

Five years ago, our ship Voyager returned from the Delta Quadrant. Kathryn's ship. We returned to Earth, our place of origin and everyone went on with their lives.

I would not.

Kathryn expected me to start using my human name. She wanted me to. She expected me to become part of Starfleet, to embrace its ideals of compassion and the championing of individuality.

I would not.

When I was on Earth with Kathryn, you see, I discovered how little taste I had for the realities of human life. Waking at a certain time. Dressing. Working. Carrying out duties that I never saw results of.

Without a goal, without a mission as important as getting home, everything bored me or infuriated me. As a part-human, I simply felt nothing for the things that should concern me.

Kathryn didn't understand.

Serving Starfleet, being their drone, was enough for her. She lived to serve a greater whole, to benefit humanity and the Federation as a whole. She didn't understand the irony.

She tried so hard to introduce me to the human race. She took me places, places I was supposed to find moving or beautiful or historic. She took me to ancient battle sites, to vistas that had inspired great works of art, to monuments marking great strides in human evolution.

She told me stories that were supposed to be amusing. Family stories from her childhood mostly, and activities from her Academy days. They were stories filled with companionship, friends and family and unity.

She made me eat, dishes from every culture, trying to broaden my palate. Different spices, different pulses, different vegetables. A mixture of things.

None of it touched me. I didn't want it. What I wanted was Voyager, isolated Voyager, a ship with only one hundred and fifty people. On Voyager, I had a purpose. On Voyager, I had been important.

Eventually, more than a little desperately, Kathryn took me to bed to show me the human pleasures of her pale body. I'm not sure why.

I remember that first time. She clung to me, undulating her narrow hips beneath me, holding me between her legs like I was a man. The whole time, she was looking into my eyes, desperate for the connection. She has no idea, I thought at the time. Stupid woman. She has no idea what connection means.

That was the beginning. The seed of what made me decide to leave.

I began to feel too big and too small for the planet, all at once. I was angry, and I started to feel that I was going to waste.

All my talents, all my experience, everything I'd gained from the Borg and from Voyager. None of it was being utilised. I was too smart to join Starfleet, I knew too much to co-operate with ignorant small-minded officers.

It was all frustrating me.

I also began to feel that I was wasted on Kathryn. She was too old, too unattractive to hold a mate such as me. She didn't have the wit or the intelligence. She didn't have the ambition. She couldn't make me come.

She really didn't understand me.

Then, one day, I was contacted by an individual from the ICO Group. I had heard of them only vaguely, and then through the Borg. Little information existed, even within the Collective.

It was believed they were a subunit of Section 31.

They told me they understood me, that my talents were too unique to waste aboard a starship. That I was capable of greatness, of spawning greatness.

Everything I had been thinking. I sometimes wonder just how well they knew me. How closely they had been watching me prior to that first contact.

The job they offered me was sketchy as best. Due to classification. But I knew enough to know that it was about weapons. Weapons development.

The very thing that had taken me from the Collective in the first place. I enjoyed that irony, a little.

I discussed none of it with Kathryn, and not only because it was classified. I enjoyed having secrets from her. I could come home every night, eat dinner, make conversation, drink a little wine, watch her write her tedious reports and not mention a word.

The secret sat in my mouth night after night, sometimes huge and scary, sometimes making me smile. I was leaving her. I was leaving this planet. Leaving the endless round of pleasantries and protocol and admirals and compassion and beautiful things. Leaving the decadence, going to make something full of death and ugliness. I could do that. I could make that choice. I was more of an individual than Kathryn could ever be.

The day I told her was the day I made her cry.

Frankly, she just made me sick. Her protestations were pathetic. It just showed me how much of a slave she was to Starfleet, how naïve.

"Why can't you tell me where you're going?" she wailed with a mouth full of tears.

"Because it is classified," I said for the sixteenth time as I disposed of the few personal effects I had collected in my time with her.

"You shouldn't have resigned your commission," she cried. "You should have taken a leave of absence ... seen if you liked it ...."

"That is irrelevant," I told her, mustering as much Borg arrogance as I could.

She became angry. "So ... what, you're just going to throw everything away? Everything you've worked for since you left the Borg?"

I did not retaliate. I said nothing at all.

"You're being foolish, Seven," she said, sitting on the bed.

"That is YOUR opinion, Kathryn. In case you failed to realise, I am no longer under your control."

She seemed shocked. Hurt. Her voice was soft. "You were NEVER under my control, Seven," she said.

I turned away from her, not wanting to continue the argument. It was pointless, and she was becoming irrational. She sat on the bed and sobbed. She continued sobbing the entire way through my packing, and as I recycled my rubbish and destroyed my uniforms.

Later that night as I prepared to regenerate, she whispered, soft as the night on the sheets "I don't want you to go."

I did not reply. I did not believe her. Right then, I saw her as part of everything that was holding me back, and her emotions were contemptible to me. Disgusting.

She stared at me for a long, long time, reaching out to me. Expecting me to respond. I did not. I would show her I did not have to conform to her frail, pathetic human feelings. I was above all of them. Eventually, she left and went into the other room, where she started crying again.

When my cycle finished the next day, she had already left for work.

So I gathered my possessions and went to the rendezvous where I was collected by representatives from ICO.

They placed me in stasis and took me here, to the planet where I have lived for almost four years. I expect they wished to keep my location a secret, but I knew instantly where I was. The Borg had been here. I was in a remote part of the Gamma Quadrant; we had obviously travelled through the Bajoran wormhole.

I didn't tell them that I knew.

In the months that followed my arrival, I began work on the weapons program. As I had suspected, they were to be weapons based on Borg technology.

What I had not suspected, however, was the direction my experiments would take.

Alone, uncluttered, free of distraction and focused only on the Borg within, I developed. Scarily sometimes, and mostly in my mind. I found I could do things, focus my nanoprobes into one area of my body, for example, make myself stronger. All through my own will.

This was unknown to the Borg, but then, I was the first to be both Borg and individual. I alone knew the power of the drone.

The weapon I had been planning changed direction. It was perfection. I, like the Borg, had been thinking too globally. The answers I was seeking lay inside the individual.

I worked on the nanoprobes, heightening their receptiveness to their host's impulses. In doing so, I tapped into a source of unending possibility. Injecting them into my bloodstream, I found that I could do more than merely make myself stronger or faster or more focused.

I could be things.

If I thought of water, my skin was water. Not perfect, and at first I could only hold my human shape while I formed these things, but I could mimic.

This was a revelation. The whole project changed.

I envisioned operatives, individuals forming an elite team who could infiltrate and destroy, through every means. The more I worked, the more I discovered there were no limits. If I could think about it, I could become it.

There was the catch though.

The mental focus required to morph into certain things was quite extreme. For example, people were almost impossible. To hold the image of every part of someone in your mind, to concentrate on it almost subconsciously, was beyond the limits of the average brain, Borg-enhanced or not.

Some things, though, were easy.

It was easy to become a data stream, for instance. I could hold that thought forever, probably because my consciousness had once been pure data, inside the Collective. It came naturally.

I practised this, learned to control it. Sent myself through the laboratory's computer systems, altering and moving files. I emerged, nanoprobe after nanoprobe, hot and fizzing inside.

In time, I knew, I could be a subspace weapon. I could board ships and destroy their computers. Shut down life support, disable command control. Send myself back to safety in nanoseconds.

But it went deeper than this, too. I really didn't think there were limits. I studied oxygen for a while, intensely. Meditated on it, on its atomic bonds. Slowly, I could feel myself on the cusp of becoming it. Slipping into space, with just one thought, becoming part of the universe. This was the beginning of something far bigger than a weapons program.

But I would need both parts of me to do it, I realised.

Meditation this deep was the ultimate individuality. The total focus on the inner, the self. But in doing it, I also found the ultimate unity. I could be a part of everything.

Finally, I understood my unique and special purpose.

It was about that time that I also began to think of Kathryn again. She had opened herself to me all those years ago, I realised. Been naked with me. She had given me individuality and asked only for unity in return. It was hard not to see the irony.

I also thought of the things she had tried to show me. I sat alone in my featureless room in the evenings, trying to remember the sunsets I had seen with her. As I thought, my skin turned hues of red and blue and purple and orange. Clouds passed through me. Clouds were easy.

I thought so much about Kathryn I could almost mimic her. I gazed at my reflection in the mirror as my lips turned into hers, almost perfectly. My skin tone changed, my bones looked different. I could almost see her in the room with me.

But I hated her. She was imperfect, this Kathryn I created. I didn't know the colour of her eyes, and I couldn't quite remember how to do her smile. The texture of her hair was wrong.

It made me miss her even more.

A few months later, I tried to leave. A sabbatical, I called it. What I really wanted to do was go out and experience. See all the things I wasn't interested in when I was with Kathryn. Take it all in, use it all. I was such a child in so many ways.

But what I also wanted to do was go back to her. I had dreams where I went back to her house and saw her, ran towards her, dropped on my knees before her. Begged her forgiveness and then took her to bed and loved her.

Like a human, with my eyes, my new eyes, on her. Drinking in her image and reflecting it back to her, letting her see her own face, bathed in passion.

I woke from dreams like that, tickled and rippling. It made me determined.

But ICO were reluctant. Lately, they had become more than excited about my experiments. They had been pulling people, talented people, from other projects to assist me. My laboratory had been becoming crowded.

Slowly it dawned on me. They weren't stalling. They weren't waiting for the latest report or one final experiment before they released me. I would never be released.

This was no longer a job, it was now my life and it was slowly being taken from me.

I also realised that the doctors they recruited were here to study me, not work under me. They weren't interested in my findings, they wanted to make those findings for themselves. By working on me, getting me to perform their ridiculous experiments.

I was rapidly losing control.

This was no longer a voyage of discovery for me. They'd taken that away. My progress reached a plateau, and I had difficulty forming complex objects without the solitude and freedom to focus that I once had.

ICO did not see it. They insisted on a daily regime of drills for me, where I would attempt to elude their teams for as long as I could. Each day I would try to better myself, better my time. This, they believed, would bring the project back on track.

They were mistaken. Just as I had once been beyond Kathryn, I was now beyond ICO. They were stifling me.

I have been thinking, as I've made my daily "runs". Thinking of the different things I can do, the different ways I can escape them. How much exactly do they know of me? Enough to know I would run to Kathryn straight away?

I think they do.

Could I protect Kathryn if they came for me? I have thought about assimilating her with the new nanoprobes, teaching her to focus as I focus. Teaching her to be the way that I am. But this would take time, time I doubt ICO would give us.

But still I want to go. I have to see her. I have to look on the face I can't remember well enough, open my eyes to the things I wasn't big enough to see before.

There are nights when I hear the sound of her sobbing. It wracks the chambers of my cold inhuman heart.

This may not be the time, but it has to be now.

I don't know my future here, how they plan to utilise me once I'm trained. They may change me. I may not even think of Kathryn then.

I cannot let that happen. I would be Borg without Kathryn. She is everything that's made me human.

When night falls, I undress by the window. I cannot morph in my clothes. I let the moonlight stroke me, remembering Kathryn's caresses. Remembering the silky glide of her tongue across my stomach and my thighs and my hips.

The nanoprobes respond and there they are, trails of her saliva on me, cooling in the night air.

I open the door myself. At least they haven't started locking me in yet. I think about paint and I am part of the wall. Cracked and peeling a little. Smelling blank. I roll along the walls, being subtle and reflecting. Touching it with my whole skin.

I let my mind go. Become whatever it touches. This part is easy. I know these corridors so well I could probably become them in my sleep.

I reach the landing pad, crawling along as rain-soaked concrete. The supply crew are in tonight. Their runabout is here.

It would be easy to steal it, but I doubt I would get beyond this system before being recaptured by ICO. No, I have to carry on. I have to focus. I have to think of Kathryn.

I spit like the rain. I run like water. I am slick like oil. Golden, working, slipping in between the seals. I fizz like acid, and I eat.

I am in the runabout. Resuming my own shape, naked and cold. Veins dark from the effort. Eyes a little exophthalmic. Working the controls with numb fingers.

Sending a subspace message to YORDA, the communications platform right at the edge of the Bajoran wormhole. The secret one set up by ICO to monitor everything in the Alpha Quadrant. I will need it to transmit me through.

Then I am moving, faster than light. Blipping. Flickering inside, holding myself as data across all those light years. Thinking of Kathryn, thinking of the Borg.

Mostly the Borg. Of how their thoughts felt inside me, naked as data, pure as space. Cramming me with every thought in the universe, square and perfect and sacred.

Then I am slammed through the nodes of YORDA. Burning. I have never gone this distance. I have never stayed data for so far. My skin is itching and electric. I smell myself smoke.

I have to lie on the floor in the shape of my own body for a long time before I can move. I worry that I will be detected. I can't suppress my lifesigns in this state. I don't know if I can do this after all.

Kathryn fills me. She comes to me, her memory. The memory of how her fingers felt inside me, naked and gentle. Showing me the nuances and flutters of human beauty, the world within. I feel her kiss, her thrusting tongue gliding against my lips. Trying to force me to feel, force me to take what she was offering. Loving me. Frustrated with me. Wanting me.

I have to see her.

I stagger to my bleeding feet, thinking of the distance that I still have to travel to get to Earth. I'm not even half way there.

Then I think of Voyager.

Kathryn didn't give up, not when the odds seemed against her. We had far further to travel, far more obstacles and dangers and unknowns to face. Kathryn wouldn't sit here waiting for ICO to collect her.

Kathryn would die trying.

I send a message to Antarctica control. Attach the signature of my nanoprobes to it. Set it to bounce, so that it puts my stream in orbit. Then I throw myself into it, screaming.

I feel the wormhole, briefly. Then the space of the Alpha Quadrant, surrounding me with its whispers. I hold my form, I hold it, thinking. Concentrating. Every nanoprobe concentrating.

Earth is far away, a dot in the cosmos. Kathryn is even smaller, a dot on that planet. Sleeping in her bed, waking, dressing, eating, working, laughing, crying. Crying all night because I didn't love her any more.

I think of these things and she grows bigger. She gets nearer. Earth swells. My mind gets smaller, pinpricks of thought. My brain is bleeding somewhere inside the data that is me. I degrade.

Things burn. I smash into Antarctica, screaming like an animal. It bounces me, sends me to the coordinates I input into YORDA. All those light years ago.

It sends me close to Kathryn.

I feel myself hurtling through the atmosphere, burning, burning. I have sent myself to the transport station in Kathryn's home town. Just a few hundred metres from her house.

I am a meteor. I am an alien. I am a visitor from the stars. I am a raindrop. I am a snowflake. I am a particle of dust.

I am Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix Zero One.

I am Captain Kathryn Janeway of the Federation Starship Voyager.

I am both of us, in this town watching the sun set on a summer evening. I am Kathryn's arm on Seven's shoulders. I am Seven's fingers inside Kathryn later. I am Kathryn's voice, crying she is coming. I am Seven's deep frustration. I am Kathryn's settled dread.

I am barely conscious. I am me, burned and weak, on the tiled floor of the transport station. Blackened, broken. Smelling like dead metal. I have smashed the floor. It's cracked around me, brittle powder spreading like two angel's wings behind me.

That is exactly what I am, an angel. A dying angel, and I've come home to heaven.

"Kathryn ..." my chapped lips croak. My eyes are almost sightless.

My legs don't work, I feel my Borg parts falling apart inside them. Grinding against each other. Outside in the street that leads to Kathryn's house, there are some children playing. It is early morning. Early Sunday morning.

Seven of seven.

The children stop and stare at me with wide, wide eyes. I am a naked woman, burned and frightening. I have no hair left, my flesh is grey. My veins are visible. Implants, idiot efforts of my dying nanoprobes, are springing from my skin.

I am Borg, I am just how Kathryn found me. How she saved me. I need her to save me once again. I need to sit with her arm around me in the simple places that she wanted me to see.

I need to feel the love she has for me.

Her stone path bites me as I drag myself towards her door. Feet won't lift. Everything bleeding, inside and out.

I think of Voyager, I think of Naomi and B'Elanna and Chakotay. I think of B'Elanna's baby. I think of Neelix and Tuvok and never seeing them again. What that will be like.

Her door shatters as I touch it. Parts of me seem to be emitting a vibration. I step in across the broken glass.

"Kathryn ..." I whisper. I barely have a voice.

She is here. I see her coming towards me, dressed for bed. Running at the sound of her breaking door.

She stops and freezes at the sight that I must be. I don't think she knows it's me.

I go towards her, barely standing. Injured.

"Seven?" she whispers.

"It's me," I tell her. Barely. "Me, Kathryn."

So that is the colour of her eyes. That blue, that grey. That is how her mouth moves. That is her smooth hair, rumpled on one side from sleep. That is how warm her skin is, the exact temperature.

She catches me as I fall to the floor. I have to lie across her lap. I can't move.

"Kathryn?"

There is someone behind her, someone that lives here. A woman who is also dressed for bed.

"Kathryn," she says. Using Kathryn's name.

She is tall above me, with bright brown hair and penetrating eyes.

"It's all right, Christina," Kathryn says.

I know her then. I remember her. She is Dr. Christina Bartle, an expert in her field. A woman ICO once approached. A woman who turned ICO down.

She is Kathryn's lover then. She lives here and she loves Kathryn in my place. Not unlike me in her brilliance. So unlike me in her loyalty.

"What happened to you, Seven?" Kathryn pants. "My God, who ..."

I don't want to tell her. I don't think I have enough time left. I have to tell her only what's important.

"Show me ..." I say.

"What?" she asks. She doesn't understand. "Seven ..."

The sun through the broken door reflected in her eyes. Filling up with tears, just like the night before I left. Just like that night she sobbed until the dawn for me.

I touch her face. I cannot speak. The light is fading from my eyes. My life is ending. I see it all.

I see everything I'll never be.

THE END


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