I was Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix 01 of the Borg Collective and I loved a starship captain.
She was small, fragile, singular, like all of her species.
Insignificant. Weak.
She stood before this drone, unafraid and making demands. She had something the Collective needed and she drove a bargain. She impressed the Collective, which was not often impressed. When she finally deceived them into letting slip her ship and her crew, she must have impressed the Collective even more.
But by then I was alone, separated by the starship captain, cut away, the voices gone. In the silence I felt the first emotion. It was only a long time later when many more emotions had become familiar to me, that I felt it again and recognised it for what it was.
Despair.
I don’t know when I fell in love with her. Feelings were new to me and it was only slowly that I learnt to sort them out and longer to recognise them for what they were. She always treated me differently from others in the crew: spent recreation time with me, allowed me into her quarters late at night to discuss new concepts with her, sought me out in my Astrometrics lab to confirm star data, when she could have communicated from the bridge. I recognised early on that many of the crew resented the special attention she gave me. At first I thought that she did so because she was suspicious of me, a Borg. Then, perhaps that she felt responsible for making me “Human”, because she had torn me from the Collective. But when she risked her own life to snatch me a second time from the Borg, I began to see more in her motives towards me.
From the very start, she touched me frequently. To begin with I did not notice; everything was new, frightening, too much to take in. Gradually I became aware of her touch - at first as one more stimulus among so many, after a while as something that was unique to my interactions with this woman. Certainly no-one else on board Voyager ever touched me deliberately and they went out of their way to avoid accidental contact with me. I came to expect her touch, then to welcome it and finally to anticipate it with pleasure. By that time I had understood that this small woman was taking up most of my world. When I was with her I felt .... fully functional.
I started to notice little things about her that had not seemed important before, like the way small lines appeared at the sides of her mouth when she was thinking, the way, when she spoke about personal things, her voice dropped to a husky murmur that sent a shiver up my spine; how lights danced in her eyes when she laughed. When I was not with her, I thought of her constantly. I identified another emotion - anticipation – when I expected to see her. At first, I thought I must be falling ill, because a sick feeling in my stomach occurred when I was ... anticipating. But the doctor pulled together his eyebrows when I described the symptoms to him and said I was perfectly healthy; then he would say no more. So I described what I was experiencing to the computer, which listed the likely causes - 93 of them, in descending order of probability. The top eighteen causes were all some form of love.
I tasted the words, “love ..... I love her” It seemed to fit, so I accepted it. Now, I had only to find a solution to this new problem. It was clear to me that I could not function efficiently with so many strange, conflicting, unsettling emotions running wild in my head and affecting my body and my concentration. So, I made field observations of members of the crew - those few who were in romantic liaisons. I consulted some of them. My researches convinced me that the solution most likely to resolve the problem was for the captain to return my feelings and for us to form a partnership.
The very thought of a partnership caused my insides to flutter and my face to burn. I continued my research, now focussed upon observing the captain’s actions and demeanour when she was with me. In addition to the time she spent with me, the many ways in which she found to encounter me, the personal conversations she held with me, I observed that her pupils dilated when she looked at me, that she made more eye contact with me than with others, that her breathing speeded up with me, but not with others. I was convinced ... the captain loved me.
So I went to her quarters one evening, as I had so often before. I told her of my feelings, told her I loved her and asked if she loved me. In the silence that followed, I became aware that being severed from the Collective was no longer the worst experience of my life. Her face grew tight, almost frightened, the light went out of her eyes and it was as though shutters dropped down. I could no longer see anything of the woman inside the uniform. She folded her arms in front of her body.
“No”, she said. “It is not possible”
And that was that.
She wouldn’t say much more, only that I should talk to the Doctor about same-sex attraction. I did, eventually.
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Encounters with species in the Delta Quadrant while with Voyager had made it clear that same-gender sexual relationships are common in the universe and I had no reason to believe that the same was not the case with humans.
Admittedly, I had never asked the question.
Apparently the gene for homosexuality had been isolated in the 21st century and it had not taken long before it became routine to screen out the tendency before birth. Human sexuality, of course, is a complicated matter and young people sometimes developed feelings for their own gender despite the pre-natal screening. If that happened, it was possible - positively encouraged - to have these undesirable urges purged by brain treatment.
The captain did not indicate whether this had been necessary in her case.
She was very kind, of course. Compassion was always her strong point as long as it was never directed at her. We avoided each other after that - I because there was nothing else to hope for; she - out of tact or disgust, who knows? I took up my work again. I worked and regenerated.
A few weeks later we made the big breakthrough with the slipstream drive and six months after that we were in the Alpha Quadrant and on Earth. There was a welcoming ceremony and the captain had to face a board of enquiry which dragged on for months before she was finally exonerated, promoted and given command of a new ship.
I only saw her once after our return. I had endured yet another day of “debriefing” by Starfleet Intelligence and I crossed her path as I left Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco. She stopped, and asked how I was doing, in her mode as the captain, concerned for a former member of her crew. But she did not want to stop, nor did she use any tone other than one of a superior to a fairly young and junior subordinate.
She did not make eye contact with me.
Starfleet Medical picked up my “abnormality” in their tests and offered to remove it. I suppose it is a measure of how far the species has come in its path to humanity that I had a choice. I refused at first, wanting to keep feeling, wanting to hang on to an emotion that had seemed simple and clean, unlike so many that now vied for space in my head. But in the end I agreed. To hold on to a superfluous trait seemed.... inefficient. Now I feel no love, no pain, no... despair.
Just a small gap where something bright once lay.
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I return to space tomorrow. The slipstream drive has been taken up by commercial interests and there is a demand for engineers with the relevant experience and no strong ties to Earth. Perhaps I shall be back in the Delta Quadrant again before long. But not with Starfleet.
I do not think I will ever return to Earth.
I am Annika Hansen and I loved a starship captain.