I'm not too crazy about Trek Lit's interpretation of how the Borg came to be. I have my own idea, I used it in fic. Bottom line is that I think the Borg were a results of technology gone wrong, rather like Harlen Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream."
Brit
That's the idea I was getting from Unity. That the mind connecting technology likely started as a wonderful thing, that slowly warped the borg's original culture.
Yes that's what I was talking about. My concept was the technology was invented to control another species.
Species one is at war with species two, the drone technology was invented to control species two and stop a war that was devastating to both sides. But making species two drones wouldn't be enough something had to control them.
Now borrowing some technobabble from the original series, one of the species one scientist recorded his or her memory engrams into some vast central processor. The machine then controlled the Species two drones. A machine, even a thinking one, believes what it is told, in other words the machine would see no flaw in its programming. Its logic could led it to believe the drone status was perfection and turn against its creators and assimilate everyone.
That part is pretty easy to come up with, the hard part is fitting what we know about the Borg from the appearances on Trek into some kind of logical whole, and if you think about it, even some of the technology that gets complained about in these threads, becomes useful if not essential to the Borg concept.
An example is the resurrection nanoprobe that Seven used to bring Neelix back from the dead. Lot of fans don't like the concept which is fine but think about this. The process of assimilation in all likelihood caused the individual's bodies to suffer massive shock. It's entirely possible that until the Borg assimilated that technology they lost the vast majority of potential drones who would simply die. We have animals here on Earth that can will themselves dead (guinea pigs is an example). A case can be made that the Borg needed that ability.
Why would the Borg pick females to control the Collective, because I believe that the job could be done by any drone that was taken young enough and given the "special" programming. But would a machine with the programming to seek perfection see only that the chromosomes of females match up perfectly?
There are animals on Earth that the chromosome matchup is in the male (birds are an example of this). There may actually be males that could be "Queen" or in the past have been "Queen".
This is all interesting and like I said, I wrote fic using a lot of it. I listened to the “First Contact” soundtrack a lot to get the mood. It’s posted in the fan fic thread if anyone is interested.
Brit