Year Eight... (Patreon)

It began as a tingle, tentative and uncertain. Nothing definite and never quite detectable. It was a thought given flesh, a misgiving, something Seven had forgotten to remember. She tried to ignore it. But she wanted to remember it. She wanted the satisfaction of clenching the thought, identifying the sensation, even as a part of her warned against it. Oddly, she could identify the warning. It was a taboo.

Seven had few of those. This was nearly subliminal. She knew the sensation only so far as it was forbidden.

“What are you endeavoring to do to me?” Seven asked her captor, her chilled voice growing even more terse, precise, in counterpoint to the sensation’s… lingering.

Her captor did not alter her neutral expression, but there nonetheless seemed to be an impression of satisfaction in the gaze she locked Seven with. “Is it not obvious?”

There was a curiosity now to the sensation. Although it remained infuriating insubstantial, this… hum of electricity inside her that she could not feel, this scent of ozone that she could not smell, this color that she could not see and music whose melody she could not remember… the curiosity grew. It was a splinter in her mind’s eye, maddeningly unknowable. Her sense of the pleasure that grasping it would give—her anticipation of it—grew.

Seven forced her attention to the problem. It was clear that this… distraction… was just what her captor intended. Better to ignore it, if for no other reason than not to give the other woman the satisfaction. It was the human way, as Janeway would say. And she was Borg. There was nothing she could not adapt to.

“You were interfering with my Borg implants,” Seven said, theorizing aloud—unusual for her, but even the meager sound of her own voice drowned out that electrical current that was passing through her, without origin and without end. “Their regulation of my synaptic pathways is being affected. My cortical node’s programming has been altered.”

“Correct. How does this make you feel?”

“I am experiencing no emotional duress,” Seven insisted. “Fear of you is irrelevant; it will not affect the situation. Since you are not in physical contact with me, I am experiencing no tactile stimuli either.”

“Incorrect,” the voice replied, words boring into Seven as she was trying to do in reverse, but with an edge of chiding to them. Seven did not pretend great familiarity with emotions, but she thought she would categorize this as sadism. “While I am withholding physical contact, you are experiencing stimuli.”

“Explain.”

“The stimuli is self-generated. You attempt to deem it irrelevant. It is not.”