“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.”  

–Confucius

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” 

–Socrates

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Wisdom, Icheb regrets, is not something the Borg ever uploaded to his cortical array. He finds it somewhat strange how the complicated technology inside his head contains the amassed knowledge of trillions, but no guiding philosophy aside from the imperative to amass even more information. Perhaps for that, he requires a connection to the Collective.  Or perhaps, like him, the Collective is little more than data storage.

The thought unsettles him.  It reminds him of the time his molecular genetics professor quoted Asimov: “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

Those words could describe Icheb, too. 

In theory, the experiences of the 9,999,999,967,498 beings who made up the Collective at the time of his assimilation should be his to remember – his from which to learn and draw conclusions.  In reality, the hive deemed their interpretations irrelevant.  The data their bodies collected was worth dissemination. The way they felt about it as individuals was not.

Icheb, of course, is no exception to this rule, so the only wisdom he possesses is the little he has gained in the 6.7 standard years since his disconnection from the hive.  Efficiency being core to his programming, he has attempted to assimilate wisdom in the way Confucius called “easiest”: by carefully observing those whom he respects, and imitating them.  The method is imperfect, but it has mostly served him well – at least adequately enough to allow him to build a life he loves with a partner who adores him.  

Only now, he faces a problem for which he has no solution, and no one he can imitate.  He is dying, and he has no idea what to do about it.

He watches Maren sleeping in the bed they share whenever they are both in San Francisco, and reflects upon the situation ... reflection being the most noble path to wisdom.

If he does nothing, in three months’ time, he will be in one of two situations: Either he will pass away, and discover who was right during all their deep discussions about the nature of consciousness and the possible existence of an afterlife; or he will be married to the love of his life, and still dying. 

Maren will stay by his side no matter what – he knows that with more clarity than he knows any of the approximately 2.32 x 10^21 facts the Borg have stored in his heavily augmented brain.  He also knows – with somewhat less clarity, but still, he knows – that watching him die will destroy her.

Unfortunately, leaving her might destroy her, too.  It’s certainly going to destroy him. But he is already past the point of saving; at least, that’s what The Doctor says, and he believes it – because between the two of them, both equipped with supercomputers for brains, they’ve run every analysis, and there is no possible outcome that doesn’t end in his deterioration and slow descent toward death. 

Well, slow in the event he’s lucky.  Given what happened on the way to Risa, it seems more likely the end is coming sooner rather than later. 

Asimov died nearly 400 standard years ago.  Icheb wonders what the writer would have made of someone like him – a single being barely out of adolescence who carries the knowledge of several thousand advanced civilizations, yet lacks the wisdom to make a simple binary decision: Should I stay or go?

No amount of reflection has made the answer clear, and the only person he has to imitate in this situation is Seven of Nine.  When it was her facing death, she pushed Icheb away for his own protection.  You’re too dependent on me, she told him.  At the time, he fought her, and he won.  Unfortunately, that was different.  There was a clear way to save her.  He risked himself for her, and his reward was her survival.

Only now is he realizing the cost.

Without wisdom, he is left with only data to guide him.  As Maren sleeps in their warm bed, he runs cold calculations, analyzing statistics and probabilities until the love they share is reduced to a simple equation.  

In the end, the numbers are not in their favor.  The math says she is better off without him. If there really is a such thing as a soul, his is tearing into pieces, but he forces himself to leave her there, walking out of their apartment without even waking her to say goodbye.

What reflection and imitation have failed to reveal will be learned only by experience.  Time – and bitterness – will tell if this choice was made of wisdom ... or the lack of it.

So, I’m being unfair.  That’s what you said, right, O’Connor?  “It’s not right,” you said, to treat the drone – I’m sorry, Icheb – with such hostility.  “He didn’t do anything to you.  He wasn’t even at Wolf 359.  For all we know, he wasn’t even born yet.  You’re being unfair.”

You know what, O’Connor?  Fuck.  You.  Just who do you think you are, anyway? You’ve been at Starfleet Academy all of three minutes and you think you can lecture me?  Let me tell you a little something about fairness.

My family has lived and died for Starfleet for four generations.  While you grew up safe and happy on your little farm, watching both Borg incursions on holo from the safety of your parents’ living room, I watched my dad break down after the orders he helped give got my mother and eleven thousand others either assimilated or killed. I was ten years old.

You want to talk about fairness? 

Rachel says you’re a real homebody; that you seem to miss your family a lot.  My heart bleeds for you.  It must be agony to have them a whole three-hour train ride away.  Let me give you some transporter credits.

Or not.

I miss my mom, too ... but more than that, I wish she were dead.  I wish she were dead because maybe then I’d still have a father instead of an admiral who shares my last name.  I wish she were dead because maybe I’d stop waking up in a cold sweat every time I dream they got the rest of us, too.  I wish she were dead because it would be a fucking mercy. 

Better dead than one of them.

Now we have two of them here on our planet, sharing our city and breathing our air, planning God-knows-what inside those nanoprobe-infested brains of theirs.  The young one sits in our engineering class, and I don’t know why, because he already seems to know every goddamned answer ... but then again, so do you.  (And that’s another thing that’s unfair, how easily this shit seems to come to you, but I heard how you flunked flight control, even if they let you cover it up – and by the way, how’s that for fairness?) 

Meanwhile, you sit there and talk to him like there’s nothing wrong with the way he got his information, nothing unfair about the way he dominates the class of ’81 with stolen knowledge and artificially enhanced biology. If he was genetically engineered to be superior, he’d be banned from Starfleet, but apparently, dangerous alien nanotechnology gets a pass.  But that’s not unfair, right? No, I am.

Starfleet was insane to let their guard down with him, and so are you.  But you pretty obviously want him.  So go for it, you crazy little bitch.  It’s your funeral, or lack of one.

Just do me a favor and keep him the fuck away from Rachel.  I’ve lost enough people I love to the Borg.  I don’t want to lose her, too.

The first time John feels guilty for sleeping with a girl, her name is Grace.  She’s slender, and pretty, and smart-but-not-too-smart, and she likes him, really likes him – maybe even a little bit too much.

She’s the first hookup he never mentions to his roommate, and the first one he actively hides from his friends.  That probably should have been his first clue, but clues are hard to come by when you’re nineteen.  Even if they weren’t, denial is a powerful thing.

He doesn’t yet realize that he has a problem.  Sure, it’s crossed his mind that this girl looks a little bit like Maren – blonde hair, pale skin, runners’ legs, no tits or ass to speak of – and maybe even acts like her, too, what with all the studying and constant stressing over exam scores.  Then again, finals are in a week.  There isn’t anyone on campus not preoccupied by grades right now, with the possible exception of Maren’s boyfriend, Icheb.

That’s how John is able to dismiss the fleeting thought that Grace is just a substitute for Maren, even as she looks up at him with innocent admiration in her heavy-lidded eyes – blue, not green, thank God, or he's not sure he could have gone through with this – lifts her uniform tunic over her head, and tosses it over the side of her too-narrow bunk, inviting him to finish what they’ve started. 

It’s only after he’s buried deep inside her that he realizes this is a fantasy gone too far ... that when he closes his eyes, he sees a different girl completely, one who looks a little like the one beneath him, but with different-colored eyes, a smarter mouth, and a brain so powerful it scares him, if he’s honest.  (Why else would he have lost his nerve?  Actually, he hasn’t figured that one out yet.)

He tries like hell to push the thought aside, to bury it deeper with every thrust of his body, but it takes hold of his brain like a Ceti Eel, writhing around in his consciousness until it nearly has control.  In the moment before he comes, he doesn’t know whether to stop what he’s doing before he can’t take it back, or let the fantasy consume his mind and take the risk of moaning someone else’s name.

In the end, he does neither.  He finishes, and he’s with Grace, really with her, murmuring her name against her slender neck, his sweaty forehead pressed into her pale skin and blonde hair.  He tells himself it was just a fluke, that he’s just been under a lot of stress and talking to Maren about it too much lately; that’s why he thought of her in those final moments before he lost himself in Grace. 

Even so, he’s surprised when he pulls away and the eyes he’s looking into aren’t green, but blue ... and so obviously enamored that it hurts. 

As always, he deflects the pain with humor.  “You’re amazing, Grace,” he tells her, flashing her his patented John Quigley grin.  “But I’m sure you’ve heard that one before.”

Her expression suddenly shifts from adoring to embarrassed, and his blood runs cold.  That was her first time, he realizes, just seconds before she confesses it herself:  “Actually, I’ve never done that before.”

Why didn’t you tell me? he wonders, but deep down, he figures he knew all along, and not just by the fumbling way her hands touched his body or the too-sharp intake of her breath as he entered hers.  No, deep down, it was part of her charm from the start: For all her confidence, all her bravado, she was innocent.  Pure.  Inexperienced.  Just like Maren.

In that moment, the guilt hits him like a phaser to the gut.  He sets about reassuring her, telling her how incredible she was (and is), and how beautiful.  How honored he feels to be her first.  Everything he says to her is true, but it’s not the whole truth ... because he already knows he can’t do this.  That this has to be the last time.  That Grace wants and deserves a better man than him, whether she realizes it yet or not.  That she needs to be loved for who she is, not for who she reminds him of.

He leaves her room a few hours later hoping that she lives up to her name – that she’ll have the grace to forgive him for what he’s about to do. 

The next day, he avoids her persistent requests on the comm.  Finally he answers, late at night, locked inside the lavatory away from the prying eyes and ears of his roommate. There, he makes his excuses, trying too hard to let her down easy.  He pulls out all the classics:  It’s not you, it’s me.  I’m not ready for a relationship right now.  I’m no good for you. 

What he doesn’t tell her is the truth: Grace, you really are amazing, but I’m in love with someone else.  He will never admit that he used her as a substitute.  He doesn’t think confession would bring him absolution.

Deep down, he knows he doesn’t deserve Grace – doesn’t deserve her, and doesn’t deserve it from her – but he tries for the latter anyway, and to his relief, she does live up to her name.  He can hear the hurt in her voice, but she lets him go without a fight.  It strikes him as ironic, because this is not something Maren would likely forgive, were she in Grace’s place.  But Grace is not Maren, so he leaves her, and she lets him.

He makes – and breaks a few more times – a vow never to let something like this happen again.  In the moment, it’s always Maren’s face he sees.  Afterward, when the guilt hits?  It’s always Grace’s.

For a counselor who is a telepath, there is a certain art to feeling others’ pain and helping them make sense of it without making it your own.  Like many of her generation, Taran Madar struggles with this.  The sociologists on Betazed say it comes from having come into the fullness of their psionic abilities at the height of the Dominion War, when the whole planet cried out in fear and suffering, then sorrow. 

Taran thinks it’s just the way she is.

Even as a little girl, before she could be properly called an empath, whenever someone was sad, she became sad, too, and tried to fix it.  She remembers her parents clearly telling her, “This is the last one” after she gave away her favorite stuffed flanarian to a crying child in the market.  It had already been replaced three times.

When puberty hit a year too soon, so did her depression.  Her perception of other people’s pain was no longer safely contained within the walls of her childish understanding.  Suddenly, she felt everything they felt, exactly as they felt it – whether or not she was ready for those emotions, or the knowledge of what caused them.  Love, arousal, terror, grief ... she felt all these things and more, and it was far too much.  Her parents tried to help, but their worry for her only drove her deeper into the darkness. 

At thirteen, she tried to drown herself in the Opal Sea in an unsuccessful attempt to wash away the pain.  It was hours before dawn, and the world was asleep.  In the quiet of her own thoughts, she decided to fade away, before the morning light arrived, and with it, other people’s voices, other people’s burdens. 

Either she was lucky or it was fate – or maybe a parent’s instinct, she thinks now that she is older – that her father woke up when he did.  His body needed only to relieve itself, but it was she who needed relief of a different kind, and when he sensed her tortured presence moving into the waves, determined and terrified, he ran straight past the lavatory, out of the house and into the sea, sweeping her into his arms and carrying her home, even as she thrashed and kicked and begged to die.

In the hospital, she learned for the first time that her paracortex was abnormally densely networked, meaning her misery was born not of weakness, but of unusual strength.  She spent three months there learning to process emotions – both hers and those of others – and another two years in therapy.  Along the way, she found her purpose.  Her counselors had saved her life, and she knew what she planned to do with it: Help others as they had helped her.   

Fourteen years later, she looks around the crowded sickbay of the USS Tesseract, feeling every bit of the terror, anguish and sorrow she felt when she was a newly empathic teenage girl in the middle of a warzone.  This time, though, she has the tools.  Respecting both privacy and regulations, she effortlessly blocks out the conscious thoughts of the injured, the worried, the grieving, and lets their emotions be her guide instead.  After a moment’s deliberation, she selects her first patient – a quiet Deltan boy about twelve years old.  He feels everything, too.  She senses him absorbing the melancholy that surrounds them like a sponge, trying in his childish way to relieve the others’ pain.  But he’s too young.  He’s not ready for this.

She goes to him, and can’t help but think about the girl she used to be, the one who chose drowning in salt water over drowning in other people’s tears.  She feels the boy reaching out with his nascent gifts, trying to fill the vacuum left by other people’s grief, and knows that if he continues like this, then one day not too far from now, he’ll climb into an airlock and decide to try to fill the vacuum for real.

“Hi,” she says softly, and he looks up at her, his brown eyes huge against his smooth bald head.  “My name is Taran.  What’s yours?” she asks, and offers him her hand.  When he takes it, she squeezes gently, breaking regs just long enough to tell him silently, You don't have to carry this alone.

Adele Oyugo has never had much love for astrophysics.  As a cadet, she had a recurring dream that she was assigned to stellar cartography for a long-term mission.  For her, the dream was a nightmare. 

Where others see beauty in the heavenly dance of stellar bodies, she sees the blank spaces in between – distances marked in scientific notation, numbers literally too large for words.

For all their beauty, the stars are lonely.

These days, Adele is lonely, too, and she finds herself tracking the distance she has traveled like she never has before.  Since that fateful day in January – the day they buried her Imzadi (along with the others) – they have covered 322.67 light years.  The computer tells her this distance is equal to 3.0526287 × 10^15 kilometers, a number so large as to be meaningless, but it's the closest thing she has to a physical measurement of the hole that’s been gouged in her soul.

She knows it could be worse. A few hundred light years is nothing compared to the estimated distance between Federation space and the nearest known Borg vessel, and thousands of her friends and colleagues are out there, trapped inside a living hell – their minds and bodies stolen along with their free will.  Because Adele is an empath, she knows all too well that the ones they left behind hurt more than she does.  At least Ken is at peace, his body at eternal rest among the stars.

She can’t help but feel jealous of the stars now – he loved them in a way she never has, and surely they’re a little less lonely with him in their midst.  But Adele has never felt more alone. 

She tracks the distance between her Imzadi and herself, and realizes her measurements are useless. 

Distance will never bring her healing.  For that, Adele needs time.

The day Iden graduated from the Academy, she celebrated by giving her entire fortune away – well, at least what she had left in her bank account.  It was a symbolic gesture, really – she still has her trust fund, and if even if she was able to spend it all at once, she’d still have unlimited credit at the Bank of Bolarus.  Such is life for the daughter of Acten Nix, Vice President of Interstellar Affairs for the largest financial institution in the entire known galaxy.

For Iden, it may have been symbolic, but for the people she helped that day, it was far from it.  Iden has a reputation for frivolity, but she’s smart and resourceful, and she did her research before deciding how to spend nearly seventy-five million credits in a single day. 

The nice thing about having access to more resources than some civilized worlds is being able to work outside official channels.  The Federation is great about helping people, but it’s huge and inefficient, with too many moving parts, some of which squeak louder than others.  In Iden’s opinion, the squeaky parts of the Federation get plenty of grease already.  That’s why she listened for the quiet ones instead.  She was always good at listening.    

The day Iden graduated, a struggling colony of leftover Bajoran refugees fighting a disease for which they had no cure received a top medical research team from Vulcan, their expenses fully funded by an anonymous grantor.  Within eighteen standard months, the plague was cured, and the researchers had developed a vaccine.  Children no longer die in their beds by the dozens on that tiny world, and their future looks bright.

That same day, ten different groups received a few million credits each, deposited directly into their accounts at the Bank of Bolarus from an untraceable source.  Among them were two newly rebuilt hospitals on Betazed, four different scholarship funds for children outside the Federation to study within its borders, a Cardassian peace group, and nature preserves on Earth, Bolarus IX and Andoria.  Iden estimates her money purchased four cutting-edge surgical suites, Federation educations for at least a hundred kids, a perpetual thorn in the side of the xenophobic majority on Cardassia Prime, and roughly 7,300 square kilometers of pristine wilderness on three of the most densely populated planets in the Federation.

The day Iden graduated, a black market weapons broker on Bolarus IX accepted a bribe to turn in the Andorian supplier of a lethal nerve toxin for which the authorities had no antidote.  The money was more than he would have made in three years of sales, and he was able to secure legal immunity for his own crimes in exchange for ratting the Andorian out.  Even better, he no longer has to look over his shoulder wondering when the package he opens will be full of the very toxin he’s been selling, because once the ‘Fleeters got their hands on the stash, they wasted no time in creating an antidote.  To this day, he has no idea who bribed him, but he’s not taking any chances.  The deal was go straight and retire rich, or get turned in to the authorities – the ones on Kronos, not Earth.  Rura Penthe wasn’t his idea of a retirement resort, so he took the offer.  Sure enough, the next day, his bank account was larger, with all flags removed.  Sometimes when he drinks too much in certain company, he tells the story and wonders which government was behind it all.  So far, no one has any theories that make sense.

Iden never told a soul.  She knew her dad would find out about the donations, though. (The bribery was another story – she covered her tracks better on that one, it being technically illegal and all.)  She expected him to yell at her the way he had when she first chose Starfleet over finance, and that’s partly why she did it – a final act of rebellion, her way of declaring once and for all that she was choosing service over selfish gain, whether her family liked it or not.  But her father had a surprise for her, too.  The day Iden graduated, he told her he was proud of her. Then he pulled her close and whispered five words into her ear that made her cry: “Sweetheart, I matched it all.”

According to the Federation Standard thesaurus in the LCARS database, the words “tenacious” and “stubborn” are synonymous.  I guess that makes sense – all my life, the people around me have described me as one or the other.  But in my experience, they don’t mean quite the same thing.

“Tenacious” is the word reporters used in the profiles they wrote on me when I won the Daystrom Prize at twenty.  It’s the word engineering professors and commanding officers use when talking about my work habits.  It’s the word my parents use when they tell the story of how I first decided to attend Starfleet Academy at age 4. “Tenacious” is a thing I’m called with affection, admiration, and sometimes even awe.

“Stubborn” is its evil twin.  It’s what my flight control professor called me in those final, desperate days before I realized the hard way I would never be a pilot.  It’s what the Academy Commandant called me after I nearly died on my survival test rather than fail.  It’s what my parents call me when I won’t give in.  It’s what Rachel, J.Q., and even Icheb himself called me when I refused to break it off with him to pacify our Borg-hating classmates. 

“Stubborn” is the flip side of “tenacious,” the other edge of the knife.  Both are equally sharp, but used for different things.  When people call me “tenacious,” it’s with a tone of voice that suggests I’m slaying dragons.  When they call me stubborn, they make it sound like I’m cutting myself.