Oblivion's Gate (Star Trek: Coda #3)

by David Mack

Such was the nature of war. Decisions made, by necessity, in haste. And then, for those lucky enough to be called survivors, a lifetime to reflect upon those choices. Decades of regret.

Life is just an infinite number of chaotic possibilities that eventually collapse into finite outcomes, so the likelihood that any two universes would turn out exactly the same is so remote as to be nearly impossible.

As Luna’s curve passed from the viewscreen to reveal Earth, Picard felt a cold chill down his spine. In place of the lush blue world he thought of as home, there loomed a dark sphere aglow with vast webs of green light: an Earth long ago assimilated by the Borg Collective. This, Picard realized, was a manifestation of all his darkest fears. Not just the specter of his own death, but the prospect of something greater and more tragic. The loss of humanity’s shared identity, its collective heritage, was a crueler fate than mere extinction. To have every trace of human civilization wiped away—art, literature, music, history, and so much more—just to appease an oppressive force whose appetite for domination could never be satisfied, was an affront to every principle Picard held dear, and a loss beyond measure. An evil without compare.

I’ve had my time in the sun. Strutted my hour upon the stage. Now calls the curtain.

Lurking beneath the whispers, rustling like a predator creeping through dead leaves, the name was still there. He felt it. And the closer he got to the Borg’s soul-crushing sprawl of cybernetic machinery, the more certain he became that they soon would hear it, too. And when they did, they would smash down like a tsunami upon him and the away team.

But all he heard was the abyssal roar of Borg drones’ minds surrounding him, an endless sea of broken consciousness, nine billion cells of awareness representing one diabolical entity: the Borg Queen.

There were truths about the universe that Wesley Crusher intuitively understood: that space, time, matter, energy, and thought all were manifestations of the same thing; that what most beings considered to be reality was merely the accumulated permutations and attenuations of twelve-dimensional forces, vibrations of invisible strings knotted in four dimensions as m-brane sheets; that there was no “true” timeline and no “true” universe; that so-called “dark matter” was a sentient force unto itself, and not at all one with a sense of humor; and that spacetime expanded forever into both the future and the past, a phenomenon with no beginning and no end, one that embodied its own finite infinity, unbound by any Alpha or Omega.

Trillions of minds acting as one moved through their shared galactic consciousness like wind over water, like exotic particles raining down upon airless moons, a deluge of dark energy with a sinister purpose.

It was the stare of a soul gazing into the abyss, hoping secretly that it would be eternal, only to realize they could see the bottom, and it was coming up fast.

Sisko turned the corner. Within ten meters, he regretted it. The heat and humidity spiked, and the air grew heavy with odors of burnt polycarbons, scorched metals, and unwashed bodies—an early warning sign that drones were nearby. It was a characteristic of the Borg with which few people were familiar, outside of a handful of veterans of the 2381 invasion: they stank. Beneath all their cybernetic enhancements and synthetic garments, they remained organic beings—flesh, blood, and bone. A drone’s link to the Collective overrode most of its executive capacity, but its autonomic functions and reactions remained the same. Under all of their mesh and machinery, the drones perspired. Though they no longer consumed food with their mouths, bacteria still lived in them, generating some of the worst halitosis in known space. And their pallid, mottled skin gave them not just the look of cadavers but also their sickening reek.

The Collective is like an obsession. It burns patterns into the brain. Rewires it. Changes it for life.”

This is the beginning of the end. This is where we’re all going to die.

Through the gateway he glimpsed the collapse of his universe: stars snuffed like dying embers. Black holes evaporating like droplets of water striking red-hot lava. Massive galaxies unwinding themselves into smaller galaxies that had collided eons earlier. One tableau after another of the impossible… all united by one common factor: Inestimable sentient pain. Trillions of quadrillions of lives being ended without warning or mercy. Cosmic eruptions of terror and sorrow. An endless wellspring of suffering and fear. Before it, the Devidians gorged themselves on the lamentations of the dying and the bereaved, drove themselves into a collective trance, ecstatic frenzy, and omnicidal psychosis.

Then, as the planet detonated, a single flash of white-hot power erupted from the gateway, a shockwave of neural energy that rushed through the ghostly mob. The spectacle beneath the dome became a feast fed by death, like a vampiric orgy fused with a fascist rally, all for the pleasure of half a million phase-shifted ghouls.

It was like staring into the eyes of a dragon—something inhuman and eternal.

The Borg had meddled with time travel once that Picard knew about. Who was to say they had not done so many times more, in countless alternate timelines? They might have generated multiple conflicting origins for themselves, mired their beginnings in paradox, or even have cross-pollinated different timelines.

“I don’t see the point anymore. Death is universal. Inescapable. Inevitable. Everything is doomed to entropy and oblivion. Even time itself is going to die. So why bother now? Why go on fighting?” Sisko’s eyes dimmed. “A life only has meaning… when we make it mean something.” He summoned the strength to grant Bashir a smile. “So go make ours… mean something.”

Only now, as he felt the extermination of his entire reality course through him, did Wesley truly understand the burden of the Travelers. They were the midwives of Creation. The witnesses to History, and the undertakers of Time. Alpha and Omega.

Reapers to the left of me, reapers to the right… and one of them has my name on it.

Watching her own end rushing up to meet her, she felt transcendently light, as if she had cast off all her cares, all her desires, so she could fully be here now, in this moment. She smiled the way that she would if she knew a good joke she had not yet told. And met her end with both heart and eyes wide open.

These are moments I did not expect us to have, Lal, but I am thankful for them.