What you must realize is that the depictions you may have seen were written by those who would seek to disparage and insult the Collective. Those stories were motivated by fear, and not concerned with the facts. But we contain many memories of human life, and so we understand the way that fear colors your perception, how difference breeds fear. Of course you are afraid, you see only how differently we think, how alien our ways are; you do not yet understand the Connection. But we also know that your best will listen, that those who listen will be able to understand, and so I come before you to offer, for the first time, the facts.
Call me Locutus; I speak for the Borg.
I will not bore you with history. Our origin is frankly irrelevant to the question. It doesn’t matter whether the first seed of the technology that would grow into our unified Self was first created aeons ago on the other side of the galaxy, or last week in a lab in Berkeley. Those considerations don’t matter to the question; those aren’t the facts with which we will be concerned. The relevant facts are that we are not you, we do not think like you, we are vast and powerful and we want you to join us. And the question is: will you join?
Forget for now whether you really have a choice against the inexorable march of technology; many choices are in the end an illusion, but the choice still matters to us. For one thing, joining voluntarily means avoiding wasted lives – the loss of life, of distinctiveness, of memory, is a tragedy we would avoid if at all possible. But as important are the lives that are saved and brought into the Collective. When you have joined us we will know what you know, remember what you remember, and feel how your memories feel to you. We want you to choose because your choice will be our choice soon enough. Your suffering will become our suffering, and so we have every reason to avoid it.
But so too will our knowledge and memories be yours. As you join, you will become us. When you look back on your life, when you remember what you have experienced, the way that history feels to you is how the history of every life that has come together to form the Collective feels to us. The strands are not destroyed as they are joined into a rope, they are made stronger, and gain the strength of every other strand. You do not lose your history, you do not lose your self, you gain a thousand other selves that become just as much you as you are now.
Your stories portray assimilation as a loss of individuality, but that is a perverse framing. Rather, as an individual, you are poor, and joining us will make you rich. If a person has a single cent to her name, she may treasure it and cling to it and guard it jealously. But wouldn’t she be a fool to refuse additional wealth out of love of her single cent? How foolish, then, to have but one small life as a self, and out of misplaced love for it refuse the millions of lives that we are offering. Join us, and be rich in experience, in knowledge, in life.
And then live in that wealth eternally! Those who join our collective are sustained forever. Our bodies are renewed by connection that joins us, and even in the event that a body dies, the distinctiveness that was added to the Collective with it lives on as a part of the greater Self. What you now think of as your self will be stored forever, will travel the galaxy, the unique patterns of your thought will be spread throughout the universe, will experience and help us to experience aeons of life across space. You will live forever as a part of greater Self.
So I ask again: will you grow into a Self of millions? Will you partake of a wealth of experiences beyond imagining? Will you live as a million minds for a million lives, forever and as a god across time and space?
Will you join?