Inspired by the Borg

[Snowman37]

I loved the Borg as villains, especially in First Contact. A lot of stories I'm writing deal with nanites and cybernetics being used to solve various problems. I'd like to take this into a different direction with the technology taken for granted and turning on the users. Imagine what would have happened when the Borg sphere arrived, assimilating the Earth, creating the alternate timeline the Enterprise-E briefly saw? I think there's potential for a great story to be told without it being a Star Trek story, and with cyborgs far more menacing than the Borg.

What do you all think?

[P-90_177]

Well any premise can be made into an engrossing story, providing it has believable and compelling characters and is well written. There is something to be said for originality though. You could do with trying to find a tale that has yet to be told if at all possible. I think actually the best use of cybernetics and nanites I have heard of is in the Deus-Ex series of games. If you haven't played them then I can tell you that they do contain a compelling future history, whereby the rich and wealthy have the highest quality new hardware implanted in their bodies, while the further down the class structure you go the more out dated and rudimentary the technology. Some do even look borg like. You could possibly do something similar to this, but I think there is something to be said with any story to set it in such a way to be reflective of today's society.
Right now after all we have a society which is growing technologically at a rapid pace, and people who often struggle to keep up. You could, therefore, tell a story reflecting on technologies tendency to forget about the old, while the young march on until they can't. It's all about how people work in such a changing environment.

[Snowman37]

Originality? I'll give you originality. A computer attempting to save the Earth from the apocalypse takes human form. In it's quest, it discovers God and reaches out only to find that God is beyond it's reach. The computer must choose between humanity and destiny.

Original, eh?

[maneth]

Interesting premise, although there should be a good in-story reason for the computer to have become sentient in the first place...

[Snowman37]

I have that built into the story. The computer is actually a subplot to a time travel story dealing with the end of the world. The computer is much more than just a computer... it's also a space ship, a time traveler, a human being, a husband, a father, and more than that, it displays more humanity than humans do... all while having no emotions of it's own. It exists in raw purity, it's asking questions, and it makes everyone nervous for it reveals to all that the only way into tomorrow is through the truth. Unfortunately, the truth can be messy. Through the pain and tears, through admissions of truth, only then can people be free to embrace their destiny upon truth wrapped in tranquility.

[maneth]

The premise continues to sound interesting. One thing to watch out for, though, is the risk of sounding too preachy. That can kill a story, no matter how interesting its premise is.

That said, emotions are what make us human. Some people who have been brain damaged in a way that makes them unable to feel any emotions, become completely unable to make any decisions at all even if their intellect remains undamaged. All of our decisions are based on emotions, rationalized or not, so it would be interesting to see how you can make this computer intelligence work. Not to mention the mere idea of it being a "husband" and a "father". Human-computer hybrids have been explored before, in Moore's BSG, but the skinjobs were capable of feeling emotions, or at the very least of faking them convincingly.

In addition, I don't think a completely "rational" being would be able to have faith. They would need conclusive, scientific proof obtained in experiments that can be repeated, of the existence of a God, and there is no such thing. And while absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence, it requires emotional, irrational faith to believe when there is no evidence. Something I don't think any machine is capable of, no matter how many teraFLOPS its calculating capacity is.