Borgcritter Sketch Dump!

It seems that the Feminist Borg website had gone down, and I realized that the only place online you can find pictures of any of the Borg Critters are deep in my tumblr archives.  So as I prep for a BorgCritter story silvercat17 , here all the Borg Critters are in one place! (Right now, the stories are lumped in with the Disabled Cyborg stories; you can read them here.)

The Borg Critters are formally known as Unit #000111, an exploration unit for a digital collective consciousness known as the Hive.  They are sent to an unknown world with harsh conditions, most notably an atmosphere that prohibits regular wireless contact.  Without regular contact from the Mother Hive, they have grown to be individuals, though they are still devoted to the Hive and their work.

Each "appendage" of the unit (the Hive is one mind, so individual bodies are considered 'appendages' rather than 'people') has its own job and specialty.  I hope you enjoy looking at them as much as I enjoyed drawing them, back at the end of the Homeless Year!
( A BUNCH of cute little cyborg animal pictures under the cut! )

Borgcritters: Dead-Man's Switch

Dead Man's Switch
Universe: Borgcritters
Word Count: 1000
Summary: Rat is the leader of the cyborg animals, but it is now painfully aware that it is prey. It finds an ingenious way of dealing with that anxiety.
Notes: You'd be best served by reading the prior stories in this series, which now is indexed with the Disabled Cyborgs series.  This was prompted by katz and sponsored by silvercat17 !  Please enjoy!


Being an individual had downsides. Namely: fear.

As a Unit, fear had primarily been a cost/benefit analysis, an awareness of the risk of losing appendages. There was no sense of mortality, for all was a glorious one, part of the Hive. Losing an appendage was unfortunate, but there was little sense of personal loss. Now, however, Unit #000111 was a group, many tiny scattered Is instead of an all-encompassing We, and fear was personal.

Rat, for instance, was now painfully aware that without the Hive's intervention and copious programming, it would be food not only to much of the life on the planet they explored, but to many of its teammates as well. And if it was aware, surely so was everyone else. Rat had the most processing power and speed, but the sense of predator/prey was an organic one.

( Read more... )