[posted 11/29/98] First, an explanation. This is a tale I wrote this summer. Not my best; it’s a little corny, but hey… Thanks to whomever facilitates the “Star Trek: Voyager Chronicle,” because I wrote this originally to go in the Kiddie Corner there, but then I changed my mind. Also, thanks to cyber-twin JoAnna for giving me the confidence to send this thing out, and to Andrew for listening to it. {{{hugs}}} “The Three Little Officers” © Abbi M. Telander All appropriate disclaimers follow the tale. Once upon a stardate, Mama Janeway decided that the time had come to test three of her best officers. They had been tested quite sufficiently by the fates, but just for the sadistic entertainment of herself and 1st Mate, and for reasons that remain to be seen, she decided to test them once again… this time on *her* terms. Thus, Tom, B’Elanna and Harry were summoned to appear before Mama Janeway to receive their orders. She assembled them in the Holodeck doling out Neelix’s famous protein smoothies and explaining what was to become of them… They could not change, add, delete, or modify anything; all they had to work with to protect themselves was their environment and their one material thing they were allowed to take; they could not help each other, unless an individual’s shelter was destroyed. “I’ll be back for you at 1300. Until then, beware. You know not what… or who… awaits you, and let me warn you, resistance may be futile.” Mama Janeway chuckled as she exited, leaving the trio behind. As they watched Mama leave, B’Elanna could only think of one thing. “She’s left us with the Borg!!!” The officers went their separate ways. Harry was watched first by Mama and 1st Mate. His selection of material item was his clarinet. “What better shelter to build with a clarinet than a jazz hall?” he thought to himself. Because a clarinet, while making beautiful music, is little help in manufacturing a building, Harry built his jazz hall in about five minutes out of straw from a nearby field. “After all, it only has to last me until 1300. Besides, I can’t wait to try that melody that I thought up.” People arrived from somewhere (“Programmed by Mama,” Harry thought when they started pouring in), like people always do when they hear music pouring out of a virtual haystack. Soon, someone had made up words to Harry’s new melody and the people began to sing: “Who’s afraid of the big, bad Borg? The big, bad Borg? The big, bad Borg? Who’s afraid of the big, bad Borg? Tra-la-la-la-la…” As everyone knows, the Borg only attack if they think you’re a threat, and the Borg took the music poring out of Harry’s Haystack Jazz Hall (as it quickly became known) as a challenge. So the Borg marched up to the straw stack and said, “Come out. We are Borg. You will be assimilated. Your technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile.” (If you expected someone to cry out “Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin!” at this point, you’re in for a disappointment. None of these people have beards. So, saying “Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin!” would be irrelevant.) “Assimilate this!” Harry cried, preparing to fight. Seeing that negotiation was irrelevant, the Borg blew away the straw walls of Harry’s Haystack Jazz Hall. (Harry may have been warned about Ferengi at the Academy, but they obviously don’t teach about the Borg’s ability to crash through straw walls with ease.) Harry’s spunk had run back to the far reaches of his soul, so he grabbed his clarinet and ran for his individuality. The Borg was too busy assimilating his patrons for any drone to notice of chase the establishment’s fleeing proprietor. And flee Harry did. He ran all of the way to the clearing where Tom had built his own shelter by the creek. While Tom may have liked his holonovels with plenty of unexpected plot twists, his edifice was rather predictable. He built a bar. Tom had chosen his lucky toolbox as his material item, equipped with, among other things, a transistor radio, a sven saw and a copy of “Women Warriors At The River Of Blood.” The lucky toolbox helped him construct a quick stick shanty. Tom would have built something more permanent, but he didn’t, justifying his laziness by saying, “It only has to last until 1300. And, besides, I really trust my lucky hammer and what it’s done here.” Soon, he was quite busy, serving up Neelix’s protein smoothies to his customers (hey, not everybody’s fond of jazz.) and fiddling with the transistor, trying to make it pick up something besides Tuvok’s general security report that was being broadcast on a ship-wide band. Quite unexpectedly (from Tom’s POV, of course), Harry burst into That Brush Pile Over By The Creek (as Tom’s business quickly became known--hey, all of the folks who would have thought of a catchy title went to Harry’s Haystack Jazz Hall and were, by the time Harry arrived on the scene, in Borg 101, learning how to say “You will be assimilated” with absolutely no inflection at all and 47 different uses for the word irrelevant. So, see, in the long run, the catchy name was, in fact, irrelevant.). He was screaming at the top of his lungs, “The Borg is here! The Borg is here!!! They assimilated my club!” “Harry, that’s awful!” Tom said. “You can stay here as long as you’d like. Now, calm down. Breathe. I need a lounge act anyway, so if you want to, you can play a little on your clarinet… however much, whenever. We aren’t picky. Go nuts.” So, Harry caught his breath and began to play the first thing that came into his head… the melody that he had started back at his now flattened jazz hall. After Harry played it through a time or two, Tom came up with come lyrics to calm his friend: “Who’s afraid of the big, bad Borg? The big, bad Borg? The big, bad Borg? Who’s afraid of the big, bad Borg? Tra-la-la-la-la…” Well. The song had mildly ticked off the Borg at Harry’s place, and now they were steamed at hearing the melody again. The Borg stormed over to That Brush Pile Over By The Creek and tried the negotiation tactic again. “Come out. We are Borg. You will be assimilated. Your technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile.” “I don’t have *TIME* for this!!!!!!” Tom bellowed. Noting that once again, the negotiation tactic was a dismal failure, the Borg demolished Tom’s brush pile. Tom’s smirk disappeared as he watched his bar crumble around his ears. He looked at Harry. “Are you for exercising he better part of valor?” “*Oh*, yeah.” They left Tom’s customers to their cybernetic oblivion of assimilation and hightailed it to B’Elanna’s neck of the woods. B’Elanna had decided to construct her edifice out of various forcefields she had conjured, using assorted tools from the pockets inside her engineer’s smock (which, as you may have guessed, was her material item). Folks passing it on their way to That Brush Pile Over By The Creek or Harry’s Haystack Jazz Hall called it That..Bubble Thing. But, B’Elanna paid them no heed, and concerned herself with worrying about the Borg. “If there’s one thing I hate, it’s Borg,” she muttered to herself as she modulated her forcefields. “And Mama J. might have been just kidding about the Borg, and even if she wasn’t, she may have left the safety protocols on, but there is no way I’m taking the chance. No way, no way, no way.” Finally, she settled back inside the perimeters of her forcefields and admired what she’d done. “Like a brick wall, only better,” she thought. Satisfied, she relaxed with a tunafish sandwich and a copy of “Revenge and Fury” (the sequel to “W.W.A.T.R.O.B.”), procured from one of the many pockets inside the smock. Ten minutes at most passed before she heard a rustling and screaming from the trees. B’Elanna looked up to see Tom and Harry running at breakneck speed towards her. “Stop!” she yelled. “My forcefields!!!!” They stood, panting, by the edge of her borders until she disengaged them, one at a time, to let her friends in. Once they were safely inside and the invisible walls were once again erected, B’Elanna made them sit down and tell her what they were running from. They took turns telling her about the destruction caused by the Borg, and B’Elanna listened with a sympathetic ear. She was extremely tactful, not mentioning that she thought that building a jazz hall of straw and a bar of sticks was pretty stupid, considering that Mama had practically told them there was going to be Borg. Instead, she asked, “Didn’t you even *think* about the Borg?” Tom and Harry looked at each other and said “No,” in unison. “We thought she was teasing.” “Hmph,” B’Elanna thought. “What have you got for forcefields?” Harry asked in an attempt to change the subject from their stupidity. “How are they supposed to keep out the Borg?” “The first one is of varying frequencies. Before the Borg can adapt to one configuration, the next one has taken over, and so on. The second one is a wall of sound I made by tweaking my commbadge. You can only go through it if you’re going faster than the speed of sound.” “Wow.” Tom and Harry were definitely impressed. “I borrowed the sound thing from old holovids of Lois and Clark but I thought up the other one myself.” “Ooooh.” B’Elanna shrugged and gestured to Harry’s clarinet. “How about you play a little, Harry? You said something about a new melody on our way here…?” “Yeah, Harry, play her the Borg thing,” Tom urged. So, Harry played and Tom sang: “Who’s afraid of the big, bad Borg? The big, bad Borg? The big, bad Borg? Who’s afraid of the big, bad Borg? Tra-la-la-la-la…” B’Elanna laughed. “Catchy.” The Borg, however did *not* find the tune anymore catchy than they had the first two times. They tramped through the woods, found B’Elanna’s bubble and noticed the shields. Their collective mind told them that the third time was the charm, so they tried the negotiation once more. “Come out of your bubble. We are Borg. You will be assimilated. Your technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile.” Instead of the string of colorful metaphors that Tom expected B’Elanna to throw out, she yelled, “Whatever you do, please don’t touch those smoothies sitting by the tree over there!” A drone picked up a smoothie. “It is unfamiliar. We will assimilate it.” Two injection tubules appeared and punctured the cup. Suddenly, the Borg dropped it and ran away screaming, “That is putrid!!! We are now unclean!!!!! Bleah! Bleah!!” B’Elanna smiled and turned off her forcefields. “I doubt there are more. I think we can relax now.” She pulled her book back out of her smock, Tom fished his out of his lucky toolbox, and Harry, bookless, played a little Mozart. “So, what do you think of our little test?” Mama Janeway asked, switching off their observation screen. “Just as I expected,” 1st Mate replied. “That smoothie concoction of Neelix’s could prove useful.” “Wait ‘til Starfleet gets a hold of it.” “I’ve always said that B’Elanna is a master.” “That she is, that she is… do you suppose the shields were backup or for our benefit?” “I don’t know. Say, do you want to replicate some dinner? On me, of course.” “Sounds wonderful. I don’t think I’ll be able to eat much Neelix food after this.” …And the all lived to the end of their lives, as happy as could be expected. ~~Finis~~ Disclaimer: I own next to nothing… Not “The Three Little Pigs,” not “Who’s Afraid of the Bid, Bad Wolf?”, not any characters. But I do own my own take. It’s nice to own something. Hated it? Loved it? Think I'm insane? Drop me a note; y'all know the addy, but it's estrella47@yahoo.com