Biography of Twelve of Twelve

Twelve of Twelve’s past is a mystery.  When she was liberated, a routine genetic test was run to determine her true identity.  The test results indicated no living relatives and gave no indication about who she was.  She might have been born on a far-flung human colony outside of Federation space or to a family that desired anonymity for whatever reasons.  Given the details of Borg assimilation techniques, there was also no telling how long she had been part of the collective.  It might have been a year or a hundred.

Like many other liberated Borg, Twelve struggles with frightening memories of her time as a drone.  However, perhaps because she does not have a history of her own, she does not see those memories as foreign or as something to be overcome or rejected.  Rather, she has sought to accept them as a part of her—to assimilate the Borg, as she sometimes says.  She prefers to be identified as a “human-Borg hybrid” rather than as a “liberated Borg.”

After her liberation, Twelve briefly worked at the Daystrom Institute under a special fellowship program run by Seven of Nine.  However, she inspired some controversy with her ideas on the integration of biological and mechanical systems.  This was and is an active field of work, and there are many indications that, after more than two centuries of rejection, public opinion in the Federation is moving toward a more open attitude to such mixing (though recent conflict with the Borg may reverse this trend). 

Twelve pushed this openness to its limits.  While she did not believe that the Borg were the best example, she did argue that some amalgamation of living organism and mechanical device was the future of human evolution.  She was particularly interested in the capacity of nanotechnology to join these two worlds.

Even though her work on nanoprobes was praised by some at the Institute, the fellowship committee chose not to renew her position when it expired.  Instead, she was approached by the Advanced Research Concepts Division of Starfleet about joining a special project involving the use of nanotechnology to repair and refit starships.  She agreed and after several years of work, was assigned as chief engineer to the first experimental result of the new construction techniques, the USS Republic.