Star Trek: 10 CORE Seven Of Nine Moments
9. Creating Her Own Collective
Though Seven would only learn of her culpability in this event several years after the fact, she was responsible for re-assimilating three drones incorrectly. When their scout ship crashed on an alien world, the four survivors, including Seven, attempted to signal the Collective to save them. As time passed, all four began to rediscover their individuality.
Seven's early days aboard the USS Voyager were marked with a strong resistance to her own individuality, having spent so much time as part of the whole. While Janeway worked to help her rediscover herself, she was unaware that it wasn't her first foray into being one. This time, however, she had people there to support her.
Her fear of being alone drove her to forcibly inject nanoprobes into these drones, effectively assimilating them for a second time. However, her attempts also blended them into a kind of mini-collective, shared a neural link, eventually driving them to leave the Borg for good. Their surgeries to remove their implants did more harm than good, with the Doctor predicting a complete removal would leave them each with a month to live.
This deeply affects Seven when she encounters them again in Survival Instinct. She now understands the damage that she did to them, having grown to accept her life as a person. After they plead with her to decide their fate for them, she elects to have their surgeries completed.
She now understands that living a lifetime as a drone couldn't compare to living a single month as an individual.