The story begins with Captain Picard of the Enterprise having a flashback of when he was captured by The Borg, a half-flesh, half-machine race that forcibly assimilates other beings into a collective hive. As it happens, The Borg are now heading towards Earth, but Picard's timely intervention prevents them from reaching their target, though not before a small pod exits the mother ship and uses a temporal vortex to travel back to 21st century Earth. There they are able to conquer Earth by preventing man's first space warp flight, which was the event that enabled mankind to encounter the Vulcan race.