Borg Cube Looming Beside a Small Planet — Print & Oil Painting

Begin with the small ochre world at the right. It is marbled brown and cream like a polished stone, it is a very long way off, and it is the only object in the frame that is minding its own business.

Everything else is the cube, and the cube is presented corner first, three faces at once, so there is no direction in which it can be said to be pointing. The surface is a dense weave of pipes, boxes, conduits and struts stacked in irregular blocks, black upon black, with a handful of white-lit rectangles cut into it and ragged patches of green glowing out from between the layers as though from something behind the wall.

The lighting refuses to help. No key, no rim, no cast shadow anywhere, only that internal green and a faint pale haze at the lower left, which leaves the eye with nothing to judge distance by. The cube could be a kilometre away or a thousand, and the picture will not say.

The first time Starfleet met one of these, everything fired at it was absorbed, and the ship lost a section of its own hull to a machine that took the sample and went back to whatever it had been doing. Part of our Star Trek collection, with Borg Cube Firing a Beam at a Planet for the same object doing something rather than nothing.