Survival Instinct by Kimberly Gibson-Tran

A personal essay about memory, childhood, and sisterhood, with insights from Star Trek: Voyager.

First published in Passengers Journal, volume 3, issue 4, in December 2022. Content warning: violent animal death.

​From the author:

This essay was born from a few intense childhood memories in Northern Thailand and my obsession with Star Trek: Voyager.

Listen to the author read her work:

The smell of the bamboo jungle is from the light, clean rain that licks into the fibers of the stalks. And in the air is a sweet fibrous smell, one you catch and let go to catch again. It’s from the hard green tube of sugar cane I broke open, broke open by blasting it against a peacock tail tree, the tree’s soft so soft leaf petals fall in rounds of little velvet fans. When my family had rabbits we used to feed them these, plucking off the stems. How the red-eyed white rabbit, when sprinkled with her food, looked baptized by little tongues of blood. We didn’t have rabbits long; the dogs would get them. This is a dreamscape I recreate. Location: Chiang Klang, Nan province, Thailand. Long ago Siam. Longer ago the northern Lanna Kingdom. I lived in this place from the age of eight to the age of fourteen with my father, a medical doctor, my mother, a nurse, and my younger sister, a brat.

Katie had to shit in the woods. We were on a star trek, an away mission, mucking our way through the slimy grasses into the tunnel canopies of fat bamboo. Four of us had beamed down, two pairs of sisters: Haley and Sarah, twins, and me and Katie. We were gathering immense amounts of data on our cardboard tricorders. No sign of the Borg, or snakes. But our ten-year-old science officer was in a predicament, as usual. Katie was always ruining games, as I saw it. Impulsive, impatient, prone to random injury. I have watched my father operate on her foot to retrieve a branch of a splinter; she’s woken from bed with a five-inch scorpion on her chest. Her round face reddens with fever when she battles an ear infection. In this memory she is sporting a headgear contraption to correct an overbite. Its adjustable plastic bands squeeze into the pudge of her cheeks and, because of the way she put it on this morning, bunch her choppy blonde hair in fountainous directions. Her hair is choppy because she likes to cut it herself.

Now, deep in the misty, alien woods, Katie needs to go—number two, she clarifies. As captain I cannot compromise the mission. The transporters perennially offline, the commbadge communicators affected by a dampening field, there is no way to contact the ship. “You can hide behind the bamboo and bushes over there,” points Sarah, first officer, helpfully. “Yeah, you just dig a hole and, like, go in it,” adds Haley, chief engineer. Haley wipes a bead of sweat from her pointy, freckled nose. I slap a mosquito buzzing close to my elbow. “Better hurry,” I order. And, with difficulty I prefer not to go into, Katie eventually manages and the mission goes on.

Why this scene comes back to me, I don’t know. I want to talk about the twins, I think. Or I want to talk about the woods. So much growth. Everything here is giant. You could stick a seed in the ground and it would do the rest. The bamboo, hard bars, thicken into walls, curve into spiral tunnels we could not help but explore. We thought we were going where no one had gone before.

In season 6 episode 2 of Star Trek: Voyager, “Survival Instinct,” which aired September 29th, 1999, a Borg sphere crash lands on a moon, and the drones aboard are severed from the collective hive mind. The four surviving Borg drones, the armor-plated, cybernetic bad guys of the galaxy, who plunder the biological and technological advances of other species, find themselves helpless, growing more and more human on the wild moon jungle, their thoughts their own. They start to remember their names. Around a campfire, eating the corpse of a dead comrade, they recount their assimilation, begin to feel that “survival is insufficient.” One of the four drones, my sister’s favorite character of the series, is Seven of Nine. Seven of Nine does not remember her human name.

Childhood is dramatic, the memories sear. The hates root deep and the loves bruise. All of these jumble into the expansive vat of the past. I don’t know the cause and effect. On that away mission, the one where Katie had to squat behind the brushes of bamboo, I don’t know what it meant when she found bones back there. “Look,” she told us. Haley and Sarah were giddy, we were all giddy with the dark secret unearthed. “Did somebody die?” said Katie. “I think it’s a dog. I saw a dog skull once when we lived in Georgia,” said Haley or Sarah, “when we used to go rabbit hunting, when we caught that magic one, remember? It was white and had a red eye and we still have the foot. We’ll show you. You can wish on it and things come true.” “A dog?” I asked, trying to rerail the investigation. “Is this where they buried Esther?” asked Katie. But it wasn’t. Katie’s dead puppy Esther was closer to the house. On this mission we had crossed barbed wire fences, we were off the property of the missionary clinic compound. We were in the deep woods, where things stay or decay. A macabre decision maybe, but we took the skulls and half skulls home, dirtying our arms.

I remember the day my mother broke the news to me, how she came in that slow, deliberate way parents come to tell you your pet has died. But no one was dead, not in a way I could name. The twins were only moving away, to a different town in the north of Thailand, a different mission team. “I know already,” I said, grieving tonelessly on a mound of grassy dirt a hundred yards from the house, playing hooky on my homeschool lessons. My mother, on break from the clinic, had had to make a trip to the hill in the boiling sun to interrupt my madness. Katie probably tattled to our cook Bpa Jan that I was sun-bathing, and Bpa Jan probably called the clinic phone. “I’m just tanning, Mom,” I stretched her title into two long syllables. “I know this is hard,” she said, sounding strange, “but Danny and your dad just couldn’t work things out. Are you wearing sunscreen? In all this UV, you’re going to burn, and there’s cancer in our family.” Danny was Haley and Sarah’s strict dad. He didn’t get along with anyone on the missionary team, thought he knew best how to evangelize a people whose language he didn’t even know.

In the Star Trek: Voyager episode, on the leafy alien moon, surrounded by the mangled wreckage of their Borg spaceship, Seven of Nine panics at the insubordination, the mutiny of Two of Nine, Three of Nine, and Four of Nine, who do not want to repair the communication beacon and send a distress call to the collective. Seven of Nine, assimilated at such a young age that she has only the memory of fear and chaos before the Borg, cannot lose her only family. She hunts them through the woods, and one by one, pierces their necks with her assimilation tubules, fills them with nanoprobes, reprograms them.

Looking back, I think my mother felt guilty. Whatever had happened between the team of missionary adults, I couldn’t fully understand. I sense that my mom didn’t want me to blame her or my dad for this, the removal of my best friends, a request they must have made to the mission board. We were so isolated in the rural area. I think now that she must have felt she wronged me. I don’t know who I blamed for the breakup of my crew and our endless collective imagination. After trying to toast myself in the sun, I set out for the bamboo caves, breaking everything I could along the way, spending myself on the thrashing of a sugar cane stalk, breathing the sweet mist of its defeat against the peacock tree. The tree that rained red petals.

I wonder what I said to Katie. It would have been me who told her about the twins leaving. I was always this thread in the chain of command. Did she cry? I don’t remember this episode, but another I do. I remember telling her when the puppy died. Mom didn’t relay this one. I saw it happen with my own eyes. Esther, our white German shepherd, Katie’s favorite, bit an electrical cord on our back porch, convulsed with blue wires, exactly like in the movies. I remember a collective scream—me, my mom, and Bpa Jan—Mom and Bpa Jan grabbing me, shouting so loudly in two languages, “Don’t touch her! DON’T TOUCH her!” The dog thrashed until she died, her jaws slacked. Bpa Jan called the gardener. He bagged the dog, dug a hole, and put her in the ground behind our house. Katie hadn’t been there. That afternoon I walked the stairs to her room and told her. She cried so hard. I have never seen her cry so hard.

I had a dream some years ago, quiet and safe in a room in my parents’ house in Texas. I dreamed a dark, miasmic danger. I was in Chiang Klang again and there were leaves, teak leaves falling big and veined as elephant ears around the red-flecked peacock tree. And the tree’s long pods, curved scabbards, were rattling savagely in the wind. Something was burning. There were fires. Something I had done or not done for Katie. Guilt. Then the brightness of headlights splashed into my eyes, woke me, and, for a second, I was barred by the striped shadow of the window blinds. No ash in my hair. Katie was spending the college break with friends in Missouri. She doesn’t come home to visit as often as I do.

The Voyager episode flashes forward to years later, after Seven of Nine and the drones are reassimilated by the Borg collective from the jungle moon. Seven of Nine, in a separate incident, has been severed permanently from the collective and is now a member of the starship Voyager’s crew. At first she resists this new, forced individuality, but eventually she comes to terms with being an “I” and not a “we.” She accepts this as what it means to be human. She renounces the cruelty of the Borg collective she was once a part of. She grows golden hair. She even remembers her first name.

One day, out of the vastness of space, Two, Three, and Four of Nine, having themselves escaped from the Collective, hunt down Seven. It so happened that on that alien moon, when Seven of Nine pumped them full of her programmed nanoprobes, she had followed no protocol. She had, in fact, fused the minds of her siblings into a recursive collective of three, bound forever to torture each other with their thoughts—privacy and individuality impossible. The procedure is irreversible. To separate they have to die.

When people are going through a tough time in their lives, some like to say they’re still in the woods, the dark maze of losing one’s way, the thickness of trouble. This is perhaps a collective metaphor. Think Luke Skywalker on the planet Dagobah, Jedi training with Yoda. Remember the muck of his X-wing spacecraft suspended over the swamp. The temptation, the shadowy vision of Darth Vader in the forest. Or Simba, wayward heir in The Lion King, tunneling after Rafiki through brambles and branches to the still pool and his father’s starry reflection. Years past our childhoods, across the world in America, Sarah, half of her twinned self, sat, dabbing and cooling her father Danny’s forehead after his chemo. She was alone and unalone, the little fetus inside her a Borg drone in its green maturation chamber, jungle of rib and vertebrae.

Bones, so many of them, piercing the ground, grinding back to dust, molecules shooting through stems, feeding us, growing the bones of our children. On October 13th, 2016, his majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the longest reigning monarch in the world, died. The world for about seventy million people shook out of phase. His body lay at the Thai Grand Palace for a full year and thirteen days before a five-day cremation ceremony. During that interval, thousands, every day, clad all in black, waited hours upon hours to see the man, the god, no one could remember beyond. He had been the king of everyone’s lifetime, beloved, gentle father of the country, calmer of political coups. There’s a famous picture of him cupping the clasped hands of an old beggar woman. Her hair a shock of white, his bespectacled, boyish face bends to hers. When I visited the Grand Palace in the summer of 2017, there were still numberless throngs in black, voiding the hot white concrete, a dark cloud pouring out of cabs and trains from the skyscraper jungle of Bangkok.

All of everything, far back enough, was star, it is said. Particles, antimatter, neutrinos, subspace. The poetry of the void, the final frontier. I wonder which way they remember it, my crew. Is it a coincidence that Haley collects skulls, paints designs on bones, duplicates marks of her Cherokee ancestors? That Sarah saves every year for a new tattoo, that some of those permanent marks are in the Thai language? Did, by chance, I just happen to like backpacking through forests, taking the same readings over and over again? Did Katie, science officer, all on her own, study the body, become a nurse?

I saw a program, a few years back, or perhaps it was a piece of journalism shared on Facebook, about the illegal dog meat industry in Thailand, and scenes came back to me. Around the corner from the clinic, down a narrow dirt street I explored on my bike, a meat stand open to the air. This was not, in itself, odd. I was used to seeing pigs’ heads and hooves cleaved, the innards grayly slicking the tile of fresh market stalls. The woman behind such a counter, blood to her elbows, would hand you back change, a green bill with the smooth, bespectacled face of the king stamped red with her thumbprint. But this was a different blood money. Hung from the hooks of the street stall were dog heads, black dogs, tongues dangling stiff, eyes only a mirror. I am only remembering this now, after the online video. At first, when Two, Three, and Four of Nine confronted her, Seven of Nine did not remember what she had done to them on the alien jungle moon. They had to reactivate their neural link for the whole history to come roaring back. What else of the past did my brain elide?

After the bamboo cave away mission, we four sisters hosed the skulls. They were packed with dirt. We watered them white, toweled them dry. Bpa Jan, the woman who cooked for us and cared for us when my parents were away at work, whose name meant Moon or Monday, shed light on the situation. In her clipped, northern dialect she told me, and I translated for the twins, that we should throw away the skulls. They were from dogs the neighbors were killing and illegally selling. I don’t know what we did with the bones then. I don’t even remember how we took the news. But I think, going back into the cave we would, knowing even now what we know, touch the bones, caress the skulls, paint them with stars and symbols.

When their father Danny passed, I sent Haley and Sarah a poem I wrote for them, and, curious, looked back at some of our old Facebook messages. We had not talked much, we mainly commented on pictures publicly here and there. There was, however, a long string of messages Sarah and I had back in 2010. She’d wanted to get a tattoo of a scripture verse wrapped around her forearm. She wanted it in a Thai Bible translation. Knowing that I could read the language, she asked if I would help her find and parse the verse, help her learn it before injecting it into her skin. Her verse was the first half of Isaiah 26:9.

My soul yearns for you in the night;
in the morning my spirit longs for you.

I looked it up in a Thai translation, first in the traditional, kingly one which seeks to match the language used for God with the language used for Thai royalty. Then, I settled on a beautiful translation in a lower, down-to-earth register:

จิตใจของข้าพระองค์อยากได้พระองค์ในกลางคืน
จิตวิญญาณภายในข้าพระองค์แสวงหาพระองค์อย่างร้อนรน

Google handles the translation back to English well:

My soul wants you in the night.
The soul within me is seeking Him earnestly.

I handle the Thai words this way:

My heart wants to have you in the night.
The spirit inside me searches for you hotly still.

So many ways to see the metaphors at work. The heart and the spirit, the heat of the searching. Thai does not conjugate verbs for tense, so time is malleable, inferred. In Thai we don’t have to wait for the morning, we can start the search in the thick of the darkness. This plaintive desire is marked on her now, but we share the scar.

After Danny’s passing, my mom visited Haley and Sarah in Georgia, dropped news about my new, extensively tattooed American-Vietnamese boyfriend. Sarah messaged me right away, inhaled my details and photos. “Hey, you can tell a lot about a person by the quality of their tattoos,” she assured me.

Time expressed itself, warped. Haley’s and Sarah’s babies are crawling now. My hair, in the place I used to pull it, is going white from either age or trauma, I can’t tell. I’m not going to lose my head over it. Katie, I notice from posted photos, is getting the same lines about the mouth that I am. My boyfriend is working through season 6 of Star Trek: Voyager. He likes the Borg, interprets Seven of Nine’s transition to human as a loss. Since he and I met online, hardly a day has gone by in which we haven’t talked or messaged. Only one day, perhaps, when I was in the Georgia woods this June, on the one day I couldn’t find a bar of cell phone signal.

At the end of “Survival Instinct,” Two, Three, and Four of Nine, fall into a coma. They’d accessed the buried memory of what Seven had done to them on the jungle moon, learned the truth. Their neural lock prevents them from being revived. There are two solutions: they have to be severed from each other, only to irreparably damage their brains and die within a few days, or they have to be assimilated again by the Borg in order to live out full lives as drones in the Collective. The ship’s doctor asks Seven of Nine what should be done. “Survival is insufficient,” Seven says, opting to break her siblings’ link, to kill them, to give them the taste of a few free days. Only she, similarly scarred, could ever have known that this is what they would have wanted.

As a child in Thailand, I often thought how capable Haley and Sarah were, how in sync, finishing each other’s sentences in their own invented language. Katie and I didn’t even look like sisters. No strangers at summer camp ever thought we were. Though we could easily tell the twins apart because Haley was a little shorter and thinner in the face, the same light brown hair draped their delicate, feminine features like a seamless waterfall. My hair, which I secretly tried to tear out at the roots when nervous and alone, was always a frizzy mass that blurred me into the humid air. No one I knew had my hair. Then there were the dreams the twins had. They had the longest, most fantastical dreams of anyone. Suspiciously detailed dreams that placed us all as characters in the story. I envied their lies, how easily the fabrications came. Their telling was some kind of elegant control. In the glow of the past light, in the emerald canopies and golden harvest fields of our youth, I often forget our fights, bitter and sometimes violent. Sarah shoving Katie in the back, my defending Katie instinctively as I had never done before and have never done since. How in that moment I knew, though she were the bane of my existence, that I would never trade my sister for anyone’s.

A few weeks ago, when Katie and her husband visited over Thanksgiving, I showed her a draft of this story about us. She read it on her phone silently, curtains of long, golden hair hiding her eyes. On a walk that afternoon, for the first time in a long time, I saw her cry. The guilt hit me. What had I done by bringing back Esther and imaginary games with the twins? By telling the world about Katie’s headgear, her shitting in the woods? “We were violent, us and Haley and Sarah sometimes, weren’t we?” she said finally. We walked on, holding each other around the waist, almost but not quite the same height.

Separation is good. It’s healthy, we are told. I have my doubts. Why else do I keep time traveling, retranslating. Why is it when I close my eyes I can almost feel the shade, hear the creaky moans of the green and gold pipes of bamboo. A colloquial phrase comes to me in Thai—translates to “I’m off to shoot a rabbit.” It means, “I’m going to use the bathroom.” You might use it especially when you are going to go somewhere outdoors, to signal a need for privacy. When my sister defecated outside, when Haley, Sarah, and I ordered her to do it behind the bamboo, that became our unforgettable day in the woods, a flashpoint, a memory in which I see everything now about the way we were—so practical, so powerful, so full of that violent fuse of imagination. My sisters. My collective. My heart wants to have them, my spirit is still looking, hotly, moving through the woods to that still pool of fathers, the mirror of a dog’s eye, that ink, the angry break of bone and cane into a hollow deep, that space in which we love each other.

Kimberly Gibson-Tran studied linguistics at Baylor and the University of North Texas. She’s written critically about poems with “Lines by Someone Else” and has recent creative writing in RockPaperPoem, Anodyne Magazine, Passengers Journal, Elysium Review, and The Common Language Project. Raised by medical missionaries in Thailand, she now lives in Princeton, Texas, and works in college counseling.

Instagram: @kdawn999

Facebook: @kimberly.gibson.739

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