Marika Wilkarah (portrayed by Bertila Damas) was a character who appeared in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Survival Instinct". A Bajoran woman who formerly served in Starfleet aboard the USS Excalibur, she was assimilated by the Borg sometime prior to 2368. While a part of the Collective, she operated under the designation Three of Nine, Auxiliary Processor of Unimatrix Zero-One, the same unimatrix that future Voyager crew member Seven of Nine belonged to.
History[]
In the year 2368, Three of Nine was one of four survivors of a Borg sphere that crashed on an uninhabited planet in the Delta Quadrant. The destruction of their vessel severed the drones' link to the Borg Collective and while they tried to survive in the jungle as they waited for rescue, they began to recall their individual memories from before their assimilation. Three of Nine, formerly known as Marika, remembered being married and working as a Starfleet engineer aboard the USS Excalibur. She also recalled the circumstances of her assimilation and was horrified by what the Borg had done to her.
Before the drones were recovered by the Borg, they attempted to hide and destroyed their distress beacon. However Seven of Nine, terrified of her new-found aloneness, hunted each of them down and forcibly interfaced with each of them using her assimilation tubules. She caused the left parietal lobes of their brains to be transformed into interlink nodes that linked them together in an ad hoc collective, then erased the act from their memories. She then led them back to the crash site, where the Borg retrieved them.
Eventually, P'Chan, Lansor and Marika escaped the Collective, but could not break their ad-hoc link, and thus were denied true individuality. In 2376, they sought out Seven of Nine on Voyager in the hopes that she could help them, and discovered her responsibility for the link.
The Doctor, Voyager's holographic chief medical officer, found that the only way to break the link was to remove the interlink nodes. However, this would kill them within a month. Seven and the Doctor decided to perform the procedure, knowing that they would prefer a short life as individuals to being linked together. Marika chose to spend her last month of life aboard Voyager. Having once been a Starfleet officer herself, finding herself on another Federation ship again gave her a sense of belonging she hadn't felt since she was assimilated. She still resented Seven for what had happened to her, but she claimed to understand why Seven did what she did.