V'ger was a massive entity and one of the most extraordinary lifeforms ever encountered by the United Federation of Planets. It generated enormous levels of power and threatened Earth with destruction until it found a way to evolve.
V'ger chose its own name. Before the name of the vessel was discovered, Starfleet personnel referred to the ship as "the intruder".
Initial contact
First detected when passing through Klingon territory in the 2270s, V'ger was unlike anything that Starfleet had ever encountered. Its initial appearance – that of a vast, luminous cloud, capable of emitting enormous amounts of energy – was described as a "twelfth-power energy field", a scale beyond the energy-generation capacity of even "thousands of starships".
During a battle with a fleet of three Klingon K't'inga-class battle cruisers led by the IKS Amar, V'ger launched a series of powerful, spherically-shaped "bolts" of plasma energy that emerged from within the cloud and eliminated the Klingon assailants. The cloud and its encounter with the Klingons, while occurring within Klingon space, was detected and monitored by a sensor drone from Starfleet's Epsilon IX communications station, which was in close proximity to the then-disputed Federation-Klingon border.
Shortly after the elimination of the Klingon vessels, the cloud passed into Federation space near the Epsilon IX station, which was able to perform limited scans on it, although most of its sensor sweeps were reflected back. The relay station's crew was able, however, to determine that it measured a diameter in excess of two astronomical units, which, at almost three hundred million kilometers, would have made the cloud at least as large as Earth's entire orbit; they also detected a null reading at the heart of the entity, indicating a solid form or vessel of some kind. Unfortunately, V'ger appeared to interpret Epsilon IX's scans as a hostile act, and eliminated the space station in the same manner as it had the Klingon vessels.
Threatening Earth
"We've plotted a course on that cloud, commander. It'll pass into Federation space, fairly close to us."
"Heading?"
"Sir, it's on a precise heading for Earth."
– Epsilon IX crewmember and Branch, 2270s (Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
With the cloud just fifty-four hours away from Earth, Starfleet dispatched the only starship within interception range, the newly refitted USS Enterprise, to determine both what the intruder was and how to stop it, if possible. When the Enterprise arrived at the cloud's coordinates, it determined that the entity had an energy output surpassing that of thousands of starships.
By assuming a non-threatening posture, the Enterprise was able to deeply penetrate the cloud surrounding V'ger and begin gathering information. During this critical time, however, the starship was cut off from all communication with Starfleet. As V'ger entered the Sol system, the cloud surrounding it began to rapidly dissipate, and spherical energy "bolts" similar to those that had destroyed the Klingons and the Epsilon IX station, only vastly more powerful, were launched by the entity. The energy spheres proceeded on courses that would place them into equidistant orbits around the planet, at which point it was predicted Earth's entire surface would be devastated.
Making contact
The Enterprise tried to make contact with V'ger, but all linguacode messages were ignored, and it became apparent that the object at the heart of the cloud was unable to comprehend the hailing signals. It was determined that the intruder communicated on a frequency of more than one million megahertz (over one terahertz) and that, at such a high rate of speed, an entire message lasted only a millisecond.
Aside from the plasma energy spheres, V'ger had other, less destructive means of gathering data. It scanned the Enterprise with a plasma-energy beam that gave some of the crew an electric shock, but otherwise left people unharmed. However, the same beam removed the Deltan navigator of the Enterprise, Lieutenant Ilia.
V'ger was able to analyze Ilia in extraordinary detail, at least down to the cellular level. It then constructed an extremely accurate bio-mechanical replica of her, which acted as a probe. This device was such a precise copy of the original that it even had her memory patterns. They were, however, suppressed, and the Ilia probe had only rudimentary knowledge of humanoid behavior, presumably reflecting V'ger's own level of experience; the probe required considerable education to act as liaison between V'ger and the crew of the Enterprise.
The heart of V'ger
Beyond the oscillating hexad of iris-like petals that Spock had to pass through during his EVA spacewalk to meld with the intruder, the center of the enormous vessel contained the oldest part of V'ger – Voyager 6, an unmanned deep space probe launched by NASA in the late 20th century. The entire vessel surrounding the Voyager probe had been built by an unknown race of machine entities in order to help it complete what the latter interpreted to be its primary programming: "learn all that is learnable," and return that knowledge to its creator. During its journey, the probe had come to think of itself as V'ger after the only remaining legible letters from its original name (the "O", "Y", "A", and "6" on the nameplate having been obscured from encounters with previous spatial hazards), and amassed knowledge to such a degree as to become self-aware.
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