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SUMMARY: Ensign Harry Kim is shocked to find himself in an alternate reality in which he lives and works on Earth, and never joined Voyager.
Kim wakes up in an apartment in early 2372 in San Francisco on Earth. No one seems surprised to see him there, not his girlfriend Libby who turns out to be his fiancée, nor a local coffee shop owner named Cosimo who says he has served Kim coffee for the past eight months, nor his friend Lieutenant Lasca who is a fellow starship design specialist at Starfleet Headquarters.
Kim wakes up to find that he lives with Libby in San Francisco |
Kim looks out of the apartment window at a view of San Francisco |
Cosimo, owner of Cosimo's coffee shop |
Lasca and Kim |
As the strange morning continues, Kim is taken by Lasca to an important meeting with Admiral Strickler at Starfleet Headquarters. Kim finds that he and Lasca work for the Starfleet Engineering Corps and have designed a prototype runabout, named the Yellowstone, which the Admiral wants to hear about. Since Kim does not remember his apartment, his engagement, his job, Lasca or designing a runabout, he feigns illness in order to end the meeting.
Lasca presents a schematic of the prototype runabout Yellowstone |
Admiral Strickler rises to end the meeting |
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Kim goes to his office in the main complex at Starfleet Headquarters. Framed awards show that he is good at his design job. He accesses classified Starfleet records using his Voyager security code and discovers that he never served on USS Voyager which, as Kim well knows, has been reported lost in the Badlands while searching for a missing Maquis ship. Instead of Kim, his best friend Ensign Danny Byrd was assigned as ops officer aboard Voyager. |
| A mystified Kim arrives at the apartment he shares with Libby, but only after getting Cosimo to tell him where he (Kim) lives. There he spends a happy evening with Libby but does not reveal his anxiety about his mysterious situation. |
Kim and Libby in their apartment |
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Leaving her asleep, he gets up in the night and examines Voyager's crew manifest. He discovers that Tom Paris is not on the crew manifest, was sentenced for treason (Maquis activities) and has been paroled from the New Zealand Penal Settlement. He now lives in Marseilles, France. |
| Libby wakes and tells Kim that she and everyone he knows are worried about his strange behaviour. Kim confides in her, telling her that he is from another reality and he does not belong there. Urging her to trust him, Kim says he has to travel to Marseilles and leaves at once. |  |
On the waterfront at Marseilles, Kim locates Tom Paris at the real Chez Sandrine. To Kim's chagrin, Paris does not know him although he listens to Kim's story. Kim tells him his last recollection is of being in a shuttlecraft heading back to USS Voyager. Kim asks Paris to accompany him to Starfleet Headquarters where they can run a computer simulation to learn what happened. Paris refuses, thinking it is a Starfleet trick. Kim's visit is observed throughout by Cosimo.
in the real Chez Sandrine, Kim tells his story to Tom Paris |
Cosimo eavesdrops on the meeting |
When Kim arrives home, he finds Lasca and a Starfleet security team waiting to take him in for questioning. Libby urges Kim to co-operate and tell Starfleet what he told her.
At Starfleet Headquarters, Admiral Strickler does not believe Kim's story. Worse, Kim's behaviour is suspicious, for he has accessed classified computer records and visited a known Maquis sympathiser (Tom Paris). Kim realises Starfleet suspects he might be a Maquis spy. Until the matter can be settled, an electronic security anklet is placed on Kim to monitor his whereabouts.
Kim is interrogated by Admiral Strickler; Lasca is also present |
a security guard puts a security anklet on Kim |
Kim visits Cosimo who tells him that his (Cosimo's) species inhabits a temporal inversion fold in the space-time matrix and that Cosimo was sent to keep watch over him after Kim's shuttlecraft intersected one of their time streams. The accident scrambled Kim's timeline and sent him back to the life he would have known if he had not joined Voyager's crew. In an effort to help Kim, Cosimo gives him a small disk containing the co-ordinates of the time stream that could take him back, saying that he might be able to return to his original reality if he recreates the conditions of the accident. But Cosimo warns that there is no guarantee; instead Kim might enter another reality vastly different from the current incorrect one. Cosimo believes that Kim has a good life in the current reality - he has a beautiful fiancée and a good job, but Kim recalls that Danny Byrd is stranded in the Delta Quadrant in his place. Kim believes he has to try to regain his original reality.
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| Cosimo explains to Kim |
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Kim tampers with the security anklet he is wearing, planning to escape. He says farewell to Libby, promising to do his best to return home. |
They are interrupted when two Starfleet security officers beam into the apartment, alerted by the security anklet tampering. Kim escapes to the street using the apartment block's fire escape, then runs away.
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| Kim escapes through an apartment window onto the fire escape; Libby pulls down the window and blocks the way against Starfleet security guards |
A Starfleet security guard pursues him and, after a chase through the streets, eventually apprehends him.
Kim uses the fire escape to escape to street level. |
A Starfleet security guard pursues Kim through
the streets and gradually catches up with him |
Unexpectedly Tom Paris arrives on the scene and lays out the security guard.
Kim, floored by the security guard, faces the guard's phaser |
Paris punches the security guard and rescues Kim |
| Paris and Kim flee. Paris reveals that he came to help Kim because, if Kim is correct, a life on Voyager would be better than his present one. |
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Needing a ship to recreate his shuttlecraft accident and ride the time stream back to his original reality and Voyager, Kim and Paris illicitly beam into Kim's office at Starfleet Headquarters. There Kim accesses the runabout Yellowstone and they beam aboard it, barely escaping Starfleet security. |
Aboard the runabout, Paris takes the helm. They break out of spacedock and head for the time stream's co-ordinates. A Nebula-class starship gives pursuit, for Starfleet believes the spy Kim is trying to steal the prototype runabout. They manage to slow down the pursuing starship long enough to recreate the conditions of Kim's shuttlecraft accident - he was travelling at 140,000 k.p.h. and conducting a polaron scan at a radius of 250,000 kilometres. But the first attempt does not work.
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| Paris and Kim in the runabout named Yellowstone |
It is now a race against time, because the pursuing starship's weapons have caused the Yellowstone to lose antimatter containment - the Yellowstone will soon explode. Kim suddenly recalls that he has omitted one of the conditions of the accident - he was in the process of beaming off the shuttlecraft. Paris pushes Kim onto the Yellowstone's transporter pad. Kim is transported and, a second later, the Yellowstone explodes.
Paris shoves Kim onto the transporter pad and activates the transporter |
the runabout Yellowstone explodes with the alternate Tom Paris aboard |
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Kim wakes to find himself back in his original reality. He is aboard the shuttlecraft Drake which is caught in a tempoal anomaly, or time stream. Voyager beams him off the Drake just before it suffers a hull breach and is destroyed.
Glad to be back on Voyager and in his normal life, Kim baffles Tom Paris by telling him: "I owe you one." |
 | | KIM TO ALTERNATIVE REALITY LIBBY: I promise you, I'm going to try to get back. It may take awhile, and I may not make it, but I swear I will try. |
| | ALTERNATIVE REALITY PARIS: I don't know if I'm supposed to be on Voyager like you told me, but it sounds a whole lot better than the life I have here. I'm willing to take my chances, Ensign.
KIM: Call me Harry. You always did. |
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