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Temporal Loop

Chapter 2

Stardate 64116.4

32 years after Voyager's encounter with the Caretaker

It turned out that Admiral Janeway knew Kathryn better than Captain Janeway ever did. Kathryn did read the logs a few years later, when she found herself in need of answers. The possible futures she discovered staggered her. She had cried herself sick as she read them, just as desolate over the joys that she herself had missed as she was over the tragedies that had befallen those other Kathryn's. Then the implications, the true implications, of being stuck in a time loop overpowered her. She stopped crying on that day, and indeed stopped connecting to the world at all. What was the use, when she would soon be doing it all over again, even if the outcome would be slightly different?

" be so sure that you are out of options. Kath? Earth to Kath; come in Kath."

Kathryn shook herself out of her reverie to find Mark grinning at her. No, not really grinning. He was only pretending to wear a cheery face in order to hide the fact that he was damn worried about her. "I'm sorry, Mark. All this talk about time travel sucked me right into the past."

Mark gave her a genuine smile this time. "Quite understandable. I'm sorry to bring you back to the present, but you've got to deal with the question at hand. Do you really want to create yet another timeline, or do you want Voyager to get back to the Alpha Quadrant on her own? The choice truly is yours. I know that Starfleet Command is telling you that you must go (even though they put you through hell for breaking the Temporal Prime Directive to begin with!), but they can only control your actions during this time frame. Once you are in the past, you are free to do whatever you want."

Mark was in full lecture mode now. This made Kathryn smile. Mark's friendship alone was worth all the sacrifices she had made to get back to Earth. "The one thing all these futures have in common is that none of them are particularly joyous for you or for your friends. I believe that the stress of existing in so many alternate timelines has severely limited your capacity for happiness."

Kathryn couldn't resist interrupting at this point. "Oh, come on Mark! Only a professional philosopher would try to get away with such melodrama! You don't really believe that existential tripe, do you?"

"As a matter of fact, I do. These logs show miniscule changes from reality to reality. For the most part, these changes are sufficiently small that each of these alternate universes can exist without threatening the fabric of reality. However, for the members of your crew, these realities are wildly divergent. I guess it is the difference between throwing a rock into the ocean and throwing one into a tiny pond; in a smaller venue, small changes make larger ripples.

"According to these eight sets of logs, plus the ones that you have kept, over forty-five people die in one reality or another. A few people (like poor Dalby) die in multiple universes, but nobody dies in all of them. Relationships are made and broken, children are born or not born, passengers are brought back to the Alpha Quadrant or stay on their homeworld, crewmen decide to leave Voyager or stay put, the list goes on and on. Every one of these changes affects your tiny community very deeply. After your return to the Alpha Quadrant, your crew remains incestuously close — and this occurs in every reality — which means that these changes continue to affect your crew throughout the rest of their lives. The little changes that have so little effect upon the universe at large are magnified disproportionately in Voyager's small collective.

"Moreover, surely you have noticed that people seem generally happier in the earlier' realities. This would suggest that people's lives slowly become more unbearable as they exist on more and more planes of reality. You haven't felt the strain as much as others because you remain a Starfleet captain or admiral in every reality you encounter." This was true. Starfleet never permitted her to resign her commission — even when her logs suggested that she had begged them to release her — because they always wanted to have an "Admiral Janeway" at their disposal. Somebody had to go back in time to defeat the Borg, and it always had to be her. "Others, however, have had more varied experiences and have become progressively more unhappy as a result.

"One individual is enough to prove my point. Let's take your first officer as an example, as he is one of the few who has nine realities with almost no points in common from one to the next. In some realities he is prosecuted for his crimes in the Maquis, and in some he is welcomed home as a freedom fighter. He has remained in Starfleet, as your first officer," (this was the only profession that he pursued in two different realities) "as a captain in his own right," (which was in fact his current incarnation) "and as a professor at the Academy. He has become an anthropology professor at a private university on Earth, and an archaeologist investigating the Beta Quadrant. He has worked on rebuilding the colony of Trebus, eventually serving as planetary magistrate. He has gone to seminary and become a spiritual counselor, and he has served out the rest of his life in jail for crimes committed while in the Maquis." That particular log had been very difficult for Kathryn to read. The thought that he might wither away and die in a prison cell had never occurred to her back in the Delta Quadrant when he was devoting his life to Starfleet and Voyager.

Kathryn remembered another painful element from that log as Mark continued. "His personal life is just as diverse. He winds up married to six different women over the course of these nine realities. I still can't believe that you are that women in three of them!" Mark chuckled merrily at this image, clearly unable to picture the two of them together.

Kathryn forced out a chuckle as well, but there was absolutely no humor in it. She would never let Mark know it, but she was desperately jealous of those other three Kathryn's. They had been married when he was an Academy professor, an archaeologist, and a jailbird. In one of those incarnations, when she and Chakotay had both taught at Starfleet Academy, they had had two children. The Janeway of that universe had described Taya and Kolopak in such incredible detail that Kathryn often dreamed of those two remarkable people that she was never going to meet. At the point that that Janeway went into the past to face the Borg, Lt. Taya Janeway was a security officer on the Enterprise and Kolopak was making a galactic name for himself as an artist. (The fact that his Aunt Phoebe was a famous artist was helpful of course, but he was incredibly talented in his own right.) Although it pained her to know of children that she would never have, she still had been delighted by the sheer possibility of being with Chakotay until she considered the reality of her own universe.

By the time she read the logs, Chakotay was deeply involved with B'Elanna (the only other non-blonde in any of his lives). After they returned home, Tom had messed up his life almost as badly as he had as a young man. He didn't wind up in jail or officially disgraced, but he had engaged in a series of reckless affairs that broke B'Elanna's heart and ended his marriage. (Oddly enough, this had not happened to any of the other Tom's from her logs. What was it about this reality that had broken him? Perhaps Mark was right after all.) Kathryn was delighted that Chakotay was able to pick up the pieces of B'Elanna's shattered life and was ecstatically happy for them both until she read those damn logs. The idea that Chakotay could have been hers — and in fact had been hers in at least three other realities — opened up a wellspring of emotions that she had long ago assumed were dammed up forever. At least he wasn't with Seven this time around, as he apparently had been at least twice before.

Don't go there, Kathryn! Aloud she said, "What is your point, exactly?"

"My point is that that guy is incapable of being happy. Every log documents his progress into depression, and every log suggests that this is a significant personality change. You've told me often enough that he wasn't always this way. Could it be that he feels the strain of existing in too many divergent universes? I would suggest that somehow he, and the other crewmembers from Voyager, is feeling the stress of leading deviating lives. Your other friends — Tom, B'Elanna, Harry, Seven, Tuvok — all seem to be a little unhappier in each incarnation as well. Only your Doctor, who is not organic, seems unaffected."

"What do you suggest?"

"DON'T GO BACK! Let it end right here. When Starfleet tries to put you in that armored shuttle and then slingshots you into the past, tell em to go jump in a lake!"

Mark seemed so certain. This troubled Kathryn more than she wanted to admit. She tried to shake that certainty by asking, "But what about the Borg?"

Mark wasn't buying this line of reasoning at all. "So what about the Borg? Maybe it was the Federation's destiny to face the Borg. Maybe it was even our fate to be destroyed by them. We'd be in good company! Even a Borgless universe isn't worth it if everyone is stuck in a temporal loop! Are any of us really living like this?"

It was tempting, really tempting, to put the welfare of her own crew first. But she slowly shook her head. She was going to go back after all, just as Starfleet Command had ordered, and just as Mark always knew that she would. Was this part of the loop, he wondered. Did she always ask his advice and then ignore it? Perhaps he should break this loop himself, and release the Voyager crew from this ridiculous merry-go-round.