Captain Janeway and Voyager lock in a course correction to avoid a rogue comet, and accidentally enter a region of space rich in Class-M planets that is in dispute between the Zahl and the Krenim. Data from the newly upgraded Astrometrics Lab indicate that the Zahl are preeminent in this Delta Quadrant sector designated as Spatial Grid 005. The humanoid species is considered to be “technologically advanced but non-confrontational.”
The commandant of an unimpressive Krenim sentry ship warns Voyager to stay out of the contested territory. He has little firepower to back up his menacing tone, which is thereby rendered somewhat comical. The undaunted Federation vessel proceeds further and encounters sizable ships belonging to the Zahl. Their friendly representative comes aboard and makes plain thatVoyager is welcome to pass through Zahl-controlled space as a step in its long quest to return home to the Alpha Quadrant. Seated at a conference table, the pinstripe-suited official explains that the sector used to be ruled by the Krenim before the Zahl defeated them in battle many years ago, and that Janeway and her crew should pay no attention to the verbal threats from scattered Krenim ships which still wander the region “making grandiose claims.”
An emergency alert from the bridge interrupts Janeway’s amicable conversation with the Zahl official. An immense spatial distortion undulation, five light-years across, is ominously heading towards Voyager. It appears to emanate from an unidentifiable ship near the Zahl homeworld. The mysterious wave front carries within itself a “massive buildup of temporal energy.” A glistening blue mist overtakes the starship. The Zahl government agent, who was standing next to Captain Janeway on the bridge, disappears, as do the Zahl spacecrafts. The Krenim sentry ship, which was monitoring the Federation-Zahl diplomatic exchange from a short distance away, is suddenly metamorphosed into a more formidable, robustly armored vessel. The commandant, now looking more haughty, hails Voyager and gives notice to the Captain in a cockier tone that she will “submit to the Krenim Imperium.”
New Astrometrics readings show that the vast area of Spatial Grid 005 is overwhelmingly dominated by the Krenim, with two hundred star systems and nine hundred planets under their superintendence. The Zahl have been reduced to insignificance.
Krenim civilization has made enormous strides in temporal technoscience. Its armed forces are in possession of a weapon of mass destruction whose potency derives from the principles of “multiversal” computational quantum physics worked up into a sophisticated chronoton-based spacetime reconfiguration technology.
The doomsday weapon is installed in the fortress-like Krenim timeship autocratically presided over by the scientist Annorax, played by Kurtwood Smith. The warship’s commander is also the pioneering quantum cosmologist who originally perfected the intricate mathematical models and equations required to proactively regulate the strategically desired large-scale alterations to the Delta Quadrant Spatial Grid 005 time continuum.
These militarily advantageous macro changes are achieved through painstakingly detailed excitations of sub-atomic passages among different reversible times in neighboring interconnected universes, and the colossal spacetime rearranging chain reactions which such stimulations set off.
The shadowy interior decor and compact, oblong design of Annorax’s timecraft are reminiscent of Captain Nemo’s combat submarine boat Nautilusin Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The high-ranking Krenim officer’s name is an anagram of Pierre Aronnax, Professor of Natural History at the Museum of Paris, one of Nemo’s undersea abductees and the first-person narrator of Verne’s early classic science fiction story.
According to the many-worlds or Many Universes interpretation of quantum physics, the “fabric of reality” (to use David Deutsch’s phrase) consists of a multiplicity of tightly interwoven parallel universes existing in utmost proximity to each other as sets of statistically probabilistic spacetimes. Any singular “moment” or “snapshot” of time in any single universe is conjoined via diminutive time machine pathways to other snapshots in radically adjacent universes. The snapshot serves as an item of calculation input data for stochastic prediction and possible determining intervention in the reprogrammable coming to pass of events. Non-random quantum interference phenomena are manifestations of inter-universe cause-and-effect contact between snapshots which occurs across minuscule communication channels. Traffic along these tiny information interchange lanes between adjoining universes is resolutely managed as an invaluable self-generating and decentralized quantum computational resource. “The typical pathway formed by these effects is about 10-35 metres across, and remains open for one Planck time (about 10-43 seconds).” For Oxford University theoretical physicist and computer scientist Deutsch, our entire universe can be transformed into a virtual reality spacetime rendering regenerator.
Wired to sub-microscopic time machine pathways, harvesting the redirected outputs of computations performed by counterpart processors in other universes, our quantum computational machine-cosmos will calculate with unprecedented efficiency for the benefit of “untold numbers of different universes.” (David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality)
The forceful temporal incursions and accompanying shock waves in the fabric of spacetime incited by Annorax’s superweapon put the axioms of contemporary hyperdimensional quantum mechanics into practice. A new timeline is reassembled as the outcome of instrument recalibrations decided by complex mathematical calculations.
“I can control the destiny of a single molecule or an entire civilization,” boasts Annorax. The Krenim ship itself exists in an exempt, history-free zone, outside of all regular spacetime, in an everlasting state of impervious “temporal flux.”
The chroniton torpedo, secondary weapon of Annorax’s ship, was also developed from temporal technoscience. It can easily penetrate conventional Starfleet or Zahl deflector shields. Short of being exterminated, any individual on board a fired-upon ship in the vicinity of a chronoton torpedo explosion is subjected to horrific chronoton-roentgen radiation syndrome. This disorder agitates the victim into a condition of temporal fluidity, where she jumps around incessantly among all past and possible future moments of her biography (see the Voyager episode Before and After).
The primary attack system of the Krenim timeship, sometimes referred to simply as The Weapon, functions on a tactical level through focused instigation of a causality paradox. This operation entails the removal of one spacetime component, such as a single humanoid species or culture, and the changing of all of history as a result.
At the beginning of Year of Hell, Annorax takes aim at a densely populated planet in Spatial Grid 005, intent on eliminating all traces of the Zahl. An elegant metropolis of ultramodern towers and majestic, centuries-old landmark edifices; high-speed trains and vehicle-free pedestrian zones; with just the appropriate balance between commercial construction and respiring greenery architected around its axial river, is vaporized at the push of a button. The temporal weapon’s condensed beam impacts with maximum thrust at a single spot and then spreads out. It leaves in its wake an eerie nothingness where there was, just seconds before, thriving life. “Trace elements are diminishing,” Krenim ship senior officer Obrist, played by John Loprieno, reports. “All organisms and man-made objects have been eradicated.” A new scan of the continuum will collect the experimental results and ascertain the degree of predictive accuracy of the latest round of calculations which it took months to churn out.
Annorax first got into the business of rewriting history in the most comprehensive sense two hundred years ago (from the inside-the-ship ‘irregular spacetime’ frame of reference). He deployed the newly completed temporal hyperweapon in battle against the Rilnar, who were the Krenim’s perennial arch-enemy. Unfortunately, the eminent techno-scientist “failed to adequately consider the complexities of temporal mechanics.”
As a “counter-indication” of the total erasure of the Rilnar race from history, a deadly rare disease broke out among the Krenim. In the span of one year, the malady claimed the lives of fifty million people, including Annorax’s wife, who was a resident of the Kyana Prime colony. The expunging of the Rilnar from the Spatial Grid 005 timeline had the negative side effect of inhibiting production by the Krenim genome of certain critical antibodies which “normally” would have been abundantly present in their immune system due to surreptitious interbreeding with members of the adversarial race. The consequence of the absence from Krenim physiology of these crucial protective protein molecules was the abrupt occurrence of the catastrophic epidemic.
Annorax seeks to restore the cosmos to its prior ‘unadulterated’ state through consummation of the perfect set of calculations and temporal incursions. Such an achievement would undo all the damage he has done that weighs on his conscience like a thousand recurring nightmares, and also bring his beloved spouse back to life. But it is an impossible dream. Each time he pulls out a new thread, as Commander Chakotay,played by Robert Beltran,Voyager‘s First Officer remarks, “another one begins to unravel.” It has been two hundred years of more and more wearisome obsession, unending exasperation, infinite pain and guilt, and descent towards near madness. Annorax keeps a lock of his deceased wife’s hair in a transparent pyramidal box. It is an oddly fragmentary physical symbol of his permanently elusive ultimate goal of someday reinstating the fully intact original timeline as it was “before the fall.”
Eradicate another Zahl colony, annihilate the Zahl homeworld, abolish the Ram Izad, obliterate the Alsuran Empire.
“You can’t imagine the burden of memory that I carry,” the Krenim leader tells Chakotay. “Thousands of worlds, billions of lives — gone, brought back, gone again.” Erase a life-form, a family, a community, a whole species. Roll the dice of Delta Quadrant spacetime yet again. Strive to restore every last individual, every molecule, every blade of grass of the mighty Krenim Imperium.
Like those in Captain Nemo’s charge, Annorax’s crew can never leave the ship. They are the perpetual prisoners of his unhealthy, imperious fixation. As Jules Verne’s enigmatic and vindictive submarine commander put it, “whoever enters theNautilus must never quit it.” (Verne 1994)
Obrist (whose name is close to Oberst, German for military colonel or group captain) and some of the other officers of the Krenim temporal weapons ship become increasingly impatient with their commander’s stubbornness and unreasonably absolutist ambitions.
The attack on the Zahl homeworld has yielded a 98% Temporal Restoration of the original timeline, which any sensible observer would recognize as a tremendous success. Such an elevated percentage of reinstatement of the primordial first conditions of the Krenim Imperium had never before been attained during two whole centuries of trying. “Our territory now includes 849 inhabited worlds spanning five thousand parsecs,” declares Obrist.
But these sterling numbers are still not good enough for the single-minded Annorax, who dispassionately orders Obrist to “begin calculations for the next incursion.” “Sir, we have just accomplished the impossible,” replies the lower-ranking officer, who has finally had enough of the endless mass murdering and decades of isolation aboard the ship. “We should dismantle this weapon,” he pleads, “and rejoin our people.”
Annorax’s implacable drive onward cannot be restrained. The next incursion, which in principle should have been a very minor and straightforward one, just to extend Temporal Restoration from 98% to 100%, completely backfires in a staggeringly disastrous setback. All progress towards reestablishment of the Krenim Imperium is wiped out in an instant.
A stunned Annorax is absolutely at a loss to understand how this calamitous turn of events could possibly have happened. “Our calculations were perfect,” he exclaims. The explanation for the total undermining of the timecraft’s diligently computed prognostications and assiduously planned techno-scientific intervention turns out to be the presence of an utterly unaccounted for anomalous component or strange attractor in Spatial Grid 005: the starship Voyager.
The wild card Component 049-Beta, in position just twenty light-years from the Krenim supership, is emitting an exceptional, unforeseen temporal field which thoroughly “threw off our calculations” in a chaos theory Butterfly Effect. “Alone, disconnected, impossible to predict,” the randomness seed spaceship from across the galaxy entropically scrambled the initial conditions of the temporal science wizard’s complex mathematical spacetime reordering equations.
What Annorax was not aware of before the incursion was that Voyager‘s crew has, since the early skirmishes, developed special temporal shielding and the capability to generate a “level 9 temporal disruption” as partially effective defenses against the secondary and primary Krenim time weaponry. Starting from data on chronoton torpedoes and the temporal shock wave they acquired during battle, Seven of Nine concluded a successful brainstorming of the design and realization of this new limited tactical system. The invaluable “Borg becoming human” Voyager crew member arrived at the breakthrough insight of statistically matching the deflector shield array to the inverse temporal variance of the chronoton torpedoes, as well as correlating it to the square of the standard deviation of these self-propelled missiles.
Following Annorax’s latest cataclysmically self-destructive temporal incursion and the passing through of its distortion wave, an Astrometrics Lab survey reveals that the Krenim have been drastically downsized in this region of space. They occupy only a handful of planets, hold no colonies at all, and have reverted to pre-warp speed propulsion technologies. The hostile Krenim ship directly in front of Voyager has shrunk to a puny semblance of its former self, although it has the identical “hull markings” and “biospectral frequency” of its previous incarnation.
To eliminate from Delta Quadrant space the “anomalous component” that has brought into sharp relief the chaos theory sensitive dependence on initial conditions of his complex system, Commander Annorax launches a full-scale assault on Voyager. The Federation vessel sustains severe physical damage. More than half the ship is destroyed as a result of taking continuous poundings. Environmental control goes offline in most of its abiding structure. Few decks remain inhabitable, and the crew must live in uncomfortably close quarters. Morale is sinking fast.
The half-Klingon, half-human B’Elanna Torres is injured during fighting and experiences agonizing internal bleeding. Captain Janeway suffers third-degree burns over 60% of her body. No dermal regenerator is available in sick bay to aid her healing. Security officer Tuvok, played by Tim Russ, is left blind after an undetonated chronoton torpedo explodes while he and Seven of Nine are working in a Jefferies tube.
At the end of Year of Hell, Part I, Janeway orders most of her battered crew to abandon ship in escape pods equipped with subspace beacons. Only a few senior officers are left behind. They pilot Voyager to the obscure safety of a class-9 nebula and hide out there for months.
Annorax, having regained the advantage over his opponent, takes Chakotay and Lt. Tom Paris, played by Robert Duncan McNeill, into custody aboard his timeship, ostensibly to study them as “samples.”
As Year of Hell, Part II begins, we learn that Chakotay and Tom Paris, captives aboard the Krenim weapons ship, have just been released from solitary confinement, in which they were held for two months while being “scanned, poked, and prodded.”
Chakotay engages in speculative, and even empathetic, dialogue with the “paranoid and megalomaniacal” Annorax, much as Professor Pierre Aronnax did with the vengeful Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
In order to factor the chaotic disturbance or turbulent “component” of Captain Janeway’s incongruous vessel into his quantum computational spacetime equations, the Krenim Commander requires detailed information on everything that Voyager has done during its three-plus years in the Delta Quadrant. In return for Chakotay’s desired cooperation in this matter, the entreating temporal techno-scientist would offer Voyager a propitious blast from the time weapon that would return the Intrepid-class starship to fully functional condition, send it happily on its way as if it had never encountered the Krenim, and even give the ship a bonus nudge a few thousand light-years closer to the Alpha Quadrant.
Chakotay is ambivalently seduced by the dark brilliance of the Krenim warrior with fish-like scales at the temples and below the ears, just as Prof. Aronnax was drawn in by Captain Nemo’s defiant aristocratic philosophy of the deep and ego-gratifying praise of Aronnax’s own published scientific studies of marine life.
Chakotay calls Annorax an “Enlightened Man,” and comes close to striking a deal with him. The Krenim leader commends the Starfleet Academy graduate on his profound intuitive grasp of temporal mechanics, which he regrets that his own First Officer Obrist lacks. “You seem to understand the subtleties of time,” he tells Chakotay, who is of Native American descent. The gift of being truly able to perceive the “colors and moods” of time is most uncommon. Annorax’s own philosophical relationship to time, however, borders on being an extravagant quixotic delusion. When Chakotay and Lt. Paris accuse him of perpetrating acts of unspeakable violence and genocide, he responds that “only time can pronounce judgment against me.”
Lt. Paris is appalled by his superior officer’s apparent collaboration with the enemy commander, and ponders the option of breaking his own chain of command. He senses that many of the timeship’s officers are on the verge of open rebellion against Annorax. Paris compares the latter to William Bligh, Captain of the H.M.S. Bounty, whose crew mutinied in the South Pacific in the late eighteenth century. While Chakotay persists in communing with Annorax, Paris spends his time with Obrist, getting a feel for how such an uprising might be encouraged, and prying technical information from him which might prove useful in sabotaging the ship.
As a magnanimous gesture, Annorax invites Chakotay and Tom Paris to sit down with him to a sumptuous feast, where each of the different food preparations and beverages is a delicacy from a previously flourishing alien culture that has been removed from history. “Every dish you see here comes from a civilization that has been erased from time.”
The last remnant of the once prosperous Malkoth race is the bottle of spirits with which the dinner guests wash down their ceremonial meal.
In Jules Verne’s archetypal story, Nemo plays host to Prof. Aronnax and his companions Ned Land and Conseil at a breakfast made up of an amazing variety of seafood. Every main course, side dish, and condiment is made solely from underwater ingredients: filet of turtle, dolphin’s liver, whale’s milk, brown seaweed sugar, compote of sea cucumber and anemone.
Like Annorax, the revenge-seeking Nemo is motivated to press forward with his unbending mission by personal torment over the loss of his young wife. Commander Annorax of the Krenim temporal warship is a prolific collector of alien artefacts from all the civilizations that he himself has extinguished, much as Captain Nemo has a priceless accumulation of pearls and sea shells, and keeps an on-board twelve-thousand volume library of the “treasures” of scientific knowledge which are the only enduring “ties which bind [him] to the earth,” its nation-states, and its research institutes — which otherwise have become his sworn enemies.
Nemo and his crew have “renounced the food of the earth,” just as they have set aside human society’s interactive systems of linguistic communication. To efface the origins, pasts, and nationalities of its members, the Nautilus crew has devised its own artificial spoken language, just as Star Trek has done with its invention of the Klingon and other alien languages. The Earth and its real otherness, its ecology and cultures, have been renounced in favor of the stars and the techno-scientific dream of Contact with the extraterrestrial Other.
Through the compulsion of classifying, naming and information processing, both captivating villains enforce what they believe to be the resolution of their problematic relationship to the object of their investigative work – the oceans of planet Earth (Nemo) or the spacetime fabric of reality (Annorax) – which in fact they are harming through an excess of science.
With his twisted way of thinking, Annorax conspires in his own mind to transfigure his murderous inhumanity into a transcendent project of redemption and (self-)cleansing. He is not really responsible for the deaths of his victims because timeline alteration means that they were at no time alive in the first place. “They’re not really being destroyed because they never existed.” Moreover, Annorax has convinced himself that he is performing the ethically admirable function of memorializing the accomplishments of the cultures he has annihilated. “This vessel is more than a weapon,” he proudly proclaims. “It’s a museum of lost histories.”
From the earliest days, Annorax became aware at some level that his assumption that human knowledge, assisted by computers, could ascend to the capability of mastering all of the cause-and-effect relationships within a complex nonlinear system was mistaken. It was techno-scientific arrogance or folly. But the dedicated mathematician and warrior-inventor could not stop. The only self-restraining step that he could manage was the adjustment from using his fascinating machine for the perfect goal of founding a cosmos without the hated Rilnar to the perfect goal of restoring the cosmos to exactly as it was before he attempted to eliminate the Rilnar.
From the standpoint of chaos theory, the goal of understanding fragments and limited parts of a complex causal system is a more reasonable basis for scientific inquiry. Annorax’s error of hubris is ironically and distressingly denoted by the clipped piece of his wife’s hair or the residuum of the last bottle of Malkothian spirits. If we do not recognize of our own volition the limits of what we can know, we will tragically end up with broken scraps and odd bits amounting to even less than what is available via the more unassuming cognitions and inferences which are justly ours.
Annorax’s supposition that his cruel deeds are not murder if he can establish that his victims never existed in history reeks of an exorbitant fascistic will to immaculate transcendence and decontamination. The “museum of lost histories” is an abominably grotesque concept that falls in line with the hideous brutalities committed by the notorious atrocity perpetrators of modern politics and history; or the depravity of revisionist “historians” who, for example, set out to “prove” that the Holocaust never took place.
A museum of remembrance, say of the Holocaust or the dispossession of the Palestinians, is an organized store of physical objects, symbolic artefacts, and witness testimonies that help us to recall and find again that which, in effect, has been lost. The perversity of Annorax’s self-image as curator of memorials is the figuration of a single unified persona who is at the same time perpetrator, say a Nazi leader of genocidal crimes against Jews, and the woefully inadequate caricature of “Holocaust activist,” involved with preserving and honoring the memory of the Jewish victims.
In the case of the Krenim Commander, this monstrous amalgamation of roles comprises, on the one side, not only being the exterminator of a race of people, but obliterating them with such a degree of ruthlessness that their very having existed at all is erased, and, on the other side, assigning to oneself the high-minded responsibility of safeguarding the signs and tokens of the memory of that people. It is also, in a somewhat different sense, an interestingly enacted variation of the grotesque dualism of much atrocity perpetrator practice, combining harrowing barbarity with clumsily contrived rituals of salvation and purification.
Annorax says more than once that his quest and that of the starship Voyagerare similar: each is endeavoring, in her own manner, to reach home. But what is critical is the difference in the way each is trying to get home, exemplified in differing relationships to time.
During the ravaging of Voyagercarried out by Annorax and other Krenim warships, Chakotay gives Janeway a replicated copy of the hand-held mechanical movement chronometer, complete with Roman numeral symbols and silver chain, worn by a particular nineteenth-century Captain in the British Navy as a gift.
The news arrived in England that the Captain’s vessel was hit by a typhoon in the Pacific Ocean. It was presumed that everyone on board was killed. But eight months later the Captain sailed his ship into London Harbor. “There wasn’t much left of it,” Chakotay tells Janeway, “a few planks, half a sail, but he got his crew home.”
The chronometer was a timing device used by mariners to determine their precise longitudinal position at sea. It was a timepiece especially constructed to reduce friction, and to be unaffected by the motions of waves and vicissitudes of temperature to which an oceangoing craft is subjected.
Annorax’s way of trying to get home, on the one hand, is always to make a few more “calculations,” to bulldoze onwards, full speed ahead and without reservations, pursuing his limitless technoscience venture. The naval chronometer that Chakotay gives to Janeway represents, on the other hand, the Newtonian physics or classical science that hesitates to go beyond a certain threshold in its view of temporality.
It is clear that neither Star Trek nor we wish to endorse the pre-Einsteinian notion of absolute, true, and mathematical time as universal standard of reference that is inherent in the Newtonian worldview. But within the fictional context of the episode Year of Hell, the image of Chakotay’s gift of the chronometer, contrasted with Annorax’s extreme conception of compressed time, invokes the question of unlimited techno-scientific innovation versus the sanity of respecting some vital limits to knowledge as an important starting point for reflection.
Voyager will get home, as long as she stays steady on her course, moving forward through means and channels where a set of agreed upon principles of “reality preservation” are heeded.
The renovation of the Astrometrics Lab is figuratively ambivalent with respect to the usefulness of knowledge of physical reality within the framework of classical science, and its subsequent upgrade to hypermodernist technoscience. The Borg-inspired mapping technology extends the venerable tradition of second millennium seafarers who navigated by the stars, but adds statistical computer-aided techniques and advanced measuring of stellar radiation flow within a knowledge paradigm that cannot be completely separated from Annorax’s own hypercoded fixation. Voyager‘s way home, as for many sea travelers in nautical literature, is otherwise a journey more than a destination, a mode of being away from one’s country or the land that was too constricting.
Tom Paris learns from Obrist that it is the Krenim weapons ship’s temporal core that keeps the vessel out of phase with normal spacetime. With Obrist’s help, Tom gains access to the ship’s communications array, and sends an encrypted message to Captain Kathryn Janeway. He informs Janeway of the timeship’s location and elucidates to her his plan for defeating Annorax. Obrist or he will disable the temporal core, thus leaving the ship, whose deflector shields are weak, highly vulnerable to conventional weapons. “You take that core offline and a photon grenade could penetrate the hull.” Paris will transmit the exact coordinates of the temporal core to Captain Janeway, enabling her to fire at a pinpointed target and demolish the supership.
The Captain forges an alliance with a pair of local Krenim antagonists, the Mawasi and the Nihydron, to form an attack fleet. She shares with them the temporal shielding technology developed by Seven of Nine. The fleet assembles for battle. Most of the remaining Starfleet officers are assigned to allied warships to provide tactical assistance.
Janeway is left alone at the helm of Voyager. On the Krenim timeship, Obrist mutinies at last. He manually deactivates the temporal core from his bridge console. Chakotay and Tom Paris are beamed out by one of the alliance ships. After some initial firefighting, Captain Janeway notices that Voyager‘s photon torpedo launchers are inoperative, so she instead sets a collision course for the Krenim ship. She orders everyone in the fleet to take their temporal shields offline, so they can participate in the restoration of history that she hopes will ensue after Annorax’s vessel is destroyed.
Janeway rams Voyager head-on into the timeship to blow up the temporal core. Her ship disintegrates and a huge cascading explosion takes place. The core destabilizes, causing a generalized temporal incursion to occur within the ship. The blue haze of the rewriting of history now overtakes the ship that has itself incited a thousand rewrites.
An artful parody of the Krenim Commander’s grandiose and too self-contained technoscience system is exhibited at the conclusion of the episode. It satirically imitates the fantasy of a flawless “next calculation” that would solve both Annorax’s own predicament and the cosmic catastrophe that he has created. Janeway, in the end, offers Annorax a “way home” that he did not think of — the “putting out of misery” (to use the words that Annorax himself uses to describe his hostile intentions towards Janeway) of his ship, the termination of its these incidents recorded in the Star Trek Chronology: The History of the Future — as events which never occurred. The Krenim weapons ship never existed.
Voyager is calmly cruising along at standard warp speed. It is again Day One of the Year of Hell that will not take place. The Captain and her crew remember nothing, and turn away from Spatial Grid 005. “Captain’s Log, stardate 51252.3. The past couple of weeks have been uneventful, but we’ve made excellent progress on the new Astrometrics Lab.” The commandant of the small Krenim sentry ship cautions Janeway in a polite, neutral tone to avoid this disputed region of space. Helmsman Paris plots a course around it. “Thanks for the warning.”
The mathematician is at home with his wife on the Kyana Prime colony. He has stayed up all night working on calculations on his temporal sciences personal access display device (PADD). “Join me for breakfast?” his wife asks. “In a little while,” he replies. “I still have a few more calculations.” “There are always a few more calculations,” she answers back. “It’s a beautiful day. Spend it with me.” He smiles, rises from his chair, and takes her hand. The subtle change is that his work assumes a more moderate role. Perhaps he will survive.