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SUMMARY: Kim forces an alien race, and himself, to challenge beliefs about the afterlife when he becomes their prisoner.
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There are 246 elements known to Federation science. The Voyager crew are excited when they detect what they believe is a new element in an asteroid belt surrounding a Class D planet. An away team consisting of Chakotay, Kim and Torres beam down to investigate. As they explore a cavern on the uncharted asteroid, they stumble upon what appears to be an alien burial ground. The element their scanners picked up is emanating from the deceased bodies as a natural by-product of their decomposition process. |
Not wanting to desecrate the site, Chakotay and his team decide to set their tricorders to passive scans only and concentrate on visual anthropological observations and then return to Voyager.
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| the away team in the alien cemetery |
But before they finish their study, a subspace vacuole (a dimensional distortion) suddenly forms and begins to fill the cavern. Alarmed, Chakotay orders an emergency beam-out but Ensign Seska, the transporter officer, has difficulty locking onto them. When she eventually retrieve the away team, there is only Chakotay, Torres and the body of a recently deceased alien woman! When Tuvok scans the asteroid, there is no sign of Kim.
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| the away team is beamed out but instead of Kim the body of an alien woman appears on the transporter pad |
Meanwhile, Kim has been transported to another dimension after having somehow switched places with the corpse. He finds himself trapped inside a ceremonial burial pod on an alien planet. His knockings from within the pod, known as the Cenotaph, are heard. The ceremony abruptly halts, and the lid is lifted, whereupon a puzzled Kim sits up and looks round. The astonished aliens escort him to a waiting area, and tell him that he is on the homeworld of the Vhnori people. The Vhnori think that Kim has come from the Next Emanation, or afterlife, and they are disturbed when he reveals that he has just come from a place that contained the dead bodies of many Vhnori.
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| Kim is let out of the Cenotaph and finds himself on an alien world |
On Voyager, the Doctor is able to revive the dead woman, whose name is Ptera. When Ptera realises that she is not in the Next Emanation with her deceased family members, she becomes hysterical and has to be sedated. Later, though still distressed, she is able to reveal that her people believe that when they die, the vacuoles take their bodies to a higher level of consciousness. She is finding it hard to accept that the distortions merely take their bodies to a barren asteroid where the bodies simply decompose. Not long afterwards, another vacuole forms, and deposits a second corpse onto the ship, and still later, a third. Tuvok has the bodies taken to the ship's morgue.
on being revived and finding she is not in the Next Emanation, Ptera becomes hysterical |
Ptera talks with Janeway and Kes |
Dr Neria re-visits Kim. Neria is the chief thanatologist of the facility where Kim arrived. There are thousands such complexes on the planet, all located on the site of what the Vhnori call spectral ruptures and Kim identifies as being subspace vacuoles. Neria hears Kim's story but refuses to believe that the Vhnori simply die. Kim belatedly realises that his very presence is violating the Prime Directive and declines to give more details. However, Neria is determined to learn more about the Next Emanation through Kim, and refuses to allow him to leave. Kim realises that he is a prisoner.
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| Dr Neria, the chief thanatologist, makes it clear that Kim will not be released, and Dr Ranora places a restraining hand on Kim's shoulder. |
Araya and Hatil Garan |
While in the waiting area, Kim meets an elderly Vhnori man named Hatil Garan. Hatil walks with difficulty ever since an accident, and is waiting his turn to travel to the Next Emanation, i.e. submit to euthanasia, so as to ease his family's burden in caring for him, but remarks that the idea was more his family's idea than his own. Hearing Kim's story about dead Vhnori bodies on an asteroid, Hatil changes his mind about wanting to die. |
On Voyager, Ptera wants to be sent home, even if that means dying a second time. The crew sees this as a possible means of rescuing Kim, and they attempt to beam her into a forming vacuole. But the procedure does not work. When they retrieve her, Ptera is dead. Janeway has the transporter officer beam Ptera's body to the asteroid, where it was meant to be.
Janeway bids farewell to Ptera |
Ptera dies |
Time is running out for Voyager as the vacuoles are damaging the warp core. If the crew does not find Kim soon, they will have to leave him behind wherever he is.
On the Vhnori world, Kim plans a way of escape. He persuades Hatil to help them both by giving him Hatil's burial shroud - Kim will take Hatil's place inside the Cenotaph, while Hatil will secretly travel into the mountains and live with friends for the rest of his life. That way he will seem to fulfil his family's wishes. Fully wrapped in Hatil's shroud, Kim successfully takes Hatil's place without suspicion. In the transference ritual, Araya, Hatil's wife, bids her husband a fond farewell, then activates the Cenotaph.
Just before the appearance of the expected spectral rupture, the Cenotaph kills Kim, and he is transferred to Voyager through the vacuole. The Doctor is able to revive him.
Kim dies |
Kim revives on Voyager |
Later, Janeway visits the Messhall late at night where Kim is sitting alone contemplating his experience. She informs him that they may have found evidence of what could be a Vhnori afterlife - the bodies release a neural energy with a frequency identical to the ambient radiation in the asteroid field, and scanner readings indicate that the energy is unusually dynamic. She orders him to take two days' leave, in order to think about his experience.
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 | | PTERA TO KES: We were always told we would see beautiful sights in the Next Emanation - colours, lights, and that we would see them with new eyes and a new understanding. But now.... What happened to the others - my brother, my father and everyone before them? People die every day on my world. Do they all end up as lifeless corpses? .... We don't believe in any kind of spirit. When we die, we're supposed to re-appear as physical beings with arms and legs. That's the whole point of sending our people through the spectral ruptures. We're supposed to travel onto the Next Emanation as ourselves and be reunited with our families. But none of that is true, is it? None of the people I love are here. I'm alone. I don't belong here. |
| | KIM TO JANEWAY: Are you saying you think they do have an afterlife? That the energy field is where they exist at a higher level of consciousness, just like they believe?
JANEWAY: I'm not certain, but I am certain about this. What we don't know about death is far, far greater than what we do know. |
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