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It’ll be Beta Canon in my writing work unless it gets into an actual script- I’m just happy I can dream it up anyway- but I have two main opinions, one for each.
First, the Bell Riots never happened in the Prime Universe, firstly. The Defiant being tossed back in time was the locking point, where that novel profession began, and the RL past-Bell could have lived in the Prime Universe, maybe he did or didn’t, but he was the fixture.
Sisko took his place because it meant something to him, the right man in the wrong place, and of course Section 31 and the Temporal Agency had questions, because if that incursion was verified they could correct it, but if in linear progression it would be too risky- as in, the good outweighed the bad consequence by leaving it be- the best they could do is the debrief that Ben handled single-handledly, holding his mindful baseball all the while.
Now, there’s another, specifically. It’s a big one. And it’s a theory, placed firmly into my first Trek novel’s tale that I’ve shared with more than a few science fiction and Trek writers, some of considerable fame and veterancy in the latter by specifics as a narrative concept, and apparently I managed quite the simple, sensible and novelly conceptual headfuck.
In short: The Mirror-universe exists because of an accidental event that nobody considered the implications of, in an episode of TOS Trek often thought was self-contained, a very famous one.
The Guardian of Forever is not simply a non-conservative, non-linear dimensional transit beacon and interdimensional absolute, one of each of itself, in every point and every universe, riding in every time a reality fork splits off. But it is alive, and a long time ago it was a person, or that person became its operating system and machine-being intelligence.
I have defined that person, who they were and their name. It’s not someone we don’t know and they were the perfect person for the job, partly because it had to be someone who once had mortal limits, understood personal responsibility and could make mistakes that they were doomed to learn from.
But this one was a mistake the Guardian can’t walk back. It’s way too big. The Guardian is not just a temporal portal, it is a psychic amplifier, linked to every reality that is, and ever could be.
And when Leonard McCoy got his head stuffed with an exceptionally severe overdose of cordrazine, right after helping Sulu, injured at the helm of the NCC-1701 above Psi 2000, and that being the last thing he recalled prior to his brief plunge into severe and sudden neuroform, delusional psychosis was doing what he did for a job, but then his hand-slipping mistake colossally screwing it up, and himself with his own hypo- the Guardian took a full read off of Bones McCoy and used that to send him into the past, not verbal, but a psychic instruction.
Allowing Edith Keeler to die because Spock’s kitbashed tricorder predicted the Terran Empire would rise was the cover story everyone believed from then on. But Keeler, in the grand scheme of things, was only one person who could have approached the warriors of hate with words of peace, and the fascist future would be set down. Her life, and death, meant absolutely nothing to the rise of what would be, and McCoy’s psychotic mind setting the tone sealed that alternate, previously benign future’s fate.
(continued)
@ValueSubtracted
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In other words, the electrical storms the Guardian set in orbit of Psi 2000 over the Forever World to protect itself, caused that injection, not by McCoy helping Sulu, but by injuring him right after the fact. And the Guardian professed its own causality loop, never itself realizing the sin it’d set into the future, because in that final moment of clarity before he lost the plot, he thought about personal consequence, what it meant to do the right thing, just as the Guardian would and once did in life.
The Guardian is the machine-being profession of someone we all know. I want you to read the above and consider the narrative and the context, and who you think it might be.
-2Paw.